Isaac Prilleltensky || The Need to Matter

[Music] today it's great to have isaac preltensky on the podcast isaac holds the inaugural irwin and barbara motner chair and community well-being at the university of miami he has published 12 books in over 140 articles and chapters his interests are in the promotion of well-being in individuals organizations and communities and in the integrations of wellness and fairness his most recent book is how people matter why it affects health happiness love work and society co-authored with his wife dr aura pierre altensky dr pierlotenski it is so great to have you on the psychology podcast today thank you for having me it's a pleasure i wanted to have you on the show for a long time the topics you study are so essential uh to the world of course to society to politics to lots of other things but also the field we both work in positive psychology so i thought we could um go through a lot of your work and uh and link it to these other things that i just mentioned great great okay let me start off by asking you what your own conceptualization of well-being is well in my view well-being is multi-dimensional and my research team and i developed a multi-faceted conception of well-being which we summarized in the acronym i cope i interpersonal community occupational physical psychological and economic well-being and in our view this model of well-being pays more attention to contextual factors than maybe other models like the spire model by talban shahar or the perma model by seligman which is very well known so we felt that we needed to emphasize more the interaction between internal factors like psychological well-being and external factors like occupational and community well-being which have a huge impact on how we feel so in other words our framework is highly contextualized yeah that is believe it or not not to you but to others that's pretty novel the whole history of well-being research and thinking even going back to you know the humanistic psychologist which i'm a big fan of um but a lot of people try to present uh people have criticized maslow's ideas of self-actualization as being too individualistic now they're not aware of his more recent attempts not more recent today but towards the end of his life uh recent uh attempts to um to bring in um community and bring in ideas of transcendence and synergy with the environment but still that that idea of self-actualization still has a very individualistic feel to it doesn't it yes i agree so in the field of positive psychology i feel there is a risk of what i call interiorization of well-being you know making it all about the interior what happens underneath the skin but yet at the same time we're very aware of the impact of interpersonal well-being you know where we know that social support emotional support the connectivity with other people is hugely influential in our own well-being um so thinking about community well-being occupational will be just an extension of something that we know very well from psychology the impact of it early forms of attachment secure attachment um bonding with your friends friendships peer relations etc so in a way it's just an extension of that it goes if we think about bronf bronfenbrenner's ecological models you know we go from the person to the family to the school the community church all the way to the nation and social policy so i think it's really important to think about well-being as sitting residing at the nexus of all these spheres of influence and in in recent work we've done a we realized that if we think about well-being as an outcome you know people want to be happy okay so let's consider that's an outcome so we ask ourselves what are some of the antecedents of that well-being or happiness or health or mental health and we found two interesting factors predicting happiness and well-being which have to do with the environment and one is fairness to what extent do you experience fairness in your relationships at work in the community so fairness has a direct impact on the level of wellness so to speak so fairness impacts wellness but it's also mediated by our feeling valued by other people and having an ability to add value so in other words the more i feel respected treated fairly treated with dignity the more i feel valued and the more i feel valued the happier i become and but it's not just about feeling valued it's about giving me opportunities to add value so when i am in a context like work or school where people build on my strengths when people feel that i have something to contribute and encourage the expression of assets my happiness also goes up so fairness in a ways in a way predicts feeling valued and adding value and these two predict happiness as well yeah thank you for explaining that and those are the two components of your of the need to matter it just so happens so not just fairness but also your need to matter that's your your definition of the need to matter so i want to let's zoom in for a second on this need are you making the claim that there is a need to matter in humans that is a separable need from perhaps uh the need to belong and perhaps even the other needs then like self-determination theory even though that maslow proposed or even that i proposed in my new book is there a is so is there is it a unique need that you believe deserves attention all on its own yes and i believe that it's a meta need or an umbrella need because when you think about feeling valued feeling valued incorporates feeling like you belong a sense of community attachment to your parents and family just to name a few these are about feeling valued feeling like i belong to this group to my family to the community when you think about adding value adding value is a an umbrella construct for self-determination mastery competence freedom self-expression so there are many a human needs among others in self-determination theory autonomy competence and relatedness so i believe that feeling valued and adding value encapsulate a lot of psychological needs and when you put this to construct together the umbrella feeling valued with the umbrella adding value you experience mattering i believe is a fundamental human need it has many origins in evolution um if you didn't belong to a group or a tribe or a family you may be left to your own devices and you m you may not survive when you add value to the tribe to the community you get rewarded you get appreciated you feel validated you feel seen and this has repercussions for today's political scene where in the very worst black lives matter where we're seeing an entire community saying we matter we want to feel valued and we want opportunity to add value so this complementarity is very important filling value and having opportunities to add value yeah i really really do love that and you do see this kind of see-saw in a sense where when you some certain groups um who have historically not have had as much power or um or the feeling to matter once they start to matter more uh along the lines of fairness you see other groups you know maybe come out of the world saying well hold up we matter too so now you're seeing you know their white supremacist group who are making the same case too right they're saying white people matter too you know so it's it's an interesting sort of psychological psychological seesaw dynamic of control of power at a very higher level which leads me to think how can we get out of that because ultimately we don't want to stay in a in a power play situation right we want to i think being both me and you are united in in the desire for a self-actualizing society that is grounded in fairness for everyone where everyone feels like they matter um and my gosh how does how does one get to there right and you are addressing a very important point which goes to the heart of the nexus between mattering and fairness because some groups have experienced historically a lot of privilege and they are having a hard time giving giving up some of that a privilege so instead of saying let's look at corrective justice so what's corrective justice what can we do to repair harms than in the past right maybe by my group so so what can we do in order to correct repair heal injustices of the past when you are willing to engage in that act of reconciliation then you come to terms with the fact that well maybe we need affirmative action you know because affirmative action is part of a healing process maybe we need the reconciliation truth and reconciliation commissions you know like there was in south africa because they bring about healing so when one group let's say white supremacists they say oh i am forgotten now i feel like society is too multicultural you know like they're paying attention too much to minorities and we white people are are being forgotten yeah i believe that they are not paying attention to all the privilege that some groups have had and and let me be very clear i think we all matter society need that all right in we we need to find a way for us to rectify injustices of the past and to learn not just to acquire more power but also to share power a and this is for example in new zealand a in the 1800s maori people signed the treaty of waitangi with a crown with a british crown and the treaty was never upheld you know the maori people were never really given the rights that they thought they were signing up for a so over the years the white population in new zealand which they called the pakeha population they decided to give up some of their power and to engage in this process of reconciliation educating the the whole nation about the treaty of waitangi and for me that's an example of people saying i am willing and ready to give up some power so that we cannot experience fairness so it's not just the province of the white europeans privilege groups yeah no absolutely i love to get right to the heart of the matter and it just does seem like the fight for power has trumped uh the fight uh for uh quality in some ways you know or the fight for fairness uh for everyone i i agree and which doesn't mean by the way that we should neglect the any aspect of the population um yeah so when when you when we think about the psychological reactions to feeling forgotten you have two opportunities you know you have a fork on the road that you need to decide am i going to become xenophobic to regain my power you know am i going to become a white supremacist to reclaim my lost diminished sense of power or or am i going to fight for fairness and justice for all the groups and it's very important you know historically um it has happened that some oppressed groups when they acquired more power became the oppressive group yeah and you know people like franz fanon and albert mehme they documented that in colonial settings like algier and tunisia so it's very important to be mindful of the psychology of acquiring too much power i agree i've been on the search for 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know that seems to be not towards the aims of fairness either so i think that there that this is just a very important uh thing that we all need to do is is to be wary of that human tendency regardless of what group we're in yes and i i i'm reminded reminded of social movements in the 60s where supposedly everybody was fighting for social justice but a lot of women tended to be relegated to secondary jobs in the social movements um and that wasn't very fair right so it was it was a lot of white males leading social movements and really not paying a lot of attention to what either black people or women were saying in the social movement um yes exactly so we have to be very reflective and monitor our our own tendencies our blind spots so to speak yeah very well very well put um i want to quote you for a second you say that quote mattering is not evenly distributed across populations some have too much of it while others have too little in the right amount however mattering can contribute to personal and collective flourishing what i want to push on a little bit because i want to understand what you mean by what would it mean for someone to have too much matter and that's an interesting idea you know that's interesting concepts like do you want to be the one in charge of saying what groups have too much and which ones don't have enough yeah that's a good point and i think um some people have the narcissistic tendencies which which are exacerbated by contemporary society including social media and the need for everyone to become a celebrity on his or her own so there are definitely contextual a factors contributing factors to this push to celebritize yourself and in my mind yes you can matter too much to the point that you are you're taking up a lot of space you take up all the oxygen in the room and you don't give enough mattering space to other people so so you can think of um the aristotelian construct of the royal path you know or or the middle the middle way too little mattering it's no good right we feel neglected forgotten invisible but too much mattering means that i am becoming center stage and i'm really not balancing it what's good for me with what's good for other people so i in that quote i talked about personal and collective wellness which has to do with what i call a me culture and a weak culture a me culture claims i have the right to feel valued so that i may be happy in a weak culture we say we all have the right to feel valued and add value so that we can all experience happiness and fairness so if you engage in a me type of behavior you can matter too much frankly and we all know these people and their mattering comes at the expense of others yeah i hear what you're saying and um and it's subtle but it but your distinction does not map on completely to the difference in already in the psychological literature between individualistic and collectivistic cultures um one may seem one first blush to say well isn't he just saying that's the difference between like eastern and western you know collective and it's no i know i get it i get it i get what you're saying it's it's subtle but they're not the same thing because one could still live in a collectivist culture and for the individual to not matter right um yes correct it is correct and what i said about mattering too much or too little applies equally to well-being in collectivist societies and individualistic societies so i believe we need to find um just the right balance between the two tendencies i'll give you an example a my sister lived in israel on iki boots for many years and you know the kibbutz is a collective society there is no private property you work for the collective and in return you get all expenses paid right you have a nice house and vacations paid and health care and a car when you need it and entertainment it on in many ways it's a very idyllic place echibots but sometimes the societal norms that give you all these goodies all these resources can become a little oppressive so to use my sister's example she wanted to do a master's degree in educational administration but the kibbutz said no we want you to be a nurse and she said like but i don't want to become a nurse i want to become you know an educational administrator this just one little example of how a collectivist society where you share everything can also become quite oppressive of individual expression right um so that's not good on the other my sister left the kibbutz eventually by the way because she felt that her her needs were not being met on the other hand we have highly individualistic societies you know like the us culture um where individual freedoms just trump everything else so oh you know freedom is the single most important value therefore i don't need to wear masks i don't need to be vaccinated basically saying i don't care about other people right because freedom supersedes the well-being of the community so you can see neither extreme is healthy we have to create spaces where we balance the well-being of the collective with the well-being and needs of the individuals yeah no you thank you for clarifying that i understand very clearly now what you mean by in the right amount battery can contribute to personal and collective forcings thank you for that um clarification you know you are you you argue in one of your papers that for mattering to materialize certain moral values must be present can you explain what those moral values are that you that you speak of yes so continuing the conversation on mattering too much um if we do not pay attention to the value of fairness i very quickly can become obsessed with my own mattering which we see all around us all the time pretty much so what does fairness do you can think of fairness as a balancing value because fairness there are different types i talked earlier about corrective fairness when we're trying to fix an injustice in the past but there is also what we call distributive fairness which is allocating people resources based on you know what they deserve to each his or her do there is also procedural fairness making sure that if people make decisions affecting your life that you have voice and choice you know about the decision that you're not left out of decisions impacting your life your career your job your community etc so we can talk about distributive justice and procedural justice so if i really want to create a healthy society i will be concerned not just with my own mattering but with your monitoring as well and i couldn't do that if i didn't pay attention to the value of fairness right because then it's look in the absence of fairness it's free for all so then i say oh i want to matter so you know i don't care if i exploit my workers because i matter more i don't care if i suppress women's voices or black people's voices because i care about my in-group more in other words mattering in the absence of fairness can very quickly degenerate into a type of narcissistic culture no yeah no absolutely which we're seeing a lot of today yes yes you point out some interesting tensions among psychological philosophical and political perspectives and mattering i found that very very interesting um when you point that can you just briefly touch on some of those tensions because there's different you know in different philosophies and different politics there's different ideas about that balance yes exactly right so to begin with psychology we started the conversation with the risk inherent both in positive psychology and humanistic psychology that we ascribe to too many powers to the individual for example to overcome adversity and it is true that post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon and many people do do overcome adversity and it's a testament to the human spirit but it is also true that when you take inequality into account the vast majority of poor people experience adversity that it's not so easy to overcome so i worry in psychology about the tendency to glorify greed and resilience too much because it tends to ignore the plight of people who didn't have enough psychological resources to overcome adversity let me be personal for a second i lost my parents in a car accident when i was eight years old both of my parents died at the same time it was very traumatic needless to say but i had experienced a lot of warmth and affection before my parents died and after their death i was adopted by an aunt who treated me like her own son and my aunt really invested in me and and i enjoyed psychological resources that helped me pull through not everyone experiences the same warmth and affection and psychological nurturance it to overcome especially individuals who because of poverty and marginalization they have to juggle a million things at the same time like two jobs lack of transportation eviction notices and a lot of injustice basically so in philosophy in politics in psychology there is this tendency which is a very american tendency to bestow upon the individual more superpowers than we really have okay so you see it in in liberal the neo-liberal politics of today which is all about the individual and becoming an entrepreneur and if you work hard you can make it you know lift yourself from with your own bootstraps etc etc all these metaphors which tend to perpetuate a sense of failure in people who cannot achieve these high stake high status right because they just say look all these people i get it on the media all the time they're telling me if i work hard enough i can make it but you know what some people have really adverse circumstances that unless we fix those for them the path to resilience will be very hard yeah your work seems to dovetail with bob newbrow's work a bit who advocated for a balance among the values of liberty fraternity and equality um can you compare contrast your theory with his yes and actually bob noble was the person who recruited me to vanderbilt university wow i didn't know that yes so i have a very um warm spot in my heart for bob who was really a wonderful scholar and and friend and bob advocated for this balance between really the values of the french revolution right the you know which is basically about liberty fraternity and equality and if you if you put liberty and equality on two ends of a continuum okay so let's say liberty it's all about freedom what's good for me i don't want to be encumbered by social norms whatever dr fauci tells me i just want to do my own thing right so that's one extreme of liberty um and the other extreme of equality is maybe it doesn't matter how hard you work you're going to get to pay the same lousy payment that we're paying everybody so think cuba for example right where it's equality with the very lowest denominator right so there's no incentive to do anything because i'm not going anywhere or you can think about my sister's example on the kibbutz right so oh yeah we're also equal that it doesn't matter what i want to study because it's all for the benefit of the whole anyways right so you can think about vices on either end of the continuum okay so now you ask the question how do you reconcile what the individual needs with what the collective needs and this is where fraternity comes in because what's fraternity fraternity is relational well-being and in the absence of relational well-being where we say scott how about scott and isaac having a chat and seeing whether we can resolve our differences it's about civic engagement it's about civic friendship this aristotelian construct it's about the thinking about the common good and when we engage in other extreme either the individualistic which is a society completely built on a meritocracy right if you work hard if you're smart you can deserve all the goodies america can offer you you know that's one bad extreme the other bad extreme is really cuba you know or the former soviet union where you know your your individuality was completely erased i have many good friends in cuba it doesn't matter what how hard you work the government is going to tell you what to do when to do it how to do it so you live a very oppressed existence so so then i ask myself how do we solve these tensions and healthy societies have robust participatory democracies where people can engage in a dialogue about how to resolve differences so an interesting study was conducted by swiss economist freyan stutzer a few years ago now where they compared happiness and longevity of people in cantons where they voted more often for decisions affecting their lives so that's a form of voice and choice people participating in dialogue about what do we need as a community for example do we want more pedestrian zones do we want to block car access to the downtown you know do we want to force people to recycle more etc etc well it turns out that people who vote on referenda more often are happier and live longer so something is telling us that when i am valued not just as an individual but also as a citizen my happiness goes up um and i can give you opposite examples scott i grew up in argentina where there is a great deal of corruption and corruption is toxic so what do people do when there is corruption they don't trust the government they don't trust the authorities and people just withdraw from the system and there is higher levels of criminal behavior alienation etc etc wow wow you've thought about this for a while i can tell well yes and i have to say you know i've lived in five countries and i grew up under a fascist dictatorship of a military dictatorship in argentina yeah that will really make you socially aware really quickly and then i lived in israel for nine years which is a very interesting very multicultural and complicated democracy i lived in canada for 15 years i lived in australia and i've been in the us since 2003 so i've been around and i think when you are exposed to different ways of organizing yourself as a society you begin to learn from exemplars um and you know for example you know in canada people pay more taxes than in the u.s but i lived there 15 years i never paid a cent for excellent medical care i received right so what is that telling you it's telling you that there are different ways for societies to organize themselves where the individual can experience more self-expression because you're not so encumbered by all these worries so anyways this is a wonderful i mean it's deeply uh connected to my own sort of thinking and what does the self-actualizing society look like um so i really appreciate this conversation and it's very clear to me abundantly clear to me that the field of community psychology needs to be better integrated in the field of positive psychology i don't why is why does it kind of feel like you're you're just out there like this outlier in our field it shouldn't be that way yes yes um and i think part of it has to do with [Music] the yet to be fulfilled promise of positive psychology paying attention not just to individuals but also to institutions remember when the field was founded you know it was be founded on these complementary pillars of not just flourishing individuals but also flourishing institutions and societies and i think we have gotten a little stuck at the individual end of the continuum and i think it's not one or it's not either or right it's not an either or a proposition that i'm advocating for forgetting the benefits of positive interventions like gratitude and savoring and mindfulness meditation and i just want to democratize those practices so that everyone can have access to them and not just be the province of a selected few i just want everyone to enjoy the science of positive psychology which is not today it's not what's happening today i agree i agree democratize gratitude that's a call hashtag democratize uh uh well democratize well-being more generally yeah no yeah democratize happiness to tell you the truth yeah okay yeah yeah i it's abundantly clear that social conditions create scarcity for some people and there is a fabulous book by malay nathan and shafir an economist and any and psychologist from harvard then princeton and they wrote this book scarcity and what do they say they say that when you happen to be poor all your mental energy goes to pay the bills and to buy shoes for your kid and to pay for a school fees when there is an outing right so you are consumed you are consumed by what you don't have scarcity right you don't have enough money so there is very little if any any psychological energy to invest in flurry shake because you don't know where the next paycheck will come from and you don't know how you're going to pay rent before you are evicted so i think we need to pay attention to the to the ground to the fertile ground where happiness grows and at present we just think that happiness can grow out of nowhere or just out of your head that's poor science that is not paying attention to the contextual factors that make you resilient enough as in my case you know i lost my parents at when i was eight that's pretty dramatic but things can be compensated when you have the right psychological nurturance around you and that's a privilege that not everyone benefits from because basically social injustice let me put it this way i think it's in the simplest form that i love what you're saying um i want to get a little bit deeper though at an existential level why why does it matter so much to ve to be to feel valued you know is it i'm going to try to play devil's advocate for a second like can someone say that's just so tied up with the need for self-esteem you know that like shouldn't we transcend that ultimately that like i demand to be you know valued you know it's that demand that that demand and that need itself feels selfish to a certain degree um so i i don't know if i'm believing everything i'm saying right now but i'm just trying to just for the sake of it yeah conversation yeah why is it so important i think from an evolutionary point of view today love has become what safety and food used to be for our ancestors um so the need because of evolutionary reasons we're comparing machines when when we enter a room full of people we tend to compare ourselves with others you know am i as good looking as these other people am i as well dressed well spoken well educated well-pedigreed as other people it just happens because it's a need for survival to scan the environment and and to see how do i stuck up will people you know if i have a heart attack where will anybody rush to save me or will they go to the to this dude who is very well dressed and high status so when you think about it um it has to do with survival and existing in a group in a tribe so that's why i want to feel valued now most of us who are lucky we have our basic needs met you know i'm not worrying about being eaten up by a mastodon in the african savannah so what do i worry about i worry about being popular i worry about being loved um and it is true what you're saying that in excess that can become a self-obsession which was the problem with the self-esteem movement so how do i how do i guard against that tendency my definition of mattering is that you need to feel valued by yourself and others and you need to add value to yourself and others and others so yeah built into my definition of mattering is the need to pay attention to the well-being of other people uh that's the difference between a me culture and a weak culture in a me culture it's all about self-esteem as you were saying you know i have the right to feel valued basically says love me i'm here i'm great my definition of mattering says that this is 50 this is 100 correct about 50 of the problem right the other 50 of the problem is that unless you are actually adding value to other people you run the risk of becoming self-obsessed so that's why that's why you cannot truly matter unless you are adding value to other people wow wow wow wow wow um this is so interesting so would you say a a a a real uh loud brash narcissist who uh who just doesn't add value to the world at all but just constantly screaming i i matter i matter would you actually say actually you don't you don't yet you don't yes exactly would you say that yeah i would absolutely say that i would say you're a narcissist you're not mattering you're not adding value to anybody you're actually a reducing value to the community by your actions by your self-obsession um so here is you asked me before about the intersection between psychology and politics and philosophy and you cannot just propagate a me type of mattering because in a me type of mattering you're forgetting the the fairness part in a weak type of mattering all of us have the right and responsibility to feel valued and add value so that we can all experience happiness and fairness so pay attention to the key words not just right to feel value but right and responsibility not just to feel valued but to feel valued and add value so that we can all experience not just happiness but also fairness so six words okay rights responsibilities feeling valued adding value happiness and fairness these six constructs must be present if you take out a piece of it the whole thing falls apart this is revolutionary i mean this is also this might be at odds with someone who would say you know you could see someone in the positive psychology community uh doing a mindfulness meditation and saying close your eyes you matter because you're you you're human you exist that's it that's all you need to do to matter i feel like you you're kind of saying you know that's not really necessarily true right and i you know um there is a big movement in mindfulness self-compassion yeah it's a bit of a misnomer because when you really dig into it it's more about mindfulness compassion it's not just self-compassion i i know you know where self-compassion started with christian f and then it they grew with chris germer um but both of them have been highly influenced by paul gilbert who is a british psychologist who wrote the fantastic book about mindfulness compassion and i think compassion embodies self and other compassion but i agree with you that if this is all about me experiencing higher levels of self-actualization without paying attention to the vicissitudes of suffering other people i i don't believe in that kind of self-compassion i believe in self-compassion that nurtures your compassion for other people and if you follow that trend of thought there cannot be compassion without justice i hear you you're you're a bit of a rebel though in the field of positive psychology it shouldn't be the case but i hear you i hear you yes i i i'll tell you a little historical note that maybe of interest i wrote a philosophical dissertation in psychology you know most psychologists write empirical studies right you know conduct study collect data analyze statistics etc well i wrote a dissertation a philosophical dissertation which my department didn't want to approve because i was a rebel i was calling into question the let's call it the monopoly of worth in empirical studies and i said no i can write a philosophical study that's worth of a dissertation so i did what was it called psychology and the status quo it was a critique of how different branches of psychology upheld social injustice because of what i was saying before that psychology tended to interiorize social problems as opposed to contextualize social problems so i wrote a critique of the atomization of psychology so just to show you i wrote my dissertation in 1989 whoa and um i've been a bit of a rebel ever since i guess i've been great that was even before that was before a lot of happiness research uh was systematically initiated even at dinner's work yeah right so i also i guess i was a critic before there was something to criticize i was gonna say that's amazing that's amazing well good for you good for you um now this is a very important uh very important question um can i matter if i never can learn how to roll ours like you do um you i can grant you special dispensation so so for a very small contribution to the isaac preltansky foundation i can grant special dispensations thank you because i didn't know that was one of your criteria for mattering um now now many people don't know this about you but you're a humor writer as well um you want to know you know this is this is also a very important dimension of you um you know won an award you wanted a word for your humor writing in 2015 by the national newspaper association yes is that is that a real society is that real yes actually it's google so it must be real okay so well i'd love to read some of your humor writing if you can somehow send it send me some links i'll put in the show notes right so very quick story about that my wife and i were thinking of writing a book based on an intervention we developed the it's called fun4wellness.com it's free to the public if people are interested we conducted randomized controlled trials on that so long story short we developed a wellness intervention and i said to my wife you know i think if i write some humor pieces you know it may just lighten up the whole intervention people may be more engaged so that led to my publishing um dozens and dozens of humor columns in the miami herald and miami today and and i got very positive responses so then i said to ora my wife and my co-author i said you know how about we write a series of books combining humor with science because you know when it comes to health and wellness there is a lot of sermonizing you know like oh if you don't eat your vegetables you will die young and destitute you know that kind of thing um so i said torah we can just teach people how to become happier and healthier through humor so we wrote a trilogy the laughing guy to well-being the laughing guy to a better life and the laughing guy to change and the trilogy all the books combine humor with science to become happier and healthier so it was an interesting experiment and um people resonate with the humor message i call it smarter through laughter i love it i love it i'm actually in the middle of taking a stand-up comedy class right now and uh it's good how is it going it's going well it's going well i'm performing tonight uh open mic uh oh well good luck guys if you have any any youtubes please send me oh yes i will but we're not ready for prime time yet well that's for sure not not ready for it but someday maybe um now you related to this you lead a research team that developed www.www.fun4wellness.com so this is a research-based online platform to promote health and wellness using videos games and humor tell me a little bit about this i hadn't heard about this until since uh until i was right right right so um following the the philosophy i was describing of engaging people in health promotion through fun we created a platform with the video clips with professional actors basically enacting some struggle in their lives interpersonal problems occupational problems weight issues so we follow these characters it's like a mini soap opera you might say in which the characters have a dilemma have a challenge they they use certain strategies that we propose in the intervention and then there is some kind of resolution and the participants play video games we created videos and self-reflection exercises and games all in an effort to learn health and wellness skills through fun and joy so we teach for example people and their behaviors we teach people how to set a goal and how to create a positive habit and their emotions we have a module on emotions how to nurture positive emotions and how to manage negative emotions under thoughts we teach people how to challenge negative assumptions about themselves and how to write a new story a new narrative about themselves we teach people about interactions how to connect with others and how to communicate so there are a lot of skill building in this platform all told takes about 12 hours to do but even if you engage with it for about two and a half hours our research team found statistically significant improvements in all the i cope domains of well-being that i was describing earlier so yeah we subjected this to two randomized control trials and we've had a number like i don't know 12 15 papers published on it this is amazing isaac i love the work you do so much i'll leave with a quote of yours you say psychologists especially positive psychologists must be very careful not to be complicit in the move to interiorize well-being um i really hope this podcast today helps people listening um if they're in the field of pod psychology and if they're not you know they're just thinking about well-being generally to include more the contextual factors that you're talking about and and incorporate this need to matter in their in their own models of of human thriving so thank you so much for the work you do it's so important for the field i can't wait to release this episode thank you so much for the opportunity scott it was fun thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in the discussion at the psychologypodcast.com that's the psychologypodcast.com thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity [Music]

Channel: The Psychology Podcast

Views: 2,774

Keywords: psychology, podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman

Id: EyMIYbRqygk

Length: 59min 58sec (3598 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021