A science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions promises to improve quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless, The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance are ignored or explained as transformations of more authentic negative impulses. The 15 articles in this millennial issue of the American Psychologist discuss such issues as what enables happiness, the effects of autonomy and self-regulation, how optimism and hope affect health, what constitutes wisdom, and how talent and creativity come to fruition. The authors outline a framework for a science of positive psychology, point to gaps in our knowledge, and predict that the next century will see a science and profession that will come to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish.

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/55/1/5.pdf

Positive psychology: An introduction.

So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

because observed behavior is the result of interactions between environmental factors and genes during the extended period of development. Therefore, to better understand expert and exceptional performance, we must require that the account specify the different environmental factors that could selectively promote and facilitate the achievement of such performance. In addition, recent research on expert performance and expertise (Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988; Ericsson & Smith, 1991a) has shown that important characteristics of experts' superior performance are acquired through experience and that the effect of practice on performance is larger than earlier believed possible. For this reason, an account of exceptional performance must specify the environmental circumstances, such as the duration and structure of activities, and necessary minimal biological attributes that lead to the acquisition of such characteristics and a corresponding level of performance. An account that explains how a majority of individuals can attain a given level of expert performance might seem inherently unable to explain the exceptional performance of only a small number of individuals. However, if such an empirical account could be empirically supported, then the extreme characteristics of experts could be viewed as having been acquired through learning and adaptation, and studies of expert performance could provide unique insights into the possibilities and limits of change in cognitive capacities and bodily functions. In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality. We provide empirical support from two new studies and from already published evidence on expert performance in many different domains.

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The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.

Building Leadership Effectiveness This program encourages leaders to develop practices that transform values into action, vision into realities, obstacles into innovations, and risks into rewards. Participants will be introduced to the five practices of exemplary leadership: modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart Coaching & Communicating for Performance Coaching & Communicating for Performance is a highly interactive program that will give supervisors and managers the opportunity to build skills that will enable them to share expectations and set objectives for employees, provide constructive feedback, more effectively engage in learning conversations, and coaching opportunities. Skillful Conflict Management for Leaders As a leader, it is important to understand conflict and be effective at conflict management because the way conflict is resolved becomes an integral component of our university’s culture. This series of conflict management sessions help leaders learn and put into practice effective strategies for managing conflict.

기독교 사역과 Leadership

The importance of intellectual talent to achievement in all professional domains is well established, but less is known about other individual differences that predict success. The authors tested the importance of 1 noncognitive trait: grit. Defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, including educational attainment among 2 samples of adults (N=1,545 and N=690), grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates (N=138), retention in 2 classes of United States Military Academy, West Point, cadets (N=1,218 and N=1,308), and ranking in the National Spelling Bee (N=175). Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Collectively, these findings suggest that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time.

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/92/6/1087.pdf

Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals

Erratum to Simonton.

Big-C Creativity in the Big City

Empirical research on the hypothesized relation between creativity and psychopathology must take care to frame the question very carefully. If a person's creativity is defined by the output of creative products, then the empirical association can be either positive or negative, depending on how that association is specified. On the one hand, individuals who make at least one creative contribution to a domain may exhibit lower risk of psychopathology than those who never do. On the other hand, among those individuals who contribute one or more creative products, those who contribute the most creative products may have higher risk of psychopathology than those who contribute the fewest creative products. These two hypotheses can both be empirically confirmed because the cross-sectional distribution of creative output is described by a highly skewed inverse power function known as Lotka's Law (Lotka, 1926). That is, the number of individuals producing n creative products is proportional to 1/n2 (Egghe, 2005). Given this skewed distribution, the risk rate can easily increase as a linear function of creative productivity even though the overall risk rate is strikingly lower than in the general population.

To illustrate, suppose that the following Lotka function holds for a particular creative domain: f(n) = 100/n2. Then the lowest creative output is 1 and the highest 10. Let us also assume that the risk of some psychopathology increases as a positive linear function of n. In particular, we might specify the risk as R(n) = −0.100 + 0.100*n. According to this hypothesized function, the risk increases from R(1) = 0, for the lowest level of creative output, to R(10) = 0.90, for the highest level of creative output. It follows from the cross-sectional distribution that (a) nearly two-thirds (i.e., about 65%) will have zero risk of psychopathology and (b) the average risk for all individuals contributing one or more creative products is only 0.09 (or 9%). The latter figure is not only one tenth of the risk hypothesized for the most prolific creator, but also presumably noticeably smaller than would likely hold in the population of individuals who made no creative contributions to a domain. For instance, it might hold that R(0) = 0.46 (based on Kessler et al., 2005), a figure fivefold higher.

This treatment can be generalized beyond this specific illustration. Whenever R(1) << R(0), that is, the risk rate is much lower among the one-hit creative individuals, then it would still be possible to have R(n) increase with increases in creative productivity n. This increase does not even have to be linear, for a positive monotonic relation will have the same effect, yielding the inequalities R(1) < R(2) < R(3) < … R(n − 1) < R(n). In fact, the creativity-psychopathology relation in the literary and visual arts may be accurately described in this manner, and even the function for philosophers is very close to positive monotonic (Simonton, 2014b).

Consequently, researchers can find both positive and negative associations depending on which part of the distribution is actually sampled in their investigation. For example, creative geniuses can be more at risk than are their far less prolific or innovative colleagues. This expectation would explain the higher rates of psychopathology often found in historiometric research (Simonton, 2014a). In contrast, psychometric studies will more likely sample much less eminent creators who enjoy higher mental health, creating an apparent contradiction when none exists.

Naturally, it is reasonable to ask why this paradoxical finding might actually appear. Possible explanations fall into two categories. First, the cognitive and personality antecedents of genius-level creativity may put the individual at increased risk for psychopathological symptoms. For instance, higher creativity may require greater cognitive disinhibition, an inclination also associated with tendencies toward psychopathology (Carson, 2014). Second, a highly prolific and creative career may have consequences that can threaten mental health, such as increased criticism and even hostility in the reception of those products. It may be no accident that positive creativity-psychopathology relationships have most often been found in low-consensus domains where immediate appreciation by colleagues or audiences is by no means guaranteed, such as the expressive arts (Simonton, 2014b). The struggling and neglected artist is proverbial.

Ultimately, these possible outcomes and potential interpretations must be addressed by empirical research, but that research must have a more complex understanding of the questions asked.

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Can creative productivity be both positively and negatively correlated with psychopathology? Yes!

Genius: The natural history of creativity

The linked pair solution to Galton's problem is examined from the per spective of the autocorrelation problem in economics. The estimated de grees of freedom, but not the correlations, are shown to be inflated due to diffusional and historical associations. An alternate form of the linked pair method is derived from the Orcutt-James solution to the autocorrelation problem. This technique permits unrestricted sampling of societies along a diffusion or geographic arc, and then provides a formula for calculating the effective number of nonredundant cases for statistical tests. The advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed.

Dean Keith Simonton

Papers

Erratum to Simonton.

Big-C Creativity in the Big City

Can creative productivity be both positively and negatively correlated with psychopathology? Yes!

Genius: The natural history of creativity

Galton's Problem, Autocorrelation, and Diffusion Coefficients