Overall, Jennifer A

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Enhancing the Good in “Doing Good”: Research and Interventions to Support a Leadership Development After-School Program
    (2019-05-11) Houston, Rephael; Overall, Jennifer; Sine, Katy; Sutton, Liz; Wilson, Sari
    Project 440 aims to help young musicians develop their skillset by cultivating strengths of character that will contribute to overall resilience. Strategic cultivation of resilience leads to development of patterns of positive change during or following challenging circumstances, both significant and small. These individual characteristics include self-efficacy, optimism, hope, grit, and character strengths. Each of these characteristics can be measured and is supported by a strong body of scientific literature demonstrating positive outcomes, including among students. Weaving these concepts into an already effective curriculum through research-based annotations, measurements, and interventions is intended to fortify resiliency in young musicians and will enhance an already robust educational program using positive psychology practices and principles.
  • Publication
    The Alchemy of Acceptance: How Accepting Emotions Enhances the Ability to Flexibly Work with Them
    (2019-08-01) Overall, Jennifer
    Positive psychology’s study of human well-being has not fully examined the adaptive ways we encounter and interact with negative emotions. Research shows that acceptance, an emotion regulation technique involving non-judgmentally and non-reactively encountering negative emotion, benefits well-being. Acceptance provides a useful counterpoint to research demonstrating that some of the means we use to make ourselves feel better, including pursuit of or highly valuing happiness and avoidance or suppression of negative emotion, often backfire and harm well-being. As the field of emotion regulation matures and explores complex and blended strategies that individuals use to regulate their emotions, it should focus on the role that acceptance may play as an adaptive initial response to emotion that promotes emotion regulation flexibility. In taking up this inquiry, I seek to expand positive psychology’s horizons toward a more complex view of human well-being – one that incorporates and even leverages the parts that are challenging and uncomfortable and offers a variety of tools for working with those experiences. Initially accepting emotions for what they are – complex, dynamic, and potentially useful sources of information about our perceptions of the world around us – might help us to learn from and respond to the world as it actually is.
  • Publication
    The Alchemy of Acceptance: How Accepting Emotions Enhances the Ability to Flexibly Work with Them
    (2019-01-01) Overall, Jennifer A
    Positive psychology’s study of human well-being has not fully examined the adaptive ways we encounter and interact with negative emotions. Research shows that acceptance, an emotion regulation technique involving non-judgmentally and non-reactively encountering negative emotion, benefits well-being. Acceptance provides a useful counterpoint to research demonstrating that some of the means we use to make ourselves feel better, including pursuit of or highly valuing happiness and avoidance or suppression of negative emotion, often backfire and harm well-being. As the field of emotion regulation matures and explores complex and blended strategies that individuals use to regulate their emotions, it should focus on the role that acceptance may play as an adaptive initial response to emotion that promotes emotion regulation flexibility. In taking up this inquiry, I seek to expand positive psychology’s horizons toward a more complex view of human well-being – one that incorporates and even leverages the parts that are challenging and uncomfortable and offers a variety of tools for working with those experiences. Initially accepting emotions for what they are – complex, dynamic, and potentially useful sources of information about our perceptions of the world around us – might help us to learn from and respond to the world as it actually is.