Category: Positive psychology

Feature, Morality, Positive psychology December 10, 2019

Good At Heart? 10 Psychology Findings That Reveal The Better Side Of Humanity

Last year we published a list of ten psychology findings that reveal the worst of human nature. Research has shown us to be dogmatic and over-confident, we wrote, with a tendency to look down on minorities and assume that the downtrodden deserve their fate. Even young children take pleasure in the suffering of others, we pointed out.

But that’s only half of the story. Every day, people around the world fight against injustices, dedicate time and resources to helping those less fortunate than them, or just perform simple acts of kindness that brighten the lives of those around them. And psychology has as much to say about this brighter side of humanity as it does the darker one. So here we explore some of the research that demonstrates just how kind and compassionate we can be.

Continue reading “Good At Heart? 10 Psychology Findings That Reveal The Better Side Of Humanity” →

Emotion, Feature, Positive psychology, The self September 17, 2019September 18, 2019

How To Cope Under Pressure, According To Psychology

By Emma Young

You’re preparing for an important meeting, and the pressure’s on. If it’s bad now, how will you cope when you actually have to perform? Will you fly? Or will you sink?

Psychologists have a lot to say about how to cope under pressure… both the chronic kind, which might involve ongoing high expectations at work, for example; and the acute, single-event variety such as a vital meeting, a make-or-break presentation, or a sports match. Continue reading “How To Cope Under Pressure, According To Psychology” →

Positive psychology, Sport January 4, 2019January 4, 2019

Runners Get A Wellbeing Boost From Participating In Organised Races

By Christian Jarrett

An increasing number of people are taking up recreational running. It often starts with a slow, painful canter around the block, followed by a wheezy vow to get into better shape. Maybe this was you, and you’ve since marshaled enough grit to complete runs of a sufficient length and frequency that you’re now comfortable telling people that you’re an actual, real-life runner. Do you leave it there, or is it time to train for and take part in a proper, organised race?

A recent study suggests it’s worth a go – Marzena Cypryańska and John Nezlek report in The Journal of Positive Psychology that recreational runners were happier and more satisfied with life during weeks in which they had taken part in an organised race. The pair believe this is because the main aim for most people who take part in (non-elite) organised races is simply to complete the course (which virtually all entrants do). Therefore “no one loses, no matter how long they take to finish” and finishers usually get some kind of medal or award and come away with a powerful sense of camaraderie and achievement. The researchers add that “In this sense, mass road races, however unwittingly, potentially represent a positive psychology intervention.”

Continue reading “Runners Get A Wellbeing Boost From Participating In Organised Races” →

Emotion, Health, Mental health, Positive psychology February 9, 2017February 28, 2017

We know what will make us happy, why do we watch TV instead?

By Christian Jarrett

The luxury microwave meal was delicious, the house is warm, work’s going OK, but you’re just not feeling very happy. Some positive psychologists believe this is because many of us in rich, Western countries spend too much of our free time on passive activities, like bingeing on Netflix and browsing Twitter, rather than on active, psychologically demanding activities, like cooking, sports or playing music, that allow the opportunity to experience “flow” – that magic juncture where your abilities only just meet the demands of the challenge. A new paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology examines this dilemma. Do we realise that pursuing more active, challenging activities will make us happier in the long-run? If so, why then do we opt to spend so much more time lazing around engaged in activities that are pleasant in the moment, but unlikely to bring any lasting fulfilment?

Continue reading “We know what will make us happy, why do we watch TV instead?” →

Cancer, Health, Positive psychology, Qualitative September 14, 2016October 17, 2016

What’s it like to be a child and your sibling is diagnosed with cancer?

By Christian Jarrett

When the dreadful news arrives that a child has cancer, understandably the focus of parents and health professionals turns to supporting the sick child as best they can. But also caught up in the nightmare are the child’s siblings. Not only will they likely be consumed by shock and fear, but they must adapt to the cancer journey the whole family has to embark on.

Official health guidance here in the UK and in the USA states that it’s important to provide support to the siblings of children with cancer. Yet the reality is we know relatively little about their experience. A new study in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry helps address this research gap, based on interviews with two brothers and four sisters – now aged 12 to 18 – of children and teenagers with cancer. The results reveal the shock and fear the siblings experienced, and the challenges they’ve faced, but also uncover a silver lining in the form of “post traumatic growth”. Continue reading “What’s it like to be a child and your sibling is diagnosed with cancer?” →

Emotion, Positive psychology September 8, 2016September 8, 2016

It’s possible to learn to be more optimistic

Man standing on rock formation By Christian Jarrett

Optimists have good reason to be optimistic – research tells us that their sunny outlook means that they are likely to live longer, healthier, happier lives compared with others who have a habit of seeing a darker future ahead. This has led positive psychologists to attempt to teach optimism, so that more people might get to benefit from its apparent positive effects. But can you really learn to see the future more brightly? By combining findings from all the relevant existing optimism intervention trials, published and unpublished, a new meta-analysis in The Journal of Positive Psychology provides us with the best answer available today. There’s reason for hope – it seems we can learn to be more optimistic. But don’t get too carried away. Many interventions only increase optimism a little bit, and probably only for a little while. Continue reading “It’s possible to learn to be more optimistic” →

Emotion, Positive psychology, Qualitative, Sport March 15, 2016July 30, 2016

Elite golfers describe their experiences of being in the zone

They talked about two main states: “making it happen” and “letting it happen”

The psychological concept of “flow” has been around for a while and yet it still retains an air of mystery. Most experts agree that it involves an enjoyable sense of being fully absorbed in a task or skill, and that in sporting contexts it often coincides with peak performance. Now further insights into the nature of flow in sport come from a new study of elite golfers published in the Psychology of Sport and Exercise. Christian Swann and his colleagues interviewed 10 male players who’d recently won or performed extremely well in top European competitions. The players described having experienced two similar but distinct kinds of psychological state during their successes: “letting it happen”, which closely resembles formal definitions of flow, and “making it happen”, which seems similar to flow in some ways, but not others.

Most previous research on the relevance of flow to peak sports performance has come from interviews in which top athletes reflect on their entire careers. This study has the advantage that the golfers were interviewed within just a few days of a specific exceptional performance. The researchers studied these performances, including specific shots, and used this as a basis to probe the golfers’ psychological states during periods when they’d displayed brilliant skill.

Although the golfers described both the “letting it happen” and “making it happen” states as being “in the zone”, there were also important differences. “Letting it happen” was more likely to occur earlier in a competition, and tended to result from a sequence of good play. This built the players’ confidence until they became absorbed in effortless play. “I didn’t have any negative thoughts,” said one player. “Everything I saw was positive”. They lost sense of where they were and their goals became open-ended: “let’s see just how well I can do”.

The other state, “making it happen”, tended to occur later in the competitions as players scented victory. This state involved intense concentration and seemed to produce exceptional play, rather than be caused by it. It was also associated with specific goals and a keen sense of the situation, including the current score and what the player needed to do to seal their win: “This was it, this was my time now. This is where I can win”. The descriptions of conscious effort and heightened awareness of the situation distinguish this state from typical flow states.

Swann and his team said they hoped their findings could help “provide a refined understanding of the psychological states and processes underlying exceptional performance in sport”. However, they acknowledged the limitations of their qualitative approach: “while we have presented our interpretations of the data, others could have coded them differently and may well have arrived at alternative conclusions,” they said.

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Swann, C., Keegan, R., Crust, L., & Piggott, D. (2016). Psychological states underlying excellent performance in professional golfers: “Letting it happen” vs. “making it happen” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 23, 101-113 DOI: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2015.10.008

—further reading—
Does your heart rate hold the secret to getting in “the zone”?
Sports psychologists understand surprisingly little about “the yips”
Speed matters when it comes to imagining the perfect putt
Social flow – how doing it together beats doing it alone

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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biological, Educational, Genetics, Personality, Positive psychology February 25, 2016January 16, 2017

Twin study raises doubts about the relevance of "grit" to children’s school performance

Grit is in vogue. US psychologist Angela Duckworth’s TED talk on grit is one of the most popular recorded. And her forthcoming book on the subject, subtitled “the power of passion and perseverance” is anticipated to be a bestseller. On both sides of the pond, our governments have made the training of grit in schools a priority.

To psychologists, “grit” describes how much perseverance someone shows towards their long-term goals, and how much consistent passion they have for them. It’s seen as a “sub-trait” that’s very strongly related to, and largely subsumed by, conscientiousness, which is known as one of the well-established “Big Five” main personality traits that make up who we are.

The reason for all the interest in grit, simply, is that there’s some evidence that people who have more grit do better in life. Moreover, it’s thought that grit is something you can develop, and probably more easily than you can increase your intelligence or other attributes.

But to a team of psychologists based in London and led by behavioural genetics expert Robert Plomin, the hype around grit is getting a little out of hand. There just isn’t that much convincing evidence yet that it tells you much about a person beyond the Big Five personality traits, nor that it can be increased through training or education.

Supporting their view, the researchers have published an analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of the personalities, including grit, and exam performance at age 16 of thousands of pairs of twins. Some of the twins were identical meaning they share the same genes, while others were non-identical meaning they share roughly half their genes just like non-twin siblings do. By comparing similarities in personality and exam performance between these two types of twin, the researchers were able to disentangle the relative influence of genes and the environment on these measures.

The main finding is that the participants’ overall personality scores were related to about 6 per cent of the variation seen in their exam performance. Grit specifically was related to just 0.5 per cent of the differences seen in exam performance. Given the small size of this relationship, the researchers said “we believe that these results should warrant concern with the educational policy directives in the United States and the United Kingdom.”

Also relevant to the hype around grit, the researchers found that how much grit the participants had was to a large extent inherited (about a third of the difference in grit scores were explained by genetic influences), and that none of the difference in grit was explained by environmental factors that twin pairs shared, such as the way they were raised by their parents and the type of schooling they had (this leaves the remaining variance in grit either influenced by so-called “non-shared environmental factors” – those experiences in life that are unique to a person and not even shared by their twin who they live with – or unexplained). This is a disappointing result for grit enthusiasts because it suggests that the experiences in life that shape how much grit someone has are not found in the school or the home (at least not for the current sample). Bear in mind, though, that this doesn’t discount the possibility that a new effective home- or school-based intervention could be developed.

The researchers concluded that once you know a child’s main personality scores, knowing their amount of grit doesn’t seem to tell you much more about how well they’ll do at school. This study doesn’t rule out the idea that increasing children’s grit, if possible, could be beneficial, but the researchers warned that “more research is warranted into intervention and training programs before concluding that such training increases educational achievement and life outcomes.”

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Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P., & Plomin, R. (2016). True Grit and Genetics: Predicting Academic Achievement From Personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000089

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Cognition, Emotion, guest blogger, Health, Mental health, Positive psychology, Thought February 18, 2016July 30, 2016

Would you really be happier if you were better looking?

By guest blogger David Robson

As shallow as it may be, most of us probably have the sneaking suspicion that we would be happier if we had more attractive facial features and a lither, more athletic body. We fork out cash on cosmetics, gym memberships and plastic surgery thanks to this belief, after all. But are we falling prey to a well-known psychological illusion?

While previous research suggests our looks do influence our lives – from what we earn to how happy we are – a new paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies shows that we probably have an exaggerated view of these benefits.

The paper was inspired by previous examples of the “focusing illusion” – the idea that when we are forced to think about one aspect of our lives, it tends to dominate our feelings and assumes a disproportionate importance in that moment.

In one early example, Fritz Strack at the University of Mannheim and his colleagues asked participants about their love life and their general happiness. The results turned out to depend on the ordering of the questions: if the participants were asked about their love life first, there was a fairly strong correlation between the number of romantic dates they’d had and their wellbeing. But if the question about happiness came first, the apparent connection between romance and wellbeing vanished.

The same turns out to be true for wealth and health: when we are primed to think about these attributes, their impact on our immediate happiness is temporarily intensified. The eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman summarises these results as “nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”.

We live in a media culture that tells us being good looking is a virtual prerequisite for a happy life, but it would make sense that the true importance of our physical attractiveness, like other attributes, is subject to the focussing illusion. To test this idea, Lukasz Kaczmarek and colleagues at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland set up a simple experiment asking 97 students to take two questionnaires measuring their life satisfaction (they rated their agreement with statements such as “the conditions of my life are excellent”) and “body satisfaction” (this involved rating whether they were pleased or not with various aspects of their appearance, including their face, physical build and body parts). Crucially, as in the previous research on the focussing illusion, the ordering of the questionnaires was randomised – half the participants started by rating their faces and bodies, the other half began by rating their life in general.

The results were exactly as expected: people with more confidence in their looks tended to be somewhat happier than those who thought they were less beautiful (body satisfaction explained about 19 per cent of the variation in life satisfaction overall) but only if they took the body satisfaction survey first, not second. Otherwise, the link between body satisfaction and life satisfaction was very weak – in other words, the results suggest that, generally speaking, people pleased with their appearance are barely any happier than those who are not. It seems it is only when reminded to think about our appearance that our body satisfaction is relevant to our happiness, just as the focussing illusion predicts.

Admittedly, the experiment involved a relatively small sample, and it would be premature to conclude that the benefits of beauty are purely illusory: multiple studies (recently reviewed by Tonya Frevert and Lisa Slattery Walker) have found that more beautiful people are given better grades at school, earn more money and tend to be perceived as kinder and more intelligent – the so-called “what is beautiful is good effect”. All of which should contribute at least a little to overall life satisfaction. Given that these differences may snowball as people progress in their careers, the students tested in the current study may have been too young to have benefited from (or borne the brunt of) these subtle, yet significant, prejudices that come with the way we look. This makes me wonder whether the focussing illusion for appearance would be as strong among a more diverse range of participants.

Even so, this new research leaves us with plenty of food for thought. For psychologists studying wellbeing, it is yet more evidence that they need to pay attention to the order in which they ask their questions. As Kaczmarek and his colleagues point out, a study that measures life satisfaction first should eliminate the focussing illusion while helping to identify the factors with more concrete, enduring effects.

For the rest of us, the results might encourage a re-think on our pursuit of beauty – and its cost. There’s nothing unhealthy about taking pride in the way we look, but it’s clear that no amount of expensive cosmetics is going to buy you perfect happiness. So before you consider dishing out yet more money while striving for physical perfection, you might certainly consider whether it’s something that will really make a difference to your life – or are you just chasing a mirage?

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Kaczmarek, L., Enko, J., Awdziejczyk, M., Hoffmann, N., Białobrzeska, N., Mielniczuk, P., & Dombrowski, S. (2014). Would You Be Happier If You Looked Better? A Focusing Illusion Journal of Happiness Studies, 17 (1), 357-365 DOI: 10.1007/s10902-014-9598-0

—further reading—
Mental health problems worsen after cosmetic surgery
It doesn’t always pay to be pretty
The downside of being good-looking AND wealthy
Men feel more physically attractive after becoming a father
Body image – it’s ‘healthy’ people who are deluded

Post written by David Robson (@d_a_robson) for the BPS Research Digest. David is BBC Future’s feature writer.

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