Positive Psychology will help you to look on the bright side and to find your place in the world around you. With expert encouragement and guidance, you will set out your own positive psychology project to discover your strengths, overcome negative attitudes, focus on what gives you purpose, and take control of your life choices. From savouring positive emotions to building better relationships and developing resilience, you will gain the tools to boost your mental and physical well-being and to find fulfilment in everyday life. This is the perfect concise start to making your life better.

This book provides an accessible and balanced introduction to positive psychology scholarship and its applications, incorporating an overview of the development of positive psychology. Positive Psychology: The Basics delineates positive psychology’s journey as a discipline, takes stock of its achievements and provides an updated overview of its core topics, exploring the theory, research and interventions in each. Launched as a rebellious discipline just over two decades ago, positive psychology challenged the emphasis of applied psychology on disease and dysfunction and offered a new, more balanced perspective on human life. From its foundations in the late 20th century to recent "second-wave" theories around the importance of recognizing negative emotions, this compact overview covers the key ideas and principles, from research around emotional wellbeing, optimism and change, to posttraumatic growth and positive relationships. The first jargon-free introduction to the subject, Hart introduces the reader to a range of issues, including self-regulation and flow, character strengths and virtues and positive relationships, concluding with a chapter on how interventions can affect happiness and wellbeing. Positive Psychology: The Basics is an essential resource for students, practitioners, academics and anyone who is interested in understanding the essence of a life well lived.

Looking for an introduction to positive psychology that offers real-life examples? This overview of the science of happiness supplies case studies from some of the world's most successful organizations and describes ways to experience the personal impact of this exciting scientific field. Rather than focusing on treating what is "wrong" with a person, positive psychology seeks to understand and foster the things that drive happiness, creativity, and emotional fulfillment. This is a relatively new area of psychological study, and this reference book presents the research and practice of positive psychology in an informative and accessible format. Readers are given a history of the field, its current applications, and the future implications of this psychological discipline. Case studies from companies such as The Body Shop, Volvo, Zappos, and Google highlight the impact of positive psychology when it's applied in a modern business setting. These case studies, along with biographies of leaders in the field, highlight each chapter and connect the dots between the empirical theory of positive psychology and its practice. Readers also receive tools to apply the practices to their own lives.

John Zelenski’s unique storytelling approach provides a broad and engaging introduction to positive psychology. Strongly guided by empirical work, and reviewing the lessons learned since the founders’ original vision of the field, this text encourages you to think critically and to look to the future by exploring positive psychology’s potential to inform social change. The second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect the latest research, with more cross-cultural coverage and a substantial new section on meaning in life and how to find it. It also emphasizes how the science of well-being can be applied to our own lives and to the well-being of entire societies, through ‘Application’ boxes describing how positive psychology is used in the real world and ‘Try It’ exercises giving you the chance to try out theories and practices for yourself! John Zelenski is a Professor of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

"The most brilliant and lucid analysis of virtue and well-being in the entire literature of positive psychology. For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: Begin with Haidt." —Martin E.P. Seligman, University of Pennsylvania and author of Authentic Happiness The Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world's civilizations—to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives and illuminate the causes of human flourishing. Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how a deeper understanding of the world's philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims—like "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"—can enrich and transform our lives.

Introduction to Positive Media Psychology summarizes and synthesizes the key concepts, theories, and empirical findings on the positive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects of media use. In doing so, the book offers the first systematic overview of the emerging field of positive media psychology. The authors draw on a growing body of scholarship that explores the positive sides of media use, including fostering one’s own well-being; creating greater connectedness with others; cultivating compassion for those who may be oppressed or stigmatized; and motivating altruism and other prosocial actions. The authors explore these issues across the entire media landscape, examining the ways that varying content (e.g., entertainment, news) delivered through traditional (e.g., film, television) and more recent media technologies (e.g., social media, digital games, virtual reality) can enhance well-being and promote other positive outcomes in viewers and users. This book serves as a benchmark of theory and research for current and future generations of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in communication, psychology, education, and social work.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of what goes right in life, from birth to death and at all stops in between. It is a newly-christened approach within psychology that takes seriously the examination of that which makes life most worth living. Everyone's life has peaks and valleys, and positive psychology does not deny the valleys. Its signature premise is more nuanced, but nonetheless important: what is good about life is as genuine as what is bad and, therefore, deserves equal attention from psychologists. Positive psychology as an explicit perspective has existed only since 1998, but enough relevant theory and research now exist to fill a textbook suitable for a semester-long college course. A Primer in Positive Psychology is thoroughly grounded in scientific research and covers major topics of concern to the field: positive experiences such as pleasure and flow; positive traits such as character strengths, values, and talents; and the social institutions that enable these subjects as well as what recent research might contribute to this knowledge. Every chapter contains exercises that illustrate positive psychology, a glossary, suggestions of articles and books for further reading, and lists of films, websites, and popular songs that embody chapter themes. A comprehensive overview of positive psychology by one of the acknowledged leaders in the field, this textbook provides students with a thorough introduction to an important area of psychology.