Lecture 2: Understanding Affective States

December 23, 2013January 6, 2014 selvam Uncategorized

WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
‘…a kind of shorthand, an abbreviated way to refer to a package of events and processes…antecedent events, the physiological and motor responses, the memories, thoughts, images, and information processing, and the mobilisation of efforts to cope with the source of emotions. All of these may be implied when someone says, “He looks angry” (Ekaman, 1989).
EMOTIONS AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

The way we process emotion is influenced by gender, genetic makeup and some personality traits.
The environmental influence on emotional processing is also strong. That is, we learn to process. That is why, the way children deal with emotions is different from that of adults.
This learning process could be largely determined by early exposure to strong emotional stimuli without accompanying support. Certain way of expressing emotions in a particular context (family) learnt as a child may be difficult in dealing with in another context (school/community) as an adult.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY & AFFECTIVE […]

Lecture 3: Flow, Positivity, Flourishing

December 23, 2013January 6, 2014 selvam Uncategorized

WHAT IS FLOW?
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness (London: Random House, 2002).

The mental state experienced during ‘an autotelic activity’ during which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus marked by loss of sense of time and space.
Generally, flow occurs when there is a balance between skills and challenges in the individual’s functioning.
In relation to wellbeing, some studies have shown that the state of flow alone cannot sufficiently explain all the constructs associated with happiness and wellbeing.
Csikszentmihalyi himself accepts that people in flow may not acknowledge subjective wellbeing.

NINE CHARACTERISTICS OF FLOW (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 1996)

Clear goals
Balance of challenge and skill
Immediate feedback
No fear of failure
Distractions excluded from consciousness
Merging of action and awareness (concentration)
Not self-conscious of the activity
Transcendence of time & space
Autotelic – intrinsic motivation (see Deci & Ryan)

ARE WE HARDWIRED FOR NEGATIVITY?

Evidence from neuroscience suggests that human memory is better facilitated, marked by increased […]

Lecture 5 – Correlates of Happiness

December 23, 2013January 5, 2014 selvam Uncategorized

READING 1: Psychology of Happiness by David Myer
DOWNLOAD MY CLASSNOTES IN PDF: PP 5 Correlates of Happiness
Veenhoven, R.. (2009). World Database of Happiness: Tool for dealing with the ‘data-deluge’. Psychological Topics 18(2), 221-246.
Veenhoven, R. (2012). Cross-national differences in happiness: Cultural measurement bias or effect of culture? International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(4), 333-353.

Lecture 6: Psycho-Social Substrates of Wellbeing

December 23, 2013January 5, 2014 selvam Uncategorized

Positive psychology makes a distinction between subjective wellbeing, social wellbeing and psychological wellbeing. The literature of positive psychology makes use of different terminologies to name positive affective states and some of them are not yet clarified. For instance, there is a confusion of terms – what Seligman (2002, p.115) prefers to call ‘gratification’, Csikszentmihalyi (2002) calls ‘enjoyment’. These confusions suggest that psychological understanding of affective states is still a work in progress (Kristjánsson, 2010). On the other hand, the complexity of terminology goes to show that pleasure, happiness and wellbeing lies in a spectrum of psycho-social states with a varying degree of valence.
Pleasure
Positive psychology suggests that pleasure (largely understood as hedonia) is not negative in itself. It has a limitation insofar as exaggerations are concerned. The exaggeration in intensity could lead to euphoria, and the exaggeration in frequency and duration could lead to habituation. Subsequently, the state of euphoria could […]