The Science behind Reflective Learning

Transcription

1 Research Compendium The Science behind Reflective Learning Reflective Learning is a company that uses research from the University of Pennsylvania to improve business results and individual performance. Based upon research by Penn s Positive Psychology Center, our web-based programs are offered as independent programs, or may be used as part of a blended solution with other distance learning and face-to-face applications. I. Executive Summary Individuals and teams that experience frequent positive emotions, engagement, and meaning perform better in a host of ways that matter to us as individuals and organizations. Our current level of understanding allows us to deploy positive psychology applications through online delivery mechanisms in real world situations with reasonable expectations of success. Why Well-Being Matters Positive psychology focuses on the roles of positive emotions, positive thought patterns, and positive relationships in relation to human flourishing. The field was promoted by Martin E. P. Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, while president of the American Psychology Association in Dr. Seligman emphasized the need to broaden the focus of psychology from minimizing mental illness to promoting full, rich lives. Today, the field encompasses the work of a wide array of researchers in psychology, sociology, health, medicine, organizational studies, business management, and other disciplines. These researchers have produced a significant body of 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 1 of 16

2 knowledge that continues to expand. Hundreds of new scientific articles are published each year, and the field has been the subject of major articles in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today and other major publications. Popular books make many areas of the research accessible to the general public (see the attached reading list). Positive psychology covers subjects ranging from recently identified states such as flow to age-old virtues such as wisdom, courage, love, and justice. It includes hope and optimism, mindfulness, morality, and grit. These are neither trivial nor purely academic topics, and the work in this field has consequences significant enough to have already garnered a Nobel Prize in Economics (Daniel Kahneman, Princeton, 2002). Organizations as diverse as Best Buy and David s Bridal (the largest bridal store chain in the country) have implemented positive psychology-based programs with favorable results (Zaslow, 2006). Positive psychology s focus is on helping healthy individuals lead richer, fuller, more productive lives. Positive psychology s results are accessible, both cognitively and experientially, to individuals from all walks of life and with widely-varied educational backgrounds. Those who are interested do not have to take the findings of positive psychology on faith; they can try them out for themselves. Reflective Learning s products facilitate learning, understanding and application of positive psychology s findings. Well-being, broadly understood as frequent positive emotions, regular experiences of engagement, and a satisfying sense of meaning, matters far more than was once believed. People who experience high levels of well-being are more successful across a wide range of domains (e.g. work, love, health). In a recent comprehensive review and meta-analysis by Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005), compared to their less happy counterparts, people who reported high levels of well-being were: - More socially active and likable 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 2 of 16

3 - More likely to be married, and to have successful marriages - More altruistic, exhibiting more pro-social behavior - In possession of higher self-esteem - Living longer; Having better physical health and stronger immune systems; coping better with being sick when they do get sick - In possession of better conflict resolution skills - Exhibiting more creative thinking - Earning more money and performing better at their jobs - Less susceptible to negative influences from advertising, cognitive biases such as own-race bias, etc. - More resilient and better able to find positive meaning in adversity These are but a few of the many findings thus far discovered. Research findings have moved far beyond the level of simple correlations, with both longitudinal and experimental data pointing to the conclusion that although a bidirectional relationship exists between well-being and success wherein each builds upon the other, it is more often the case that well-being comes before success. For example, simple measures of well-being (e.g. a one-time assessment of an individual s levels of positive affect taken during college years) can predict income and success years later controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, and GPA (see Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener for an extensive review). A similar trend seems to be the case for resilience; Tugade and Fredrickson (2004) found that people who reported frequent positive emotions and continued to experience them over the course of a month showed increased resilience at the end of that month. This effect was dependent on the continued experiencing of positive emotion (e.g. resilience only increased if people continually experienced positive emotion). Theoretical Structure Seligman (2002) proposed that the unwieldy notion of happiness or wellbeing could be decomposed into three more scientifically manageable 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 3 of 16

4 components: positive emotion (the pleasant life), engagement (the engaged life), and meaning (the meaningful life). Each exercise in the Employee Excellence suite is designed to further one or more of these. The Pleasant Life The pleasant life is what hedonic theories of well-being endorse. It consists of having a lot of positive emotion about the present, past, and future, and learning the skills to amplify the intensity and duration of these emotions. The positive emotions about the past include satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, pride and serenity, and we developed gratitude and forgiveness exercises that enhance how positive memories can be (e.g. Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005; McCullough, 2000; Seligman et al., 2005). Positive emotions about the future include hope and optimism, faith, trust, and confidence, and these emotions, especially hope and optimism, are documented to buffer against depression (Seligman, 1991, 2002). Positive emotions about the present include satisfaction derived from immediate pleasures. We offer exercises for learning to savor and increase positive emotions in the past, present and future. One way of understanding the way in which positive emotions can have a lasting impact on well-being comes from Barbara Fredrickson s "Broaden and Build" theory of positive emotions. According to this model, negative emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness have specific behavioral consequences that are easily recognized and have been long understood. The "fight/flight" response to the perceived threat in the environment is one such response. Sadness results in withdrawal, which can be a survival response when the sadness is produced by loss occasioned by threats in the environment. The positive emotions are weaker, but more frequent. They are more interconnected and do not have the highly-patterned behavioral responses of the negative emotions. Rather, individuals experiencing positive emotions engage in a broader array of social and personal behaviors generally identified as creative, collaborative, cooperative, and connective. Positive individuals develop a 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 4 of 16

5 broader array of responses to situational challenges and build relationships and psychological resources within themselves that make the successful execution of one of those responses more likely (Fredrickson, 2000). Fredrickson and colleagues have provided evidence that positive emotions counteract the detrimental effects of negative emotion on physiology and attention (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998) and promote creativity, broadened attention, and efficient decision-making in their own right (Isen, 2003). They also contribute to resilience in crises and ability to find positive meaning in adversity (Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, & Larkin, 2003; Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). The cognitive literature on depression documents a downward spiral in which depressed mood and narrowing thinking perpetuate each other. In contrast, Fredrickson and Joiner (2002) reported that positive emotions and a broad thought-action repertoire amplify each other, leading to an upward spiral of well-being. Reflective Learning programs are designed to harness this theory by identifying and amplifying positive emotions. The Engaged Life The second route to well-being in Seligman s theory is the engaged life, a life that pursues engagement, involvement, and absorption in work, intimate relations, and leisure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Flow is Csikszentmihalyi s term for the psychological state that accompanies highly engaging activities. Time passes quickly. Attention is completely focused on the activity. The sense of self is lost. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow occurs in situations where an individual is making use of his skills in a way that is challenging, stretching his abilities to the limit, but not so difficult that it is frustrating. Seligman (2002) proposed that one way to enhance engagement and flow is to identify peoples highest talents and strengths and then help them to find opportunities to use these strengths more. We call the highest strengths signature strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Many of the Reflective Learning products include significant components on identifying and employing and individual s strengths. ReflectedBestSelf is built around this theory and, ResilienceOnline, R4Power, 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 5 of 16

6 Penn START and the EmployeeExcellence suite include components of it in their material. Hodges and Clifton (2004) explored the impact of strengths-based practice, teaching employees to use their strengths in their work. They found that employees whose work is shaped to make use of their strengths report higher levels of engagement in their work, and subsequently reported greater job satisfaction. The Meaningful Life The third route to well-being in Seligman s theory involves the pursuit of meaning. This consists in using one s signature strengths and talents to belong to and serve something that one believes is bigger than the self. There are a large number of such positive institutions: religion, politics, family, work, community, and nation, for example. Regardless of the particular institution one serves in order to establish a meaningful life, doing so produces a sense of satisfaction and the belief that one has lived well (Myers, 1992; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). Such activities produce a subjective sense of meaning and are strongly correlated with well-being (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). A consistent theme throughout meaning-making research is that the people who achieve the greatest benefits are those who use meaning to transform the perceptions of their circumstances from unfortunate to fortunate (McAdam, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997; Pennebaker, 1993). In addition to resulting in greater general well-being, increasing meaning leads to greater productivity. For example, Grant et al. (2007) found that callers at a fundraising organization spent 141% more time on the phone with potential donors and ultimately raised171% more money when they had recently been given the chance to interact with one of the beneficiaries of their organization s fundraising, and hear about the impact that their efforts had on that person s life. Data on the Three Lives 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 6 of 16

7 Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005) examined the role that these three lives played in life satisfaction in 845 adults who responded to a survey over the internet. They found that each way of pursuing well-being pleasure, engagement, and meaning independently contributed to life satisfaction. Furthermore, they found that people high on all three reported especially high life satisfaction, higher than would be predicted by looking at the contribution of the three lives separately. In other words, pleasure, engagement, and meaning appear to have a synergistic effect when an individual is high in all three, having an effect that is larger than the sum of its parts, and leading to what Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005) call a Full Life. In contrast, people who were low on all three reported lower life satisfaction than would be predicted based on the effects of each life on its own; the authors called this the Empty Life. Seligman and colleagues then studied the pleasant, engaged, and meaningful lives of 327 young adults at the University of Pennsylvania (mean age = years, SD= 6.63; 53% women, 69% Caucasian); the sample included clinical depressed (n=97), nondepressed psychiatric (n=46), and nondepressed nonpsychiatric (n=184) students. Clinical depressed students experienced significantly fewer positive emotions, less engagement, and less meaning in their lives than did nondepressed psychiatric (d=.37) and nondepressed nonpsychiatric samples (d=1.17). Seligman and colleagues then measured life satisfaction as a function of pursuing each of these three lives. They found that the pursuit of meaning and engagement were robustly (p <.0001) correlated with higher life satisfaction (rs =.39 and.39, respectively) and lower depression (rs =.32 and.32, respectively), whereas the pursuit of pleasure, surprisingly, was only marginally correlated with life satisfaction (r=.18) and lower depression (r=-.15) (Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006). Despite these findings, and even though the Declaration of Independence made the pursuit of happiness a founding principle for our country, happiness and its pursuit generally get bad press and suffer from significant negative biases even in the business world. Happy individuals are often viewed as intellectual 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 7 of 16

8 lightweights who just don t get it, or Pollyannas who shut their eyes to the negative in an effort to remain happy despite the cold, harsh reality of the world. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. Earnest Hemingway One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person. William Feather To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. Gustave Flaubert Google reveals that when the phrase fat, dumb, and is used on the web, 97% of the time it is as fat, dumb, and happy. This view of happiness goes deeper than just witty quotes and omnipresent clichés. Some years ago, a Harvard Business School researcher, Teresa Amabile, found that subjects tend to rate the authors of critical book reviews as more expert and competent, even when knowledgeable, independent judges evaluated the positive book reviews as of higher quality and greater forcefulness. Reflective Learning s products supply tools for businesses and institutions and provide users with a shared vocabulary for addressing wellbeing and resilience. Such a common language and set of experiences help re-shape culture away from the negative is smart and negative is real biases and toward a positivity works mindset. Dr. Shatte- "More than education, more than experience, more than training, resilience determines who succeeds and who fails." 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 8 of 16

9 The body of literature has convincingly demonstrated that high levels of individual well-being are beneficial for businesses and institutions. Employees are more productive, make better decisions, and recover better from adversity. There is still significant work to be done. What is the cost of a unit of productivity improvement when realized through increased employee wellbeing versus purchasing of technology or recruiting better skilled workers through higher salaries? When a company faces difficult times, what is the return on investment in resilience training for employees versus the cost to respond to lawsuits from dissatisfied employees and the sap on productivity from depressed morale? The questions identify a glaring inefficiency in the current marketplace: online positive psychology training can be used to boost individual, corporate, and institutional performance, in a cost-effective, scalable, and rapid way. The tools offered by Reflective Learning are so new that no significant ROI data exist yet. Rather than discourage organizations from deploying the tools, this should encourage visionary leaders to seize the first-mover advantage and realize the value of these tools before others in their industry. Considering the above-described findings of positive psychology, it becomes easier to understand how seemingly simple exercises such as Three Blessings or Using Your Strengths in a New Way can result in individuals and groups who are much better able to address both the obstacles and the opportunities they encounter. These exercises promote well-being a state where we function far more creatively and effectively both as individuals and in relationships to others. A more focused, deeper process such as that embodied in Resilience Online or R4Power increases ability to maintain this higher state of functioning with greater conscious understanding and in the face of more severe challenges. Further, the online delivery method embodied in Reflective Learning s products has been shown to be effective in a large scale, random-assignment, placebocontrolled test of several of these products (see below) David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 9 of 16

10 II. Program Data- Empirical Support The exercises that appear on reflectivehappiness.com have been tested in a variety of populations from young adults in university settings, to therapy patients, to nationally representative samples ranging from ages and in a variety of settings from anecdotal case studies, to lab experiments, to webbased interfaces, to group and individual psychotherapy. Our findings consistently suggest that these exercises are effective in both decreasing depressive symptoms and increasing self-reported well-being. Furthermore, the exercises appear to be widely accepted by users; not only are compliance rates high, participants often continue to use them even when the study no longer requires them to do so. III. Program Explanations Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D. first began piloting these exercises when he taught five courses at the University of Pennsylvania involving a total of more than 200 undergraduates, with weekly assignments to carry out and write up various exercises. Many of these exercises form the basis for the EmployeeExcellence suite. These seemed remarkably successful; life changing was a word not uncommonly heard when students described their experiences with these exercises. The popularity of the Positive Psychology course at Harvard (855 undergraduates enrolled in spring 2006) is likely related to the impact of this material on the lives of users. In the next phase of piloting these interventions, Seligman taught more than 500 mental health professionals (clinical psychologists, life coaches, psychiatrists, educators); each week for 24 weeks, trainees heard a one hour lecture and then were assigned one exercise to carry out in their own lives and 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 10 of 16

11 with their patients or clients. Once again, at the anecdotal level, they were astonished by the feedback from mental health professionals about how well these interventions took. These pilot endeavors yielded so many powerful case histories and testimonials that he and his colleagues began efforts to put positive psychology interventions in more scientifically rigorous designs. In January of 2005, was opened. This product is a consumer version of the corporate program, EmployeeExcellence. The site has a book club, a newsletter, and forum discussion of positive psychology each month, but more important, one new positive psychology exercise is posted each month. The first month s exercise was the Three Blessings exercise. In the first month of operation, 50 subscribers had scores in the range of severe depression scoring 25 or higher on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D; Radloff, 1977). Their mean was 33.90, close to what might be termed extremely depressed. Each of them did the three blessings exercise and returned to the web and average of 14.8 days later. At that time, 94% of them were less depressed, with a mean score of 16.90, which is down into the border of the mild-to-moderate range of depression. We replicated these findings several months later with essentially the same results. Although this was an uncontrolled study, such a dramatic decrease in depression over a short period of time compares favorably to medication and to psychotherapy. Below are the details of three recent studies that have tested these exercises using more rigorous, controlled experimental designs: 1. Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson (2005), Individual Exercise Over the Web 1 This study tested the efficacy of three exercises Using Your Signature Strengths (N=66), Three Blessings (N=59), and Gratitude Visit (N=80) when 1 Seligman s research group is in the process of replicating this study and examining several other exercises included on reflectivehappiness.com: Which Door Opened, Active and Constructive Responding, Savor a Beautiful Day, Positive Service, and ABCDE Disputation David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 11 of 16

12 given to individuals of a wide range of ages and demographics over the web as compared to a placebo condition in which participants wrote about their early memories (N=70). Participants depressive symptoms and self-reported levels of well-being were assessed before and after they used the exercise for a week, then at 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month follow-ups. They found that Using Your Signature Strengths decreased depressive symptoms and increased well-being immediately, and that this effect remained through 6-month follow-up, while Three Blessings showed a delayed effect, with increased well-being and decreased depression starting at 1-month follow-up and remaining through 6- month follow-up. The Gratitude Visit exercise had the largest immediate effect, but the effect faded by 1-month follow-up. For the first two exercises (Signature Strengths and Three Blessings), the longevity of the effects depended on whether or not participants continued to use their exercise after the initial 1-week period during which they were required to do so; many participants opted to continue using their exercise, even though they were not explicitly asked to. The Gratitude Visit was a one-time exercise, and it was not possible for participants to continue using it, so it is not surprising that the effects faded. However, it is possible that, in larger interventions that include the Gratitude Visit among other exercises (see below), the immediate surge in happiness that results from doing the exercise might foster participants receptivity to other exercises. 2. Seligman, Rashid, & Parks (2006), Study 1 Group Positive Psychotherapy This study tested the efficacy of six exercises, five of which are included, in some version, in the EmployeeExcellence suite Three Blessings, Using Your Signature Strengths, Gratitude Visit, Active and Constructive Responding and Savor a Beautiful Day. Participants were young adults with mild-moderate depressive symptoms (substantially above the normal range, but not suffering from clinical depression), who were randomly assigned to receive a series of six 1.5-hour workshops once a week (N=16), or to a no-intervention control condition (N=21). Each week, they practiced one of these exercises and then discussed their experience in the workshop group. Participants who received the 6-week 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 12 of 16

13 group intervention showed significantly fewer depressive symptoms and significantly greater satisfaction with life at the end of the intervention compared to the control condition, whose symptom levels remained constant. These effects lasted through 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year follow-up assessments. 3. Seligman, Rashid, & Parks (2006), Study 2 Individual Positive Psychotherapy In this study, young adults with Major Depression seeking treatment at the University of Pennsylvania s counseling center were randomly assigned to receive either 14 weeks of Individual Positive Psychotherapy (N=11), or 14 weeks of the usual psychotherapy treatment provided by the center (N=9). In addition, a group of 12 individuals receiving medication management from the counseling center were matched on demographic variables and baseline characteristics with participants in the positive psychotherapy group, and they served as a second non-randomized control condition. The positive psychotherapy condition contained a variety of exercises, many of which appear on reflectivehappiness.com, such as Using Signature Strengths, Gratitude Visit, What Door Opened, Active and Constructive Responding, Strengths Date, and Savoring a Beautiful Day. At the end of the 14 week period, participants who received positive psychotherapy reported fewer depressive symptoms and were significantly more likely to have attained remission from Major Depressive Disorder than individuals who received the center s standard psychotherapy, or medication management. They also reported improvements in global life functioning that were larger than those observed in either comparison condition. In summary, three randomized controlled trials suggest that the positive exercises on reflectivehappiness.com are effective means of decreasing depressive symptoms (and, in one instance, treating clinical depression) as well as increasing well-being and life functioning when given in person or over the web. Although this research is still in the early stages, it shows great promise 2007 David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 13 of 16

14 IV. References Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins. Fredrickson, B.L. (2000, March 7). Cultivating positive emotions to optimize health and well-being. Prevention & Treatment, 3, Article 1. Fredrickson, B.L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19, Fredrickson, B.L., & Joiner, T. (2002). Positive emotions trigger upward spirals toward emotional well-being. Psychological Science, 13, Fredrickson, B.L., & Levenson, R.W. (1996). Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 12, Fredrickson, B.L., & Losada, M. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60, Fredrickson, B.L., Tugade, M.M., Waugh, C.E., & Larkin, G.R. (2003). What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, Grant, A.M., Campbell, E.M., Chen, G., Cottone, K., Lapedis, D., & Lee, K. (2007). Impact and the art of motivation maintenance: The effects of contact with beneficiaries on persistence behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, Hodges, T.D., & Clifton, D.O. (2004). Strengths-based development in practice. In P.A. Linley & S. Joseph (Eds.), Positive Psychology in Practice (pp ). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131, David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 14 of 16

15 Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K.M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9, McAdam, D.P., Diamond, A., de St. Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997). Stories of commitment: The psychological construction of generative lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, McCullough, M.E. (2000). Forgiveness as a human strength: Conceptualization, measurement, and links to well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19, Myers, D.G. (1992). The pursuit of happiness: Who is happy and why. New York: William Morrow. Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). The concept of flow. In C. R. Snyder & S.J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp ). New York: Oxford University Press. Pennebaker, J.W. (1993). Putting stress into words: Health, linguistic, and therapeutic implications. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31, Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2006). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, Peterson, C., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues. New York: Oxford University Press. Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned optimism. New York: Knopf. Seligman, M.E.P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York: Free Press. Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T.A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60, Seligman, M.E.P., Rashid, T., & Parks, A.C. (2006). Positive psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 61, Tugade, M.M., & Fredrickson, B.L. (2005). Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 15 of 16

16 Isen, A. (2003). A role for neurophysiology in understanding the facilitating influence of positive affect on social behavior and cognitive processes. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp ). New York: Oxford University Press. Zaslow, J. (March, 2006). Happiness, Inc. The Wall Street Journal, Vol. XX, pp. P1. Retrieved from search.html?keywords=happiness&collection=wsjie/6month on Sunday, October David N. Shearon and Acacia C. Parks-Sheiner Page 16 of 16