Ice-cold beer - one of life's small pleasures

Another new study (Quoidbach et al, 2010 – see details below) has been published on the topic of money and well-being, specifically, whether being wealthy enough to access the best things in life affects your ability to savour small pleasures.

The research suggests that wealthier individuals report lower savoring ability, and even being reminded of wealth produces the same negative impact on savoring as actual wealth. In fact, you don’t actually need to enjoy any peak experiences (such as spending time on a tropical beach holiday) for your savoring ability to be impaired – simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase your tendency to take life’s small pleasures for granted.

For a full review of the research and its implications, see Positive Psychology News Daily.

Reference:

Quoidbach, J., Dunn, E.W., Petrides, K.V. & Mikolajczak, M. (2010). Money giveth, money taketh away: The dual effect if wealth on happiness. Psychological Science 21 (6), 759-763.

Image:

Cold beer courtesy of niel schubert

Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

I’ve just heard that Aaron Jarden, lecturer in psychology at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and  president of the New Zealand Association of Positive Psychology is about to launch an open source journal for the study of well-being.

According to the website, the International Journal of Well-being is a “blind peer-reviewed journal that publishes timely original high-quality scholarly articles and book reviews focussed on scientific and philosophical investigations into wellbeing. The journal aims to promote thought, discussion and understanding, and to disseminate scientific research on wellbeing through published academic papers and video abstracts“. Normally you have to pay an absurd amount to get access to academic journal articles, so this is a very welcome development.

You can register for free monthly IJW updates here.

Image: courtesy of  Heike_Quosdorf

Thanks to Todd B. Kashdan for the link

Part 1:

Keynote 1: Stopping the Insanity: Promoting Positive Mental Health is Sanity in a World Needing Better Mental Health - Corey Keyes, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology at Emory University, USA

Corey Keyes

Keynote 2: How Positive Emotions Work, and Why – Barbara Fredrickson, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.

Part 2

Keynote 1: Occupational Health Psychology: A European Perspective – Wilmar Schaufeli, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.

New research from Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan (2010) suggests firstly that you need to be intrinsically motivated to help in order to derive these benefits for yourself, and secondly helping others when you’re extrinsically motivated (e.g. by reward or the fear of reprimand) is worse for their well-being than if you don’t help them at all.

Clearly this has implications for companies where excellent customer service is at the heart of their business. Are your customer service staff intrinsically motivated to help?

My article on Positive Psychology News this month covers this topic in more depth – read it here.

Image courtesy of D3 San Francisco

Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize winner and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School as well as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University) talks about the complexity of happiness and how it is different for the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. With the aid of a story about colonoscopy, he explains why the way events or experiences  end is so important to happiness.  He also reminds us that the money-doesn’t-make-you-happy argument is not as straightforward as many Positive Psychologists believe.

Thanks to Yechezkel Zilber for the link

As always, you can post your comments here and on the PPND website.

Image: thanks to PVBroadz

Some of you might be wondering what the connection is between social media (aka social networking), business and positive psychology. The answer (or at least one of them) as far as I am concerned is performance. Both individiual and organisational performance depend on employee engagement and well-being, both of which can be increased through social networking.

As Will McInnes points out in this slide show (presented as part of Social Media Week), technological changes are unstoppable, so we’d be better off working out how we can use them effectively. Huge organisations like IBM have shown that it can be done – as this great blog from Casey Hibbard at the Social Media Examiner shows.

Of course there are headlines every day reporting the dark side of social networking, or about how many hours employees are wasting as they update their Facebook profiles. But technology can be used to change people’s behaviour for the better – McInnes gives the example of Toyota Prius drivers competing to better their MPG  ’score’ on the dashboard. You may remember that I touched on this subject with my posting on the so-called “Fun Theory” last year.

So if you want to engage your staff and take advantage of the social connections that people naturally make, think seriously about how social networking is being used in your organisation.

Fortunately, if you’re a shopaholic, you may be able to fool youself into thinking about material purchases as if they were experiences, and in this way derive some longer-lasting benefit from them!

Image courtesy of Lauren Close

Ultimate Multi-tasking

Here’s a link to my post to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, on the subjects of happiness, busyness and holiday letters.

Please feel free to add your comments and thoughts here or on the PPND site.

Image: sha in LA