Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Dealing with Adversity and Achieving a Happy Life

Stress: a contributing factor to psychological and physical health problems

• Can stem from traumatic events, or frequent daily hassles
• Interferes with the operation of the body’s immune system, and can be measured at the cellular level
• Stress can be reduced by social support

Loneliness: when a person has fewer and less satisfying relationships than desired

• If you see your personality as “fixed”: you are likely to react to rejection by cutting yourself off from others
• If you perceive yourself as capable of change: experience rejection as an opportunity for future improvement or growth

• Interventions related to self-change help to improve people’s resilience in the face of stress and reduce the likelihood of depression

Discrimination

• Experiencing discrimination based on disability, sexual minorities, and weight, is associated with harm to well-being
• Weight discrimination predicts mortality

Improving mental health

• Regular exercise
• Social support has shown to be beneficial for people with PTSD
• Joining groups can foster social connectedness and help prevent depression
• Practicing self-forgiveness

Is the legal system fair?

• Understand potential sources of error and bias within the current system
• Lineups used to identify criminal suspects are subject to bias if all the suspects are shown at once (simultaneous lineup)
• In legal proceedings, defendants’ race, gender, physical attractiveness, and socioeconomic status can influence jurors’ perceptions and judgments

Happiness: often referred to as subjective

Article summaries with Science of Happiness at the University of Utrecht

Table of content

• Revising the adaptation theory of well-being
• Strengths and weaknesses of self-report measures of subjective well-being
• Is the study of happiness a worthy scientific pursuit?
• Non-traditional measures of subjective well-being and their validity
• Concepts and components of well-being
• What are the possibility, desirability, and justifiability of happiness?
• Three revolutions in the global history of happiness
• What is well-being?
• What is eudaimonia?
• The relationship between cognitive outlooks and well-being
• Affective forecasting and impact bias explained
• Factors that might influence high happiness
• The dark side of happiness
• Increasing happiness
• The Sustainable Happiness Model (SHM)
• Using Positive Psychological Interventions (PPIs) to increase subjective well-being
• Impact of the size and scope of government on human well-being
• Well-being in metrics and policy
• Subjective well-being and national satisfaction
• Can and should happiness be a policy goal?
• Including subjective well-being measures in government policies
• The relationship between materialism and well-being
• Affect and emotions as drivers of climate change perception and action
• How pro-environmental behavior can both thwart and foster well-being
• The relationship between social bonds and well-being
• The relationship between social capital, prosocial behavior, and subjective well-being
• Marriage, parenthood and well-being
• The relationship between close relationships and health

The Promise of Sustainable Happiness

Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (in press). The promise of sustainable happiness. In S. J. Lopez (Ed.), Handbook of positive psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

The article suggests that, despite several barriers withholding people to increase their well-being, less happy people can successfully strive to be happier by learning a variety of effortful strategies and practicing these with determination and commitment. They use the sustainable happiness model (by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade, 2005) as theoretical framework. According to the model, three factors contribute to an individual’s happiness level:

• The set point

• Life circumstances

• Intentional activities/effortful acts that are episodic and naturally variable

The journey to happiness has always and still is of great interest, there is empirical evidence that it even leads to positive life outcomes such as a higher income and stronger relationships. The question, however, is whether people can actually attain a level of sustainable happiness.

To answer this question, we first we look at what happy and unhappy people are like:

The first thing that comes to mind is the difference between their ‘objective’ circumstances that could cause a difference in their level of happiness. Some examples include: marital status, age, sex, culture, income etc. It is shown, however, that these factors do not explain the variation in people’s level of well-being.

The article proposes that happiness and unhappiness is due to the subjective experience and construal of the world by people. They interpret their environment differently, leading the authors to explore an individual thoughts, behaviors and motivations. Happier people see the world in a more positive, and thus happiness-promoting, way. Research suggests that happy people are this way because of multiple adaptive strategies:

Construal

Research that involved having happy