Perhaps because the word positive automatically brings to mind the insufferable yellow smiley face, the field of positive psychology is struggling to get the respect that it deserves. Two articles in the Fairfax press this year – (30 March and 1 September) – have reinforced common misconceptions about positive psychology – in terms of both what it is, and how it is applied.
Positive psychology is not and has never been a “positive thinking” movement. Rather, it’s the study of what allows people to operate at the peak of their potential: to live longer and healthier, participate in more satisfying friendships and marriages, and have more engaging and meaningful careers. It’s also the study of what makes communities and institutions stronger and more resilient.
In contrast to the way positive psychology is portrayed in the media, research within the area has explicitly debunked the notions that “putting on a happy face,” pursuing short-term pleasures and external rewards, or boosting self-esteem are effective means of creating long-term well-being at home, at work, or in schools. Positive psychology is more about finding meaning and lasting fulfilment.
But books such as The Secret and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have bastardised positive psychology and regurgitated it into a crowd-pleasing and a multimillion-dollar “positive thinking” industry. And misunderstanding and ill-informed commentary have compounded the problem and produced a bitter backlash against the science. The source of this backlash’s power is easy to identify – it is ignorance about the field.
Positive psychology is focused on understanding what enables us to flourish and achieve our potential at home, at work, and in schools. The field contrasts with the majority of work in the discipline of psychology which has traditionally focused on the goal of reducing illness and negative states. While understanding and alleviating sickness and depression is a worthy goal, it only addresses part of the well-being equation.
The pursuit of money does not make us happy. Madeline Puckette
Some of the findings are exciting and challenge our thinking on what it takes to live a happy and healthy life. One key set of findings is that the pursuit of money and status that so pervades our culture and political discourse is unhelpful in making us happy. People adjust very quickly to something that gives them pleasure or pain. A famous study of lottery winners and victims of spinal injuries found that while those who won the lottery were briefly much happier and those who became quadriplegics and paraplegics were briefly much less happy, everyone soon returned to their original levels of happiness.
Seeking extrinsic rewards, such as money and status, doesn’t build lasting happiness, it simply sets us up to run on an addictive “hedonic treadmill”, which keeps returning us to where we started. Positive psychology research has found that long-term well-being is driven by cultivating trusting and nurturing relationships, having interesting and engaging work, and setting meaningful goals and feeling yourself progress towards achieving them.
Another clear set of findings suggests that individuals gain at least as much, if not more, from building on their strengths as improving areas of weakness. Management research has found that even though problematic employees demand more attention, managers who invest the most time with their best people perform between two and three times better than managers who spend more time with their worst.
Similarly, managers who create environments allowing employees to regularly exercise their talents have more productive workers and lower turnover. The findings don’t suggest we ignore negativity but create conditions where individuals and groups can thrive.
These are only a few of the numerous findings from positive psychology that inform how we can arrange our lives, schools and workplaces to be more engaging, productive, and resilient. The express goal of the field is to bring an evidence-based approach to helping individuals cope with and grow from disengagement, isolation, depression, stress and trauma and take advantage of their collaborative ability, creativity, vitality to build wellness and to flourish.
Putting on a happy face is not effective for creating long-term well-being. Chantel Beam
People who know the field know that it is not a positive thinking movement and that it doesn’t even focus exclusively on the positive but extends to the study of adaptability, strength, and growth out of hardship and failure.
There are certainly legitimate critiques of positive psychology: the field is still relatively new and evidence is still being generated and integrated. And its focus to date has been on the individual and primarily in Western contexts. But most critiques have been levelled at the ways positive psychology is applied. As with any emerging movement, the tendency for some to sell services or write books under the guise of positive psychology but with only a cursory understanding of the field is ever present.
And as with any field, there are increasing numbers of poorly-trained practitioners and consultants claiming to practise positive psychology without truly understand the research or the challenges of implementing its conclusions. Such consultants are likely to promise too much, deliver too little, and create resistance to change that could have been beneficial if positive psychology principles had actually been understood and implemented.
But a few bad apples shouldn’t damn an entire field or the many qualified and competent researchers and practitioners who are implementing well-validated positive programs or testing new interventions to address some of the most pressing issues of the day.
Adam Barsky is affiliated with Applied Research Consulting which consults in the area of Positive Education and Positive Leadership, both are informed by Positive Psychology.
Michael Zyphur does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
Adapted from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Win to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
Article | Fri, 01/06/2012 – 00:00
By Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
To understand what makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work, we have been studying what we call inner work life—the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivations that occur continually throughout the workday. When inner work life is positive, people feel happy, have positive perceptions of their work and those they work with, and are highly motivated by the work itself. When inner work life is negative, everything is reversed. In our quest to find the forces that rule inner work life, we discovered that lower-level, local leaders —such as team leaders—can be surprisingly powerful. The route to this discovery was an interesting one.
Because inner work life is usually not observable, we knew that, to learn about it, we would have to study people’s inner thoughts. To that end, we asked 238 people working on 26 creative project teams in seven companies to complete a diary form at the end of each workday over the course of an entire project. The major question on the diary form asked people to describe an event that stood out from the workday. Along with the diary narratives, we collected data on a number of other measures, including creativity, productivity, emotion, and motivation. In the end, we had nearly 12,000 event-of-the-day narratives, revealing people’s thoughts and feelings about their work, their colleagues, and their organizations.
We made two major discoveries. The first was the inner work life effect: People are more creative, productive, committed to the work, and collegial when their inner work life is positive. For instance, when people are in a good mood, they are more creative. Not only are they more creative on the day they are happy, but they are also more creative the next day, even when we control for their mood on the next day.
But what makes for good inner work life? When we looked at the days when people’s inner work lives were at their best, by far the most common event that occurred was simply making progress on meaningful work. In fact, progress occurred on 76 percent of best days. And it wasn’t only huge breakthroughs. We found that, very often, small steps forward were sufficient to boost inner work life. That was our second discovery, and we call it the progress principle.But there is a dark side. Setbacks in the work had the greatest negative effect on inner work life.
The lesson from our research is clear—if you want workers who are fully engaged, productive, and creative, then you must do everything in your power to support progress and to remove obstacles that can lead to setbacks for the people who work for you. We identified two pairs of action types that managers can take to support progress and inner work life; catalysts/inhibitors and nourishers/toxins. Catalysts directly support progress in the work, while their opposite, inhibitors,derail progress. These include things like supplying needed resources. Nourishers, actions that make people feel valued and respected as human beings, directly support inner work life; their opposite, toxins, poison it.
Many people think it is obvious that people will be more happy and engaged when they are making progress. But when we surveyed 669 managers about how important supporting progress is, we found out differently. We asked managers at all levels from companies around the world to rank order the importance of five motivators, including support for progress. The other four items were straight from conventional management wisdom: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, and clear goals. Supporting progress came in dead last. In fact, only 5 percent of managers picked it as their No. 1 motivator. Moreover, when we looked at the teams and companies that took part in our research, we saw that most managers acted like supporting progress was a low priority.
We had expected that the people at the top of an organization would have the greatest influence over inner work life, by supplying or withholding the catalysts and nourishers. C-level executives definitely did have an impact. But we were in for a surprise. Our study revealed that—holding other factors equal—“local” sources of catalysts, such as team leaders and immediate coworkers, had a stronger influence on inner work life than “broad” forces such as top-level managers and organizational systems. This certainly doesn’t mean people were impervious to the effects of these broad forces, but it does mean local leaders have special leverage on the inner work life of a team. In fact, they can be a more important day-by-day source of the catalyst factor than top managers. By analyzing the team leader actions that led our research participants to see their team leaders as supportive (or not), we identified a set of catalyst leverage points.
As a team leader, do. . .
Gather information constantly that could, in any way, be relevant to the team’s work.
Involve the team in making important decisions about the project.
Develop contacts with people outside the team who could be important sources of information and support for the project.
Sell the project; fight for a good project if it is threatened.
As a team leader, don’t. . .
Fail to disseminate project-relevant information to the team.
Micromanage; don’t stifle team members’ autonomy in carrying out their work.
Fail to motivate and inspire the team by what you say and, especially, the example you set with your own work habits.
Avoid solving problems or cause problems through your own timidity or arrogance.
Fail to provide clear, appropriate, meaningful assignments and goals.
Because of their close working relationship with subordinates, team leaders also have an especially powerful impact on inner work life through the Nourishers they provide or fail to provide. In fact, they may have even more power than top managers to create a supportive or debilitating work environment for members of a team. They can even attenuate the negative impact of an unsupportive upper management. If you are a team leader, our research identified direct actions you can take—or avoid—if you want to support your team’s inner work life through nourishers. Even if you are not a team leader, you can apply the same tools—whatever your level in your organization.
As a team leader, do. . .
Show that you respect people and the work they do.
Recognize and reward the accomplishments of your people.
When needed, provide emotional support to those who work under you.
Create opportunities for the development of friendship and camaraderie in the team.
As a team leader, don’t. . .
Act dismissive, discourteous, or patronizing.
Display apathy toward your team members or their projects.
Obfuscate roles, responsibilities, and formal relationships, or change them haphazardly.
We all want workers who are engaged, creative, and fully productive. The progress principle describes how to do that. First, use nourishers to support the inner work lives of the people who work under you (and for that matter, your colleagues). Second, support progress every day through the generous application of catalysts. Your organization and its people will share the benefits.
Adapted from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Win to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Her studies have focused on creativity, motivation, and performance in the workplace. She has a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher, writer, and consultant. He has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Virginia.
Imagine: you’re crawling home from work on the motorway after a long and stressful day. The roads are congested and the weather is gloomy. Every time you switch lanes, the traffic grinds magically to a halt, as all the other lanes begin to flow freely. The radio cuts to a commercial. It’s windy.
And then it happens.
The idiot in the big SUV across from you won’t let you in. But you need to take this exit. You can feel the anger – the rage – swelling up from deep within you, as he still won’t let you in. How are you going to respond? Will you yell something? Will you lean on your horn? Will you gesture at him?
What about other situations in life? When someone or something hurts you, how do you respond?
Venting only makes you angrier
If you would usually react in one of the ways described above, then you’re certainly not alone. But a number of studies have shown that venting your anger in the form of an outburst will actually only serve to make your anger worse. Dr Dianne Tice, from Florida State University, describes it like this:
Anger that is expressed angrily begets more anger. Letting it out is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The only way to handle anger is to control it, and then either use it or forget it.
Jeffrey Lohr, from the University of Arkansas, puts it this way:
Punching pillows and breaking dishes doesn’t reduce subsequent anger expression. That, the research shows clearly.
We are not steam kettles
So what’s going on – isn’t it just common sense that “letting it all out” is an important step in dealing with negative emotions?
Not so, says Stefan Klein in his fascinating book The Science of Happiness. He asserts that this common misconception about the need to release anger (or tears) arises from an outdated nineteenth-century notion that the brain is like a steam kettle, in which negative feelings create pressure that needs to be released. But Klein says that this is simply not true:
Over forty years ago, controlled studies showed that fits of rage are more likely to intensify anger… Our heads do not represent steam kettles, and our brains entail a much more sophisticated system than can be accounted for by images taken from nineteenth-century technology.
Ancient wisdom
Of course, looking for ways to avoid outbursts of anger is anything but a new idea. Jesus told his disciples to “turn the other cheek”; Paul encouraged the Roman church to “overcome evil with good”; and Buddha taught that “hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love”.
Of course this is not to say that anger has no place at all – used well it can spur us on to positive change, or to helping others. For example, in this context Daniel Goleman talks about constructive anger. But anger in the form of venting or rage tends not to resolve any underlying misunderstandings or disagreements.
Summary
So the next time somebody cuts you off in traffic, or won’t let you change lanes, maybe take a moment to think about the negative effects of venting your anger. You’ll certainly feel better afterwards if you can manage to keep your cool!
In a future article we’ll look at some practical and helpful steps that you can take for resolving your anger positively.
If you’re an employer (especially if you’re my employer), I want you to go out right now and buy a box of chocolates for your staff. Then while you’re handing them out, why not make a point of letting everyone know just how good they’re looking today?
Just so long as your staff weren’t expecting it, you’d most likely see that their work was significantly better today – that they seemed more attentive and focused, and could come up with more creative solutions than usual. Pretty cool, huh?
Isen’s study
That’s what Alice Isen from Cornell University showed in a study of how positive affect (or emotion) influences clinical problem solving (Isen, Rosenzweig & Young, 1991). In the study, two groups of third year medical students were taken through a diagnosis problem where they had to decide which one of six hypothetical patients was most likely to be suffering from lung cancer. However, positive affect had been induced in one group first by telling them that they had successfully solved an anagram problem.
What Isen found was that even though both groups reached the same conclusions, the happy group reached their conclusions significantly more quickly than the control group. And the only difference between the two groups was their state of mind!
So what was going on?
The importance of dopamine
When you receive an unexpected reward, several different parts of your brain start releasing a chemical called dopamine, which is renowned for its many effects on how we think and feel. In fact, many drugs like cocaine, and to a lesser extent nicotine and alcohol, work largely by flooding the brain with dopamine. But as Ashby, Isen and Turken (1999) discuss, dopamine also has a very positive influence on our ability to think creatively and solve problems.
Dopamine facilitates the stimulation of individual neurons in the brain, and this makes it easier for the brain to do all sorts of things, from moving muscles to learning new languages. As Stefan Klein puts it in his bookThe Science of Happiness:
…once in the brain, [dopamine] has seemingly miraculous powers. It helps control our alertness and attention. It stimulates curiosity, the ability to learn, imagination, creativity and sexual drive… Under its influence we feel motivated, optimistic, and full of self-confidence.
So when Isen’s happy group tackled the diagnosis problem, all the dopamine that had been released into their brains was giving their problem solving skills and creativity a natural supercharge. How about that!
Implications
The implications of Isen’s study are huge. Imagine what it would be like to radically lift the energy and problem solving abilities of your staff, friends or family just through giving small unexpected gifts? Wouldn’t you want to work or live in an environment where everyone’s glad to be there, and firing on all cylinders?
I guess the only caveat is that is this example, the gift needs to be unexpected for the effect to work – so you wouldn’t expect this to keep working if you tried it every day for a week.
But I’m not expecting anything this afternoon.
So why not head out to the store now and buy those chocolates, tell your staff how amazing they are, make them feel great, and as a result see them work more productively, efficiently and creatively!
References
Ashby, F. G., Isen, A. M., & Turken, A. U. (1999). A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition. Psychological Review, 106, 529-550.
Isen, A. M., Rosenzweig, A. S., & Young, M. J. (1991). The influence of positive affect on clinical problem solving. Medical Decision Making, 11, 221-227.
Klein, S. (2006). The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy-and What We Can Do to Get Happier. Marlow & Company, New York.
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Today’s video is a brief explanation of the functions of dopamine:
Think about this carefully: if you could eat one marshmallow right now, or two marshmallows after waiting 15 minutes, which one would you pick?
I hate to break it to you, but if you happen to be from 4-6 years old (phew, you’re saying!) it seems that an excellent predictor of life success boils down to whether or not you decided to wait for the two marshmallows. Or at least, that’s what Walter Mischel from Stanford University found in a landmark study of delayed gratification.
In the study, the researchers led children aged from 4-6 into a room with a marshmallow placed on a table, and then gave them a choice: they could either eat the one marshmallow, or wait for 15 minutes and then eat two. The researchers then left the room, and watched what happened next.
Of the 600 participants, only about 200 were able to wait the 15 minutes to claim the two marshmallows. Interesting enough in its own right, but where things really started to get fascinating was over a decade later when Mischel started sending out surveys to the original participants to see how they were getting on in high school.
He found that those who were able to wait for the second marshmallow were much more likely to be well-behaved in school, and that their SAT scores were significantly higher. What’s more, Scientific American reports another study following 1000 children for 30 years which found that those with greater self-control turned out to be healthier, more financially secure and had lower crime rates. Pretty impressive!
The reason is that self control helps us to work towards desirable longer term goals that might not be appealing in the short term, and conversely to avoid appealing actions in the short term that might lead to undesirable outcomes in the long term. Which are quite important skills, if you want to do well in college, or eat healthily, or stay out of trouble with the police.
So the question is – how well can you control your impulses? Would you take the marshmallow?
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For a more detailed description of Mischel’s original experiment, see this article from The New Yorker. Also, check out another version of Mischel’s study here:
