emotional distress

Study: Trigger warnings don’t work, may undermine emotional resilience

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It’s Official—Trigger Warn­ings Might Actu­al­ly Be Harm­ful (Medi­um):

“In the era of col­lege stu­dent sen­si­tiv­i­ties to a seem­ing­ly ever-increas­ing list of pos­si­ble offend­ing mate­r­i­al, the use of so-called “trig­ger warn­ings” has become com­mon­place on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es. These warn­ings are usu­al­ly giv­en at the begin­ning of a class (or at the begin­ning of spe­cif­ic sec­tions of a class) to pre­pare students…”

After con­trol­ling for var­i­ous fac­tors, such as sex, race, age, psy­chi­atric his­to­ry, and polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, the researchers found that those par­tic­i­pants who received trig­ger warn­ings were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly (com­pared to those in the con­trol con­di­tion) to sug­gest that they and oth­ers would be more vul­ner­a­ble to emo­tion­al dis­tress after expe­ri­enc­ing trau­ma. [Read more…] about Study: Trig­ger warn­ings don’t work, may under­mine emo­tion­al resilience

A Course Correction for Positive Psychology: A Review of Martin Seligman’s Latest Book

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(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter).

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psychology

A review of Mar­tin Seligman’s lat­est book, Flour­ish: A Vision­ary New Under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty to rad­i­cal­ly change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­o­gy had been pre­oc­cu­pied sole­ly with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it. He called for a psy­chol­o­gy that would uncov­er what makes peo­ple cre­ative, resilient, opti­mistic, and, ulti­mate­ly, hap­py. The “pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy” move­ment was born.

Yet in his lat­est book, Flour­ish, Selig­man tries to pro­vide some­thing of a course cor­rec­tion for pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy. [Read more…] about A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Review of Mar­tin Seligman’s Lat­est Book