Harvard 01 Positive Psychology 1504

Oh hey how are you yeah we met yes how you doing good luck thank you thanks when I start or people still coming in can we start all right come on we start so at some point in about 40 minutes Jessica will come up first and then you'll introduce yourselves you want to come up also or yeah okay yeah it looks like there will be alright soon in about 45 minutes I'll call you up and then Jessica is going to come up first and then want one after the other all right right what add something oh it does yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah or I can when I go over the syllabus no problem yeah is on yeah yeah oh I'll set it all up date hi morning good morning good morning unfortunately this is not a seminar so I'll be I'll be talking otherwise we could have had those Sindel has interactions maybe we can try that you know the problem with with teaching two classes to lecture classes is that you can tell the same jokes twice but given the success of my jokes yesterday it's a good thing so I'm teaching this class because this is the class I wish had been taught when I was an undergraduate here this doesn't mean thank you listen to the next sentence this doesn't mean that it's the right class for you and what I hope to do is today and over the next actually over the next three lectures is give you a sense of what this class is about so that you can make the decision of whether it is or is not for you before I go into the the substance let me just do some housekeeping so this class many of you know already will not be taught again next year it may be talking two years time I'm not sure depends of on whether whether I'll be here or not but it is neither this nor 1508 the psychology of leadership will be taught next year it's very important for for us for the teaching staff to get feedback from you the best way to send us feedback may be with the section leaders it's easy you meet with them we maybe there is something about the lecture either come talk to me after or send me an email this class is is evolving another there's a couple of you auditing it you took it last year you'll see there's new stuff constantly trying to improve it based on feedback that we get from you if you don't like something if you like something if you have a good story to go with something a good video clip and that can go with an idea a good joke especially do share but then there are emergencies meaning sometimes you have to ask a question in the middle of the class right it's like when you got your pee and when you go to go you got to go right so we have we have a method of dealing with that and what we'll do if it is an emergency and you really have to stop me in the middle we can take a positive psychology break just put your hand up in the middle and I'll stop and address it because if something is not clear to you it's probably not clear to too many others the powerpoints and the videos of this class will be on the website the the powerpoints will be on except for this class before before before beginning of the class so that you can take you can print it out and and take notes during the class last year most students preferred that but while the video tape is going to be on the website I prefer that you come to class it's not very you know seminar is one thing but here talking to five people will be a little bit a little bit difficult so if you can make it make it not just for this reason for my own sake but also I think there is a certain energy in the class that we can get something that we do not necessarily get when we watch it on on video so I urge you to come but if you can't it or want to watch it again it will be on be on the website now the fact that the powerpoints and the and the course will be filmed means that you don't need you to write down every word that that I say what I'd rather want you to do is to engage in active note-taking what does that mean that's different from passive note-taking which is okay so we talked about this I need to write this because maybe it will be on the exam and rather the way I'd like you to take notes is to engage with the material so for example if I say something that say oh well you know this is an idea that I can apply oh this is an idea that I want to share with my roommate write it down for two reasons first of all because it's more fun and you passively writing notes but second because you'll actually retain the material better and most important you'll be able to apply to your lives better this is very much an applied course the students who who gained the most benefit from it last year or once you went went ahead and applied what they learned here whether it's right after class or or later I'm getting emails now with students that you know the the idea of beliefs of self-fulfilling prophecies really help me in my work and if students who graduated or I just started meditating or I've been exercising regularly since since taking this class or you know I really had a setback and thinking about some of the ideas helped me get over it as much as possible try and apply it and you start applying it by taking notes actively many of you have asked what's the overlap with the psychology of leadership the answer is very little I mean here and there there may be some overlap in quote that I and a favorite quote of mine no studies as far as I remember are overlapping however they are complementary in what sense in the sense that many of the ideas the basic premises of the two classes are similar both of them are applied both of them draw on what we call a strength psychology which is another word for positive psychology but in terms of overlap there will not be well hardly any overlap what I did purposely in this class and in the next in 1508 is use the first two lectures really to give you a sense of where the class is going so that you can make up your mind if you want to take one the other or or neither only start with a little bit of history just to give you a sense of this positive psychology I mean it really came onto the scene in a storm it's been become one of the largest classes on many many of the campuses around the country and it all started fairly recently so I want to give you a sense of where positive psychology came from and how we evolved to to where we are today so humanistic psychology which is a group of psychologists like Abraham Maslow whose text you're reading for this class Rolo Mae Carl Rogers and various other psychologists founded the humanistic psychology movement in the nineteen fifty also moved on into the 60s and they were considered the third force in psychology the third force with the first force being behaviorism the second force being psychoanalysis and the way in any many ways it was a reaction to these two forces it was a reaction to behaviorism because what does behavioral behaviorism say basically we are like a box that we need to put in a stimulus and you get out a response very similar to machines it was also a reaction to psychoanalysis psychoanalysis that you're a great extent focused on neuroses on our instincts most of them the base instincts and it was a reaction to it in watch in what way was it a reaction to it in that it said no we're more than just boxes of stimuli and responses were more than just instincts were more than just dark forces we have potential for greatness we have potential for heroism and when the humanistic psychologist said we it meant everyone and they said we need to focus on anymore now this was a fresh voice within psychology attracted many many followers also classes were were full on college campuses but there was a problem the problem in humanistic psychology was that it didn't have the rigorous methodology the epistemology and what happened over the years is that it evolved 60 70s and 80s into the self-help movement and I'll say a few words about the self-help movement in in a few minutes he didn't have the scientific rigor it didn't have the empirical rigor the studies that are being run in William James were absent from humanistic psychology the problem was that it didn't hold because you need the rigor in order to hold in order to that you have traction especially at a university but if you go to the self-help shelves in the in the bookstore you'll see that obviously it had a lot of impact but not the University and therefore there are very few psychologists around the country who are teaching a humanistic psychology there are a handful but but not many and then came positive psychology positive psychology said we'll take the potential of the or the the approach of the humanistic psychology and bring rigor to it regardless of humanistic psychology being different still I consider it the grandparent of positive psychology and I want you to meet a couple of the grandparents Abraham Maslow that said you'll read a lot of him back in 1954 he published his his seminal work in which he had a chapter which he called toward a positive psychology 1954 it was way ahead of his time yeah and the book didn't have as much traction because there wasn't the wound that many studies run on the basic concepts basic ideas there nevertheless he was there and he talked about in that chapter about its psychology of kindness a psychology of optimism a psychology of heroism a psychology of success a psychology of goodness focusing on the positive rather than the negative if Maslow is the grandfather then Karen horney is the grandmother Maslow came from behaviorist School of Psychology he studied monkeys at the beginning of his career and then moved on to more to humanistic psychology car normally started with psychoanalysis which was a student of Freud and then she said wait a minute psychoanalysis focuses too much on the negative let's look at the positive so as I said earlier reaction to behaviorism and reaction to psychoanalysis so these are the grandparents the humanists let's look at the parents Martin Seligman you're reading an article by him this week or next week in 1996 he was the president of the American Psychological Association best known for his work on learned pessimism as well as learned optimism learned helplessness sorry not learned pessimism learned helplessness was his best-known work in 1996 he became the APA American Psychological Association president and his agenda was to make one psychology more applied and be to start positive psychology and he's been the champion ever since he's at Penn University but going around the world promoting positive psychology now it's not that before positive psychology came into the scene there wasn't research on happiness well-being self-esteem relationships of course there was research about it but what positive psychology did and what Marty Seligman did to great extent was unify these scholars they understand next time why he had to unify these scholars because of the dearth of of research on these topics unified got grants they're supporting those of your thing of going into graduate school disappointing many graduate students doing research within positive psychology one of the parents of positive psychology right here the University professor Ellen Langer some of you I know work with her we're going to encounter professor Langer a few times through the semester and I can guarantee you every time you read her research you're going to be blown away in some of the things that she did are still coming even if she did them in the seventies are still considered be leading in the most important studies in the field so we're going to talk a lot about her and her work and what she did she took a lot of the ideas from humanistic psychology the idea of mindfulness which was really the realm of mystics in the realm of mysticism and brought it in and brought empirical rigor to it another of the parents of positive psychology professor Phil stone those of you been to 1508 know that I'm dedicating these two classes to him was my mentor actually both Langer and professor stone were my dissertation supervisors which explains a great extent why I'm here back in 1999 professor stone taught the first positive psychology class at Harvard I was the TF was a seminar we taught it again in 2002 and when I graduated professor stone said why don't you teach a lecture class on the topic and there's a lot of demand for it and he pushed very hard within the department and here we are today so let's get into what positive psychology is or specifically this class this class is not just about information it's not about me feeding you research results it's not about you just reading more and more about it it is about what I hope to be transformation now what is the difference information which is what we mostly see in classes here looks like this this let's say is our mind information is that when we take information knowledge and we put it inside the container this is what most education is about right so you read for the exam you memorize you listen to lectures you take notes and it all goes in here one of the problems is that it goes in here and it leaves here very soon right like five minutes after the final exam this class will hopefully be different yeah you'll get information you'll get research you will talk about again rigorous empirical work in the field but more than information it's about transformation what is transformation it's not about taking knowledge and putting it in here it's about changing trance changing the form of the way our mind perceives the world it's changing this changing the way we look at the world you see because especially when we talk about happiness so much of whether we can attain happiness in our lives or not depends not on the information that we have ok so I'll read another book big deal it depends on the way we look at the world think for example you're you're in a swim meet and there are people from the swim team here and you were hoping to come in second and you come in eighth in the race one way of interpreting it is to say you know I suck no good self-esteem down depressed about it that's one way of interpreting another way even though I was hoping for second in claim ATS you say okay depressing it's upsetting I'm sad but what can I learn from it one of the main themes of this course is the notion of learn to fail or fail to learn what can I learn from it we'll spend a whole lecture talking about it what can i how can I improve as a result of this race in other words it's the same information right eighth place instead of second place but very different interpretation depending on the form of our mind or think about another very common example I'm sure you know people who have what we would consider everything now they're wealthy successful prominent admired and yet they're unhappy on the other hand you see people who have very little barely get the basic the minimum and yet they're always upbeat always happy what goes in is not what determines happiness the way we interpret it the way we look at the world is more than 50% of the equation of happiness and we'll talk about that a lot throughout the course now when I say change the form I don't just mean it metaphorically I was giving this class before 1999 I would have just meant it metaphorically I actually mean it physically because in 1999 this is some of the research that we'll talk about when we talk about mindfulness in 1999 they showed that the structure of our brain actually changes till the day we die until 1999 most researchers thought that it was changing until many thatíll the age of three others adolescence some till our 20s today they know the brain changes till the day we die regardless of age one of the ways to change it which we'll talk about is by doing meditation it actually changes the neural pathways of the brain if we persist and do it over time we know that Yuliya because we have an fMRI again things that we couldn't see in the past so when I say transformation I also mean it literally how is this transformation going to come about now this is not Berkeley it's also not primal scream what I mean is that we're going to be covering less material but uncovering more of our potential let me tell you a story to give you a sense of what I mean Michelangelo's David one of the most beautiful sculptures the history of art Michelangelo was once asked how did you do it how did you create David this is this beautiful huge structure and he said you know what I went to the quarry I saw this huge piece of marble and in it I saw David all I needed to do was chip away the excess stone chip away the excess stone see you're going to learn very few new things in this class but what I hope you will get out of this class will provide you the opportunity create the conditions for you to chip away some excess stone because what humanistic psychology saw and what positive psychology saw was that each one of us had the potential within it within us the potential that was limited limited by false beliefs limited by education as we'll discuss later to some extent limited by many limitations and what we're going to do is chip away those limitations this is what transformation is about and we thorough the soul grows by subtraction not addition again a very learned man great philosopher he certainly there was a lot of information in his in his mind but he also realized that what it's about is the transformation another great psychologist who lived over two thousand years ago Lao Tzu in pursuit of knowledge every day something is acquired in pursuit of wisdom every day something is dropped knowledge information wisdom transformation information is not enough certainly not in our world where there is an information highway which are which we are part of we also need to create a transformation highway what is wrong is not the great discoveries of science information is always better than ignorance no matter what information or what ignorance what is wrong is the belief behind the information the belief that information will change the world it won't this by the way is the same as those of you who were here yesterday the same for leadership sure you can know about all the terrible things or the wonderful things happening in the world but how do you change them information is not enough for that so the approach that I'll take in this class is the humanistic approach let me just read you something that Maslow said Maslow contrasts the humanistic approach to learning from other approaches to learning whether behaviorism psychoanalysis or learning in general quote if one took a course or picked up a book on the psychology of learning most of it in my opinion would be beside the point that is beside the humanistic point most of it would present learning as the acquisition of associations of skills and capacities that are external and not intrinsic to the human character to the human personality to the person himself again external would mean the information intrinsic would mean transformation and he continues humanistic philosophy offers a new conception of learning of teaching and of Education stated simply such a concept holds that the function of Education the goal of Education the human goal the humanistic goal the goal so far as human beings are concerned is ultimately the self-actualization of a person the becoming fully human the development of the fullest height that the human species can stand up to or that the particular individual can come to in a less technical way it is helping the person to become the best that he is able to become it's about uncovering the potential within each person sounds naive sounds like not something that we would hear in most psychology textbooks it is it's naive it's like idealistic and we're going to talk about naivete and idealism throughout the course and their importance another aspect of this class it's not about providing definitive answers concerning the good life is about identifying the right questions this is different from a math class where there are actual objective answers to the question no one can tell you what will make you happy no research can tell you what will make you happy or have higher self-esteem or be more motivating or improve your relationship it's up to you to identify these things again the only thing that the class can do what we can do in sections what I can do in the lectures is provide you the conditions to ask the right questions to be able to deal with them whether in response papers in talking to your friends or parents education is the quest for information and transformation and therefore must begin with the question question question no coincidence that they're connected etymologically one of the problems in education is Neil postman argued is the children enter school as question marks and leave as periods children often go to school you know they start school with the sense of ball sense of excitement looking forward to learning they often lose that or this looking up looking forward to the next day to the next class let me show you an excerpt from a very smart psychologist who talks about the different approaches of children compared to adults here is talking about his experiences as a child attending Halloween parties so the first couple of years I made my own costumes which of course sock the ghost the hobo no good then finally third year baking the parents got the Superman Halloween costume not surprisingly cardboard box so faint top mask included remember the rubber band on the back of that mask that was a quality item there wasn't it that was good for about 10 seconds before it snapped out of that cheap little State well they put it in there with you go to your first house trick or snap but broke I don't believe it wait up you guys I gotta fix it hey wait up wait up that's what you say they don't say wait they say wait up hey wait up because when you're little your life is up the future is up everything you want is up why not hold up shut up mom I'll clean up let me stay parents of course just the opposite everything is down just calm down slow down come down here sit down put that down hopefully we'll be able to capture this the sense of looking up looking forward a lot of it comes from asking questions the one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions there's actually research on this very solid research John Kotter professor at the Business School ran this study where he followed the class of new school HBS class of 1974 he followed them for 20 years and he wanted to see how they were doing 20 years later they were very successful prominent wealthy but then we've been the class of 1974 20 years later he found a small group about 5% of the graduating class that was extraordinarily successful and what he wanted to do was identify why what is it about these people that made them more successful than their classmates and he found two things and again these people were more successful not just professionally but also interpersonal in their family life what was unique about them again there's no question they were all smart all driven but there were two things that differentiated the extraordinary from the rest one they were driven and they believed that they could do well we're going to talk gonna spend a lot a lot of time talking about beliefs self-fulfilling prophecies they believed in themselves that's one two they were always asking questions there was one of their distinguishing characteristics always wanting to find out more always wanting to learn more HP the end of 80s wasn't the end of their education always read more always talk to people buy IDs ask questions initially of their bosses then of their people of the people working for them of their spouse of their children always asking questions to characteristics distinguish them from the rest so what is the question that's going to guide this this class what I call the question of questions also the title of my book how can we help ourselves and others individuals communities and society become happier this class is very much about the individual but a community is a collection of individuals how can we make others happy and society is a collection of communities so how can we make society as a whole hand and we'll get a lot of tools to do that in this class note also that I talked about how can we become happier I didn't say how can we become happy how can I become happy doesn't really help me as a question what does it mean does it mean to be happy am I happy relative to the person sitting in the front row am I happy relative to the person sitting at the back to the teaching staff what does it mean am I happy also happy means a binary either I'm unhappy or happy it means that there is an end to the pursuit okay all I want to do is get become happy but that's not what happiness is about first of all it's impossible to measure happiness in an objective manner so let's say only one to five how happy are you and I right for it will be very different for from anyone else in the in the room so you can't really gauge that what I can gauge is have I become happier relative to myself over the last ten years five years year or ten years from now asking the same questions see because one of the things when taking a class like this is that students very often ask when we talk about heavier weight am I happy but when we have a class on self-esteem why do I have self-esteem or when we take a class on relationship relationships is my relationship good these are not the question again there are unhelpful questions the helpful question to ask is how can I become happier so that five years from now I'm happier than today how can I increase my self-esteem so the ten years around my self-esteem is higher than it is today I started thinking about these questions you know when I was 16 close to 20 years ago certainly happier 10 years ago then I was 10 years before then I'm happier today than I was five years ago and I hope the ten years from now I'll be happier with higher levels of self esteem than I have today it's about pursuing happiness constant if not binary I'm unhappy or have you have high self esteem or low self esteem how can I improve how can I get better how can I lead a more fulfilling life another thing about this class is that it's not a survey class if you want to serve very class there is a handbook of positive psychology it's about this the steak weighs about 10 pounds and it's very good it has a lot of articles in there and a great overview you can read that this will not be it rather it's a selective exploration of the question of questions the articles the ideas that I think are central for making our lives better the focus will be Western psychology I have studied and I do study eastern psychology and philosophy and practice it as well but I'm not an expert there but I will bring many ideas and one of the nice things is that while Eastern psychology has been doing positives I called you for thousands of years positive the Western psychology is only realizing now some of these merits so for example we have a lot of research that will discuss about meditation we have a lot of research about mindfulness in general many of the a lot of the wisdom that comes from from the east but this is not a cross-cultural course it is eclectic I was an undergraduate here concentrated in philosophy and psychology I then went studied education for a year in the other Cambridge and then did my PhD in organizational behavior which is business psychology and ethics I'm going to bring many of these ideas into this class because I think this is again the question is too big for just one discipline to handle so it is eclectic and will draw in many areas will study research will study other people I think the best self-help books are biographies because they show you the real person as opposed to the five steps to happiness or three steps to self-esteem studying a real life gives us a better sense and we'll study ourselves for two reasons first of all because it is a class about making our lives better but second as Carl Rogers said one of the founders of the humanistic psychology movement what is most personal is most general if we really understand ourselves better we also understand other people better or as Maslow said in delving into the depth of his own mind one delves into the depth of all Minds there are of course individual differences there are many of them but in terms of the essence the essence there are a lot of similarities so we are going to study ourselves and through that learn to understand others better this is not English 10a nor mat 55 you will not do as much reading as you would do for a survey English course and it doesn't have a difficulty level the most difficult class even though 25a I think was elected as the most difficult class at Harvard what it is about is rigorous fun and I'll talk about that in a minute what I mean by that phrase Oliver Wendell Holmes I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity but I would give my line for the simplicity on the other side of complexity this is what this class is about simple ideas again it's not difficult to understand the ideas here so again not like 55a you will not read a lot of stuff the idea that you will get are simple but its simplicity that on the other side of complexity and how do we get to the other side of complexity by applying these ideas how much you get out of this class depends on how much you put into it the response papers section discussions and how seriously you take the readings again they were picked very very carefully it's a different kind of effort that's required it requires courage to look inside to write about your life and change is hard let's do an experiment just for a second this is after all a psychology class so take your hand and fold your hands just try this okay how does this feel find relaxing all right now take your hands and fold them the other way around how does that feel I told you this class is hard change is difficult even folding our hands in the opposite direction is difficult so can you imagine can you imagine changing habits of things that we have learned over the last 20 years or so chipping away that excess stone change is hard but it's possible William James thought it takes about 21 days to change habits and we're going to help you in this class in some of the groundbreaking work I think in this area was done by the TF Shawn who did great work last year on changing habits so we're going to take some of his ideas and apply them this is what I said last year we didn't do it and Shawn did it with with some of his students this year we're going to do it for the whole class it's not easy to change habits but it's certainly possible john dryden English poet said we first make our habits and then our habits make us now there are many habits that are good for us but there are some there or not there are limiting and these will try and chip away in this class so what's this rigorous fun thing I mentioned the self-help movement you know today there is a real disconnect between the self-help movement and academic psychology on the one hand you have pop psychology alright you go into Harvard bookstore you go into the the coupe and you find dozens probably hundreds of self-help books and there are new ones being written every day that the Shelf is packed and always changing very charismatic very interesting many of them well written but most of them not based on research lack the rigor so while there is a lot of charisma there a lot of accessibility to the common person there is very little rigor go to the others extreme academia a lot of rigor empirical research very important stuff being done testing and retesting ideas but you know what the problem is according to some researchers some of them actually from here the average academic journal article is read by seven people and that includes the author's mother right rigger serious stuff accessibility what this course is about is bringing the rigger from academia and the fund from the self-help movement it's about bridging the gap between the ivory tower and Main Street okay any questions about the material thus far or about the course in general just one thing on your I'm going to go with the syllabus in a minute but under syllabus if you see the on the other side the grading some of you don't have it again I promise it wasn't 55a but if you add it up you will see that it's less than 100 I never took 55 they apparently and I guess not none of us took 55 they right yes I overlooked it so I'll rectify it on the website so it's it's a hundred and what I want to do now is have the teaching staff of this class introduce themselves we have an absolutely amazing group a group that's committed to the course committed to you so that you can derive the most out of this class so I'd like to start by calling up Jessica Glazer who's our head TF and then everyone else will follow to introduce themselves good morning welcome to positive psychology my name is Jessica Glazer and I'm so happy to see all of you here today this is going to be an amazing semester um I really look forward to getting to know all of you there are a lot of you but if you've worked with me before you know that I mean what I say so let me tell you a little bit about myself I graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in sociology after graduation I moved back to New York where I worked at Sotheby's vizor and as a manager for the comedian Louis black I've also trained for the last 12 years as a musical theater and rock vocalist last fall and moved back up to Cambridge to TF Whitney humor and this semester I'll be working with you guys and also for the psychology of leadership so that's my 15-second summary and I really do hope to meet all of you so please be in touch with us before I forget sectioning will be next week we'll have it online Thursdays and Friday Thursday and Friday we are going to have it for two days so that we can get everybody settled and we can get rolling with the amazing work that we're going to do this semester and now I'd like to introduce the teaching staff if you guys could all come up and introduce yourselves I honestly believe that we have the most gifted teaching staff at for any class at Harvard they're an amazing group of people and this is going to be a wonderful semester so if you guys could just come up now that'd be great thanks hi I'm Ellen Brodsky that works right well let's see I studied theology at Haverford College a long time ago worked in sexuality education for about 10-12 years and I work in documentary film right now and the last work I did here at Harvard was ITF to sexuality class about three years ago I think almost everyone graduated from that and I loved I love TF in here and I'm friends with a lot of TFS and I'm glad to be back hi I'm Debby Cohen I am I graduated from here in 91 and then went to the education school in 92 also here and I'm tells yoga teacher I run a I am in my pursuit of happiness I left a career of teaching high school English to teach yoga and I teach throughout the Harvard community to sports teams through the Wellness Center the dance program etc and run a yoga teacher training program which is committed to pretty much the same premise as this course exactly the same premises this course more you know emphasis on experiential learning has been my interest and on the same path as tall so thanks hi my name is Kim Westheimer and I've been teeing for a couple of courses at Harvard recently the human sexuality class and then most recently social psychology so it's been fun to see some familiar faces here from those two classes and this course just sounds like a lot of fun to me in addition to doing work at Harvard I am an independent consultant I do a lot of work with schools and with human service organizations looking at issues around prejudice and stereotyping and and around race gender sexual orientation and sexuality and such and this just seems like it'll be a really fun course I'm glad to be here hey i'm shawn Achor i taught last year for positive psychology with tall we filled up Emerson and today we float up standards that they want taught to teach again I got to build a bigger building here based on my calculations between his two classes tallest teaching over one out of every six students at Harvard you don't have to think about I redid the math at 600 percent of Harvard also helped with some of the math on the syllabus if you look there I taught you guys for a lot of different classes of top for human sexuality as well win humor English Bible classics Christian literature positive psychic personality psych a couple other ones I'm probably kidding I went here's an undergrad studying English in religion and then went to the Divinity School I stayed Christian and Buddhist ethics there and now I'm working a psych lab with Allen Langer who we saw up earlier working on the novel I've been working on for a while um and and teaching here I'm loving I'm applying to business school now so I'm really looking forward to meeting all of you hi I'm Deb levy um this is my fourth course TF in here I've T EFT in human sexuality implied social psychology and adolescent development this fall and I've had a great time each semester I've been waiting to TF and actually take this class since it was offered last year I went to one class and my dear friend Jeff TF tan just the concept he would tell me over the phone I've been applying to my life so I was really I'm really excited to be here I'm happier this semester that I was even last semester and last spring I actually initiated the first Harvard field day where we did egg toss and three-legged race had my sections compete with each other so I hope you can have some more fun this semester hi I'm Pat Hernandez I graduated in oh four from leopard house in psychology I basically took every course that tile offered and he was my thesis advisor it was wonderful right now I work in conflict management in Boston which is basically negotiation effective communication things of that nature and postpone a consulting job in change leadership to come and be part of this class because it's going to be amazing and hopefully I'll see most of you either here or in leadership psychology good morning my name is Matt Killingsworth my passion is really positive psychology and especially some of the questions the question that Tao is asking really how do we take each of us organizations society as a whole and move Happiness higher I graduated from Duke University a few years ago after studying engineering and economics and I really decided this was really the question is really important to ask I started a company I work for a start-up software company in Cambridge now and I realized that really building companies and building products that really isn't what it's all about it's really about sort of the human organism and trying to you know almost from the engineers mindset how do we optimize that environment and that organism so I hope to meet some of you and I'm really excited to be in this class hi I'm Jeff parati and blue thanks and I'm glad to see I have some fans and some people I know here some of you I know from Winthrop out some from other courses that I've TF human sexuality psychology and law creativity adolescent development and positive cycle assed year I'm really excited to be back I'm hoping I'll be able to TF this course as well but today I wanted to make sure I came because I only have like a few days left of this tan and I thought that this would at least be a large captive appreciative audience here if thank you Thanks so you'll you'll get a lot of practical tips in this class like for those of you looking to extend your tans moisturize anyway that the story that good Thanks can't overestimate that the story I like to tell that to illustrate the principles of positive psychology in my life is a story that actually happened 10 years ago to me when I was first involved with my partner Steve and I wanted to take him home to my family in Cleveland Ohio to meet my parents and all and I was talking to them on the phone and I was really surprised when my father said no Jeff why don't you just come home alone you know people really won't understand we're not having the holiday here and all and I was chucked because I had been out to them for several years I thought I had a real supportive family and you know but this is my Italian Catholic father who's like no just come home alone so I was pretty upset so I got off the phone and I was crying and Steve hugged me and said don't worry honey there'll be other holidays we can ruin that was like and sure enough there were but immediately I felt better and it just showed me the power of humor and relationships and reframing to feel better and think positively about what might seem like negative events and also in retrospect my families really embraced Steve and he's very much a part of our family so it speaks to the possibility that things and people do change which is a fundamental premise of this course so I really look forward to working with you either in this course we're seeing you some where else on campus thank you yeah we're going to have a lot of rigorous fun in this class I can tell I want to go with this syllabus just just briefly you have our I didn't know how many TFS we'd need for this class but I guess we'll need a quite a few so my email and Jessica's email are around there and you can email us anytime don't worry about waking us up the first two weeks as I said will be the introduction then on February 16th we'll go into the science of positive thinking again there's a lot of self-help books on that we were actually going to look at the science behind it when it tells stories amazing athletic feats amazing personal interpersonal feats coming from belief in oneself we're going to talk about the question of focus showing that it's not the external that matters but it's more the internal and we're going to learn about how to change our perspective our interpretation Jeff's Jeff's stories right on you know how do you take a difficult objective situation and make life of it March second can we change March 7th es we can change I wouldn't be teaching this class if I thought it was impossible yeah academically I'm interested in the topic I love reading this material but I wouldn't put as much effort as I'm putting into it if I didn't think it was possible to change March 9th I'm going to talk about the mind-body connection the first lecture on the mind-body connection we're going to talk about it some more the importance of off sleep I think it's a significant topic at Harvard after Spring Break we'll talk about perfectionism in many ways this is the most personally meaningful lecture for me for four years I've been dealing with it I know at Harvard it is quite pervasive and I want to share with you some of some of my my personal stories my shift or becoming less of a perfectionist you're not yes perfection is no perfectionist but making some progress and about the research that's out there and some of the exercises that we can do to help ourselves and others April 13th the right person to teach the class on humor Sean very difficult by the way to teach a class on humor most if you've been to humor lectures mostly more extremely dry there is a real disconnect between the lecture Andy and the class Sean is perfect guy to teach it and he taught he he gave it last year which was amazing we're going to talk about some other things you know relationships self-esteem and so on about the grading if it were up to me this class wouldn't be graded let me quote Maslow if it were up to me this class here is Maslow quote in the ideal College there would be no credits no degrees and no required courses a person would learn what he wanted to learn Harvard is a great place not ideal and hence there are a credits and there are grades if you want to take this class pass/fail by all means do so the midterm and the final exam are both going to be in class so last year 1504 was a take home I've decided for various reasons not to not to happy to take home and I know it's inconvenient for some but I think it would be most beneficial to have it at home um one thing about the readings I'm going to go to the final project in a minute but one thing about the readings there are three books required and one of them is not there yet that is the Maslow book what they have right now is a secondhand version of the full book which i think is very expensive I've asked Wiley who are printing the book to make smaller book only with the chapters that we're reading obviously I think are the best chapters from a very thick book and they've agreed and it will be less than half the price of what the full book would cost so that should maybe even came in today I'm not sure anyone been to the coop this morning is it other thin maslow books there it's there great okay so it's there but if you want the full book they also have second-hand books of the full version let me say a few words about the final project because I think that's one of the unique things about this class and you're not going to just hand in a paper like in most classes what you're going to hand in is a 20 to 30 minute presentation that will include powerpoints and text on any topic within positive psychology either a topic that we talked about such as happiness relationships whatever or any other topic that you are interested in but you want to delve deeply into and really get a sense of what this material is about what you are going to hand in is a 10 to 15 page double spaced text of the lecture as if you're talking with slides either in Word or if you know how to use powerpoints in powerpoints not only you're going to hand these in your also going to actually give this presentation you're going to give it to three or four people in this class they're going to give you feedback on it get this of course is not this part will certainly not be graded but just to help you to make it even better and also for you to practice and teaching it when we also hope is that you'll be giving this presentation to other people in your family and when you go when you go home to your friends and I gave my first presentation and to the squash team here when I was an undergrad to my team you know 10 people but they listen and that's how it starts it will include reference to research again ivory tower and Main Street so presentation which will be accessible but at the same time have the academic rigor and use as many stories film clips exercises as you want in this in this presentation you can some of my lectures I've tried to well model this but come up with your with your own ideas why presentation there are many reasons here are the two main reasons first of all because the best way to learn something is to teach it I know positive psychology now very well because I taught the class and I'm teaching it again the I know leadership the role because I'm teaching the class there's no better way to learn something and then it doesn't just go away one day after the exam it actually really sticks it makes it different that's what I want you to choose a topic that you're really interested in that you really think will make a difference in your life again when I talk about perfect well everything actually I'm also talking about myself I'm taking this class just as you are I want to be happier at the end of this class than I am today as does Debbie it's very it's very personal and when you teach the stuff you learn it better the second reason why it's important for us and that's another central theme in the class is to spread goodness and we'll talk a lot about it next time we want you to teach this material to other people as well to talk about it the more you talk to other people about this class the more you'll get out of it because that's how we assimilate it so teach either the material that you see here but certainly your own presentation and also for us it's much more fun reading presentations than it is academic papers I hope you'll decide to take this class I hope you'll enjoy it hope to see you next week you

Channel: Anantko

Views: 278,582

Rating: 4.8723006 out of 5

Keywords: Positive Psychology, Harvard, Harvard University, 1504, Best, Lecture, Ever, Lectures, School, Student, Education, Motivation, Self Esteem, Self-Esteem, Happiness

Id: IwUecXRvnS0

Length: 63min 42sec (3822 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2011