Jarden Aaron

University of Melbourne | MSD · Centre for Wellbeing Science

The human interest in ‘wellbeing’ dates back thousands of years, with complex understandings [...]

Ethics – perhaps the quintessential snooze button of coaching. Rarely is the topic, and indeed ethical mastery itself, embraced by practitioners. Instead, ethics is often viewed as a set of obligations and rules for what 'not to do'. However, here the authors assert that ethics is powerful and potential-filled, with the capacity to take a transform...

This paper describes the development of the Flourishing Classroom System Observation Framework and Rubric, which provides a framework and practical approach to defining and describing multiple interconnected observable characteristics of a classroom system that individually and together can be targeted to cultivate collective flourishing within sch...

Aim: To determine prevalence, predictors and change over time of nurses' and student nurses' mental health and well-being, and explore nurses' perceptions, barriers and enablers of well-being. Design: Longitudinal mixed-methods survey. Methods: Forty-nine students and registered nurses participated from Victoria, Australia. Data were collected...

Prospection can be defined as mental representations of possible futures which individuals use to make daily decisions. The current study aimed to assess the links between a specific type of prospection, cognitive forecasting of life satisfaction, and various wellbeing and illbeing indicators. More specifically, this study aimed to assess individua...

The study aim was to determine prevalence and predictors of life satisfaction in New Zealand. In this observational cross-sectional study, a sample of 10,799 participants from NZ were drawn from the Gallup World Poll from 2006 to 2017. Data were analysed using regression analysis and ANOVA. Prevalence of life satisfaction across time varied little...

The Temporal Satisfaction with Life Scale measures judgements of life satisfaction using 15 items, according to three temporal dimensions: past, present, and future. However, only seven studies have looked at the psychometric properties of the Temporal Satisfaction with Life Scale, and this has been individually across vastly different countries an...

Whilst coaching has traditionally focused on enhancing performance, over recent years and with the emergence of positive psychology, the focus on outcomes has broadened to include wellbeing and resilience alongside performance. Within the field of positive psychology, a large focus has been on the scientific study of wellbeing and whilst academic d...

Job crafting is an employee-initiated form of proactive job redesign, that has, in recent years, attracted substantial evidence for its associations with work engagement and employee well-being. Yet, despite this research, the advantages of integrating job crafting within a coaching partnership have not been examined. We address this gap in the pre...

Background: The aim of this study was to determine the effect of demographic and psychological factors on resilience in new graduate-, mid- and late-career veterinarians working in Australia. Method: An online cross-sectional survey of 800 veterinarians collected demographic and descriptive data in two stages from late 2015 to 2017, such as gend...

This chapter summarizes the essentials of assessment, principles of good assessment, and wellbeing assessment in the context of school communities. Drawing from positive education initiatives, what wellbeing assessments in schools look like, and why they are important is outlined and discussed. Examples of good assessment tools and their use in pra...

Background The contribution of work to positive mental health is increasingly apparent. Transition into the workplace causes a range of stressors for new graduate nurses who experience both psychological wellbeing and illbeing in their first year of practice. Objective To determine published prevalence, predictors, barriers and enablers of new gra...

Background The wellbeing of individuals influences organisational outcomes. Insight into nurses’ wellbeing is crucial to a sustaining a high-quality workforce. Aim To describe nurses’ perceptions and experiences of wellbeing, work wellbeing, and mental health. Method Using a qualitative descriptive design, semi-structured interviews were conducte...

Aim To synthesize Registered Nurses’ self‐reported perceptions and experiences of psychological well‐being and ill‐being during their first year of practice. Design Qualitative meta‐synthesis. Data sources Databases included Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Excerpta Medica database, Medical Literature Analysis and Retriev...

Wellbeing science is the scientific investigation of wellbeing, its’ antecedents and consequences. Alongside growth of wellbeing science is significant interest in wellbeing interventions at individual, organizational and population levels, including measurement of national accounts of wellbeing. In this concept paper, we propose the capability mod...

Universities must prepare students for a complex world, but current mental health levels impair student outcomes. Increased concern over student wellbeing has fostered the demand for positive education interventions – a relatively new topic requiring more research. We tested a positive psychology wellbeing intervention imbedded in undergraduate psy...

The newly developing field of positive psychology has largely ignored the context of the individual in both research design and reporting. Limited knowledge exists about how people in different contexts (as opposed to cultures) experience well-being. Consequently, many positive psychological interventions (PPIs) are de-contextualised and applied un...

This paper reports on an investigation of the psychometric properties of the PERMA Profiler—a popular measure of well-being—with a large sample of Australian adults (n = 1942). We assessed the factor structure, scale reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity of the Profiler. Theory and evidence point to a second-order factor structure w...

در حالی که پیچیدگی‌های زندگی معاصر آسیب‌پذیری انسان را تشدید کرده است، در عرضۀ خدمات روان‌شناختی، اولویت‌های متعارض و معضلات اخلاقی در مرکز توجه هستند. هیچ مجموعۀ واحدی وجود ندارد که بتواند راهنماهای اخلاقی یا استانداردهای کاملی را برای گسترۀ پیچیدگی‌های انسان دربرگیرد. بااین‌حال، مجموعه‌ای از ارزش‌های فراگیر و اصول، ما را به‌سوی تصمیم‌گیری‌های اخل...

اصول اخلاقی بی‌عیب و نقص، شاید نوعی ایدئال آرمان‌گرایانه باشد، چراکه متخصصان روان‌شناسی مثبت هم همانند سایر انسان¬ها جایزالخطا، آسیب‌پذیر و ناکامل هستند. پیچیدگی¬های زندگی معاصر ازجمله زندگی اینترنتی در حال گسترش، تغییرات نامنظم آب‌وهوا، بحران¬های پناهندگان، هویت¬های در حال تحول و دوقطبی‌سازی اقتصادی فزاینده، آسیب‌پذیری انسان را تشدید می¬کند. در عر...

The aim of this paper is to present the psychological strengths we identified from interviews with community dwelling older adults. Data for this paper is drawn from participants in a community dwelling older adult study. The latter involved qualitative in‐depth interviews with the participants exploring their well‐being. All participants were comm...

This research investigated New Zealand adolescents' (aged 11 to 13, N = 361) perceptions of wellbeing from a prototype perspective. Specifically, three studies examined what constitutes and promotes wellbeing, whether adolescents' perspectives are aligned with adults' conceptualizations and academic models of wellbeing, whether socioeconomic status...

As positive psychology has developed as a field, questions have arisen around how to ensure best practice, including with respect to ethics. This issue is particularly pertinent vis-à-vis its applied dimensions, such as positive psychology interventions by students and graduates of MAPP programmes. However, the field has hitherto lacked clear ethic...

Aim and objectives: To explore community-dwelling older adults approaches to enhancing their psychological well-being. Background: Older adults who are living with long-term or chronic health conditions are particularly at risk of experiencing low psychological well-being. Little attention has been paid to preventive strategies that enhance psyc...

These guidelines are the result of a collaborative and independent working group led by Aaron Jarden, Tayyab Rashid, Annalise Roache and Tim Lomas. The guidelines are independent of any organisation or association; however, numerous parties have been involved in the development and refinement of this first iteration. It is the authors’ intention to...

Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) and programs differ markedly in implementation quality. Lower quality implementation is associated with interventions that include multiple components (or PPIs), are delivered across multiple layers (individual, workgroup/classroom and organisation/school) or agency sites, and include cohorts with heterogene...

Objectives: To test the effect of a community wellbeing intervention, delivered by community partners, on the wellbeing, resilience, optimism, and social connection of older adults in the general population (Study 1) and older adult carers (Study 2), a population at risk for low wellbeing. Methods: Participants self-selected to take part in an 8-w...

Young people living with disadvantage are at elevated risk of a range of negative life outcomes, including social exclusion, impaired health and well-being, and low educational or vocational participation. In this context, the Resilient Futures program was conceptualized and developed as a strength-focused and positive psychology intervention whose...

Longevity is a valuable resource for society, as older people are increasingly looking for new ways to contribute after retirement. Their contribution is however dependent upon their physical health, mental health and wellbeing. The potential role that mental health and wellbeing, two separate but interrelated constructs, play often are both under-...

Gratitude has been described as an adaptive evolutionary mechanism that is relevant to healthy psychological and interpersonal outcomes. Questions remain as to whether the presence and benefits of gratitude are consistent from young adulthood to old age; prior research has yielded mixed evidence. We examined the magnitude and direction of age diffe...

Although positive psychology was initially conceived as more a shift in perspective (towards the “positive”) than a new field per se, in pragmatic terms, it is arguably beginning to function as a distinct discipline, with people self-identifying as “positive psychologists.” Thus, this conversation hour explores whether it is time for the field to s...

Decades of research have shown that positive life events contribute to the remission and recovery of depression; however, it is unclear how positive life events are generated. In this study, we sought to understand if personality strengths could predict positive life events that aid in the alleviation of depression. We tested a longitudinal mediati...

Prospection, the representation of possible futures, is a ubiquitous feature of the human mind (Seligman et al., 2013). In this chapter we adopt a subjunctive mood and go beyond evidence within the three sections covered in this book to explore possible futures for both recovery and wellbeing, identifying three emerging themes within each area. Som...

This book brings together two bodies of knowledge - wellbeing and recovery. Wellbeing and 'positive' approaches are increasingly influencing many areas of society. Recovery in mental illness has a growing empirical evidence base. For the first time, overlaps and cross-fertilisation opportunities between the two bodies of knowledge are identified. I...

First responders (i.e. operational police officers, firefighters and ambulance officers) perform a critical role in our society, and as such we need them working at their best. In this chapter the authors posit that the wellbeing initiatives in many emergency service organisations are not aimed at first responders achieving their best, but instead,...

This chapter summarizes the benefits of well&;#x02010;being at work, and the case for well&;#x02010;being assessments and the use of positive psychological assessment measures is made. It discusses current workplace well&;#x02010;being assessment practices, drawing on various related literature. The chapter outlines a new framework for conceptually...

: The predominant focus on sporting populations has limited our conceptual understanding of mental toughness in lay contexts. On the basis of its wider benefits beyond sports, we sought to understand the central and peripheral attributes of mental toughness from a layperson’s perspective. To this end, we employed a prototype analysis which consiste...

Introduction: The current study utilised objective techniques to investigate the relationship between children's time spent in greenspace (open land covered in grass or other vegetation) with various physical and psychological variables. Potential relationships between physical activity and greenspace with body composition, emotional wellbeing, se...

We hypothesize that hedonism (valuing pleasure) as a pathway to happiness is more strongly correlated with happiness in more individualistic (vs collectivistic) cultures. Multi-level modeling is used to test this hypothesis in a sample of 6899 individuals across 19 cultures, controlling for age, gender, and national economic prosperity. As predicte...

The first volume of Positive Psychologists on Positive Psychology (2012, ASIN: B007IXU1RY, ISBN: 978-0-473-20944-5) was a huge success by any reasonable standard: the complete book was downloaded some 10,000 times, individual interviews downloaded some additional 20,000 times, and the demand meant it was also translated into Spanish and Chinese. Re...

A large international sample was used to test whether hedonia (the experience of positive emotional states and satisfaction of desires) and eudaimonia (the presence of meaning and development of one's potentials) represent 1 overarching well-being construct or 2 related dimensions. A latent correlation of .96 presents negligible evidence for the di...

To investigate the prevalence and associations of flourishing among a large sample of New Zealand workers. A categorical diagnosis of flourishing was applied to data from the Sovereign Wellbeing Index, a nationally representative sample of adults in paid employment (n = 5549) containing various lifestyle, physical, psychosocial, and work-related in...

Meta-analyses indicate the efficacy of positive psychology interventions in promoting well-being. But, despite accumulating empirical and anecdotal evidence of these interventions’ implementation in real-world settings, no review of effectiveness research exists. Accordingly, we identified 40 positive psychology intervention effectiveness trials ta...

Four individual profiles of ways toward happiness were found on a Slovene sample: Full, Empty, Pleasurable, and Meaningful life types. The present study aimed to validate these four types in samples from seven different countries (N = 3690) utilising four different languages. Participants completed the Orientation towards Happiness Scale and measur...

In a three-wave, year-long, large-sample dataset (N = 755), 10 candidate "personality strengths" (Grit, Gratitude, Curiosity, Savoring, Control Beliefs, Meaning in Life-Presence, Strengths Use, and Engagement, Pleasure, and Meaning-Based Orientations Toward Happiness) were compared as predictors of 6-month increases in goal attainment, and as moder...

The Flourishing Scale (FS; Diener et al. in Soc Indic Res 97(2):143–156, 2010) was developed to assess psychological flourishing, which can be conceived of as a social-psychological prosperity incorporating important aspects of human functioning. This study takes the FS, which has previously been validated on convenience samples of students, and an...

What is positive psychology? When, where and how did positive psychology develop? What is it like to use positive psychology applications in the real world of professional practice? How much do helping professionals utilise positive psychology frameworks? Why do some practitioners opt for particular positive psychology applications and frameworks o...

Given the limitations of traditional economic indicators, several national governments and multinational organisations are investigating new measures of progress and well-being to inform policymaking, with some researchers (e.g., Layard, 2005; Diener & Seligman, 2004; Marks & Shah, 2004; Frey & Stutzer, 2002) calling for scientific measures of happ...

Review of The Oxford Handbook of Happiness

¿Qué es la psicología positiva? ¿Cuándo, dónde y cómo se desarrolló la psicología positiva? ¿Qué se siente al utilizar las aplicaciones de la psicología positiva en la práctica profesional y en el mundo real? ¿Con qué frecuencia utilizan los profesionales el marco de la psicología positiva? ¿Por qué algunos profesionales optan por aplicaciones más...

El Programa de los Martes es un programa on line gratuito diseñado para potenciar los recursos de las personas y optimizar el afrontamiento de los desafíos del día a día. Ha sido traducido del original The Tuesday Program (Jarden, 2010). Los temas que componen este programa son: • Descubriendo y utilizando las fortalezas humanas • Desarrollando una...

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Wellbeing (IJW). This editorial explains the aims, scope and points of difference of the IJW.