June 07, 2022
Harnessing the power of positivity:
According to Adam Cash’s book “Psychology for dummies”.
Some people criticize psychology as “negatively focused” with all its focus on therapy and pathology and learning disabilities; they say it's always tried to fix people and groups. Well, a group of psychologists in the late 1990s and early 2000s headed by well-known psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, introduced as essentially a new branch of psychology known as “positive psychology”. Positive psychology is defined as the science of positive subjective experience, positive individuals' traits, and positive institutions that improve quality of life and prevent pathologies.
Positive psychology covers the following:
Emotional intelligence:
Optimism
Wisdom
Gratitude
Courage
Meaning
Creativity:
Self-efficacy
Compassion
Altruism
Toughness
Humor
Have you ever wondered if athletes train to get stronger, faster and more agile? Musicians practice to get more fluid and precise. But what if you want to get mentally quicker, more agile, stronger, more precise or just plain smarter?
This is an area of psychology known as cognitive enhancement, defined in 2008 by psychologists Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind through improvement of external information processing systems.
Many forms of cognitive enhancement are being researched and some have been around for a very long time. In essence education is a form of cognitive enhancement. Other forms include mental training, medication, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), relaxation techniques, neurofeedback and biofeedback.
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