The latest quarterly edition of the open-access International Journal of Well-being has just been published.  No. 3 includes

• some new research by Nathaniel Lambert, A. Marlea Gwinn, Tyler Stillman and Frank Fincham on how sharing positive experiences can boost your vitality and help you overcome tiredness,
• An interview with Barbara Fredrickson (famous for the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions), and
• A review of the film Happy, directed by Roko Belic

This edition is quite a lot shorter than the previous two – does this reflect a lack of material, or positive psychologists’ preference to be published in ‘traditional’ positive psychology journals? Whichever it is, let’s hope it isn’t a trend that will continue.

Can you change people’s behaviour for the better by making tasks more enjoyable? Car manufacturer Volkswagen seems to think so - they’ve been running a competition looking for new designs or inventions which prove the ‘Fun Theory‘, i.e. that having fun is the easiest way to get people to do the right thing. Examples include  the bottle bank arcade machine,  the world’s deepest dustbin, and the piano staircase, which is my favourite.

I don’t know what the positive psychology theory is behind behaviour change and having fun (perhaps linked to Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions?) but on the basis it’s worked with the majority of kids since time began, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work with the majority of adults too.

The competition closes on 15th December, so if you want to enter your idea, and have the chance of winning 2500 euros, you need to get your skates on.

Thanks to Neil Ashley for the link

Working Together

Here’s a link to my posting to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, called      ‘Creating Strong Bonds in the Workplace’, which gives you some of the major theories and practical applications of positive psychology for developing positive relationships at work.

As usual, feel free to leave your thoughts and comment here, or on the PPND website.

Image: thanks to enfad

Maybe it’s the traditional British reserve but whenever I mention that I’m interested in the subject of happiness, people tend to raise their eyebrows and look a little bemused. Very often they say ‘that’s simple, if I had more money I’d be happy’, or at this time of year in particular, ‘if I lost a little weight/stopped smoking I’d be happy’. Happiness is worth a closer look because, actually, it’s not that simple; research has shown that health and wealth might bring happiness to a point or temporarily, but that it doesn’t last.

Happiness is becoming big business now. If you type ‘happiness’ into Amazon, you get over 5000 books on the subject. There are TV programmes about it and websites devoted to it. But why does it matter to organizations what makes people happy?

In his article ‘Happiness is a serious business’ quoted in People Management, Nic Marks, head of the Centre for Wellbeing at the New Economics Foundation, refers to the CIPD employee attitude survey 2006, part of which looked at the relationship between positive and negative emotions and several key performance indicators (KPIs): job satisfaction, meaningfulness of work, absorption in work, commitment to complete work, loyalty and performance.

What the survey found was that, with the exception of job satisfaction, positive emotions seem to have more than twice the impact on these KPIs as negative emotions do. In the case of job satisfaction, says Marks, people’s satisfaction ratings and assessments of others are more clouded by their negative feelings than their own experience and behaviour. He concludes that organizations could therefore have more impact and improve individual, team and organizational performance by promoting a climate that fosters positive emotions at work.

In short, there is a very serious point to ensuring that people are happy at work. In the past, we have thought that feeling happy was a result of good functioning i.e. ‘life is going well, therefore I feel good’. However there is a growing body of research (e.g. by the psychologist Dr Barbara Fredrickson, a world expert in the field of positive emotions) which suggests that feeling happy is also a cause of good functioning. So happiness is important to organizations because feeling happy actually helps promote creativity, resilience and resourcefulness; all qualities that we need to improve our performance and succeed at work.