Tal Ben-Shahar born 1970, is an American and Israeli teacher, and writer in the areas of positive psychology and leadership. As a lecturer at Harvard University, Ben-Shahar created the most popular course in Harvard's history, Positive Psychology 1504.
Positive Psychology 1504 syllabus PDF
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I like Dr Tal Ben-Shahar‘s open courses 1504 about Positive Psychology very much and recommend it too.
Like a favorable book, I watch it from time to time. It helps me to understand things in my life, or I should say it helps me to understand myself a lot. I have watched 12 sessions three years ago and recently, I started to watch the full 23 sessions again. We often hear people’s conversations about becoming rich, promotion, organisation management, communication and relationships, stress and happiness etc., the answers are all in the sessions.
I think I’m a positive person in general. I enjoy doing things more than talking about things. I’m curious about differences and want to know what make me see things differently from or similarly to others. I want to know how can I become well-being. That’s how I started to watch the online courses.
The first session introduces what is positive psychology.
Tal first taught the class in 2002. In 1999 Prof. Phillip Stone taught the first positive psychology class at Harvard. As Tal stated, the class is to bring the rigor, the substance, the empirical foundation, the science from academia and merge it with the accessibility of the self-help or the New Age movement. The science that works… Academic and Apply.
  • Positive psychology is the grandchild of humanistic psychology
  • The first force of psychology – behaviorism (the work of Skinner, Watson, Thorndike)
  • The second force of psychology – psychoanalysis (the work of Freud, Jung, Adler)
  • The third force of psychology – positive psychology (the work of Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Aaron Antonovsky, Martin Seligman, Ellen Langer, Phillip Stone)
  • The ABC – Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition
  • The average academic journal article is read by 7 people.
  • Silence is something that’s missing from our culture.
  • Knowledge is about information, wisdom is about transformation.
  • Questions make difference.
  • The biggest mistake in research and application is not asking the right questions.
  • Happiness is not binary, either-or, 0-1. Happiness resides on a continuum.​
What is most personal is most general 
- Carl Rogers
  • Martin Seligman’s contribution to positive psychology in 1998
  • Robert Kagan – the destination between information and transformation
  • Michelangelo’s masterpiece David – to chip away the excess stone
  • Henry David Thoreau – “Soul grows more by subtraction than by addition”
  • Lao Tzu – “In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired, in pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped”
  • Voltaire – “Common sense is not that common”
  • Archibald Macleish – information is not enough
  • Peter Drucker (management scholar of 20th century) – “The most common source of mistake in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.”
  • Jerry Seinfeld – children’s curiosity
  • John Carter – the distinction between extraordinarily successful MBA students and the successful MBA students on two things: 
  • Daniel Goleman and Dalai Lama – culturally insensitive
  • Carl Rogers – “What is most personal is most general.”
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes – simplicity on the other side of the complexity
The class is for anyone who is interested in positive psychology, anyone who wants to become happier, and anyone who wants to put the ideas into practice.
This class is not about something new, but to remind us the importance of many things we already know and how we should apply them in our life. It helps me to identify my strengths without ignoring my weaknesses. It helps me to realise more about how to ask the right questions.
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The second session highlights the importance of positive psychology.
  • Not everything will resonate with you. Not everything you explorer will be right for you. Research does not say that it’s right for everyone. Bear in mind you need to identify things that work for YOU.
  • Researchers also need to focus on positive studies. First, it’s important to focus on what works. Second, being happy is not just getting ride of the negation of happiness. Third, prevention is actually by focusing on cultivating the positive.
  • Today the depression is ten times higher than it was in 1960s.
  • Today the earliest age of depression is age 15.
  • 80% of Harvard students experienced depression over the past year in 2004
  • “Resilience, a class of phenomena characterized by patterns of positive adaption in the context of significant adversity or risk.“
  • To be idealistic is to be realistic.
  • The successful children were resilience. They were not super kids. They were optimistic, they had faith and sense of the meaning of life, pro-social behaviour, focused on their strengths, set goals, had a model, and they had social support (identify the right support).
  • Questions create the reality. The questions that we ask very often determine the quest that we will pursue, the path that we will take, the life that we will lead.
  • “Appreciate” – firstly to be grateful and not take it for granted; second, to grow. ​
  • Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book The How of Happiness (2008) – the important of finding ‘fit’.
  • David Myers’ research – the ratio of negative research : positive research = 21:1.
  • Abraham Maslow in 1954 stated psychology research does not focus enough on the positive
  • Richard Kadison’s article – 45% of college students nationwide over the past year have experienced depression to the point of not functioning.
  • Martin Seligman’s research in The Handbook of Positive Psychology – the importance of studying on positive side.
  • Aaron Antonovsky – from the pathogenic model to the salutogenic model – the original of health.
  • Jacqueline Stavros and Cheri Torres’ book Dynamic Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Living
  • Marva Collins’ teaching approach and her book Marva Collins’ Way: Returning to Excellence in Education – believe in ourselves, stop blaming, take responsibility, take action.
  • Daryl Bem – Self-perception theory – taking action will increase our levels of confidence.
  • Nathanial Branden’s book Six Pillars of Self Esteem – no one is coming, it’s up to you to make the most out of this experience.v
Positive psychology focuses on questing what is the source of health psychical, psychological and emotional, how do we get people to flourish intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, inter-personally, intra-personally.
Positive psychology emphases that 
  1. let’s study what works 
  2. let’s study what works best.
The third session emphases the importance of studying positive psychology by three reasons again. First, only focusing on problems (e.g., weaknesses) is not enough as the questions blinds us to key information that works. Second, getting ride of the negation does not guarantee us the positive. Third, it does not just take us from zero to positive but also help us to deal with the negative.
This session also presents the five basic premises of the course.
  • Bridge the disciplines, bridge academia and main street.
  • Change is possible.
  • Internal factors primarily determine happiness.
  • Human nature must be obeyed – important foundation of mental health and well-being.
  • Happiness is also a moral claim.
  • Gallup organisation’s global poll result – most people think to focus on their weaknesses if they are to succeed. Big mistake!
  • The disease model is we are ill because of illness. If we get rid of the illness we are healthy. The health model is we are ill because we did not cultivate we are about enough. We do not become self-actualize, we diminish ourselves. If we do what we suppose to do we will not become unwell.
  • What the world needs more than anything else is practical idealists.
  • Research done at Dartmouth – Americans spend the most time out of any other people in the world volunteering: an average of 4 hours a week.
  • The Pygmalion Effect – teacher’s expectations are self-filling prophecies.
  • Practicing yoga in jail reduces the likely-hood of second-time offenders.
  • Doing meditation transforms our brain.
  • Three times a week of physical exercise, 30 minutes each time has the same effect as our most powerful psychiatric drugs.
  • To be a practical idealist, the foundation of it has to be the belief that change is possible.
  • The average relationship in human history is one in which the woman is subjugated.
  • The Cambridge Somerville Youth Study started in 1930s between Harvard and MIT, 250 kids in the intervention group and 250 kids in the control group, 40 years follow-up. The results were socking: Juvenile offences was no difference; physical health and mental health were no difference. It proves that idealism, good intention and a lot of money were not practical.
  • Marva Collins – help students shift from a passive victim to an activated agent. She asked the question “How can we cultivate the seed of greatness in our students?”
  • David Henry Thoreau in 1940s wrote “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
  • Pink Floyd – “People are comfortably numb.“
  • Abraham Maslow – neurosis – the failure of personal growth; the ‘growing-tip’ statistics
  • Martin Seligman – prevention – human strengths – “…the effective prevention is not remedial, rather it consists of identifying and amplifying the strengths that these teens already have.”
  • Nathaniel Branden – psychological immune system
  • Alfred North Whitehead – a second psychology
  • Sheldon White – the importance of second psychology
  • Carol Dweck – self-esteem, idealists
  • Albert Bandura – self-efficacy, and people can change just by a sentence they heard
  • Muzafer Sherif’s research in 1954 – social psychology – conflict solution – the contact hypothesis doesn’t work
  • Elliot Aronson – social psychology – conflict solution – a super ordinate goal that you have to carry out together
  • David T. Lykken and Auke Tellegen – The Minnesota Twins Study – their paper “Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon” in 1980s.
  • Jon Kabat Zinn, Richard Davidson and Herbert Benson – studies on meditation
  • John Stuart Mill’s book The Subjection of Women
  • Karen Reivich, Martin Seligman – Resiliency Project
This session continues talking about the basic premises, specifically focusing on (a) how change happens, (b) Internal factors primarily determine happiness, and (c) human nature must be obeyed.
I enjoyed watching this session very much. Firstly, Tal’s explanation of our base levels of happiness makes a lot of sense to me. Beyond the basic needs (food, shelter, basic education), external circumstances makes very little difference on our levels of well-being. I recalled my own experience, for instance, got an offer from a good university, got a job offer after an interview, passed my PhD viva, received my driving licence, got the key to my first house, received a reward from the employer, experienced a break-up, lost my beloved grandparents etc., indeed, for not long I went back to my base level of well-being.
Secondly, I had the same view of “people are unhappy is because they have high expectations”, they expect too much. Tal states that the problem is right versus wrong expectations rather than high or low expectations matters. This leads me to quest how do we know it’s a right or wrong expectation? Tal adds “the right expectation is to believe in change from within… our readiness and potential to experience happiness is mostly depended on our state of mind…it’s about changing our interpretation of the world, of what’s happening to us, of our achievement, of our failure. It’s about what we choose to perceive, what we choose to focus on. It’s about transformation.”
Thirdly, human nature is constrained. We stopped giving ourselves the permission to be human. Indeed, the paradoxical intentions! The harder I try to get rid of some thought or behaviour, the stronger it seems to become. Rejecting our nature leads to sub-optimal performance.
Fourthly, meditation. Simply focus on breath.
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  1. Law of Gravity same as law of human nature: Human nature has constraints 
  2. Suppress a natural phenomenon would only reinforce it. 
  3. Rejecting our nature leads to sub-optimal performances 
  • Studying the best and applying it the the rest of us is actually about democratizing excellence.
  • One of the most significant barriers to people doing things in the world, to actually introducing change is that they underestimate their ability to bring about change.
  • All change begins in the mind of single people or a small group and then it expands.
  • The Butterfly Effect – Change happens exponentially
  • The six degrees of separation – how are we all connected or intra-connected.
  • The nature of exponential function – social networks – smiles and laugh are contagious 
  • A lot of research shows how difficult it is to change happiness based on external factors.
  • In general, external factors such as accident, place of residents, income level, lottery, promotion make very little difference to our well-being. One external circumstance does matters is democracy versus oppression.
  • The ‘great deception’ leads to the great depression.
  • The ABC – Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Serge Moscovici, Margaret Mead – social science research – minority can make difference
  • Richie Davidson – meditation and brain changes
  • Joshua Green – morality and brain
  • Daniel Gilbert – the base level of happiness
  • Philip Bickman – the base level of well-being
  • Ed Diener – happiness level – wealth matters very little to our levels of well-being
  • Thomas Sowell – human nature
  • Should we accept human nature? Could we perfected or change? 
  1. Constrained vision – Alexander Halmiton, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Edmund Burke, Francis Bacon – Our nature is constrained, it’s limited. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed whether it’s psychical nature or human nature. – We may not like it, but it is what it is. We cannot change it. Let’s make the best of it and channel it toward the good.
  2. Unconstrained vision – Thomas Jefferson, Jean-jacques Rousseau, George Bernard Shaw, Ronald Dworkin, Benjamin Constant – Human nature can be improved. It can be changed. We can perfect it. – Let’s change it.
  • Daniel Wagner – ironic processing – when we suppress a natural phenomenon, that phenomenon only strengthens.
  • Viktor Frankl – paradoxical intentions - "What you resist persists."​