#14 - Boosting Happiness Using Positive Psychology

Abstract

Abstract

Positive Psychology is a social and intellectual movement within the discipline of psychology that focuses on human strengths and how people flourish and are successful. Through mentor-ship, participants have the ability to build many personal connections with others that can influence mentees to live a better life. However, the mentors themselves can benefit as well through sharing their life experiences and through connecting with fellow mentors as well as mentees. The goal of this study is to assess the correlation between the use of positive psychology and building personal connections with others which can boost the happiness of mentors. In this study, a pretest and a post test is given to the mentors in the SPARK program: a program that involves college students mentoring at risk youth in hopes of redirecting their lives to formulate a positive outlook towards communication and school. The pretest ask the mentors to rate how they are feeling on a scale of one to ten prior to mentoring with one being absolutely terrible and ten being great to the point of extreme happiness. The post test ask the mentors to rate themselves on how they are feeling after mentoring, what activity was done in SPARK, as well as how the other mentor’s cosmos (personal life story) made them feel. The goal of this study is to show that building connections through SPARK using “happiness-boosting techniques” can boost the overall happiness of mentors. These techniques include writing and delivering a gratitude letter, sharing personal stories with a positive outlook, and sharing good news with others along with playing drums, breaking the ice and other fun activities.

Keywords: Positive psychology, happiness, Spark, Cosmos.