Chapter 5

Positive Education: Teaching Well-Being to Young People

First, a quiz:

Question one: in one or two words, what do you most want for your children?

If you are like the thousands of parents I’ve polled, you responded, “happiness,” “confidence,” “contentment,” “fulfillment,” “balance,” “good stuff,” “kindness,” “health,” “satisfaction,” “love,” “being civilized,” “meaning,” and the like. In short, well-being is your topmost priority for your children.

Question two: in one or two words, what do schools teach?

If you are like other parents, you responded, “achievement,” “thinking skills,” “success,” “conformity,” “literacy,” “math,” “work,” “test taking,” “discipline,” and the like. In short, what schools teach is how to succeed in the workplace.

Notice that there is almost no overlap between the two lists.

The schooling of children has, for more than a century, paved the boulevard toward adult work. I am all for success, literacy, perseverance, and discipline, but I want you to imagine that schools could, without compromising either, teach both the skills of well-being and the skills of achievement. I want you to imagine positive education.

Should Well-Being Be Taught in School?

The prevalence of depression among young people is shockingly high worldwide. By some estimates, depression is about ten times more common now than it was fifty years ago. This is not an artifact of greater awareness of depression as a mental illness, since much of the data arises from door-to-door surveys that ask tens of thousands of people “Did you ever try to kill yourself?,” “Did you ever cry every day for two weeks?,” and the like without ever mentioning depression. Depression now ravages teenagers: fifty years ago, the average age of first onset was about thirty. Now the first onset is below age fifteen. While there is controversy about whether this rises to the scary appellation epidemic, all of us in the field are dismayed by how much depression there is now and how most of it goes untreated.

This is a paradox, particularly if you believe that good well-being comes from a good environment. You have to be blinded by ideology not to see that almost everything is better in every wealthy nation than it was fifty years ago: we now have about three times more actual purchasing power in the United States. The average house has doubled in size from 1,200 square feet to 2,500 square feet. In 1950 there was one car for every two drivers; now there are more cars than licensed drivers. One out of five children went on to post–high school education; now one out of two children does. Clothes—and even people—seem to look more physically attractive. Progress has not been limited to the material: there is more music, more women’s rights, less racism, more entertainment, and more books. If you had told my parents, living in a 1,200-square-foot house with me and Beth, my older sister, that all this would obtain in only fifty years, they would have said, “That will be paradise.”

Paradise it is not.

There is much more depression affecting those much younger, and average national happiness—which has been measured competently for a half century—has not remotely kept up with how much better the objective world has become. Happiness has gone up only spottily, if at all. The average Dane, Italian, and Mexican is somewhat more satisfied with life than fifty years ago, but the average American, Japanese, and Australian is no more satisfied with life than fifty years ago, and the average Brit and German is less satisfied. The average Russian is much unhappier.

Why this is, no one knows. It is certainly not biological or genetic; our genes and chromosomes have not changed in fifty years. Nor is it ecological; the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, who live thirty miles down the road from me, have only one-tenth of Philadelphia’s rate of depression, even though they breathe the same air (yes, with exhaust fumes), drink the same water (yes, with fluoride), and make much of the food we eat (yes, with preservatives). It has everything to do with modernity and perhaps with what we mistakenly call “prosperity.”

Two good reasons that well-being should be taught in schools are the current flood of depression and the nominal increase in happiness over the last two generations. A third good reason is that greater well-being enhances learning, the traditional goal of education. Positive mood produces broader attention, more creative thinking, and more holistic thinking. This is in contrast to negative mood, which produces narrowed attention, more critical thinking, and more analytic thinking. When you’re in a bad mood, you’re better at “what’s wrong here?” When you’re in a good mood, you’re better at “what’s right here?” Even worse: when you are in a bad mood, you fall back defensively on what you already know, and you follow orders well. Both positive and negative ways of thinking are important in the right situation, but all too often schools emphasize critical thinking and following orders rather than creative thinking and learning new stuff. The result is that children rank the appeal of going to school just slightly above going to the dentist. In the modern world, I believe we have finally arrived at an era in which more creative thinking, less rote following of orders—and yes, even more enjoyment—will succeed better.

I conclude that, were it possible, well-being should be taught in school because it would be an antidote to the runaway incidence of depression, a way to increase life satisfaction, and an aid to better learning and more creative thinking.

THE PENN RESILIENCY PROGRAM: A WAY TO TEACH WELL-BEING IN SCHOOL

My research team, led by Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham, has devoted much of the last twenty years to finding out, using rigorous methods, whether well-being can be taught to schoolchildren. We believe that well-being programs, like any medical intervention, must be evidence based, so we have tested two different programs for schools: the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) and the Strath Haven Positive Psychology Curriculum. Here are our findings.

First, let me tell you about the Penn Resiliency Program. Its major goal is to increase students’ ability to handle day-to-day problems that are common during adolescence. PRP promotes optimism by teaching students to think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter. PRP also teaches assertiveness, creative brainstorming, decision making, relaxation, and several other coping skills. PRP is the most widely researched depression-prevention program in the world. During the past two decades, twenty-one studies have evaluated PRP in comparison to control groups. Many of these studies used randomized controlled designs. Together these studies include more than three thousand children and adolescents between the ages of eight and twenty-two. Outcome studies of PRP include:

 

• Diverse samples. Penn Resiliency Program studies include adolescents from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, community settings (urban, suburban, and rural; white, black, and Hispanic; rich and poor) and countries (for example, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, and Portugal).

• Variety of group leaders. Group leaders include schoolteachers, counselors, psychologists, social workers, army sergeants, and graduate students in education and psychology.

• Independent evaluations of Penn Resiliency Program. We conducted many of the PRP evaluations; however, several independent research teams have also evaluated PRP, including a massive trial by the UK government, involving one hundred teachers and three thousand students.

 

Here are the basic findings:

• Penn Resiliency Program reduces and prevents symptoms of depression. A “meta-analysis” averages over all the methodologically sound studies of a topic in the entire scientific literature and a meta-analysis of all the studies reveals significant benefits of PRP at all follow-up assessments (immediately postintervention as well as six and twelve months following the program) compared to controls. Effects endure for at least two years.

• Penn Resiliency Program reduces hopelessness. The meta-analysis found that PRP significantly reduced hopelessness, increased optimism, and increased well-being.

• Penn Resiliency Program prevents clinical levels of depression and anxiety. In several studies, PRP prevented moderate to severe levels of depressive symptoms. For example, in the first PRP study, the program halved the rate of moderate to severe depressive symptoms through two years of follow-up. In a medical setting, PRP prevented depression and anxiety disorders among adolescents with high levels of depressive symptoms at the outset.

• Penn Resiliency Program reduces and prevents anxiety. There is less research on PRP’s effects on anxiety symptoms, but most studies find significant and long-lasting effects.

• Penn Resiliency Program reduces conduct problems. There is even less research on PRP’s effects on adolescents’ conduct problems (such as aggression, delinquency), but most studies find significant effects. For example, a recent large-scale program found significant benefits on parents’ reports of adolescents’ conduct problems three years after their youngsters completed the program.

• Penn Resiliency Program works equally well for children of different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

• Penn Resiliency Program improves health-related behaviors, with young adults who complete the program having fewer symptoms of physical illness, fewer illness doctor visits, better diet, and more exercise.

• Training and supervision of group leaders is critical. PRP’s effectiveness varies considerably across studies. This is related, at least in part, to how much training and supervision the teachers receive. Effects are strong when teachers are members of the PRP team, or are trained and then closely supervised by the PRP team. Effects are less robust and consistent when teachers have minimal training and minimal supervision.

• The fidelity of curriculum delivery is critical. For example, a study of Penn Resiliency Program in a primary care setting revealed significant reductions in depression symptoms in groups with high adherence to the program. In contrast, PRP did not reduce depressive symptoms in groups of patients with low program adherence. Thus, we recommend that teachers of PRP need intensive training and lots of supervision.

 

So the Penn Resiliency Program reliably prevents depression, anxiety, and conduct problems in young people. Resilience, however, is only one aspect of positive psychology—the emotional aspect. We designed a more comprehensive curriculum that builds character strengths, relationships, and meaning, as well as raises positive emotion and reduces negative emotion. With a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, we carried out a large randomized, controlled evaluation of this high school positive psychology curriculum. At Strath Haven High School, outside of Philadelphia, we randomly assigned 347 ninth-grade students (fourteen-to fifteen-year-olds) to language arts classes. Half the classes incorporated the positive psychology curriculum; the other half did not. Students, their parents, and their teachers completed standard questionnaires before the program, after the program, and over two years of follow-up. We tested students’ strengths (for instance, love of learning, kindness), social skills, behavioral problems, and how much they enjoyed school. In addition, we looked at their grades.

The major goals of this global program are (1) to help students identify their signature character strengths and (2) to increase their use of these strengths in their daily lives. In addition to these goals, the intervention strives to promote resilience, positive emotion, meaning and purpose, and positive social relationships. The curriculum consists of more than twenty eighty-minute sessions delivered over the ninth-grade year. These involve discussing character strengths and the other positive psychology concepts and skills, a weekly in-class activity, real-world homework in which students apply these skills in their own lives, and journal reflections.

Here are two examples of the exercises we use in the curriculum:

Three-Good-Things Exercise

We instruct the students to write down daily three good things that happened each day for a week. The three things can be small in importance (“I answered a really hard question right in language arts today”) or big (“The guy I’ve liked for months asked me out!!!”). Next to each positive event, they write about one of the following: “Why did this good thing happen?” “What does this mean to you?” “How can you have more of this good thing in the future?”

Using Signature Strengths in New Ways

Honesty. Loyalty. Perseverance. Creativity. Kindness. Wisdom. Courage. Fairness. These and sixteen other character strengths are valued in every culture in the world. We believe that you can get more satisfaction out of life if you identify which of these character strengths you have in abundance and then use them as much as possible in school, in hobbies, and with friends and family.

Students take the Values in Action Signature Strengths test (www.authentichappiness.org) and use their highest strength in a new way at school in the next week. Several sessions in the curriculum focus on identifying character strengths in themselves, their friends, and the literary figures they read about, and using those strengths to overcome challenges.

Here are the basic findings of the positive psychology program at Strath Haven:

Engagement in learning, enjoyment of school, and achievement

The positive psychology program improved the strengths of curiosity, love of learning, and creativity, by the reports of teachers who did not know whether the students were in the positive psychology group or the control group. (That’s what is called a “blind” study because the raters do not know the status of the students they are rating.) The program also increased students’ enjoyment and engagement in school. This was particularly strong for regular (nonhonors) classes, in which positive psychology increased students’ language arts grades and writing skills through eleventh grade. In the honors classes, grade inflation prevails and almost all students get As, so there is too little room for improvement. Importantly, increasing well-being did not undermine the traditional goals of classroom learning; rather it enhanced them.

Social skills and conduct problems

The positive psychology program improved social skills (empathy, cooperation, assertiveness, self-control), according to both mothers’ and “blind” teachers’ reports. The program reduced bad conduct, according to mothers’ reports.

 

So I conclude that well-being should be taught and that it can be taught in individual classrooms. In fact, is it possible that an entire school can be imbued with positive psychology?

The Geelong Grammar School Project

I was on a speaking tour in Australia in January 2005 when I had a phone call from a voice I had never heard before. “G’day, mate,” it said. “This is your student, Dr. Trent Barry.”

“My student?” I queried, not recognizing his name.

“Yeah, you know that live six-month telephone course—I woke up at four in the morning every week to listen to your lectures from the outskirts of Melbourne, where I live. It was fantastic, and I was fanatic, but I never spoke up.

“We want to helicopter you to the Geelong Grammar School. I’m on the school council, and we are in the middle of a fund-raising campaign for a well-being center. We want you to talk to the alumni and help us raise money for the campaign.”

“What is the Geelong Grammar School?” I inquired.

“First, it’s pronounced Geee-long, not G’long, Marty. It’s one of the oldest boarding schools in Australia, founded more than one hundred fifty years ago. It has four campuses, including Timbertop—up in the mountains where all the year-nine students go for the entire year. If they want a hot shower at Timbertop, they cut their own firewood. Prince Charles went to Timbertop—the only schooling he has fond memories of. The main campus, Corio, is fifty miles south of Melbourne. There are twelve hundred students, and two hundred teachers in all. Unfathomably wealthy.

“The school needs a new gym,” he went on, “but the council said we want well-being for the kids as well as a building. I told them about Seligman—they had never heard of you—and they want you to come and convince the rich alums that well-being can actually be taught and that a curriculum can be mounted to give the new building called a well-being center real meaning. We’ve raised fourteen million dollars in just six months, and we need two million dollars more.”

So my family and I boarded a helicopter on a rickety platform in the middle of Melbourne’s Yarra River, and six minutes later we landed on the front lawn of Trent’s palatial home. My wife, Mandy, whispered to me as we landed, “I have this uncanny feeling that we are going to spend our sabbatical here.”

I spoke that afternoon to a rather frowny gathering of about eighty teachers. I noticed particularly that one of the most reserved people was the new headmaster, Stephen Meek. Tall, handsome, exceedingly well dressed, very British, a mellifluous speaker with a voice as much of a basso as mine, he was the stiffest person present. Then that evening, introduced by Stephen, I spoke about positive psychology to about fifty just as spiffily dressed alumni, and I watched enough checks being written right there to meet the $16 million goal. I was told that Helen Handbury, Rupert Murdoch’s sister, had given quite a lot of the $16 million. On her deathbed shortly thereafter, she said, “Not another gym; I want well-being for young people.”

A week after I returned to Philadelphia, Stephen Meek called. “Marty, I’d like to send a delegation to Philadelphia to meet with you about teaching well-being to the entire school,” he said. A few weeks later, a trio of opinion makers from the senior faculty arrived for a week of well-being shopping at Penn: Debbie Cling, the head of curriculum, John Hendry, the dean of students, and Charlie Scudamore, the principal of Corio (the main campus).

“What would you do,” they asked Karen Reivich and me, “to imbue an entire school with positive psychology if you had carte blanche and unlimited resources?”

“First and foremost,” Karen replied, “I would train the entire faculty for two whole weeks in the principles and exercises of positive psychology. We’ve been doing this with large numbers of British teachers. The teachers first learn to use these techniques in their own lives and then how to teach them to students.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “Then what?”

“Then,” Karen went on, “I would leave one or two of America’s leading high school teachers of positive psychology in residence at the school to correct the trajectory of the faculty as they teach well-being across all the grade levels.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Indeed,” I chimed in, now asking for the moon, “bring in the stars of positive psychology—Barb Fredrickson, Stephen Post, Roy Baumeister, Diane Tice, George Vaillant, Kate Hays, Frank Mosca, Ray Fowler—one each month, creating a speaker series for the faculty, students, and the community. Then have each of them live on campus for a couple of weeks, teach students and teachers, and advise on the curriculum.”

“Okay.”

“And if Geelong Grammar can afford all that, I’m coming on sabbatical with my family to live at the school and direct the project. Try and stop me!”

It all happened just that way. In January 2008, Karen and I and fifteen of our Penn trainers (mostly MAPP graduates) flew to Australia to teach one hundred members of the Geelong Grammar faculty. In a nine-day course, we first taught the teachers to use the skills in their own lives—personally and professionally—and then we gave examples and detailed curricula of how to teach them to children. The principles and skills were taught in plenary sessions, and reinforced through exercises and applications in groups of thirty, as well as in pairs and small groups. Aside from the sky-high teaching ratings we got from the teachers (4.8 out of 5.0) and the fact that the teachers had given up two weeks of their summer vacation without pay, the transformation of Stephen Meek was emblematic.

The headmaster opened the first day with a broomstick-stiff, chilly welcoming speech, candidly laying out his skepticism about the whole project. Stephen, a vicar’s son, is nothing if not completely honest. I didn’t yet know this about him, however, and I thought about packing up and going home straightaway during his “welcome.” Immediately throwing himself into everything, however, by the second day, Stephen was, by his own account, warming to the project. By the end of the nine days, he was glowing and hugging my faculty. (They are eminently huggable, but not typically by British headmasters.) He wanted more and told his teachers that this was the fourth great event in the school’s history: first, the move from the city of Geelong to the country Corio campus in 1910; second, the founding of Timbertop in 1955; third, coeducation in 1978; and now what he dubbed “positive education.”

Following the training, several of us were in residence for the entire year, and about a dozen visiting scholars came, each for a week or more, to instruct faculty in their positive psychology specialties. Here’s what we devised, which essentially divides into “Teaching it,” “Embedding it,” and “Living it.”

TEACHING POSITIVE EDUCATION (THE STAND-ALONE COURSES)

Stand-alone courses and course units are now taught in several grades to teach the elements of positive psychology: resilience, gratitude, strengths, meaning, flow, positive relationships, and positive emotion. The two hundred tenth-grade students on the Corio campus (the upper school) each attended a positive education class taught twice weekly by the heads of each of the ten boardinghouses. Students heard several lectures by the visiting scholars, but the backbone of the course was discovering and using their own signature strengths.

During the first lesson, prior to taking the VIA Signature Strengths test, students wrote stories about when they were at their very best. Once they got back their own VIA results, students reread their stories, looking for examples of their signature strengths. Nearly every student found two, and most found three.

Other signature strengths lessons included interviewing family members to develop a “family tree” of strengths, learning how to use strengths to overcome challenges, and developing a strength that was not among an individual’s top five. For the final strengths lesson, students nominated campus leaders whom they considered paragons of each of the strengths. Teachers and students now have a new common language of strengths for discussing their lives.

After Signature Strengths, the next series of lessons for the tenth grade focused on how to build more positive emotion. Students wrote gratitude letters to their parents, learned how to savor good memories, how to overcome negativity bias, and how gratifying kindness is to the giver. The blessings journal, in which students kept track nightly of what went well (WWW) that day, is now a staple at the school across all grades.

At the Timbertop campus, built on a mountain near Mansfield, Victoria, all 220 ninth-grade students live a rugged outdoor life for an entire year, which culminates in everyone running a marathon through the mountains. The stand-alone positive education course at Timbertop emphasizes resilience. First, students learn the ABC model: how beliefs (B) about an adversity (A)—and not the adversity itself—cause the consequent (C) feelings. This is a point of major insight for students: emotions don’t follow inexorably from external events but from what you think about those events, and you can actually change what you think. Then students learn how to slow down this ABC process through more flexible and more accurate thinking. Finally, students learn “real-time resilience” in order to deal with the “heat-of-the-moment” adversities that ninth graders so often face at Timbertop.

After resilience, the next Timbertop lessons address active-constructive responding (ACR) with a friend and the importance of a 3:1 Losada positive-to-negative ratio. Both the first and second units are taught by the health and physical education teachers, a natural fit given the rugged goals of Timbertop.

While these stand-alone courses teach content and skills, there is much more to positive education than just the stand-alone courses.

EMBEDDING POSITIVE EDUCATION

Geelong Grammar teachers embed positive education into academic courses, on the sports field, in pastoral counseling, in music, and in the chapel. First some classroom examples:

English teachers use signature strengths and resiliency to discuss novels. Even though Shakespeare’s King Lear is a pretty depressing read (I slogged through it again recently), students identify the strengths of the main characters, and how these strengths have both a good side and a shadow side. English teachers use resiliency to demonstrate catastrophic thinking by characters in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Teachers of rhetoric have changed their speaking assignments from “Give a speech about a time you made a fool out of yourself” to “Give a speech about when you were of value to others.” Student preparation for these speeches takes less time, they speak more enthusiastically, and listening students do not fidget as much during the positive speeches.

Religion teachers ask students about the relationship between ethics and pleasure. Students consider the philosophers Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill in light of the most current brain research on pleasure and altruism, which suggests that altruism and compassion have underlying brain circuitry that has been favored by natural selection. Students examine perspectives (including their own) about what gives life purpose. Students and their parents engage in a “meaning dialogue,” in which they write a series of emails about what makes life meaningful, prompted by a packet of sixty famous quotations on meaning.

Geography teachers usually measure the dismal variables: poverty, drought, malaria, but Geelong Grammar geography teachers also have students measure the well-being of entire nations, and how criteria for well-being differ among Australia, Iran, and Indonesia. They also research how the physical geography of a place (for instance, green space) might contribute to well-being. Instructors in languages other than English have students examine character strengths in Japanese, Chinese, and French folklore and culture.

Elementary teachers start each day with “What went well?” and the students nominate the classmates who displayed the “strength of the week.” Music teachers use resilience skills to build optimism from performances that did not go well. Art teachers at all levels teach savoring of beauty.

Athletic coaches teach the skill of “letting go of grudges” against teammates who perform poorly. Some coaches use refocusing skills to remind team members of the good things they did, and these coaches report better play among those students who overcome negativity bias.

One coach developed a character strengths exercise to debrief his team following each game. During the debriefing session, students review the game’s successes and challenges through the lens of character strengths. Team members identify—in themselves, in their teammates, and in their coaches—examples when specific strengths were called upon during the game. In addition, students identify “missed opportunities” for using certain strengths, the idea being that identifying these missed opportunities will increase awareness of future opportunities to use strengths.

Chapel is another locus of positive education. Scriptural passages on courage, forgiveness, persistence, and nearly every other strength are referenced during the daily services, reinforcing current classroom discussions. For example, when gratitude was the tenth-grade classroom’s topic, Hugh Kempster’s sermon in chapel and biblical readings were about gratitude.

In addition to stand-alone courses and embedding positive education into the school day, students and teachers find themselves living it in ways they had not anticipated.

LIVING POSITIVE EDUCATION

Like all Geelong Grammar six-year-olds, Kevin starts his day in a semicircle with his uniformed first-grade classmates. Facing his teacher, Kevin shoots his hand up when the class is asked, “Children, what went well last night?” Eager to answer, several first graders share brief anecdotes such as “We had my favorite last night: spaghetti” and “I played checkers with my older brother, and I won.”

Kevin says, “My sister and I cleaned the patio after dinner, and Mum hugged us after we finished.”

The teacher follows up with Kevin. “Why is it important to share what went well?”

He doesn’t hesitate: “It makes me feel good.”

“Anything more, Kevin?”

“Oh, yes, my mum asks me what went well when I get home every day, and it makes her happy when I tell her. And when Mum’s happy, everybody’s happy.”

 

Elise has just returned from a nursing home where she and her fifth-grade classmates completed their “breadology” project, in which Jon Ashton, a television celebrity chef and one of our visiting scholars, taught the whole fourth grade how to make his granny’s bread. Then they all visited a nursing home and gave away the bread to the residents. Elise explains the project:

“First we learned about good nutrition,” she said. “Then we learned how to cook a healthy meal, but instead of eating it, we gave the food to other people.”

“Did it bother you to not eat the food you’d spent so much time preparing? It smelled really good.”

“No, just the opposite,” she declares, smiling broadly. “At first I was scared of the old people, but then it felt like a little light went on inside me. I want to do it again.”

Elise’s best friend quickly chimes in, “Doing something for others feels better than any video game.”

Kevin and Elise are two of the threads sewn into the tapestry of “living it” at the Geelong Grammar School. Kevin starts his schoolday with “What went well?” but when Kevin goes home, he lives positive education. No courses are displaced by WWW, but with this enhancement, the days get off to a better start. Even the faculty meetings get off to a better start.

Positive education at Geelong Grammar School is a work in progress and is not a controlled experiment. Melbourne Grammar School up the road did not volunteer to be a control group. So I cannot do better than relate before-and-after stories. But the change is palpable, and it transcends statistics. The school is not frowny anymore. I was back again for a month in 2009, and I have never been in a school with such high morale. I hated to leave and return to my own frowny university. Not one of the two hundred faculty members left Geelong Grammar at the end of the school year. Admissions, applications, and donations are way up.

Positive education alone is a slow and incremental way of spreading well-being across the globe. It is limited by the number of trained teachers and the number of schools willing to take on positive education. Positive computing might be the rabbit out of the hat.

Positive Computing

“We have five hundred million users, and half of them log on at least once a day,” said Mark Slee, the strikingly handsome head of research for Facebook. “One hundred million of them are mobile users.”

Our jaws dropped. The jaws belonged to leading researchers from Microsoft, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology media lab, the Stanford Persuasion lab, a couple of video game designers, and a half dozen positive psychologists. The venue was the Penn Positive Psychology Center, for a meeting on positive computing in early May 2010. Our topic was how to go beyond the slow progress in positive education to disseminate flourishing massively. The new and future computing technologies might hold the key.

The organizer was Tomas Sanders, a visionary privacy researcher from Hewlett-Packard. He set the tone for the meeting. “A necessary condition for large-scale flourishing, particularly among young people, is that positive psychology develop a delivery model for its well-being-enhancing interventions that scales up globally. Information technology is uniquely positioned for assisting individuals with their flourishing in a way that is effective, scalable, and ethically responsible,” he declared. Tomas then defined positive computing: the study and development of information and communication technology that is consciously designed to support people’s psychological flourishing in a way that honors individuals’ and communities’ different ideas about the good life.

We spent a lot of our time discussing how concretely to adapt existing technology to individual flourishing. Rosalind Picard, the leading researcher in affective computing, which promotes the use of computers to build a better emotional life, presented the idea of a “personal flourishing assistant” (PFA). The PFA is a mobile phone application that maps where you are, who you are with, and what your emotional arousal level is. It then gives you relevant information and exercises; for example, “The last time you were right here at this time, your happiness was maximal. Take a photo of the sunset and transmit it to Becky and Lucius.” The PFA will tag your experiences, and it can be searched later—“Show me the four peak moments from last week”—building up a “positive portfolio.”

By chance, Major General Chuck Anderson happened over from our comprehensive soldier fitness training (see Chapters 7 and 8) just down the block as this discussion was in progress. “It’s amazing,” he said. “The first thing my soldiers in Afghanistan ask me when they come out of combat is not for a hamburger, but for Wi-Fi. General [George] Casey has decided to make psychological fitness just as important for the army as physical fitness. But my soldiers are reminded every day—by push-ups and jogging—of the importance of physical fitness. I have been mulling over how to make psychological fitness just as salient to them just as frequently as physical fitness. I thought I might make every Thursday morning psychological fitness morning and have my brigades do positive psychology exercises. My soldiers are all wired; all of them have a cell phone, and most of them have BlackBerrys or iPhones. Listening to you all, I think the army can do better; we can create the right ‘resilience apps,’ or maybe you could even create the right games to teach strengths, social skills, and resilience.”

Whereupon Jane McGonigal took the floor. “I create serious games, games that build the positives in life,” she said. (Go to www.janemcgonigal.com to play one.) In Jane’s games, for example, Gaming to Save the World, players solve real-world problems such as food shortages and world peace. “We can teach strengths through gaming,” she told us. “Schoolchildren could identify their signature strengths and then in the games tackle problems that will build these strengths.”

Along with creative developments in gaming, Facebook seems like a natural for measuring flourishing. Facebook has the audience, the capacity, and is building apps (applications) that speak to the development and measurement of well-being worldwide. Can well-being be monitored on a daily basis all over the world? Here’s a beginning: Mark Slee counted the occurrences of the term laid off in Facebook every day and graphed the count against the number of layoffs worldwide. Sure enough, they moved in lockstep. Not thrilling, you might think.

But now consider the five elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment. Each element has a lexicon; an extensive vocabulary. For example, the English language has only about eighty words to describe positive emotion. (You can determine this by going to a thesaurus for a word such as joy and then looking up all the related words, and then counting the synonyms of all those related words, eventually circling back to the core of eighty.) The hypermassive Facebook database could be accessed daily for a count of positive emotion words—words that signal meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment—as a first approximation to well-being in a given nation or as a function of some major event.

It is not only measuring well-being that Facebook and its cousins can do, but increasing well-being as well. “We have a new application: goals.com,” Mark continued. “In this app, people record their goals and their progress toward their goals.”

I commented on Facebook’s possibilities for instilling well-being: “As it stands now, Facebook may actually be building four of the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement (sharing all those photos of good events), positive relationships (the heart of what ‘friends’ are all about), and now accomplishment. All to the good. The fifth element of well-being, however, needs work, and in the narcissistic environment of Facebook, this work is urgent, and that is belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self—the element of meaning. Facebook could indeed help to build meaning in the lives of the five hundred million users. Think about it, Mark.”

A New Measure of Prosperity

What is all our wealth for, anyway? Surely it is not, as most economists advocate, just to produce more wealth. Gross domestic product (GDP) was, during the industrial revolution, a decent first approximation to how well a nation was doing. Now, however, every time we build a prison, every time there is a divorce, a motor accident, or a suicide, the GDP—just a measure of how many goods and services are used—goes up. The aim of wealth should not be to blindly produce a higher GDP but to produce more well-being. General well-being—positive emotion, engagement at work, positive relationships, and a life full of meaning—is now quantifiable, and it complements GDP. Public policy can be aimed at increasing general well-being, and the successes or failures of policy can be held accountable against this standard.

Prosperity-as-usual has been equated with wealth. Based on this formulation, it is commonly said in the rich nations that this may be the last generation to do better than its parents. That may be true of money, but is it more money that every parent wants his children to have? I don’t believe so. I believe that what parents want for their children is more well-being than they themselves had. By this measure, there is every hope that our children will do better than their parents.

The time has come for a new prosperity, one that takes flourishing seriously as the goal of education and of parenting. Learning to value and to attain flourishing must start early—in the formative years of schooling—and it is this new prosperity, kindled by positive education, that the world can now choose. One of the four components of flourishing is positive accomplishment. The next chapter explores the underlying ingredients of achievement, and it presents a new theory of success and intelligence.