JMoore

3/15/06

The first week's reading included an introduction by Dr. Donald Clifton's grandson and co-author Tom Rath.  He recounts his grandfather's final days of life while transcribing information to include in the book.  Dr. Clifton's life work revolved around a field of psychology termed "positive psychology."  He studied the negative effects of Korean War POWs that simply gave up when faced with endless months of being ignored by their captors.  The POWs only received negative reports, letters, and were denied ALL positive emotional support.  He termed this "mirasmus."  As a result the North Korean's "Ultimate Weapon" was the denial of emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships.  Dr. Clifton studied this effect and set out to study the opposite of negativity--his premise was to see if positivity has an even stronger impact than negativity.

With this as background, I expect to read on to understand ways to be more positive than negative.  I wager that by filling others' invisible buckets to the brim by using positive psychology will increase self-worth of the affected students in the class room.