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From the SxSW Panel: Does the Internet Make You Happy?

March 18, 2011 By 2 Comments
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I had a great time participating on a panel at the SxSW Interactive Conference with moderator and organizer Anastasia Goldstein, along with Catherina O'Gorman (Think Love.org), Kevin Hansen (SecretRegrets.com), and Veer Gadwaney (DailyFeats.com) . (See the visual map of the panel discussion in a previous post). Here is an overview of my comments: Our panel asked the question: Does the Internet make you happy? My answer was ‘No.’ Let me tell you why. First, happiness is not about the tools. Second, happiness comes from within. We have to get over asking what does technology “does to us” and start asking what we, as humans, are trying to do—individually and as members of a global community—and how technology can help. When I say happiness comes from ‘within,’ I’m talking about the brain. Humans are subject to “impact bias” which means that we always think things and events are going to make us happy, but that isn’t the case. Most of what we … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cognition, Positive Psychology, Psychology Tagged With: , , ,

Positively Media: New Blog on Psychology Today

March 13, 2009 By 1 Comment
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I am very excited to announce that I have joined the blogging community on Psychology Today's website writing about the positive use of media and social technologies. My blog there is called Positively Media: How we connect and thrive with emerging technologies. The first posting is called Zen Moment: Social Media isn't a "thing," it's a state of being talks about the phenomenon of social media. Check it out!  I'd love to have your feedback. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Positive Psychology, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , ,

Using Media for Post-Holiday Stress Reduction

December 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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The holidays can be stressful. For me personally, I consume more candy, cookies, wine, and rich food over the two weeks surrounding Christmas than I do the entire rest of the year combined. I also exercise less, since I am frantically trying to keep up with real life while I also plan, shop, decorate, wrap presents, cook, and deal with the sensory overload of too many people in not enough space. Even if they are all people I love, which is not always the case, it gets emotionally tiring to be cheerful when you would prefer to sneak out of the house. This rush of demands and activity is complicated by constant images of what holidays, families, and life are supposed to be like that fill every media channel. It’s a very human habit to hold up our own life against other, often unreasonable, standards that we see every day. From Father Knows Best and “Happy Days” to It's a Wonderful Life, we see families helping and supporting each other in ways that we all would like. We … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cognition, Positive Psychology, Psychology Tagged With: , , , ,

Happiness and Its Causes

September 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

For those interested in positive psychology, there is a must-attend conference November 24-25 in San Francisco "Happiness and It's Causes." In spite of obvious jokes about a happiness conference in San Francisco, this event brings an extraordinary line-up of people taking a wide-ranging look at positive emotions and mental states. While semantically, the word 'happiness' has some issues in sounding sort of new age---the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding---you can see from the stellar list of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and neuropsychologists that the hard sciences as well as soft are playing a major role in looking at positive experience. (Even economists are getting into measures of quality of life these days.) The study of positive experience, aka positive psychology, was started on the premise that we shouldn't always focus on the pathologies of human existence and that we should start to learn more about what drives and nurtures positive emotions, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture & Society, Positive Psychology Tagged With: ,