Positive Individual Level and Character Strengths

Positive Individual Level

• DSM is a term used by psychologists and psychiatrists for mental illness.
• Assumptions of VIA Classification:
  • Human strengths are not secondary to weaknesses.
  • Human strengths are scientifically understandable.
  • Human strengths are individual differences that vary.
  • Human strengths are influenced by environmental factors.
  • Three Levels of Human Strengths Classification:
    • Virtues are core characteristics valued by moral thinkers and philosophers.
    • Character strengths are psychological processes that define virtues.
    • Situational themes are specific habits that deploy strengths.
• Character strengths are positive traits like curiosity, kindness, and gratitude.
• Signature strengths are positive traits frequently exercised, celebrated, and owned by an individual.

Criteria for Character and Signature Strengths

• Character:
  • Widely recognized (universality).
  • Manifested in behaviors, thoughts, feelings, actions, and across situations.
  • Morally valued, regardless of benefit.
• Signature:
  • A sense of ownership and authenticity (this is me).
  • Excited in displaying strength, first impressions are key.
  • Rapid learning curve as it's practiced.
  • Continuous learning of new ways to enact strength.
  • A sense of yearning to enact strength in accordance with the trait.
  • Demonstrating strength does not diminish others, but may benefit them.
  • Strength's use contributes to life fulfillment for self and others.

Six Core Virtues and Their Related Strengths Within the VIA Classification

• Wisdom: Acquisition and use of knowledge. Strengths include creativity, originality, curiosity, love of learning, judgment, personal intelligence, and perspective.
• Courage: Exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of adversity. Strengths include authenticity, enthusiasm, zest, industry, perseverance, valor, persistence, and bravery.
• Humanity: Interpersonal strengths. Strengths include kindness, loving, being loved, and social intelligence.
• Justice: Civic strength. Strengths include fairness, leadership, teamwork, and loyalty.
• Temperance: Protection against excesses of all kinds. Strengths include modesty, humility, prudence, self-control, and forgiveness.

Other Important Information:

• Strengths are most associated with life satisfaction: curiosity, gratitude, hope, love, and zest (Park, Peterson & Seligman, 2004).
• Commonly endorsed strengths (USA and other nations) include kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, and judgment, among others.
• People recovering from serious illness/disorders have greater appreciation for beauty, bravery, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, humor, kindness, love of learning, and spirituality (Peterson, Park, & Seligman, 2006).
• Gratitude is a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation; it's also a character strength. It's the realization that someone has helped you and feeling overwhelmed by your love for another.
• Gratitude, as an emotion and strength, has connections to supporting others and promoting prosocial behavior, positive cycles, and reinforces helpful actions.
• Expressing gratitude makes others feel good and increases likelihood of helping others. Feeling connected to something larger, gaining a wider human relational universe, a more meaningful and fulfilled life – these are all benefits of experiencing gratitude.
• Gratitude reminds us of our place in the world and guards against excessive narcissism.
• Excellence is the acquisition of extraordinary skill. This involves cognitive skills like large knowledge, memory abilities, and efficient information processing, as well as commitment to success and ongoing practice, often deliberate practice.
• Becoming an elite performer typically takes at least a decade of dedicated practice.
• Aesthetic appreciation of world's beauty, love, stimuli, and emotions.
• Art, music, help patients, and boost intelligence.
• Increased brain size can result from learning piano.
• Creativity types: Process creativity (psychological and personal) and Product creativity (highly original and inventive problem-solving).
• Superior problem-solving skills are demonstrated in low/small c creativity.
• Big C creativity means genius and long-lasting contributions to a field or culture.
• The confluence approach has 6 components needed for creativity, in relation to knowledge, personality traits, intellectual abilities, motivational style, supportive environment, and thinking styles.
• T-shaped creativity integrates Freud's primary process thinking, Jung's deeper level of the unconscious, and a psychodynamic orientation, to preconscious thinking.
• 4 stages of creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.
• Convergent and divergent thinking are different types of cognitive processing. Divergent thinking generates multiple possibilities, while convergent thinking finds a single solution.
• Ways to increase creativity include cross-brain activity, rapid thought, original thought, and flexible thinking, alongside imagination and associations. Optimist traits and 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
• Altruism is the motivation to promote another's wellbeing.
• Optimism is the expectation of a desirable future, either global or specific to an outcome or experience
• Optimism may involve specific positive expectations or a larger, more general expectation of good outcomes.
• Individuals with optimism are more likely to cope with adversity.
• Pessimism is the opposite, anticipating negative outcomes and likely not trying to cope with events.
• Coping strategies can be classified as approach or avoidance coping, broken into emotion- and problem-focused types. Adaptive coping often involves addressing emotions first.
• Transformational coping involves finding meaning in negative or stressful events; this includes benefit-finding, spiritual development, and seeing the bigger picture.
• Positive mental health involves a combination of emotional, psychological, and social well-being.
• Wellness is described along a continuum; it's an active process of moving toward successful, fulfilling existence and includes self-care, and context, including social contexts and relationships.
• Humor is viewed as desirable in many cultures.
• There are differing theories of humor (e.g. incongruity theory).
• Humor may serve as a coping mechanism and enhance social support.
• Therapeutic humor can promote health.
• It is a common theme that meaning gives significance to life, and the need for meaning and the ways of coping.
• Religion and spirituality contribute to well-being.