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.

/pdf/the-role-of-deliberate-practice-in-the-acquisition-of-expert-3j9768t5su.pdf

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

A controversy has emerged over whether Picasso's sketches for Guernica illustrate a Darwinian process of blind-variation and selective-retention (i.e., nonmonotonic variants), rather than a more systematic, expertise-driven process (i.e., monotonic improvements). This issue is objectively addressed by having judges (1 pro-Darwinian, 2 anti-Darwinian, and 2 neutral) rank the figural components according to their perceived progress toward the final version of the painting. Besides strongly agreeing on the perceived order (composite progress score alpha = .85), the independent judges concurred that this order was conspicuously nonmonotonic, with minimal tendency to converge on the end result. These conclusions held not only for the sketches as a whole, but also for the sequence of sketches for the separate figural elements of the painting. Hence, Picasso's creative process is best described as producing blind nonmonotonic variants, rather than expert monotonic improvements. The general method used in this st...

FEATURED ARTICLE: The Creative Process in Picasso's Guernica Sketches: Monotonic Improvements versus Nonmonotonic Variants

Eminence, creativity, and geographical marginality: A recursive structural equation model.

Galton's (1869) theory of genius posits an intimate correspondence between personal ability and social eminence. This connection implies that the covariance structure for multiple indicators of distinction is described by a simple single-factor model. After defining rival models that predict no traitlike consistency and stability, structural equation software programs (TETRAD and EQS) were used to test 4 alternative measurement models on 5 data sets of between 6 and 16 indicators each (28 presidents, 2,012 philosophers, 772 artists, 696 composers, and a subset of 92 composers)

Latent-variable models of posthumous reputation: A quest for Galton's G.

Amid the pageantry of the recent turn-of-the-millennium celebrations were numerous newspaper articles and television reports ranking the most influential people of the century, if not the past 2000 years. Each of these lists, whether specific to science, leadership, or athletics, comprised individuals known for their remarkable impact on society, human behavior, and thought. The creative geniuses that top such lists exemplify the heights of human achievement, possibility, adaptability, and even destructive capacity—individuals as diverse as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Napoleon Bonaparte, Pablo Picasso, and Eleanor Roosevelt. It is apparent from our fascination with such lists that our society holds the creative individual and the creative genius as a measure of its own value and well-being. In this chapter we describe the nature of both creativity and the creative genius, their relationship to the positive psychology movement, as well as the strategies that have been developed to measure these phenomena at the individual and sociocultural levels.

Creativity and genius.

Foreign Influence and National Achievement: The Impact of Open Milieus on Japanese Civilization Input from alien cultures might stimulate exceptional national achievements. This hypothesis was tested by applying generational time-series analysis to a society whose history shows tremendous variation in its receptiveness to the external world ( viz., Japan between 580 and 1939). After required controls and data transformations were introduced, the cross-correlations were examined between 3 measures of extracultural influx (outside influence, travel abroad, and eminent immigrants) and 14 measures of national achievement (politics, war, business, religion, medicine, philosophy, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and swords). For most domains of creative achievement, the number of eminent individuals at generation g was a positive function of the amount of foreign influence at generation g - 2. For many leadership domains, in contrast, activity at generation g tended to be positively associated with national openness to alien influences at g + 1.

Dean Keith Simonton

Papers

FEATURED ARTICLE: The Creative Process in Picasso's Guernica Sketches: Monotonic Improvements versus Nonmonotonic Variants

Eminence, creativity, and geographical marginality: A recursive structural equation model.

Latent-variable models of posthumous reputation: A quest for Galton's G.

Creativity and genius.

Foreign influence and national achievement: The impact of open milieus on Japanese civilization.