In this article, the author describes a new theoretical perspective on positive emotions and situates this new perspective within the emerging field of positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory posits that experiences of positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, which in turn serves to build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. Preliminary empirical evidence supporting the broaden-and-build theory is reviewed, and open empirical questions that remain to be tested are identified. The theory and findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.

http://www.elaborer.org/cours/A13/lectures/Fredrickson2001.pdf

The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

Attachment--and loss.

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

We are in the midst of a technological revolution whereby, for the first time, researchers can link daily word use to a broad array of real-world behaviors. This article reviews several computerized text analysis methods and describes how Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) was created and validated. LIWC is a transparent text analysis program that counts words in psychologically meaningful categories. Empirical results using LIWC demonstrate its ability to detect meaning in a wide variety of experimental settings, including to show attentional focus, emotionality, social relationships, thinking styles, and individual differences.

/pdf/the-psychological-meaning-of-words-liwc-and-computerized-4sd1bn03dk.pdf

The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods

Policy-makers are considering large-scale programs aimed at self-control to improve citizens’ health and wealth and reduce crime. Experimental and economic studies suggest such programs could reap benefits. Yet, is self-control important for the health, wealth, and public safety of the population? Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children's self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money, and promote prosperity.

/pdf/a-gradient-of-childhood-self-control-predicts-health-wealth-5fdg5ylocq.pdf

A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

WHY DO WE CELEBRATE DARWIN DAY BUT NOT ARISTOTLE DAY OR Newton Day or Descartes Day? The reason Charles Darwin is special enough to deserve a toast every Februaiy 12, quite simply, is because he cam e up w ith what philosopher Daniel D ennett has called "the single best idea anyone has ever had" (1995: 21): a purely naturalistic means o f explaining why living things bear features th at m ake them appear as i f they had been designed (West, Griffin, and Gardner 2007). Darwin's fundam ental contribution to science was to identify a mindless, physi­ cal process th at could produce com plex, functional design, w hich he called natural selection. To understand natu ral selection, it is useful to th in k o f genes as replicating en tities that, through repeated generational cycles o f replication, m utation, and selection for variants that confer beneficial fitness effects on th eir bearers, com e to build "devices" around them ­ selves. These phenotypic design features, w hich are "devices" in the sense o f having a com plex ordering o f interrelated and hierarchically organized parts th at cooperate to efficiently and elegantly accomplish some task, are how genes "take action" in the world, w hich eventuates in their increased reproductive success. And, it is through the increased

The Evolution of Generosity: How Natural Selection Builds Devices for Benefit Delivery

We present an evolutionary perspective on forgiveness that conceptualizes forgiveness as the output of psychological mechanisms that evolved to help solve the ancestrally recurrent adaptive problem of exploitation. Appealing to principles of good design, evolution-minded researchers suggest that the cognitive mechanisms that execute forgiveness should draw heavily upon two internal representations—representations of the transgressor’s relationship value and representations of the transgressor’s exploitation risk. Our review of research that examines the hypothesized role of these variables in forgiveness reveals three insights. First, perceived relationship value is a consistent predictor of forgiveness, with empirical support emerging largely irrespective of differences in study design, methodology, sample, or measurement. Second, growing evidence suggests that relationship value plays a causal role in forgiveness. Third, there is an emerging consensus that perceived exploitation risk, at least as it has been measured so far, plays a less important role than relationship value in people’s decisions about forgiveness. Empirical studies have produced mixed evidence for the previously tendered hypothesis that relationship value more strongly influences forgiveness when the transgressor is perceived to pose little exploitation risk. Whether these inconsistent results are due to methodological differences, cultural differences, or other factors remains unclear. We conclude by forging conceptual links between the evolutionary approach to forgiveness and two other prominent models of forgiveness: the stress-and-coping model and the interdependence model.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Forgiveness

Religious Coping: The Patient's Experience

Although most people present themselves as possessing prosocial traits, people differ in the extent to which they actually act prosocially in everyday life. Qualitative data that were not ostensibl...

/pdf/searching-for-prosociality-in-qualitative-data-comparing-yud3p9b753.pdf

Michael E. McCullough

Papers

The Evolution of Generosity: How Natural Selection Builds Devices for Benefit Delivery

An Evolutionary Perspective on Forgiveness

Religious Coping: The Patient's Experience

Searching for Prosociality in Qualitative Data: Comparing Manual, Closed‐Vocabulary, and Open‐Vocabulary Methods

Immune System Dysfunction