Acacia Parks

Happify.com

Background Digital interventions have been shown to be effective for a variety of mental health disorders and problems. However, few studies have examined the effects of digital interventions in older adults; therefore, little is known about how older adults engage with or benefit from these interventions. Given that adoption rates for technology a...

Introduction Increasing demand for mental health services and the expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years has driven the development of digital mental health interventions (DMHIs). To date, AI-based chatbots have been integrated into DMHIs to support diagnostics and screening, symptom management and behavior change, a...

The impact of the positive psychology movement on digital health has been an underemphasized contribution on the field. Marty Seligman was an early figure in developing and evaluating interventions using the Internet and some of the earliest studies of positive psychological interventions used online recruitment and dissemination. We discuss some a...

Digital mental health interventions (DMHI) are scalable and cost-effective strategies for increasing access to mental health care; however, dropout rates associated with digital interventions are high, particularly for open-access digital interventions. While some studies have focused on predictors of dropout from digital mental health programs, fe...

BACKGROUND The American Heart Association has identified poor mental health in particular as a key barrier to healthy behavior change for those with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Digital mental health interventions, like those delivered via the internet to computers or smartph...

Background The American Heart Association has identified poor mental health as a key barrier to healthy behavior change for those with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Digital mental health interventions, like those delivered via the internet to computers or smartphones, may prov...

Background: Loneliness is a growing area of concern, attracting attention as a public health concern due to its association with a variety of psychological and physical health problems. However, interventions targeting loneliness are less common than interventions for other mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, and existing inter...

BACKGROUND Loneliness is a growing area of concern, attracting attention as a public health concern due to its association with a variety of psychological and physical health problems. However, interventions targeting loneliness are less common than interventions for other mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, and existing interve...

BACKGROUND Stress is an important transdiagnostic risk factor in adolescence and predicts a host of physical and psychological problems in adolescence and adulthood. Adolescence is also a developmental stage in which people may be more sensitive or reactive to stress. Indeed, research has shown that adolescents report high levels of stress, particu...

BACKGROUND Diabetes is a leading cause of years of life lost and accounts for approximately one quarter of healthcare dollars spent in the United States. However, many of these costs are related to poor medication adherence and lack of self-care behaviors, and are thus preventable. Depression, which is more prevalent among people with diabetes than...

Background: Diabetes is a leading cause of years of life lost and accounts for approximately one-fourth of health care dollars spent in the United States. Many of these costs are related to poor medication adherence and lack of self-care behaviors and are thus preventable. Depression, which is more prevalent among people with diabetes than in the...

BACKGROUND Chronic conditions account for 75% or more of health care costs, and the impact of chronic illness is expected to further grow over time. The burden of chronic illness can be amplified by depression, which is problematic because in the context of chronic illness, depression is substantially more common than in the general population. The...

Background: Chronic conditions account for 75% of health care costs, and the impact of chronic illness is expected to grow over time. Although subjective well-being predicts better health outcomes, people with chronic conditions tend to report lower well-being. Improving well-being might mitigate costs associated with chronic illness; however, exi...

BACKGROUND A critical issue in understanding the benefits of online interventions is a lack of information on the sustainability of those benefits. Sustainability in studies is often determined using group-level analyses which might obscure our understanding of who actually sustains change. Person-centric methods might provide a deeper knowledge of...

Background: A critical issue in understanding the benefits of Web-based interventions is the lack of information on the sustainability of those benefits. Sustainability in studies is often determined using group-level analyses that might obscure our understanding of who actually sustains change. Person-centric methods might provide a deeper knowle...

Psychological interventions targeting well-being can reliably increase well-being and decrease depressive symptoms. However, only a handful of studies have implemented well-being interventions online, and those studies have largely done so in a way that prioritizes experimental control over realism and scalability. We sought to take existing well-b...

Depression and anxiety are costly for both employees and employers, in terms of direct medical costs as well as costs stemming from lost productive time and missed days at work. Resilience training has been shown to improve workplace functioning for employees, which suggests that it is a promising avenue for reducing some of these costs. However, e...

Background: Despite reductions in cigarette smoking in the U.S., improvements in the efficacy of smoking cessation treatments are needed, as rates of sustained abstinence remain disappointingly low. Both low positive affect and high negative affect contribute to smoking relapse and constitute viable targets for smoking cessation interventions. Alt...

Positive Psychological Interventions are activities that have been demonstrated to cause a positive change in a population by increasing a positive variable (e.g., optimism). Although these activities come in a variety of forms and focus on a wide range of positive variables, researchers tend to concentrate their efforts on seven popular and well-r...

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Objective: Osteoarthritis is a leading cause of disability for which there is no cure. Psychosocial-oriented treatments are underexplored. We developed and tested an intervention to build positive psychological skills (e.g., gratitude) to reduce osteoarthritis symptom severity, including pain and functioning, and to improve psychosocial well-being...

Knee osteoarthritis is a painful, disabling condition that disproportionately affects African Americans. Existing arthritis treatments yield small to moderate improvements in pain and have not been effective at reducing racial disparities in the management of pain. The biopsychosocial model of pain and evidence from the positive psychology literatu...

L’objectif du présent article est de passer en revue la littérature grandissante portant sur les interventions psychologiques destinées à accroître le bonheur. On discute d’abord de la notion de bonheur et de l’importance de celui-ci pour les individus et les groupes sociaux. Ensuite, on présente une vue d’ensemble des interventions orientées vers...

UNSTRUCTURED Correction:Seeing the "Big" Picture: Big Data Methods for Exploring Relationships Between Usage, Language, and Outcome in Internet Intervention Data.

Previous research finds cultural differences in response to activities designed to increase happiness, or Positive Psychological Intervention (PPIs). The goal of the present study is to explore why different cultural groups respond differently to PPIs. Specifically, we examined responsiveness to PPIs in three cultural groups – Anglo-American, Asian...

Background Assessing the efficacy of Internet interventions that are already in the market introduces both challenges and opportunities. While vast, often unprecedented amounts of data may be available (hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of participants with high dimensions of assessed variables), the data are observational in nature, ar...

Happiness pursues via numerous pathways: through sensory experiences, using savoring; through social interactions, using active-constructive responding and gratitude; through cognitive experiences, using optimism activities. This chapter examines the theories and research findings that serve as a foundation to the mechanism underlining Positive Psy...

This chapter provides a guide to readers interested in selecting a science-based self-help tool that targets happiness, for one's own personal use, for one's client, or for use in research. It reviews the rationale for disseminating positive psychological interventions (PPIs) via self-help. The reader is provided with some caveats and recommendatio...

Happiness-increasing interventions demonstrate significant variation in outcomes, suggesting that the people who use them might be as important as the interventions themselves to determine efficacy. In light of this, instructive interventions might not be necessary to increase happiness given a population with knowledge of happiness-increasing stra...

Objective: Greater depressive symptoms and low positive affect (PA) are associated with poor smoking cessation outcomes. Smoking cessation approaches that incorporate a focus on PA may benefit smokers trying to quit. The purpose of this study was to conduct a pilot randomized clinical trial to compare standard smoking cessation treatment (ST) to sm...

As PPI research embraces the use of the Internet, it is incumbent on the research community to keep up with the ever-evolving best practices in online intervention research. This paper provides an overview of current practices in online positive psychological intervention (OPPI) research and suggests improvements to those practices. Drawing from th...

Systematic reviews, such as meta-analyses, are highly valued within scientific, professional, and lay communities because they provide an easily digestible aggregate of a large body of work. A recently published meta-analysis of positive psychology interventions concluded that these interventions have small effects and argued for the use of these i...

Inducing temporary positive states reduces pain and increases pain tolerance in laboratory studies. We tested whether completing positive activities in one’s daily life produces long-term reductions in self-reported bodily pain in a randomized, controlled trial of an online positive activities intervention. Participants recruited via the web were r...

Positive psychology aims to understand the positive side of human functioning, expanding research on positive behaviors, cognitions, emotions, and character traits. The findings of this research have highlighted strategies (e.g., savoring, gratitude, kindness, social relationships, and hope and meaning) that, when practiced, lead to increases in in...

Positive psychology and well-being interventions have flourished in the past decade (Parks & Biswas-Diener, 2013; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005). Effective programs have been developed to build resilience and increase positive variables such as subjective well-being, positive emotion, individual strengths, positive relationships, and a se...

Low positive and high negative affect predict low rates of smoking abstinence among smokers making a quit attempt. Positive Psychotherapy can both increase positive affect and decrease negative affect and therefore may be a useful adjunct to behavioral smoking counseling. The purpose of the present study was to assess the feasibility and acceptabil...

The current article discusses the potential utility of self-help books as a means of disseminating positive psychological interventions, and presents data comparing a positive psychology-based self-help book with a cognitive-behavioral self-help book and a self-monitoring control condition. We studied college freshmen (N=58), and argue that this po...

The recent growth of positive psychology has led to a proliferation in exercises to increase positive thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Preliminary evidence suggests that these exercises hold promise as an approach for reducing depressive symptoms. These exercises are typically researched in isolation as single exercises. The current study examine...

Although the last decade has witnessed mounting research on the development and evaluation of positive interventions, investigators still know little about the target population of such interventions: happiness seekers. The present research asked three questions about happiness seekers: (1) What are their general characteristics?, (2) What do they...

The Journal of Positive Psychology: Dedicated to furthering research and promoting good practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: (2012): Positive living: A pilot study of group positive psychotherapy for people with schizophrenia, The Journal of Positive Psychology: Dedicated to furthering resea...

Positive psychology interventions target positive emotions in order to increase happiness, engagement in life, and well being while also ameliorating the impact of symptoms on a person's life. We examined an adapted version of group positive psychotherapy for people with schizophrenia (Positive Living (PL)) in a pilot study. Sixteen participants we...

We describe an undergraduate service-learning research course in which undergraduates are trained to disseminate an intervention designed to promote resilience and well-being in middle-school youth. The course provides undergraduates with an opportunity for active and collaborative learning in psychology and serves as a new model for the wide-scale...

A sizable portion of the population experiences subthreshold depressive symptoms, and these symptoms can lead to substantial functional impairment. However, there is little research on psychological interventions for depressive symptoms in nonclinical populations. In a series of three studies, I examine the efficacy of Positive Psychotherapy (PPT)—...

Positive psychotherapy (PPT) contrasts with standard interventions for depression by increasing positive emotion, engagement, and meaning rather than directly targeting depressive symptoms. The authors have tested the effects of these interventions in a variety of settings. In informal student and clinical settings, people not uncommonly reported t...

Psychology since World War II has been largely devoted to repairing weakness and understanding suffering. Towards that end, we have made considerable gains. We have a classification of mental illness that allows international collaboration, and through this collaboration we have developed effective psychotherapeutic or pharmacological treatments fo...

Drawing on points made by Le, Muñoz, Ippen, and Stoddard (2Q03), we propose directions for further research to explore the importance of sociocultural factors in the prevention of depression. We provide a rationale for using the entire spectrum of preventive interventions, including both targeted and universal interventions, to curb the depression...