Week 14 - The End

This will be my last blog for this semester.   Over the past 14 weeks I have shared with you what aspects of motivation and emotion I found most enjoyable and my progress and thought processes for conducting my assignments, the key one being our text book chapter.   When reading over my weekly blogs, it is evident that I have an interest in what motivates someone to think positively and how positive aspects play a role in motivating the individual.  This was originally seen in Week 1 where I picked my text book chapter Positive thinking and Motivation.  This was then seen in Week 3 where I discussed the effects of dopamine release and the positive effects this has on the body, motivating the individual to seek out environments that result in this chemical release.  

In Week 4 I focused on the Self Determination Theory and how the three fundamental psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness all need to be satisfied in order to reach optimum psychological growth.  In Week 5, I discussed intrinsic motivation and the benefits this creates in performance, reaching goals and increasing well-being. Week 6 focused on the idea of helplessness and how if an individual feels that they are unable to overcome a negative situation that this results in greater self perceived inadequacy unlike those with a positive outlook. Week 7 introduced me to the father of Positive Psychology, Martin E. P. Seligman and his research in the area, opening up a whole array of information for me to sort through (which I really enjoyed reading)!  Week 9 saw me go a little off track however I really did enjoy researching robots that can convey emotional expression!  In Week 10 I had a lot of fun sorting through emotions within our tutorials, however what I found sad, was the fact that we have so many negative emotions and descriptions for how we are feeling and not so many positive ones.

The notion of the positive thinker was again brought up in Week 11.  This week focused on the idea of happiness and how being more extravert and less neurotic predicts how happy the individual actually is. Week 12 was my least favourite week, however I did enjoy the psychodynamic theory’s concepts of repression and suppression (something I can relate to experiencing)! Finally, Week 13 was definitely my favourite as it focused on Positive Psychology and covered much of the information that I wrote about in my text book chapter and more.  I most probably found it more enjoyable and interesting because of this.

As you can see, I have actually leant a lot in this unit.  Not only have I learned about differing theories and various aspects of motivation and emotion, I have also gained a few IT skills along the way! This was the first time in my undergraduate degree that I have had to write a blog, a text book chapter and create a multimedia presentation on the internet for everyone to see.  This will also have practical applications for the future, because I am sure that one day all books will be electronic, meetings will always take place via the internet and everyone will most probably work at home as a result.  This will mean that most forms of communication will end up being in electronic form.   The downside was that it did take a very long time and each of these assessment items were very time consuming, in the end however, it is something that we can all be proud of and will be able to look back on in the future.  It was also a nice way to finish off the year by combining the work of each student.  We have all become close friends over the past three years and to be able to keep something we have all worked hard on together will be a nice keepsake as we finish our undergraduate degree in Psychology.

If I take anything away from this learning experience, it would be to try and follow Seligman’s stance on Positive Psychology and attempt to be a more optimistic person.  Not only will this see me being open to new experiences and not be overwhelmed by the obstacles I face, it will also see me create greater connections with others, be more successful and be physically and mentally healthier. I guess overall, this subject has given me the intrinsic motivation I need to try and live a more optimistic life J

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my learning experience and hopefully you have learnt something too!

The End!

Week 13 - Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology

I really enjoyed the topic this week which was growth motivation and Positive Pychology, in fact, I think it was my favourite subject.  I think I especially enjoyed it because it covered a lot of the same topics that I wrote about in my text book chapter, but it also went over subjects that I did not include which I found quite engaging as well.  Perhaps some of the other information in a future chapter could be incorporated, combination of the two would make for a very informative chapter.

Positive Psychology focuses on prevention of mental illness. In doing so, it aims to build individual’s strengths and help them to maintain a more positive outlook on life (Reeve, 2009).  As I touched on in my text book chapter and previous blogs, Martin E. P. Seligman is renowned for promoting Positive Psychology.  He has written numerous books and articles relating to the topic and I found these especially helpful when writing my text book chapter to get ideas and to decide what information I would like to include.  I have provided links in my previous blogs to some of his work. 

I myself like the idea of creating a more positive person and believe that if this type of angle is implemented into the modern world, the one of prevention rather than cure, individuals would have a more positive outlook on life and learn to deal with negative events in a more positive manner.  The teachings in positive therapy are really not that hard to incorporate into someone’s daily life, it is really just a matter of the individual changing their thinking style and inevitably living a more happy life and increasing their well-being. As James mentioned in the last lecture, by just having one person that believes in you and your ability to overcome negative events or achieve your goals, this is seen as extremely beneficial to someone’s motivation to overcome and achieve these things (Neill, 2010a).  It does not take much to create a happy person.  To live in a positive mindset is really quite simple, but it is sad that people find this so hard to achieve.

In this week’s lecture, James also mentioned the term nirvana (Neill, 2010b).  Within my text book chapter I discussed the different way that easterners view obstacles in life.  Unlike the majority of the western world, easterners see obstacles in life as a challenge.  In doing so, they attempt to solve the problem in order to seek triumph and find meaning in the negative events within their lives.  Easterners seek to live fulfilling lives in order to receive rewards in the afterlife (Snyder & Lopez, 2007).  This term ‘nirvana’ is referred to in Buddhism. Buddhists aim to reach a state of inner peace.  In order to reach this goal, Buddhists must overcome desire and obtain the virtues of love, joy and compassion.  Once desire has disappeared from an individual’s life, this is nirvana and the individual is free.  Even if someone does not believe in the after life or eastern religions, I think there are some very important lessons to be learnt for everyday living.  To live happier, care free and more fulfilling lives I think it would be beneficial to incorporate these thinking styles into everyday life (Snyder & Lopez, 2007).  By seeing obstacles as challenges, being content with what one has and being open to love and showing compassion would improve anyone’s view on the world, others and most importantly themselves.

Obviously I could continue to just keep going on and on about this topic, I really enjoyed each aspect of the chapter and lecture.  Maybe there should be a unit in the future that just focuses on Positive Psychology! If I could take anything away from the teachings of Positive Psychology in particular, it would be to believe in myself and my ability to overcome obstacles, achieve goals, be happy, content and grateful for all of the good things in my life and most of all to enjoy whatever 'good' comes my way J  I have also completed my multimedia presentation for my text book chapter, click here to view it!

References

Neill, J. (2010, November 3). [Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology Lecture].  Lecture presented at the University of Canberra, ACT. [Lecture notes]. Retrieved from http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4208&topic=4

Neill, J. (2010, November 10). [Growth Motivation and Positive Psychology Lecture].  Lecture presented at the University of Canberra, ACT. [Lecture notes]. Retrieved from http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4208&topic=3

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America,  USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Snyder, C. R. & Lopez, S. J. (2007) Positive psychology the scientific and practical explorations of human strengths. London, UK: Sage.

Week 12 - Unconscious Motivation

Finally, the text book chapter is finished! If you would like to read it, click here. I am quite happy with what I have achieved, I actually enjoyed researching and writing about this topic.  As it was on positive thinking and motivation I learnt a lot about the benefits of thinking positively and have been trying to increase my well being and mental health by ‘attempting’ to adopt a more positive thinking style.  Despite the fact that I feel that I should have spent more time on it, this really would not have been possible with all of the other assessment I have had due throughout this semester.  Overall though I think I am more glad that I have finished it and was able to figure out how to do the coding on Wikiversity! It is not over yet though, my task over the next week will be to create a multimedia presentation which summarises the main points of my chapter using a program on the Internet called Screenr.  In today’s lecture James taught us how to use this program, it seems relatively easy to use which will be nice, as this will enable me to spend more time writing my presentation rather than figuring out how to actually record it! 

This week however, we have focused on the topic of unconscious motivation.  I did not find this week as enjoyable as the others, however the subject I found most interesting was that of Psychodynamics. Freud believed that motivation is an intricate occurrence because individuals often engage in behaviours that they do not want to do. Freud stated that all people have wills and ideas.  However he also states that the conscious will fights against the unconscious counterwill and that this fight never sees a victor (Reeve 2009).

The most prevalent concept in Freud’s Psychodynamic theory is that of repression. Repression is an unconscious act that sees the individual forget information unconsciously (Reeve, 2009).  Repression undergoes the act of analysing each thought and determining whether it qualifies to enter the public domain. As many of these motivations stay in the unconscious as a result of the act of repression, many individuals are not aware of their unconscious motivations. This act of repression occurs as these motivations do not fit in with an individuals own self view or the opinions that others and the outer society have of these desires.   When these thoughts begin to emerge, anxiety overtakes this situation and this cases repression to occur yet again (Reeve, 2009). 

Suppression on the other hand is something that I know I have definitely engaged in. Suppression is when an individual deliberately and consciously stops a thought from entering their mind. However as people have very little control over their thoughts, this act does have a high failure rate as suppressed thoughts do not remain that way forever. We use repression when we do not want to think, do, want or remember something.  The following example relates to me over the past week:

            Think: I should really be doing that assignment

            Do: Don’t go out tonight!

            Want: Try not to eat Maltesers!

            Remember: Try to forget about what I did last time I was out…

It is apparent that individuals use suppression for their inner good, it is a private experience that we all struggle with in order to keep a secret, overcome fear, pain and to control our behaviours (Reeve, 2009).  This unwanted thought however can actually become an obsession, because the more the individual tries to not think about something, the more they actually begin to think about it!  I find I continually do this when I do not want to do an assignment.  I watch TV, go out, go on Facebook and do everything but the assignment.  However, no matter how much I try not to think about the assignment (what I should be doing) I just keep thinking about it more and more.  So in the end, it is clearly more beneficial to just do the assignment and have fun later! That concludes my blog for this week.  I will start my multimedia presentation this week and provide a link in my blog next week so you can view it!

References

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Week 11 - Personality Motivation and Emotion

I enjoyed this week’s topic on personality, motivation and emotion.  Now that we have discussed both emotion and motivation in detail, this week has looked at the connection between the two and integrated previous topics we have covered throughout our psychology degree by incorporating our understanding of personality. I guess it makes you realise just how much all subject areas of psychology are connected. What I found most interesting however, was how both motivation and emotion when influenced by personality can cause happiness or unhappiness, which is related to my text book chapter on positive thinking.

In the textbook Reeve (2009) starts the chapter by asking the reader if they are happy.  Not only does he ask this, but he asks if someone were to follow you around all day for several days would they see someone who is always happy, experiencing positive emotions and whether it is an intense happiness or just something like contentment.  In answer to this question, Reeve (2009) goes on to say that most people are happy, however some are simply happier than others.

When answering these questions myself, I would say that I am generally happy.  I would say that I am most happy when I am spending time with my friends and family and having a bit of fun.  However, at this very point in time, with lots of assessment due and exams not too far away I guess I am not experiencing an ‘intense’ happiness.  This ‘level’ of happiness should hopefully change after this semester is finished however. Once the weather is warmer, I am not stressed, on holidays and celebrating my Birthday, Christmas and New Years I am sure my happiness will increase!

Reeve (2009) states that there are three motivational principles that are related to personality.  These are happiness, arousal and control.  These personality characteristics explain why people have varying motivational and emotional states in the same or similar situations (Reeve, 2009).  The reason that individuals have such differing experiences to the same situation is a result of how a stimulus is interpreted and experienced.  An individual’s personality traits will determine how positively someone responds to these stimuli, which in turn determines just how happy or unhappy someone is.

Two of the big five personality traits, neuroticism and extraversion are said to be predictors of happiness. Neuroticism is an indicator of how emotionally stable someone is.  Those who are high on this construct are predisposed to negative emotionality, stress, anxiety and upset.  These people tend to get stressed more easily and are subject to more negative episodes (Neill, 2010). Those low in neuroticism are deemed as emotionally stable and steady.  Extraverts tend to be more sociable, enjoying the company of others.  They are also more socially dominant and seek out stimulating environments.

Studies have concluded that extraversion is a predictor of positive happiness and neuroticism is a predictor of unhappiness (Neill, 2010).  Extraverts have more positive moods than introverts, have greater capacity to experience positive emotions and are more enticed by positive rewards that the environment has to offer. Neurotics on the other hand have a stronger behavioural inhibition system, which alerts the individual to greater threats and harm within their given environment, increasing their cautiousness. A negative event in their environment will cause them more distress and lead to negative emotions and anxiety (Reeve, 2009). As we can see, extraverts and those who are low on neuroticism are likely to seek out new experiences and be less worried about their consequences, making them a happier person.

I know that I will be a happier person once the text book chapter is out of the way.  It is due next week now, I don’t think I will touch on the idea of extraversion and neuroticism and positive thinking in my chapter due to the word count, time and the fact that emotion is also prevalent in these findings. However I will be discussing the idea of happiness, well being and the personality traits resilience and hardiness and how each of these determines how positively someone thinks.  It is good to know that James is available to help us.  However I for some reason want to have written my chapter before I put it up on the Wikiversity page.  In my next blog I will provide a link to my finished chapter.  Until then though, I better keep working on my chapter so you will have something to actually read!

References

Neill, J. (2010, October 27). [Personality Motivation and Emotion Lecture]. Lecture presented at the University of Canberra, ACT. [Lecture notes]. Retrieved from http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4208&topic=5

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Week 10 - Aspects of Emotion

This week looked deeper into biological, cognitive and socio cultural causes of emotion.  As found in one of the first tutorials, emotion is hard to define.  Not only do people have trouble identifying what an emotion is, but there is no agreement on what constitutes the criteria for core emotions. 

I can understand this dilemma.  From a naive perspective, how can we be sure that everyone experiences the same emotions? Are they experienced to the same extent? Each person is different and has varying life experiences, values and cultural norms.  Emotions are such an abstract construct that I find it hard to believe that they can even be measured. So how can we possibly identify all the emotions that people experience and say that they are the same?

Despite these questions, there are 6 basic emotions that have been identified and sadly people appear to experience more negative emotions than positive. Reeve (2009) states that fear, anger, disgust and sadness are all  basic, negative emotions and that joy and interest are basic, positive emotions.  

From a biological view point, it appears that emotions are all inherently adaptive in some way.  They have coping functions which help the individual cope with life events and social functions, to help you communicate how you are feeling with others (Reeve, 2009).  They also are able to regulate behaviour through a feedback system by prompting you do act in adaptive ways. 

The biological aspect of emotion also states that differing rates/patterns of cortical neural firing result in the experience of varying emotions (Reeve, 2009).  This happens unconsciously in the brain at any time.  Joy for instance is associated with a decrease in frequency of neural activation over time and surprise is associated with a quick activation increase (Neill, 2010).

Izard came up with 10 fundamental emotions these consist of positive, neutral and negative emotions.

(Reeve, 2009)

This theory suggests that these 10 discrete emotions prepare an person to act adaptively, this enables the individual to develop social relationships and tackle threats head on (Reeve, 2009).

What I found most interesting in the biological perspective was the facial feedback hypothesis, where just by moving the facial muscles and by the temperature changing in the face and glandular activity being altered in the skin, emotion can be created.  In our face there are 36 of 80 muscles that are involved in facial expression (Reeve, 2009).  A study looking at this found that by changing facial expressions for the five emotions rear, anger, disgust, joy and distress evoked changes in the respiratory and cardiovascular rates (Reeve, 2009).

Despite the fact that some facial behaviour is learned, some facial expressions are innate and are found across cultures throughout the world (Reeve, 2009). This suggests that some emotions are actually inherited and certain facial expressions are associated with varying emotions.

However despite this finding, many emotions can arise from social interaction.  Cultural influence also determines one’s understanding of emotion.  Reeve (2009) suggests that if you change your cultural context, the emotions that you will experience will also change.  For example, in China love is viewed as a negative emotion and in the US is it seen as a positive one.  This may be due to the fact that in China there are many arranged marriages and it is more common for people to feel depressed when they are in love because they know they cannot pursue this relationship.  This finding is depicted in the diagram below.

(Reeve, 2009)

In tutorials we explored this idea further.  We separated into our groups and were given a hand-out with a list of emotions.  We had to develop our own model of core emotions into clusters.  We were told not to be guided by previous theories, however our group decided to initially follow the basic model of emotion in the hope of expanding and changing it further, unfortunately we ran out of time.  We did however spend a lot of time sorting through the differing emotions to put them into categories (there were over 100).  This also proved difficult, as there were many words we had never even heard of before! So out came the laptop and synonyms on Word!  You can view our fabulous model below! For a closer view see Group Four's Emotion Model.

Again what I found sad was the fact that most of the emotions we decided to keep in our model were again negative.  The largest cluster we had was for sadness, closely followed by anger. Happiness was our next largest group.  We believed ours was extra special due to our artistic talent for our headings!

I guess Seligman would not be too impressed by the fact that negative emotions seem to be more prevalent and recognised within the individual. Maybe new words need to be created that reflect other positive emotions, rather than so many negative! That concludes my blog for this week, I will be continuing to work on my chapter throughout the next two weeks.  I am feeling a little stressed but hopefully I can get it finished in time!

References

Neill, J. (2010, September 22). [Control beliefs and The Self Lecture].  Lecture presented at the University of Canberra, ACT. [Lecture notes].  Retrieved from http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4208&cal_m=10&cal_y=2010

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America,  USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Week 9 - Nature of Emotion

This week we started to focus on the nature of emotion. These next few weeks are just focusing on one chapter a week, which means that there is not as much information to focus on. There are five underlying key questions which are asked in psychology in relation to emotion.

            What is an emotion?

            What causes an emotion?

            How many emotions are there?

            What good are the emotions?

            What is the difference between emotion and mood? (Reeve, 2009).

The answer to all of these questions it the same answer to most questions posed in psychology.  The answer is that none of the above questions are particularly simple to answer because emotion is a complex and multidimensional construct (Reeve, 2009).  There are many biological and environmental triggers and mechanisms for experiencing an emotion.  There is varied debate as to how many there actually are, and the function that they serve.  There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, as they appear to serve adaptive function and would not have evolved if they did not do so.  Finally, a mood, unlike an emotion is a general sense of feeling either good or bad and is not necessarily triggered by a specific incident.  An emotion however is relatively specific, triggered, experienced and dissipated relatively fast. This then leads psychologists to ask five more questions:

            How can emotion be measured?

            What are the consequences of emotion?

            How can emotion be changed?

            How and why did emotions evolve?

            How do emotions of animals and humans vary? (Reeve, 2009)

Again there is no one straight forward answer to any of these questions.  Emotion is not able to be physically measured and psychologists must rely on self report measures and subjective experiences.  Emotion has been found to have negative consequences on health, as too much negative emotion has dire effects on both physical and mental health (Neill, 2010).  There are some emotions that both humans and animals share which represent the animalistic part of our evolution, but there are also some that humans have uniquely (Neill, 2010). 

When asked to define emotion in tutorials a few weeks ago, it was much harder to define than motivation.  Psychologists however have found four components which are continually touched upon when describing an emotion.  These are displayed in the flow chart below.

(Reeve, 2009)

I found Reeve’s view on emotion quite interesting. 

           

 Emotion as Motivation

According to Reeve (2009) the emotions you experience are motivational agents which either inhibit you from taking action or draw you towards something positive.  In this process, the emotion is the reward or punishment which then goes on to feed this cycle of behaviour.

 Emotion as readout

The readout is part of the feedback loop that tells you if you are on the right or wrong track.  Whether the emotional response is high or low it will redirect your efforts towards the goal (Reeve, 2009).  As James mentioned, without emotion we would be like a robot (Neill, 2010).  This is the most challenging part of robotics, as somehow scientists will have to create a similar feedback and reward system.  Scientists have not been able to build an emotional organic robot.

I have found this clip on You-Tube where Japanese scientists have tried to convey emotional facial expression in a robot. In doing, these scientists have been able to create 30 different facial expressions and combinations of these emotions in response to words.  Their aim is to create a flow of consciousness in robots and in doing so,  improve communications between humans and robots.  These scientists want to  convey emotion with the power of speech, however it is evident that there is still a long way to go.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLXGS0J52co.  Here is another robot which looks like Albert Einstein which has been designed to mimic facial expressions showing fear, happy, disgust and confusion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkpWCu1k0ZI&NR=1. A bit scary!  It makes me wonder if one day we will not be able to tell the difference between a human and a robot…

The one question that continues to arise in this topic is just how many emotions are there? The biological view on emotions suggests that only a small number exists. It states that there are between 2-10 universally  that continue to occur across cultures (Reeve, 2009).  These evidently have risen from biological and evolutionary processes.  The cognitive view however, suggests that there is no end to the number of emotions, it sees many  shades of gray.  There can be culturally specific emotions, as well as personal, however these can differ dramatically. For instance one person’s experience of sadness may be different to someone else’s.  There is no way of testing this, as some think that their experience of an emotion is unique to them.  Much of the complexity in this is brought about from individuals having different emotional experiences (Neill, 2010).

Reeve (2009) has identified six basic emotions.  It can be said that emotion can be reduced to clusters or factors.  These can be formed on the basis of whether these emotions are also found in animals, whether people have a similar response to the same situation or if the same physiological arousal occurs in the body. Sadly, love was not included in this model.

Fear: Is the response to the threat of harm, it has a unique cognitive and physiological response.  For instance, I had this feeling the other night when I came across a massive huntsman on the ceiling which I had to very bravely dispose of!

Anger: I  People site anger as their most memorable experiences.  Anger is experienced when something is not right, when an injustice has occurred or someone has been wrong.  If we look at this in the light of positive and negative emotions, despite anger being negative, it drives positive behaviours to make things right. 

Disgust: Drives you to be repelled from an object you do not want to be connected with.  This could be someone in a social setting, off food etc.

Sadness: Is a less energising response, it is a downstate of not being activated, being sorrowful for what you do not have.

Joy:  Has a euphoric, pleasant, positive affect. It can occur when something goes better than expected, when someone makes progress towards their goals and achieves them.  An example of this in my life was getting full marks for my speech the other day, much better than I had anticipated!

Interest: Sees an arousal of curiosity.  This is the feeling you get when you start something new, you may take a risk approach and investigate something further (Reeve, 2009).

As the flow diagram shows, these can be divided into both positive and negative emotions.   Negative emotions help us to respond to threat and prevent harm and positive emotions help you to get involved and feel satisfied when you achieve something (Neill, 2010).

Overall, I find this nature vs nurture debate to be a common theme throughout my studies.  It is again brought about in emotion.  Personally I think that emotion is a combination of the two.  It is evident that everyone appears to experience the same emotions and the fact that people show similar experiences to the same events proves this.  However as mentioned above, I also think  that everyone is different and has led different lives.  Therefore, someone’s individual emotional experience to one event may be different to someone else’s depending on whether they have or have not experienced something similar before.  Personality may also play an important factor in emotion as well, as depending on people's coping mechanisms and how they view the world, an intense emotion such as anger could be more easily brought about and higher in intensity to a rather insignificant event compared to others who would not think anything of it. 

References

Neill, J. (2010, October 13). [Nature of Emotion Lecture].  Lecture presented at the University of Canberra, ACT. [Lecture notes].

Retrieved from http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4208&cal_m=10&cal_y=2010

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America,

USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Week 7 - Personal Control and The Self

There was no lecture this week so today’s blog will just focus on the material covered in the tutorial.  This week’s tutorial covered content that I could use in my text book chapter Motivation and Positive Thinking.  What interested me the most this week was the book that James brought to class called ‘Learned Optimism’ by Martin E. P. Seligman.  Seligman is a positive psychologist who introduced new life into psychology.  Instead of focusing on the negative, he brought about the idea of Positive Psychology.  His two main contributions are that of learned optimism and goal setting.  A few of his works are available online on Google Books.  One of these that I have come across is the The Science of Optimism and Hope which builds on the research of the cognitive foundations for effective living.  It focuses on the qualities within a person that can improve well-being through optimism and hope. I have not yet looked over it in full, but I am sure that Seligman’s research and work, will contribute significantly to my text book chapter, as he is renowned for his work within positive psychology.

Templeton, the man who has sponsored Seligman to write this book in particular, discusses Seligman's outlook on life, which is very similar to the teachings of the Secret which I mentioned in Week 1. 

“What we look for in life, good or evil, problems or solutions, a measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere and we can improve our lives by changing our mindset. He argues that the social sciences can teach us about the merits of these virtues and how to live more satisfying productive fulfilling lives” (Templeton as cited in Seligman, 2000, pp. 3).

While looking further into Seligman’s work I came across one of his videos on You-Tube and he calls himself ‘happierdotcom’ and actually has a wide variety of videos on there.  In these he discusses the definition of Positive Psychology, how this can be used in therapy and his view on optimism and the difference between an optimistic and pessimistic person, I have a attached a link to this particular video here (Dr. Seligman's Definition of Optimism). 

Focusing more on the tutorial material in particular, we completed the ‘Test Your Own Optimism’ test which was taken from Seligman’s (1998) book Learned Optimism.  It measured pessimism and optimism.  According the class’s results, everyone in the class was very pessimistic.  As we know, optimism predicts life satisfaction, well being, work productivity and health, so maybe everyone in our class has no hope! However optimism is learned and we can change it.  There was some argument in class as to whether the test actually measured these constructs properly as the choice of answers was limited and appeared to not differentiate between the two.  For example question 28 asks:

‘Your boss gives you too little time in which to finish a project, but you get it finished anyway.’

a.       I am good at my job

b.      I am an efficient person (Seligman, 1998).

Both answers in this question appear to be more positive in nature and it could be argued that they do not necessarily focus on the construct of pessimism, sparking concern as to whether it is an appropriate measure to have included.

In one of Seligman’s You-Tube videos however he talks about The Happiness Test, which is similar to this one which we completed.  Despite people being upset and thinking that their results are wrong, it could mean that everyone in the class, including myself who scored a whole -1, are actually not overly optimistic in our thinking patterns. Seligman states that “Happiness and strengths tests tell you where you are relative to people like you and how much room there is for improvement" (Seligman, 2009 b).  Maybe it would be a better option in the future for us to take a strengths test which Seligman refers to in his video.  A strengths test will tell us our 5 highest strengths and in doing so will outline what we need do more of and what we should use in everyday situations to become more optimistic (Seligman, 2009 b).  This type of test would be more helpful as it would provide our strengths and how to improve them, rather than just telling us we are pessimistic.

I found this tutorial and the material I have researched since very interesting and applicable to my text book chapter.  I am happy that James introduced me to Seligman’s work as this will really contribute to my text book chapter and my ideas.

References

Seligman, M. E. P. (1998). Learned optimism. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2000). The science of optimism and hope. Retreived from http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ISezR6pODo8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA415&dq=seligman+positive+psychology&ots=D-uHmj4cjH&sig=7jJcJ-7idDTOY7x0iLjbPKp8Wqg#v=onepage&q=seligman%20positive%20psychology&f=false

Seligman, M. E. P. (2009, October 4). Dr seligman's definition of optimism [Video podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-rMuJW-UKg&feature=related

Seligman, M. E. P. (2009, October 4). The happiness test [Video podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3dSuTA0QPbKag%26feature%3drelated&ei=UTF-8&fr=hp-pvnb