Skip to Content Skip to Content

Positive Psychology

Six tips to stay calm, positive, and resilient in trying times
A close up of a plant growing from the cracks of a cement sidewalk.

Six tips to stay calm, positive, and resilient in trying times

The situation around COVID-19 can be overwhelming, but experts from Penn’s Positive Psychology Center offer advice to get through—or at the very least, get by.

Michele W. Berger

Scientists look to West Point to better understand what it takes to succeed

Scientists look to West Point to better understand what it takes to succeed

A team of researchers led by Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts and Sciences examined data from thousands of West Point cadets to assess the attributes that were most predictive of success. Their results “suggest that both cognitive and non-cognitive attributes matter in different ways and at different times,” they wrote.

What factors predict success?
A person sitting at a desk covered in papers, with a computer screen in the background. Four people are blurry, in the foreground. They are all engaged in conversation.

The findings of this latest work add to the canon of overall knowledge about what factors predict success. They also strengthen Duckworth’s original theories about grit and, at the same time, highlight other attributes key to long-term achievement.

What factors predict success?

New research from Angela Duckworth and colleagues finds that characteristics beyond intelligence influence long-term achievement.

Michele W. Berger

How reading a good book can make you a better person

How reading a good book can make you a better person

Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts and Sciences wrote about the human capacity for empathy. “True, human beings tend to be egocentric, experiencing and reacting to the here-and-now of our lives,” she wrote. “But also true, and out of all species perhaps uniquely so, we’re capable of mentally untethering ourselves from our own narrative and imagining what it is like to walk a path entirely different than our own.”

In the pursuit of happiness, a new class leads the charge
A man in a blue shirt and khakis standing in front of rows of students sitting at desks.

A new course taught by James Pawelski of the Positive Psychology Center (standing) not only gives students an intellectual understanding of what it means to be happy and how to pursue it, but also aims to foster long-term change.

In the pursuit of happiness, a new class leads the charge

The course, taught by Positive Psychology’s James Pawelski, not only gives students an intellectual understanding of the subject but asks them to practice what they’re learning.

Michele W. Berger

Scientists found an opposite ‘light’ force to the driver of all your worst impulses

Scientists found an opposite ‘light’ force to the driver of all your worst impulses

Scott Barry Kaufman and a team of researchers from the School of Arts and Sciences have developed a Light Triad Scale to assess positive character traits in individuals, a counter to the Dark Triad that drives bad behavior. “Yes, everyday psychopaths exist. But so do everyday saints, and they are just as worthy of research attention and cultivation in a society that sometimes forgets that not only is there goodness in the world, but there is also goodness in each of us as well,” wrote Kaufman.