Alejandro Adler

University of Pennsylvania | UP · Department of Psychology

Can well-being be taught at a large scale, and should it be taught in schools? Does teaching well-being improve academic performance? In Study 1, 18 secondary schools (n=8,385 students) in Bhutan were randomly assigned to a treatment group (k=11) or a control group (k=7). The treatment schools received an intervention targeting ten non-academic wel...

Indicators of social progress are the primary drivers of public policy. If existing economic measures of prosperity are complemented with wellbeing metrics that better capture changes in individuals’ quality of life, decision makers will be better informed to assess and design policy. The science of wellbeing has yielded extensive knowledge and mea...

As a society we care about what we measure, we use what we measure, and what we measure drives policies and society in a particular direction. We therefore need to measure progress correctly. If societies blindly accept GDP as their measure of progress, they might be trying to maximize the wrong indicator for society. In this paper I present Bhutan...

Seligman recently introduced the PERMA model with five core elements of psychological well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. We empirically tested this multidimensional theory with 516 Australian male students (age 13-18). From an extensive well-being assessment, we selected a subset of items theoreti...

Purpose: Drawing on recent advances in the field of positive psychology, we conducted a pilot evaluation of employee wellbeing using Seligman's (2011) multidimensional PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) model of flourishing. We analyzed associations between multiple aspects of employee wellbeing and thr...

2019 Positive Education Chapter in 2019 Global Happiness and Wellbeing Policy Report Seligman, M. E. P., Adler, A. (2019). Positive Education. In J. F. Helliwell, R. Layard, & J. Sachs (Eds.), Global Happiness and Wellbeing Policy Report: 2019. (Pp. 52 - 71). Global Council for Wellbeing and Happiness.

This chapter reviews the state of Positive Education across the globe as of the end of 2017. Throughout the chapter we underscore the components of what we consider the best practices: rigorous ongoing evaluation, analyses of effect sizes and intervention duration, cultural adaptation of evidence-based interventions, treatment fidelity measurements...

Should schools teach the skills for well-being? Embedded in the concept of education is the notion of changing individuals in a particular direction, of taking them from their current state to, ideally, a better one. That direction is informed by how we measure success in an educational setting. If schools measure only academic performance, as they...

Traditional education has focused on teaching individuals the tools to succeed academically and professionally, and students’ progress has been measured according to their performance within this limited paradigm of success. Various decades of rigorous international research have shown that skills exist for building the elements of well-being, and...

The World Development Report is an annual World Bank publication that highlights the latest research and trends in international development programming. This major review carries substantial weight in setting the policy and program agenda for donor and recipient agencies around the world. The 2015 Mind, Society, and Behavior report is remarkable i...

Drawing on recent advances in the field of positive psychology, we present a multi-dimensional, whole school framework for measuring well-being within the school environment, organized around Seligman's (Flourish, 2011) PERMA model of flourishing. We apply this framework to assess student and staff well-being at an entire school-St. Peter's College...