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Selected Positive Psychology Books

Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity by Robert A. Emmons

By Robert A. Emmons

This book explores evidence-based practices in a compelling and accessible way and provides a step-by-step guide to cultivating gratitude in people’s lives. Gratitude Works! is filled with practical tips for fostering gratitude as a way of life and includes scientific research as well as religious and philosophical insights to show how gratitude can work in our lives.

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How to be a Positive Leader by Jane Dutton, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Shawn Achor

By Jane Dutton, Gretchen SSpreitzer, and Shawn Achor

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s—and their own—capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. Here leading scholars—including Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Give and Take; positive organizational scholarship movement cofounders Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn; and thirteen more—describe how this is being done at companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt’s Bees, Connecticut’s Griffin Hospital, the Michigan-based Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, and many others. They show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts

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Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology

Editted by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener and  Norbert Schwarz

This book is a collection of the research on defining and measuring hedonic psychology and subjective well-being.

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Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance by Kim Cameron

By Kim Cameron

Positive Leadership shows how to reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and what Kim Cameron calls “positively deviant performance”—performance far above the norm. Citing a wide range of research in organizational behavior, medical science, and psychology as well as real-world examples, Cameron shows that to achieve exceptional success, leaders must emphasize strengths rather than simply focus on weaknesses; foster virtuous actions such as compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness; encourage contribution goals in addition to achievement goals; and enable meaningfulness in work. In this concise, inspiring, and practical guide, Cameron describes four positive leadership strategies, lays out a proven process for implementing them, and includes a self-assessment instrument.

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Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar

By Tal Ben-Shahar

Drawing on the latest psychological research, Ben-Shahar shows how making the right choices—not the big, once-in-a-lifetime choices, but the countless small choices we make every day almost without noticing—has a direct, long-lasting impact on our happiness. Every single moment is an opportunity to make a conscious choice for a happy and fulfilled life. Choose the Life You Want covers 101 such choices, complete with real-life stories, to help you identify and act on opportunities large and small.

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Adaptation to Life by George Vaillant

By George Vaillant

Adaptation to Life, poses fundamental questions about the individual differences in confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise? George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with case histories, each method of coping.

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The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting by Laurence Steinberg

By Laurence Steinberg

In The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting, Dr. Steinberg distills decades of research into a parenting book that explains the fundamentals of raising happy, healthy children, giving readers an invaluable map to help them navigate parenthood from infancy to adolescence.

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The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality, and Modern Life by Barry Schwartz

By Barry Schwartz

Out of the investigations and speculations of contemporary science, a challenging view of human behavior and society has emerged and gained strength. It is a view that equates “human nature” utterly and unalterably with the pursuit of self-interest. Influenced by this view, people increasingly appeal to natural imperatives, instead of moral ones, to explain and justify their actions and those of others.

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Scientific Approaches to Consciousness by Jonathan Cohen and Jonathan Schooler

By Jonathan Cohen and Jonathan Schooler

Recent developments in both the empirical and theoretical methodologies of the fields of psychology and neuroscience have made it possible to begin to study the phenomenon associated with -- if not directly underlying -- consciousness in a scientific fashion.

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Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie

By Tom Rath and Barry Conchie

In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been examining decades of data on the topic of leadership. They studied more than 1 million work teams, conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders, and even interviewed more than 10,000 followers around the world to ask exactly why they followed the most important leader in their life.
The results of that research are unveiled in Strengths Based Leadership. Using Gallup’s discoveries, authors Tom Rath and Barry Conchie identify three keys to being a more effective leader and use firsthand accounts from highly successful leaders — including the founder of Teach For America and the president of The Ritz-Carlton — to show how each person’s unique strengths can drive their success.

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