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Do you think watching the presidential debates stresses you out? Good Morning America conducted a “stress test” using the LifeData system, and heart rate monitors, to observe the stress levels of a focus group while watching the final presidential debate. It turns out, watching the debate was pretty stressful. Perceived stress was pretty low at the […]

We recently finished another semester at the small college where I teach. But, I’m finding that my students’ responses to one particular final exam are lingering with me. The course is a semester-long seminar on positive psychology, and the final exam is one essay question. This year, I asked them to address the question, “Why

Smartphones are increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. Recent estimates indicate that 64% of American adults (Pew Internet Research, 2015) and almost one quarter (24.4%) of the global population owns a smartphone.  And those numbers are rising.  By 2016, the number of global smartphone users is estimated to reach 2.16 billion (eMarketer, December

App-based EMA helps show that the teacher can set classroom “climate.” This means that you might have felt like your soul is slowly decaying in a class like Ben Stein’s in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Or that you literally can’t survive in a class like Professor Snape’s in Harry Potter. Or feel totally inspired in

Problems, whether beautiful, baffling or “wicked,” beg to be solved. In fact, a recent conference in Ann Arbor Michigan suggests there may even be an app for that problem. The Positive Technology Conference was recently held at the University of Michigan on March 26-27, 2015. Hosted by the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research,

Thanks to experience sampling (or EMA), the psychological study of moral life just left the laboratory. If you’ve taken a general psychology class, you’ve probably heard of experiments examining human morality. Think Zimbardo’s prison experiment, where, in 1971, college students were randomly chosen to play either a guard or an inmate in a mock prison