This is a learning note of Positive Psychology, please contact the author if you want to cite the article.
Best wishes.

1. Introduction

• Over-promising, under-delivering.

• Replay might constitute a general mechanism of learning and memory.

The Road to Positive Psychology

1. The First Force: Reaction to behaviorism
2. The Second Force: Reaction to psychoanalysis
3. The Third Force: Humanistic Psychology

• Humanistic Psychology -> Positive Psychology

Transformation & Information

Information & Transformation

• The interpretation matters very often a lot more than the information that goes in.

There is no “WOW”

• Over-promising, under-delivering.
• Victories and losses, ups and downs.
• Making common sense more common, especially in the real world application.

Identify the right questions

• Education is the quest for information and transformation, and therefore must begin with a question.

• Questions make a difference.

• The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.

Extraordinarily successful

1. Really believe in themselves.

   • They thought they could do well. They were driven. They were motivated.

2. They were always asking questions.

   • They were always at a state of curiosity. Always looking up, open up, wanting to understand the world the more.

Happy or Happier?

• There is not a certain point beyond which I become happy.

• Happiness is not a binary either-or, zero-one.

• Happiness resides on a continuum.

• How can I become happier?

The effort of application

• Applying into your life;
• Introducing behavioral actual change to your life.

Why Positive Psychology

The importance of focusing on what works

• Positive psychological approach: ‘What makes some individuals succeed despite unfavorable circumstances?‘’

Resilience (适应力)

• A class of phenomena characterized by patterns of positive adaptation in the context of significant adversity or risk.
• Ordinary characteristics (they can all be taught, they can all be learned), extraordinary results
  • Optimism
    • They believed that things would work out well. It may not work out this time. It will work out later. I have learned from what had just happened.
  • Faith and a sense of meaning in life
    • Idealism
  • Pro-social behavior
    • Helping other people, it also helps ourselves.
    • And we entered an upward spiral between self-help and other-help.
  • Focusing on strengths
    • What I am really good at? Identify your strengths.
  • Set goals, future-oriented.
    • Not just thinking about how bad things are today, perhaps.
    • They also think about this is where I wanna be 5 years or 10 years from now.
  • A role model
    • Someone that they want to emulate to be like.
    • That gave them strength. That gave them a sense of direction.
  • Social support (Most significantly, No. 1 contributor to resilience.)
    • They did not bowl alone. I’m tough enough to reach out for help.
    • The strength to admit weaknesses as well.
    • The strength to admit a need.
    • Most important is to identify the right people who will be able to give back to you when you reach out to them.
• Although Harvard is a stressful environment, there are some people who are able to go through it, to do well, to thrive, flourish, and while still going through the ups and downs we all do, overall experience it as a much more positive experience.

Questions create reality.

• Think about it on the individual level. If the only question that we ask ourselves, or the only questions are ‘what are my weaknesses, deficiencies?’, then the only thing that we will see in ourselves are our weaknesses and deficiencies.
• Could a person who only or primarily focuses on weaknesses, and does not see, does not appreciate the strengths, their passions, their virtues, experience high levels of self-respect, self-confidence, happiness?
• It is no less important to appreciate what is good than looking for something to strengthen.
  • Appreciate has two meanings: (1) to say thank you for something, not take it for granted; (2) to grow, when we appreciate the good, the good appreciate, the good grows.
  • When we take the good for granted, the good depreciates.

Marva Collins: Positive Learning

• Role models
• High Expectations
• From blame to responsibility
• Tough and respectful
• Optimism and faith in the future
• From focusing on deficiencies to focusing to on strengths

Passive Victim	Active Agent
self-pity, ruminate	take action
blame others	responsibility
frustration	confidence
anger	hope and optimism

To be an active agent when suffered though it will take some time to go through.

Responsibility

• It is your own responsibility to make the most of your experience. It is your responsibility to make the most out of this class.
• How can you make this an excellent section? Take responsibility for it.
• Understanding that you have to take responsibility for your life is recognizing, understanding that no one is coming to make your life better for you. You are responsible for your life, for your self-confidence, for your self-esteem, for your happiness.

Happiness is not the negation of unhappiness

Disease Model v.s. Health Model (Positive Psychology)

Level	Disease Model	Health Model
1	Focus on weaknesses	Focus on strengths
2	Overcoming deficiencies	Building competencies
3	Avoiding pain	Seeking pleasure
4	Running from unhappiness	Pursuing happiness
5	Neutral state (0) as ceiling	No ceiling
6	Tensionless as ideal	Creative tension as ideal

Prevention through cultivating capacity

The most effective way of actually dealing with individual depression or anxiety, is actually not to focus on depression and anxiety directly. But that is important as well. It was found that the most effective way of dealing with this phenomenon was actually

• to cultivate the positive.
• to cultivate personal strengths.
• to cultivate and identify one’s passions.
• to ask a question such as what is meaningful to me in my lift, what’s my purpose, why am I here, what do I really really want to do once I graduate.

People ask these questions and spend time on these questions are much more likely to begin the (positive) quest.

Cultivating Capacity

• Stronger ‘psychological immune system’
  • What happens when we have a strong physical immune system? Does that mean we don’t get ill? Of course not. We do. But it means that we get ill less often and when we do get sick, we’ll recover more promptly.
• Larger and stronger ‘psychological engine’
  • If we have a small engine and we have to pull a car up a steep hill, a difficult hill, the engine is more likely to collapse, to blow up. Whereas if our engine is large, we’re much more likely to get up that hill and to do it more gracefully, with relative ease.
• Mental health
  • Positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, self-deception, or hand-waving. Instead, it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behaviors present in all its complexity.