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Positive psychology is a movement within academic psychology that psychology is not just about fixing whats wrong, its about building whats right. It disputes the notion that you need to dwell on and express negative emotions in order to bring about change and instead proposes that you savour... If we define applied positive psychology as “the application of empirically validated strategies and interventions that help people change their state”, then meditation , though not always found as part of positive psychology courses, certainly deserves to be. Central to developing optimistic thinking is a skill that all individuals possess, but usually use in the wrong place. The skill is called “disputing” and its use is at the heart of learned optimism. If an external person, who was a rival for your job, accused you falsely of failing at your job and not deserving your position, you would dispute him... The researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered that the times in their lives when people are at their happiest, are the times in which a person’s total attention was taken up with what they were doing, a state that he named flow... In a longitudinal study of nuns, researchers studied their auto-biographical sketches written in the 1930s. They discovered that 90% of those who expressed the most positive emotions, who wrote about feelings of happiness and "eager joy" were alive and well at age 85, compared to only 34% of the least cheerful quarter... Researchers have focused on questions such as "what behaviours and attitudes positively affect happiness and self-fulfillment? Can we learn to be happy?"... |