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Get Real: Positive Psychology Is NOT Crippling America – Responding to "Bright-Sided"

Andrew Rosenthal — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:08:57 +0000

We’ve been reading lots about the book coming out by Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. We were invited to respond to an article about Ehrenreich following her talk at the University of Pennsylvania. The original guest column is online, and included below, with text linked out to original sources where appropriate.

Comments? Questions? Leave a note in the comments section and let us know.

Guest Column | A personal trainer for your happiness

Learning and practicing optimism can literally brighten your future

By Andrew Rosenthal and Doug Hensch

Last week, The Daily Pennsylvanian asked “Does Positivity Cripple the U.S.?” after hearing Barbara Ehrenreich speak in College Hall about her new book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion Of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. According to reports, her talk was an argument against positive thinking and smiles. Seriously.

Although we did not attend the talk or review a pre-released copy of the book, a few things about Ehrenreich are clear. According to the DP and The New York Times, she finds herself “infuriated” by teddy bears and frustrated by upbeat T-shirts. Positivity and optimism are “the strongest sources of negativity in our society” she claims — and optimism is “just too damn much work” to be a worthwhile pursuit. However, we resist the urge to dismiss Ehernreich outright as a grump.

Ehrenreich is critical of “bogus” and “false” and “unsullied” optimism. Fine. But such specific modifiers mean that there must be a “genuine,” “real” and “authentic” optimism out there — something imperfect but grounded in reality. In fact, realistic optimism is the bedrock of positive psychology — the scientific study of well-being. When carefully defined, optimism is about seeing opportunity in challenge, identifying the limitations of bad events and finding hope in the most dire of times. Optimism is what got Barack Obama elected.

In practice, what is the difference between optimism and pessimism? A pessimist examines a situation and can identify only the most dire possible outcomes. Case in point: Ask a good attorney to review a contract, and she will point out everything that might possibly harm you in its execution. Planning for the worst situation is a good thing when it comes to attorneys and airline pilots. But artists and authors and athletes flourish as optimists, when they take a chance and try to do better, and more, than their predecessors.

This isn’t just a matter of semantics — it’s science. Research started decades ago shows that Penn students who are optimists perform better in school and exhibit fewer signs of anxiety and depression than those who are pessimists. Today, every freshman in Wharton is required to complete the PennSTART program to learn how to enhance optimism skills through resilience training. In last week’s DP, columnist Maya Brandon called for PennSTART to become available to students in all schools.

In her talk, Ehrenreich reportedly railed against smiling. But research shows that people who exhibit genuine smiles in a high-school yearbook picture are less-likely to be divorced in their mid-50’s. And a happy physician reaches a faster, more accurate diagnosis of a difficult liver condition. Positivity levels were the difference between life and death for the Sisters of Notre Dame. Nuns who expressed the most positivity throughout life lived an average of 6.9 years longer than those who expressed the least.

But some of the most striking research shows that emotions of the heart, like hope and optimism are good … for the heart. Pessimistic men who suffered heart attacks were 86 percent more likely to die of another heart attack within 10 years. Only 33 percent of the most optimistic patients suffered the same fate. Put more bluntly, being a pessimist has the same effect on heart health as smoking about three packs of cigarettes a week. These findings are nothing to sneeze at — unless, of course, you’ve got a cold. If so, your roommate should hope he is an optimist — optimists have a significantly reduced chance of catching a cold, compared to pessimists.

Authentic happiness and realistic optimism have been rigorously studied around the world. Some of the best work comes from Penn’s own Martin Seligman, Ph.D., the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology. Seligman and his colleagues have developed tests to let you measure your own optimism and happiness. The tests are available for free, at happier.com. Is your glass half empty, or half full?

happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.

Optimism Can Be the Difference Between Life and Death

Andrew Rosenthal — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:03:49 +0000

Dr. Michael Evans of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto writes in The Globe and Mail that Optimism May Help Ward Off Disease. He cites a recent study from Dr. Hilary Tindle et al in Circulation (the journal of the American Hearth Association) that followed 97,000 women and found that optimism is predictive of less heart disease.

Evans tells the story of a patient:

Marie was 64 when she contracted a rare form of cancer in the bile duct. Her prognosis was poor. We tried many interventions and had some success but, alas, only in the short term.

Marie was a teacher and had researched a new therapy based in, of course, California. It seemed to be a hybrid of unproven but promising new medical treatments with some alternative treatments added to the mix.

She had the money and an incredible, even refreshing, faith in this therapeutic cocktail, and wanted to try it while she was still relatively healthy. Tickets were bought and I wished her bonne chance .

She received a call the day before she was to leave to say there’d been a mistake, and she didn’t qualify for their program. Marie died the following week.

While the news about the health impact of optimism isn’t new, it’s a good reminder about the importance of becoming more optimistic.

We recently asked happier.con consultant Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner to define optimism from a scientific perspective: “The reason that we often talk in the research about optimism being more important is that… if you’re optimistic, you’re actually going to try, and you make it more likely that what you want to happen will [occur].”

We also asked Martin Seligman, the author of “Learned Optimism” to give an overview of the findings on optimism and physical health. The research shows that those who are optimistic have “much better” cardiovascular health than pessimists, with 1/4 the rate of cardiac deaths as the rest of the population.

Want to see optimism in practice? Then check out this great video from the people at The Foundation for a Better Life.

This video spot is from The Foundation For a Better Life.

Video from Martin Seligman: Positive Psychology is What Every Human Being Can Say Yes To

Martin Seligman — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:07:56 +0000

More videos from happier.com expert Dr. Martin Seligman can be viewed in our video section.

30 of the Best Books on the Science of Happiness – Written by the Experts

happier.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:00:36 +0000

Looking for a new book? We’ve selected 30 of the best books about the science of happiness. Written by the happier.com experts and other thought-leaders, these books are the best place to go to learn about the research and practice of positive psychology and ways to start getting happier.

When we come across a new book or one of our experts recommends one, we’ll add it to the bookstore as soon as it’s available. And since the bookstore is actually run by amazon.com, you can use your existing account with the site.

Have suggestions for books to add or questions about what’s included? Just let us know!

Books include:

Curious? by Todd Kashdan

Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson

Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman

Over 100 Videos from the Happiness Experts – Free on happier.com

happier.com — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:27:32 +0000

happier.com now offers more than 100 videos from the happiness experts. Videos are available for free — just complete the 2-step registration process.

The videos feature Martin Seligman, Todd Kashdan, Acacia Parks, Barbara Fredrickson and other happier.com experts and contributors.

Videos are grouped into categories including education, exercises, gratitude, happienss, happier.com, optimism, positive psychology, relationships, resilience, strengths and tests.

Challenge your negative thoughts

Doug Hensch — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:08:19 +0000

Last week, I wrote about explanatory style. I related one experience where I got really down on myself for making a mistake at work and how my own style at the time put me in a downward spiral. It was this event that helped me realize that I was a pessimist. Over time, I was able to alter this thinking style and improve my happiness and my ability to solve problems. One simple and effective way to do this is through the ABCDE method.

It takes practice but it does have the ability to help you challenge your beliefs and create a more optimistic way of seeing events and situations.

A – State the Adversity in objective terms. Avoid any judgments and just state the facts of the situation. In my case, there was a mistake on a report that I sent out to some senior people at my company.

B – Listen to your Beliefs. I proceeded to blame myself. I thought I was incompetent, stupid, and responsible for this happening. (Notice how I did not state my feelings, at this point.)

C – State the Consequences. As a result of these beliefs, I felt sad, anxious, and even angry with myself. My thoughts were completely out of perspective as I ended my internal rant by thinking that I was going to lose my job. I had spiraled completely out of control.

D – Dispute your beliefs. If someone had come up to me and said that I was a terrible project manager and that I was stupid and incompetent, you can bet that I would have spent the rest of my day arguing with this person. But, because these beliefs came from me, I let them stick. Today, I would put this in perspective by saying something to the effect: “I have done an excellent job on this project, so far. Yes, I made the mistake, but at least four other people on our team did not catch it, either. I have received lots of praise from many of my clients and I am a valued part of this organization. My work has saved the company tens of thousands of dollars and I helped this team gain some notoriety throughout the company.”

E – Observe the Energization that this creates. This can be difficult but it is important step in savoring your new way of thinking. With regard to my situation, I would have said, “Wow, I feel a lot better. I am glad that I was able to put this in perspective and I am encouraged by the fact that I was able to challenge my own beliefs. This will help me a great deal in the future because I know that this is not the last time that I will make a mistake…”

In their book, The Resilience Factor, Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte write that “…if you want to improve your ability to respond to adversity, you must listen to what you are saying to yourself when it occurs.” And, if you are constantly blaming yourself or thinking in an overly negative way, it is time to think in terms of ABCDE.

Optimism Training for 2 Million Children of Military Personnel: Positive Psychology Helping America’s Kids

Andrew Rosenthal — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:10:54 +0000

This article from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer helps underscore the potential for positive psychology to improve the lives of kids

Coalition aiding military children meets in Phila.

By Carolyn Davis

Inquirer Staff Writer

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., former commander of multinational forces in Iraq, said here yesterday that the Army would work with the University of Pennsylvania to help soldiers better deal with the stress of serving in uniform.

The Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program also will cover soldiers’ families, said Casey, the Army’s chief of staff. A formal announcement with more details is to be made next week.

Casey was in Philadelphia to speak during the first day of the Military Child Education Coalition’s national conference at the Sheraton Philadelphia Center City hotel.

The Army will partner with the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, whose Resiliency Project works to give elementary and middle-school students skills in social problem-solving and interpreting stressful events.

“We have to get it right for families and children. We really believe our soldiers draw their strength from their families, and their families draw their strength from their communities,” Casey told the more than 1,000 conference attendees.

The conference’s theme is how to support the two million children of U.S. servicemen and women.

“Military children are America’s children,” said Mary M. Keller, president and CEO of the private, nonprofit coalition. Based in Texas, it includes civilian educators, military personnel who work with children, and parents of military children, about 75 percent of whom are under 12. The conference continues today and tomorrow.

Keller said the idea for the coalition began 12 years ago as a way to help children with a parent on active duty. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the coalition began including children of National Guard members and reservists.

Keller emphasized that not all military children struggle with a parent’s service. For those who do, the conference addresses such topics as helping families deal with a loved one’s deployment and reintegration.

Army veteran Scott Quilty led a session called “Mom/Dad is Home. Now What?” Quilty, the U.S. program manager of a nonprofit group called Survivor Corps, told participants of his 2006 service in Iraq.

Quilty said he was leading a platoon stationed south of Baghdad, in an area called the Triangle of Death for its constant insurgent attacks. He stepped on a buried bomb, which shattered his right arm, calf, and thigh.

A physician’s assistant with the platoon that day saved his life, and doctors eventually amputated his right arm below his elbow and his right leg below the knee. His emotional recovery, he said, has been harder than his physical one.

Quilty didn’t have children at the time. But many soldiers who have suffered serious injuries do.

Children in particular have to make a huge adjustment to cope with a wounded parent’s condition after returning from war, said Michelle D. Sherman, director of the Family Mental Health program at the Oklahoma City Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Sherman, in a session on teens in families affected by trauma, said military children not only feel the stress of their mobility, but also of deployment of their mother or father to faraway danger zones and of the parent’s return.

Keller said she worries that public attention to helping these children could wane as U.S. soldiers leave Iraq. “When there isn’t a war, that doesn’t mean the stress is gone,” she said. “If my dad came back profoundly changed when I was 10, that still remains.

Tuesday’s Tip – Learn your explanatory style

Doug Hensch — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:53:11 +0000

“I’m an idiot,” I said to a colleague after I had made a mistake on a report that had just been sent to several senior people at our company. “I can’t believe I did this, again. I’m always screwing up like this,” I said, thinking that this had become a habit and that I made mistakes all the time. Immediately, my thoughts spiraled into a mini-panic attack. Additional negative thoughts included:

I’m going to lose this project.
My career is in jeopardy.
Everyone is going to think I am stupid.
I’m a failure as a father and a husband.
I have let my family down and I’m going to be out of a job…

My colleague let me finish my rant, and said, “Wow. You’re pretty hard on yourself. Did you listen to what you just said?” If he had only heard what I was thinking…

No, I had not been really listening to myself but his question hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew that much of what I was saying and thinking was completely false but I couldn’t escape the pit in my stomach.

Shortly after this happened, another colleague of mine recommended that I read Martin Seligman’s latest book, Learned Optimism – How to change your mind and your life. Within the first few pages, I came to the realization that the way I was explaining events (both good AND bad) was not very healthy – I was a pessimist.

Dr. Seligman writes that there are three dimensions of your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. If you look at my statements from above, there was a certain degree of permanence to them - “always” and “I’m an idiot.”

As for pervasiveness, I took a small mistake at work and ended thinking that I wasn’t a good father or husband. Making a universal explanation for a specific adversity leads to giving up in other areas of your life.

Finally, I personalized this adversity. I didn’t take into account that several people helped me write the report and had actually signed off on it. I took full responsibility for something that I should have recognized was actually shared by others.

After determining my explanatory style, I recognized all the negative consequences that went with it. I was afraid to take risks. I didn’t take on the most difficult projects. I stayed in my comfort zone. When something bad happened, I focused on feeling bad as opposed to solving problems. Most importantly, I realized that I was planting the seeds of pessimism with my kids. (The research shows that there is a very strong correlation between a parent’s explanatory style and that of the child.)

I decided to work on my pessimism, but I wanted to get a more accurate read on my explanatory style, first. One way to to do this is to take Dr. Seligman’s Optimism Test. The test presents you with 12 different situations, asks you to come up with one major cause for each situation, and then asks you to rate the question on three different scales. A higher score indicates an optimistic explanatory style while a lower score indicates a pessimistic style.

The good news is that we can change our explanatory styles (come back next Tuesday for more on that…). All it takes is practice and some patience. But, the first step is to be mindful. Your friends, colleagues, and your kids are listening to your explanations – you should, too.

What is your explanatory style?

From Martin Seligman: Optimism & the Prevention of Heart Attack

Martin Seligman — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:01:53 +0000

There is good evidence that building optimism will make you more resilient from depression and more productive at work. There is also mounting evidence that optimism may make you physically healthier, with some of the strongest evidence coming from well-designed studies of cardiac mortality. I believe that your learning the skill of optimism could save your life. (If I am wrong, you have very little to lose except some of your pessimism.) Here’s why I believe this:

The story begins at a poker game in Northern Iowa in the late 1980’s. Bob Colligan, a psychologist from the Mayo Clinic, sat to my right. After singing “two tenors” every time a pair of tens appeared on the table, he made an intriguing suggestion about health. I had presented a talk earlier that evening on the suggestive evidence that optimism improves health in aging men. Bob mentioned that since 1950 every patient admitted to the Mayo Clinic for any physical problem took the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory, the MMPI. This is a 500 item yes-no test (“I am a secret agent of God”). Could we somehow code each item for optimism or pessimism and form a new optimism-pessimism scale?

Chris Peterson did just that, and Bob soon began to analyze the optimism or pessimism of patients admitted to the Mayo Clinic for all causes, using Chris’s technique. To see if optimism predicted longevity, Bob selected 839 consecutive patients who referred themselves for medical care in 1950. Death from any cause was the focus of the study and two hundred of these patients had died by the year 2000. The optimists had a whopping nineteen percent increase in longevity when their expected life span was compared to that of the pessimists.

Many of these deaths were cardiac, so Greg Buchanan and I undertook a prospective study of optimism and second heart attack. In this study, unlike the Mayo Clinic study, we knew the entire range of risk factors for each patient, so we could better zero in on pessimism as the deadly culprit. One hundred and twenty-six men had their first heart attack in the early 1980s in San Francisco. At that time, they were all interviewed about their lives. Their “attributional style” — pessimism or optimism — was derived from these interviews in just the same content-analytic way that we derived the optimism or pessimism of the MMPI items. The raters of the interviews were, of course, blind, unaware of the health of the men. Over the next eight years, half of these men died, mostly of a second heart attack. What predicted who would survive and who would die? Damage to the heart at the first heart attack, Type A, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, and the entire panoply of traditional physical risk factors did not predict second heart attack. Pessimism, on the other hand, predicted second heart attack and death. Of the most pessimistic quartile, 86 percent died, whereas only 33 percent of the most optimistic quartile died (Buchanan, 1994).

Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health found similar results. In 1986, 1306 men took the MMPI, from which she derived the optimism-pessimism score. In 10 years of follow-up, 162 cases of coronary heart disease occurred: 71 cases of nonfatal myocardial infarction, 31 cases of fatal coronary heart disease, and 60 cases of angina pectoris. She adjusted for smoking, weight, blood pressure, and a variety of other traditional risk factors. Men with high levels of optimism had less than half the risk for combined fatal and nonfatal myocardial infarction and for angina pectoris. The greater their optimism, the lower the risk for cardiac incidents.

In the largest study, 999 Dutch men and women from the Arnhem Elderly Study, took a variety of psychological tests and were followed for nine years, from 1991 to 2001. 397 died, and a high level of optimism was far and away the best predictor of survival. Taking sex, age, disease, education, smoking, alcohol, prior cardiac disease, cholesterol, and weight into account, strong optimists were at one-quarter the risk for cardiac death. Again the higher the optimism, the more protection against cardiac death. This was true of both men and women.

So the effects of optimism on risk for heart attack are strong, stronger probably than most or even all of the traditional risk factors. But is optimism the cause of the lower risk for heart attack or does it merely correlate with some unknown protective factor, like serotonin level or genes, which in turn is the active ingredient, causing both the optimism and the protection from heart attack?

We do not know, and there is really only one impeccable way to find out: a random-assignment experimental study, in which some people are randomly assigned to become optimists and later heart attacks are measured. Random assignment rules out all such confounding “third variables.” There is one such study in the literature: My research group invites the most pessimistic members of Penn’s entering freshmen to be randomly assigned to a control group or to a workshop which teaches the optimism techniques you will learn over the next three months. The freshmen who learn optimism not only have less depression and anxiety over the next three years but their physical health is significantly better than the controls. While the study is not about heart attack, but about the whole mélange of undergraduate physical ills, it shows optimism to be a cause, not just a correlate of better health.

I urge you (and the people you care about) to do the exercises on happier.com diligently, and as my mother used to say “use them in good health.”

References:

Buchanan, G.M., Gardenswartz, C.A.R., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1999). Physical health following a cognitive-behavioral intervention. Prevention and Treatment, 2.

Giltay, E., Geleljnse, J., Zitman, F., Hoekstra, T., & Schouten, E.(2004). Dispositional optimism and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in a prospective cohort of elderly Dutch men and women. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61, 1126-1135.

Kubzansky, L. Sparrow, D. Vokonas, P. and Kawachi, I. (2001). Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full? A Prospective Study of Optimism and Coronary Heart Disease in the Normative Aging Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 63, 910-916

Maruta, T., Colligan, R. Malinchoc, M. & Offord, K (2000). Optimists vs. pessimists: Survival rate among medical patients over a 30-year period. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 75, 140-143.

1.5% of all Heart Attacks Triggered by Negative Emotion

Andrew Rosenthal — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:03:24 +0000

Sure, we’ve always known that anger and rage isn’t healthy. But what we’re learning more and more is just how closely connected mental health is to physical health.

In today’s New York Times, Robert Allen recounts how “a recent meta-analysis of 44 prospective studies in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology confirms a strong relationship between anger and both the onset and outcome from coronary heart disease; moreover, approximately 1.5 percent of heart attacks are “triggered” by intense anger.” And that’s the most basic type of relationship. Most of us are perfectly comfortable with the idea that anger can be bad for you.

But did you know that optimistic people are less likely to get sick from the cold? Dr. Sheldon Cohen, at Carnegie Melon, has become recognized for his work linking psychological factors like stress, social support network and optimism to susceptibility from disease. His highest-profile research involves exposing people to the cold virus — a controlled amount of virus in a controlled setting — and predicting who will become sick based on factors like their optimism and psychological resources. Dr. Cohen’s work is starting to get more and more recognition. Just last week he delivered the 2009 Contributions in Positive Health Award Lecture at the First World Congress on Positive Psychology.

The connection between physical health and psychological factors is just the beginning. This study of positive psychical health represents one of the primary focuses of positive psychology, moving forward. At the recent World Congress on Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman and other thought-leaders argue that positive psychology ought to be about more than the study of happiness: we should study positive health, positive education and the science of flourishing.