Christmas Lights

The holiday season and the New Year period can be a pretty stressful time. We’re inclined to think that everything must be perfect, and that includes the gifts we give, the food we prepare, the warmth of our welcome to guests, what we wear to the office party and so on. Often we also take on the responsibility for ensuring that everyone around us, our children, family, and friends, all have a good time – and that can be extremely hard work! So what’s the antidote to festive stress? Well, I think this time of year provides us with some ideal opportunities for savouring: noticing, appreciating, and enhancing the things which are already positive in our lives – and you’d be hard pressed to find anything easier to do. The rules of savouring are simple to follow, and you don’t need any special skills or equipment. In fact anyone, young or old, rich or poor, can learn how to savour and reap the benefits.

What is savouring?

Savouring is about slowing down and paying conscious attention to all your senses (touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell). You stretch out the experience, and concentrate on noticing what it is that you really enjoy, whether it’s sipping a glass of chilled vintage champagne at the New Year’s Eve party, looking forward to seeing your children’s faces as they open their Christmas presents, or recollecting the time you played one of the three wise men in the school nativity play. By learning to savour, you can increase your capacity to notice what is good about your life and thus appreciate it more fully. In doing so, you can maximize your positive emotions and overcome the built-in survival mechanism called the negativity bias.

The flavours of savouring

The great thing about savouring is that it’s such a flexible technique, coming in so many different flavors. For example, think of all the different things that you might luxuriate or bask in, relish, treasure, or cherish. You can choose something tangible (like a warm bubble bath) or something intangible (like a lifelong friendship) to notice, appreciate, and enhance. You can use some or all of your senses when savouring, and you can savour across time dimensions, focusing on things in the past, present, or future. This gives you enormous scope when looking for opportunities to savour in your everyday life.

Bubbles

How to savour in 5 easy steps:

The ‘rules’ of savouring are very straightforward and easy to remember:

1. Slow down.
2. Pay attention.
3. Use all your senses – touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing.
4. S-t-r-e-t-c-h out the experience for as long as you can.
5. Reflect on your enjoyment.

It’s important to remember that savouring is a process not an outcome – in other words it’s something we do, not something we get.

Over the next 12 days, try some of the following savouring suggestions:

Savouring the future

• Anticipate the excitement and delight on your children’s faces as they open their presents on Christmas morning.
• Look forward to welcoming friends into your home.
• Anticipate the strong community bonds created by attending local carol services or neighbourhood parties.
• Look forward to a fresh start in 2012, the chance to set new goals, and the green shoots of Spring.

Savouring the present

• Relish that box of dark chocolate pralines that you received from Auntie Joyce.
• Drink in the aroma of cloves, tangerines, and cinnamon of the mulled wine as it simmers on the stove.
• Luxuriate in a warm bath scented with the fragrance of neroli oil, jasmine, and rose petals.
• Turn off your mobile phone so that you can snuggle up with your kids on the sofa and laugh at the latest Disney movie.

Winter Frost

Savouring the past

• Reminisce, with others if you can, about remarkable holidays in the past, such as the time when you built a mammoth snowman on the front lawn, volunteered at a downtown soup kitchen, or glimpsed reindeer in Lapland.
• Ring a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while and talk about the good old days.
• Get out the photo album, and spend 15 minutes remembering all those special occasions.
• Pick a prominent accomplishment from 2011 – an exam passed, a promotion gained, or weight lost – and savour your memories of the achievement.

Remember to take your time, to imagine the small details of the positive experience using all your senses if you can, and to share it with others.

How not to savour!

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are several things which can completely spoil your experience of savouring, or fail to get it off the ground. These include:

• Killjoy thinking about how the experience might be improved
• Analyzing in the moment why an experience is positive
• Rushing

And finally….What will you savour?

There are so many different ways to savour that there will be at least one which suits you. But why not use every spare ten minutes this festive season to try them all, and let us hear about your experiences?

Happy Savouring!

Bryant, F. & Veroff, J. (2007) Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Quoidbach, J., Berry, E. V., Hansenne, M. & Mikolajczak, M. (2010). Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(5), 368-373. From the abstract:

“The present study examines the relative impact of the main positive emotion regulation strategies on two components of well-being: positive affect (PA) and life satisfaction (LS). A total of 282 participants completed measures of PA, LS, overall happiness, and the savoring and dampening strategies they typically used. Results show that when experiencing positive events, focusing attention on the present moment and engaging in positive rumination promoted PA, whereas telling others promoted LS. In contrast, being distracted diminished PA, while focusing on negative details and engaging in negative rumination reduced LS. … our results further show that … typically using various strategies rather than a few specific ones … was beneficial to overall happiness. Our findings suggest that there are several independent ways to make the best (or the worst) out of our positive emotions, and that the cultivation of multiple savoring strategies might be required to achieve lasting happiness.”

Images

Christmas Lights by Sirenz Lorraine:
Bubbles by ion-bogdan dumitrescu
Winter Frost by tlindenbaum

Gratitude Journal

Do Positive Interventions Ever Backfire?

A few weeks ago someone started an interesting discussion on the ‘Friends of Positive Psychology’ Listserv by asking if using a gratitude activity had ever backfired. The question may have been prompted by a recently published study by Susan Sergeant and Myriam Mongrain in which a gratitude exercise not only did not work with particularly needy personality types, but also appeared to result in lower self-esteem. You can read a review of the research on the British Psychological Society’s website here. (Note that, as usual, there are limitations to the study which you need to take into account.)

Establishing Fitness to Purpose: 3 Alternatives

This again raises the question of fit (which we have covered several times before on PPND, and which Jeremy McCarthy recently discussed here), that is, whether positive psychology techniques, such as expressing gratitude, are suitable for everyone or whether they must be tailored.

It seems from the previous articles and comments on PPND there are three broad approaches:

1. One size fits all: Anyone can benefit from doing any of the positive psychology techniques.

2. Personalized: It’s possible, given the science, to find a specific approach to suit every individual. On the one hand this makes sense because we need to know if there are any exceptions to the general rule. But on the other there is no middle way with this approach. What you could end up with is “This exercise will work for those with personality type A and experience of X but not for those with personality type B or C and experience of Y or Z.” As we are all unique (aren’t we?), the level of detail to which you’d need to drill down to get a definitive answer could go on. And on. And on.

3. The Half-way House: This is the way I describe Sonja Lyubomirsky’s best fit approach. In The How of Happiness she suggests choosing a happiness strategy according to whether there is a fit with your

*source of unhappiness
*your strengths
* your lifestyle

She then provides a handy diagnostic for person-activity fit to determine which four of the 12 empirically-based strategies in her book will be most valuable to you.

Reflections on Fitness to Purpose

I can see why option 1 (one size fits all) is attractive, especially if you’ve got slightly more knowledge about positive psychology than the person you’re talking to and you’re keen to broadcast it, but actually I only know one person who takes this approach – a colleague who insists on being the expert and that people should do the dozen or so empirically validated positive psychology exercises to the letter. I’m not advocating you should take this approach by the way, but as it happens, this person does seem to be pretty successful with it.

Cutting Your Cloth

Option 2 (completely personalized) is also logically appealing. The right positive psychology technique, in the right way, at the right time, for the right person does make sense, doesn’t it? After all if someone broke a leg you wouldn’t prescribe a dose of statins to fix it. But can we deal with unhappiness, mental ill-health, or other deficits in the same way? Whether you work as a coach, therapist, counselor or psychologist, can you ‘see’ the client’s problem with the same clarity that a doctor read an Xray? I simplify to make a point, of course physical illness isn’t always straightforward to diagnose!

So that leaves us with option 3, Lyubomirsky’s half-way house, the person-activity fit. She states that “…there is no one magic strategy that will help every person become happier” because “Each individual is unhappy for a unique constellation of reasons.” However, she appears to be sticking with her twelve broad categories of evidence-based activity and is confident that persisting with your four best matches will pay off and boost your happiness. If not, she suggests trying other complementary activities, again selected from her original 12.

What’s interesting about Lyubomirsky’s approach is that fit is based on what you think and feel about the activity (“Will I enjoy it? Will I value it?”) and your motivation to do it, not on your innate personality characteristics. Perhaps the person-activity fit criteria really are a good proxy, but there is no suggestion that doing the ‘wrong’ activity could actually be harmful to your well-being (as occurred in the Sergeant and Mongrain’s study of highly needy people mentioned above), merely that it won’t work and that you’ll become demotivated.

So what is right? Does fit matter, and if so, how much? Are positive psychology advocates that bothered if a small group of people reacts badly to one of their techniques under laboratory conditions?

I don’t think any positive psychologist has ever given a cast-iron guarantee (even my colleague fights shy of that) but they certainly have led many hundreds of thousands of people to believe that greater well-being is readily within their grasp based on doing a small selection of activities. It would seem that there is a huge amount of work to be done, not just in terms of research but also in the way we present positive psychology to the public. Until then (paraphrasing Richard Lazarus) should we be surprised if the ‘science’ of positive psychology is continually criticized for promising a lot and delivering little?

References

Lazarus, R. (2003). Does the positive psychology movement have legs? Psychological Inquiry, 14(2), 93-109.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The how of happiness. London: Sphere. Quotations are on pages 69 & 71.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin Books.

Sergeant, S. & Mongrain, M. (2011). Are positive psychology exercises helpful for people with depressive personality styles? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 6 (4), 260-272

Images

Gratitude Journal courtesy of Limevelyn
Scissors courtesy of trakygraves

• 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.

Hefferon & Boniwell's Book

Unusually for me, my posting for Positive Psychology News this month is a book review, Kate Hefferon and Ilona Boniwell’s Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s a textbook, in short it’s a highly enjoyable, educational, and engaging read, well worth the £18-£20 it’s currently selling for online. It includes all the usual subjects such as positive emotions, subjective well-being and resilience, lots of new research, and topics you won’t find mentioned in other positive psychology textbooks, like the positive body, sex and positive death. I thoroughly recommend it whether you’re a student, lecturer, practitioner or positive psychology enthusiast. It’s so good it’s now at the top of our list of recommended reads on our Positive Psychology Masterclass!

For the full review, click here.

Word cloud from the national well-being debate

A few months ago (see here and here) I wrote about the British government’s intention to measure national well-being. This project came about because of the obvious failing of GDP (gross domestic product) to capture all the nuances of social and economic progress (and more recently, the lack of it).

I promised to update you on this project’s progress, and at the end of July 2011, a series of reports was issued by the Office for National Statistics. In August’s posting for Positive Psychology News, I review  the ONS interim findings and question whether we are really any better informed about the nation’s well-being than we were 8 months ago.

Read the full article here.

The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben

Back in February 2011 I looked at the British government’s plans to measure the nation’s well-being. Now the National Statistician, Jil Matheson, has published her Reflections on the National Debate on Measuring National Well-being.

Was it worth waiting for?  Have we learnt anything new about well-being?  Was it worth the £2m it cost to conduct this ‘debate?’

Based on the fact that they only captured the views of  some 35,000 people (about 0.06% of the population), probably not. Have we learnt anything new about well-being? Having read Ms Matheson’s Reflections, again probably not. As I pointed out before, they’d secured enough  experts on the advisory panel to tell them everything they needed to know about well-being without spending £2m and 10 months consulting the general public. If the exercise was intended to engage the public and make Cameron et al on the coalition government look like they’re more in touch with the general public, then judging by the numbers who took part, it probably hasn’t succeeded on those grounds either.

And of course, there is always the danger that politicians will actually bow to public opinion about what makes them happy, when they don’t actually know (the  ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ argument).

According to this report, a draft set of national well-being indicators will be published in Oct 2011.  We wait with bated breath.

UPDATE: 18/08/11

In the light of the recent riots in England, you might be interested to read what people said mattered most to them:

• “children who contributed to the debate through events in schools said eating breakfast in the morning, playing on computer games, playing with dolls and push-chairs, celebrating Christmas and birthdays were some of the things that matter most
• some young adults included make-up, good clothes, alcohol, music and fast food on their list
• some older people were concerned about the loss of a sense of community

All the age groups highlighted the importance of family, friends, health, financial security, equality and fairness in determining well-being” (p9).

I wonder what the Government will make of that.

Image: The British Parliament & Big Ben: ** Maurice **

In the Positive Psychology Masterclasses that I co-present with fellow University of East London MAPP graduate, Miriam Akhtar, the important role that gratitude plays in boosting well-being often comes up. Gratitude is active when people write thank-you letters, reflect on three good things at the end of the week, or simply say, “Thank you,” to someone (and really mean it).

But our participants often balk at the prospect of reading out loud a Thank You letter to the person they want to thank. It seems that this kind of overt display of positive emotion is a step too far. “Posting a letter is one thing,” said Katrina, “but I couldn’t stand in front of [Mrs  X] and read it out loud – way too embarrassing, for both of us!”

As it happens, we’re in good company here: Thank you, Sonja Lyubomirsky, for being honest enough to admit that expressing gratitude doesn’t float your boat either.

The Importance of Fit

During our MAPP programme, when we were assigned to test out various happiness-enhancing activities on ourselves and report back, we often argued about the idea of fitness. Some of us found that a particular exercise worked really well, and we may even have continued to practice it after our assignment was handed in, whereas other students couldn’t get on with it at all and stopped at the earliest opportunity.

In her book, The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky devotes a whole chapter to the question of suitability, pointing out that although it’s widely accepted in the domains of diet and physical health, thinking about whether a particular approach will suit us isn’t something we often do when considering our emotional and psychological health.  She explains three elements of suitability: fit with the source of your unhappiness, fit with your strengths, and fit with your lifestyle. The advice is that choosing appropriately will vastly increase your chances of succeeding when you’re contemplating doing any exercises to increase your well-being.

On top of suitability, her new research with her colleagues Rene Dickerhoof and Julia Boehm (University of California, Riverside) and Kennon Sheldon (University of Missouri, Columbia) suggests there are two other important factors which influence your chances of increasing your happiness when you carry out an evidence-based happiness exercise: your motivation and the effort you invest.

Longitudinal Study

In this study involving approximately 330 students, Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues gave participants two choices: they could choose to participate in a happiness intervention or they could choose to participate in a cognitive exercises study. Participants in both groups were randomly assigned to one of two empirically-validated positive exercises or to a control activity, each of which involved writing for 15 minutes per week for 8 weeks, as described below:

• Evidence-based exercise 1: Expressing optimism by writing about an imagined future ideal self
• Evidence-based exercise 2: Expressing gratitude by remembering times when you were grateful to another person and writing a letter to that person (but not sending it).
• Control Activity: Writing about what you did in the past 7 days

Well-being was assessed using a range of measures at the start of the study, at the end of the 8^th week, and again another 6 months later. The degree of effort and energy that participants put into their writing exercises every week was assessed by independent coders who ranked it on a 7 point scale.

The Motivation Effect

The researchers interpreted self-selection into the happiness intervention group as an indication of motivation to become happier. They hypothesized that that the ones in the happiness intervention group that performed one of the positive exercises would report greater gains in well-being than those in the cognitive exercises group, even though they completed exactly the same empirically-validated happiness activities. They predicted that participants in the experimental conditions in both groups would report greater gains in well-being than those in the control condition.

The Effort Effect

Researchers also predicted that those participants who exerted more effort would demonstrate a greater boost in their well-being compared to those who exerted less effort, and that the effort effect would be strongest in the two experimental conditions and weakest or non-existent in the control condition.

The Results

As a whole, combining both happiness intervention and cognitive exercise groups, there was no significant difference in the well-being levels of the participants who completed the two empirically-validated exercises compared to the control group either at the end of the 8^th week, or at the 6 month follow-up.

Given that expressing gratitude and optimism have been shown in other studies to increase well-being, this may come as a surprise. The researchers explain this in terms of the role played by one’s motivation to be happier. In other studies, all participants were interested in increasing their own happiness and were aware that this was the purpose of the study. In this research, some participants thought they were signing up for cognitive exercises, but at the start were told that the aim of the study was to improve well-being. In other words, it may be that expressing optimism or gratitude is simply not as meaningful or useful to people who aren’t motivated to practice them.

At the end of 8 weeks the happiness intervention participants reported greater increases in well-being compared to the participants in the cognitive exercise group. The happiness intervention participants who completed the positive exercises reported greater increases in well-being compared to both the cognitive exercise participants who did the same exercises and to those in the control condition.

After 6 months, the happiness intervention participants who completed the positive activities reported greater boosts in well-being than those in the cognitive exercise group who practiced the same exercises and than those in the control groups.

What Role does Effort Play?

In terms of effort, as predicted, the results suggest that the amount of effort we use when practicing positive exercises such as expressing optimism or gratitude does affect subsequent gains in well-being, but doesn’t have a significant effect when we do a neutral or less meaningful activity, such as listing our previous week’s activities.

Research conclusion

The study results indicate that motivation to become happier (in this case demonstrated by self-selection into the happiness intervention group) and continued effort make a difference, but only in the two positive activity conditions, not the control.

Lyubomirsky and her colleagues conclude that happiness activities such as expressing optimism and gratitude are more than just placebos, but that they are more effective when participants are motivated to improve their well-being and put effort into doing them.

Summary

We can sum all of this up by saying that if you want to increase your happiness, there are three basic  rules you need to be aware of:

1. It’s important to do the right positive exercise.  It needs to be empirically validated, and it needs to be right for you. If expressing gratitude or optimism doesn’t do it for you, try something else.
2. You must be highly motivated to improve your well-being, and, if you’re working with clients, they need to be aware of purpose of the positive exercise. Sceptics need not apply!
3. There’s no getting away from it. You have to carry out the activity conscientiously and persistently. In other words, you need to invest time and effort into practicing. If you think you can take short cuts, forget it!

So with those three guidelines in mind, what will you do differently?

Lyubomirsky, S., Dickerhoof, R., Boehm, J. K., & Sheldon, K. M. (2011). Becoming happier takes both a will and a proper way: An experimental longitudinal intervention to boost well-being. Emotion, 11(2), 391-402.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin Books.

Images

1. Gratitude: Kateausburn

2. Bright Optimism: Theen Moy

3. Day 25 Effort: Toastwife

The Happy Couple

Here’s my March 2011 article for Positive Psychology News Daily, in it’s entirety – sorry that it’s so late!

This month focuses on new research behind the meaning of smiling, and in particular, the intriguing differences between men’s and women’s smiles.

I don’t know what it is about March but for me it’s such an optimistic month. Spring is well and truly here, the buds are appearing, daffodils blooming and gone are the long dark days of winter. Spring is also the time for love and romance – you can just picture the scene, the happy couple smiling as they emerge from the church, wedding bells ringing in the air and confetti floating like blossom on the wind.

Yearbook Smiles

Thinking about smiling, marriage and well-being, one piece of research that every student of positive psychology can reel off is the Yearbook Study, in which the genuineness (or ‘Duchenne-ness’ as Chris Peterson calls it) of women students’ smiles in their college yearbook photos predicted, 30 years later, whether they were married and scored highly on life satisfaction, good relationships and managing stress. This study by Lee Anne Harker and Dacher Keltner in 2001 is often used to illustrate the ‘build’ aspect of Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions – that positive emotions are about more than just feeling good, they help to build social and psychological resources too. In short feeling happy now is much more than an end in itself, it’s also an important influence on your future well-being.

One of the limitations of this research is, obviously, that its participants are all female – it used data from a pre-existing study (the Mills Longitudinal Study) – and I wonder how much it also applies to men. Do men’s smiles now predict future happy marriages and personal life satisfaction?

But What About Men?

Yesterday I accidentally came across a little snippet of new research by Simine Vazire, Laura Naumann, Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling on smiling which suggests that male and female smiles don’t mean the same thing. In other words smiling reflects different emotions depending on gender. This study found that smiling is positively associated with positive emotion in women but not in men. In men, smiling is negatively associated with negative emotion. Curious isn’t it?

Equally happy?

In the study, 76% of women smiled compared to only 41% of men, although they experienced similar levels of positive emotion (measured using the PANAS – Positive and Negative Affect Scale).  In short, positive emotion is a strong positive predictor of smiling for women but not for men, and negative emotion is a strong negative predictor of smiling for men but not for women.

Different Adaptations for Men and Women?

So, if we’ve got this right it would seem that women smile when they’re happy, and men smile when…well…they’re not unhappy. In line with Jacob Vigil’s socio-relational framework of expressive behaviours (which in lay terms means that the way we express certain emotions is adaptive and motivates others to respond to us in ways which enhance our social fitness) Simine Vazire and her colleagues suggest that in women, smiling signals warmth, trustworthiness and enthusiasm to others, and in doing so attracts fewer and more intimate relationships (not sure about the fewer!), whereas in men, smiling signals confidence, calmness and a lack of self-doubt and distress, which apparently attracts numerous, less intimate relationships.

If that’s the case, then this adds some further detail to Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory. Perhaps the Yearbook Study isn’t quite as straightforward as it’s often portrayed, and the positive emotional paths to future well-being are rather more winding than direct. It would be interesting to see if a similar study of men’s smiling  or unsmiling yearbook photos resulted in similar well-being outcomes.

It’s a bit of a cliché that men complain that they don’t understand women, but to me it now seems the other way round. I mean, what is it that men do when they’re feeling happy then, if it’s not smiling? Any suggestions??

Harker, L., & Keltner, D. (2001). Expressions of positive emotion in women’s college yearbook pictures and their relationship to personality and life outcomes across adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 112-124.

Vazire, S., Naumann, L.P., Rentfrow, P.J.& Gosling, S.D. (2009). Smiling reflects different emotions in men and women. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 403 -405. Abstract.

Vigil, J.M. (2009). A socio-relational framework of sex differences in the expression of emotion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32 (5), 375 -390.

Zhivotovskaya, E. (2008). Smile and Others Smile with You: Health Benefits, Emotional Contagion, and Mimicry. Positive Psychology News Daily.

Images

The happy couple: Bride, you may kiss by e3000

Equally happy?:  Promenade in the rain by seanmcgrath

In his forthcoming book, Flourish, Martin Seligman reveals his latest approach to well-being.

Readers of his Authentic Happiness (2002), the book which brought Positive Psychology out of the academic closet and into the mainstream, will remember the three pathways to happiness, which were:

1. Positive Emotions  – leading to a pleasurable life

2. Engagement (or flow) – leading to an engaged life

3. Meaning (and purpose) – leading to a meaningful life

All three together lead to ‘the Good Life’.

Now Seligman has updated this model to include two more elements: Relationships / social connections and Accomplishment. The model is now called ‘Well-being Theory’ because Seligman believes that ‘happiness’ is too woolly.

Well-being Theory can be remembered with the acronym PERMA:

1. Positive Emotions

2. Engagement (or flow)

3. Relationships/social connections

4. Meaning (and purpose)

5. Accomplishment

NB – PERMA is only a theory, and not everyone in the positive psychology world agrees with it! Accomplishment in particular causes a fair amount of discussion. Seligman suggests (and indeed recommends) that all 5 facets can be measured both subjectively and objectively, but these measures have yet to be agreed.

Image: Glädje (Joy) by Henrik Ström