Positive Psychology and Well-Being: Applications for Enhanced Living

"Positive Psychology and Well-Being: Applications for Enhanced Living introduces readers to well-being from a positive psychology perspective, one of the original missions of psychology as a science, and encourages adopting proactive approaches to healthy living. It provides guidance for enhancing and maintaining life-long well-being.

Topics range from strengthening our immune system through nutrition, exercise, and sleep to recognizing physical and psychological stressors resulting from unhealthy lifestyles, ineffective thinking, unaccommodated differences, and poor communication. This book describes the breadth of gender identities and ways to maintain long-term healthy friendships that include pair bonding, marriage, and alternative relationships. It addresses integrating work and leisure activities to enhance awareness of personal consciousness and social responsibility. It discusses developing an individual value system that makes life worthwhile, by finding connectedness to others and the universe. Sources of values include personal knowledge, cultural values, religion and spirituality, and scientific information.

Designed to help students choose personalized constructive behaviors for total health maintenance based upon the best available information, Positive Psychology and Well-Being can be used in any college-level course that emphasizes a proactive, preventative approach to the study of psychology of adjustment and well-being.

Frederick Brown holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Virginia, and is associate professor in cognitive psychology at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He initiated, with collaboration from the psychology faculty at the University's statewide campuses, an introductory course in well-being and positive psychology. He is a member of the International Positive Psychology Association, Health and Wellness division.

Cynthia LaJambe received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from The Pennsylvania State University. She was awarded a three-year National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship. She is a human factors specialist and data analyst for the Larson Transportation Institute at Penn State and a member of the Health and Wellness division of the International Positive Psychology Association."