I’ve managed to align my homework with my personal interests by writing a paper on organizational virtousness. The foundational paper of the concept contains an awesome table (that I’ve modified a bit): traditional scholarship studies the left and middle columns, positive scholarship studies the right column.

* Is there a word for better-than-sustainable? When I asked Sara she said we don’t need a word for something imaginary.

The five personality factors were extracted from adjectives of language using factor analysis: a statistical method for finding orthagonal factors. I looked into using that analysis of language on my values. The first issue is that the factor analysis is not trivial: most adjectives are loaded on more than one factor, suggesting that a model called “the Abridged Big Five-Dimensional Circumplex” (AB5C) is more appropriate. I am nowhere close to understanding it, but I think the model basically says that five-dimensional personality space is not Euclidean but Elliptic.

Applying personality results to values also raises the question: what’s the difference between values and traits? It turns out there is some research that finds very definite links. I haven’t had time to read this research yet, but I’m guessing that traits drive non-conscious behaviour and values drive conscious behaviour – the gap between them is cognitive dissonance.

Related to both values and traits are the 24 character strengths that are one of the foundations of positive psychology. The strengths were generated from factor analysis of the values of many cultures and are experimentally supported. They get organized into six virtues that I’ve heard do not hold up under factor analysis, although I haven’t gotten around to reading the studies (so think of them as mnemonics).

Playing to your strengths is one of the best ways to be happy. So focusing on your strengths is probably more useful than traits or values. I have a bunch more research to do (and maybe some movies to watch) before I figure out where to go from here…

• pleasure
• engagement
• meaning

Seligman basically says nothing about meaning (but Wikipedia’s Meaning of life is an excellent overview). Engagement is effectively synonymous with flow/wu wei. Pleasure is 50% heritable (which explains why winning the lottery doesn’t make you much happier in the long run) but the other 50% can be changed.

Seligman has both academic and commercial sites with a bunch of questionnaires. The only intervention he talks about for engagement is to restructure unengaging tasks to focus on “character strengths” (although there are others). To increase pleasure there are at least two effective engagements:

• gratitude training (eg: a “good times” journal, writing letters of gratitude)
• mindfulness

Mindfulness is supposedly based on Buddhist meditation, but I think there’s some confusion. As I see it, Buddhist meditation includes two kinds of mindfulness:

• awareness of the present moment external to the self
• meta-consciousness: observing the structure of the self (the “monkey mind”) to transcend the present

The purpose of awareness training in psychology is to increase the pleasure gained and retained from pleasant experiences. When the sense of self is removed to savor an experience, you increase pleasure. When the sense of self is removed in carrying out a task, you increasing engagement. There is a correlation between these but I don’t think positive psychology understands the causal relationship yet.