Using the new Positive Psychology

11 Amazing Thank You Notes From Famous People After a short stint in the New York theater world, comedienne Carol Burnett landed a job as a regular on The Garry Moore Show in 1959. She caught the attention of CBS executives, who offered her her own series in 1967. With her husband Joe Hamilton at the helm, Burnett broke new ground as the first female host of a TV variety show. The Carol Burnett Show ran for 11 seasons and earned a handful of Emmy Awards in the process. As Carol Burnett painfully recalled later in life, whenever she’d expressed an interest in a career in the theater as a teen, her mother would always dissuade her and recommend that she would have better luck studying to become a writer. As she was nearing graduation from UCLA, Burnett and several fellow drama students were invited to a departing professor’s house to perform at his bon voyage party. When Vicki Lawrence cut her hair in a short “pixie” cut as a high school senior, many of her classmates commented on her resemblance to Carol Burnett.

Dawn French: 'I decided I'd pretend to be someone very confident' | From the Observer | The Observer Dawn French: 'I'm a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Observer Why are you in Australia? You were supposed to have settled in Cornwall for the rest of your days. For my sins and my guilty pleasure I am a judge on Australia's Got Talent, alongside tiny little bambi Geri Halliwell. It's an honest, open kind of competition and I thought, I'll give it a go. That is an interesting honeymoon… It is extraordinary. Do you genuinely like reality talent shows? Oh yes. Did you go through anything like that process in your early days? No. What do people think of you in Australia? They love The Vicar of Dibley. Both your novels have been bestsellers. I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart. The second novel, Oh Dear Silvia, is out now in paperback. I think you earn big laughs in something truthful if it has tragedy also. A lot of the book is written in accents, which are supposed to be so difficult to write. It's based on people I know or mixtures of people.

Happiness & Health - Chronic Disease Prevention - Harvard Public Health Magazine [ Winter 2011] Could a sunny outlook mean fewer colds and less heart disease? Do hope and curiosity somehow protect against hypertension, diabetes, and respiratory tract infections? Do happier people live longer—and, if so, why? These are the kinds of questions that researchers are asking as they explore a new—and sometimes controversial—avenue of public health: documenting and understanding the link between positive emotions and good health. A vast scientific literature has detailed how negative emotions harm the body. Jack P. Focusing on the positive “But negative emotions are only one-half of the equation,” says Laura Kubzansky, HSPH associate professor of society, human development, and health. Kubzansky is at the forefront of such research. Among dozens of published papers, Kubzansky has shown that children who are able to stay focused on a task and have a more positive outlook at age 7 report better general health and fewer illnesses 30 years later. State of mind=state of body

25 Free Stock Photo Sites When I began the research for this article, I knew of only a handful of free stock photography sites. I set out to find as many good ones as I could, thinking maybe I’d find a dozen. I was quite surprised to find 25 good, solid resources out there. Note the terms of use for each site. Keep in mind that “Royalty Free” does not mean the images are free; it means that you don’t need to pay the photographer a royalty each time you use the image. Update: Check out our latest list of 18 MORE free stock photos sites. QualityStockPhotos.com is my favorite site for free stock photography. Stock.XCHNG is a great site for free stock photography. This is a huge resource, currently indexing over 3 million photos! The photos on Imagebase are free to use, and are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Morguefile is a completely free source for stock photos. Openphoto groups their completely free photos by categories, and offers a search function as well. Imageafter has 20,000 images available.

The Anatomy Of A Thank You Note – Krrb’s Guide To Expressing Gratitude With Style ~ Krrb Blog First off, if you can get your hands on a kid who is just learning to write and then convince said kid to write (or make a good go at writing) "Thanks" on a piece of paper that you can put into an envelope and send, you are golden. Your job is done. Who is not going to be touched by a child's early attempts at writing? Nothing says thank you like a note written by a 4 year old. You too, can produce thank you notes that would make your grandparents proud and that would bring a smile to even the most jaded of faces. I mean, if the leader of the free world has the time to write thank you notes by hand, I don't want to hear anything from the rest of us about not being able to "get around to it." Looks simple, right? The Occasion OK so here’s the first big issue to tackle: When do I need to write a thank you note? Some people say that writing a thank you note after a dinner party is overkill, but if you had a great time, we say go for it! The Stationery A Postcard A Note Card DIY Thank You’s 1.

Unstuck iPad app - How to live better every day – Unstuck Happiness 1. The meanings of ‘happiness’ 1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’ What is happiness? Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term: A state of mind A life that goes well for the person leading it In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value, namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value—or, more commonly, well-being, welfare, utility or flourishing. Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment: namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person.[1] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. 1.2 Clarifying our inquiry 2. 2.1 The chief candidates 2.2 Methodology: settling on a theory 3. 4. 5.

Money <em>can</em> buy happiness… if you spend it on other people | Not Exactly Rocket Science “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” – Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life – we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys suggest that the two are unrelated. Across and within countries, income has an incredibly weak effect on happiness once people have enough to secure basic needs and standards of living. Once people are lifted out of abject poverty and thrown into the middle class, any extra earnings do little to improve their joie de vivre. I can’t get no… satisfcation Hey big spender There is a silver lining then.

Women in STEM: four steps to a stronger Athena Swan application | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional A change is in the air: Athena Swan, the charter recognising commitment to women's careers in STEM, has become a topic of conversation at meetings in universities up and down the country. I was at a leukaemia research meeting only the other week and spent most of my coffee break talking about the scheme. Minds have been focused by money. The National Institute for Health Research's BRC/BRU funding will require a minimum silver Athena Swan award, which can only be obtained following a submission to the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU). For this reason, most universities and departments now have their own self-assessment team preparing or planning applications, with over 90 awaiting decisions from the last round. I recently sat on an Athena Swan assessment panel. 1) Write a good letter First impressions matter. 2) Identify your organisation's direction Is the number of female staff increasing or are you becoming more male dominated? 3) Check recruitment at all levels • Thinking about training.

To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself | Not Exactly Rocket Science Want to know how much you’d enjoy an experience? You’re better off asking someone who has been through it, even if they’re a complete stranger, than to find out information for yourself. This advice comes from Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, who espoused it in his superb book Stumbling on Happiness. In the first study, he found that female students were better able to predict how much they would enjoy a speed-date if they listened to the experiences of strangers than if they make their own assessments based on available information. This interesting result masks a second one of equal importance – people don’t believe that this works. Time and again, psychological studies have found that we overestimate how happy we will be after winning a prize, starting a new relationship or taking revenge against those who have wronged us. Gilbert says that the main reason for this is an inability to accurately imagine future events. Photo by Laughlin, found on Flickr

Girls' school holds 'blow your own trumpet' week 28 April 2013Last updated at 22:03 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Head teacher Heather Hanbury warns of the constant pressures on girls An independent girls' school is holding a "blow your own trumpet" week to help over-pressured, high-achieving pupils who find it difficult to accept that they have been successful. "Some teenagers will continue to push themselves, never recognising when they've done enough," said Heather Hanbury, head of Wimbledon High School. Last year the school ran a "failure week" to help girls cope with setbacks. Now the London day school says it wants to raise girls' sense of "self-worth". Ms Hanbury said that after last year's innovative "failure week" she had been contacted by fellow head teachers who said pupils could also have problems in coping with their achievements, with some girls unable "to accept success when it finally came". Self-confidence Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteHeather HanburyHead, Wimbledon High School

Sonja Lyubomirsky Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness, a book of strategies backed by scientific research that can be used to increase happiness.[1] She is often quoted in news articles about positive psychology and happiness.[2][3][4] In the book The Only Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, a criticism of self-help books, Lyubomirsky's The How of Happiness is praised as a self-help book that has claims backed by empirical data.[5] Lyubomirsky is also an associate editor of the Journal of Positive Psychology. The How of Happiness[edit] Breakdown of sources of happiness, according to The How of Happiness The How of Happiness has spawned an iPhone application called Live Happy, produced by Signal Patterns. The How of Happiness has also spawned a song called The How of Happiness Book Tune, which acts as a mnemonic aid to help readers remember the content within the book. [11] References[edit] See also[edit]