One of my favorite upper-level elective courses to teach is Positive Psychology. I recently came across a comprehensive account of various facets of how positive psychology can be assessed in nations:  https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction . Like, the website is just great. Below is an example of the data you can explore, in various formats, animation options, and you can download the data. It is great! From this website, I download loaded and compiled two data sets that caputure GDP, Cantrill Ladder Score, and life span data for hella countries. You can perform a variety of significant and non-significant correlations and regressions using this data. Additionally, the countries are divided into six regions, allowing you to conduct some one-way ANOVAs with your students.  Here is the data, compiled by my awesome RA, Maddie:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/129NQcPdFwZjyzZAJdX6odKC7KiFk_Q1Lqa-SD4kk5FQ/edit?usp=sharing

OK. Lotte van Rijswijk, writing for Resume.io,  used Instagram photos to determine the happiest college in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia . Here is the Top 20 list for the US. If you go to the website, you can see similar summaries for the UK and Australian data and an interactive table containing all of the data. Here are some ideas for using it in class: 1. This methodology is pretty interesting. She used smiling recognition software and pictures from Instagram to measure happiness. I think this study would pair well with this study about using software to evaluate smiles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617734315 https://resume.io/blog/the-happiest-schools-in-the-us-uk-and-australia 2. Ask your student to consider the sampling error that may result from using Instagram data for any research. For example, are photos on Insta representative of human experiences? Is it reasonable to gather a sample of college-aged students using Insta? 3. The ...

Pew recently revisited the question of how survey modality can influence survey responses.  In particular, this survey used both web and telephone based surveys to ask participants about their attitudes towards politicians, perceptions of discrimination, and their satisfaction with life. As summarized in the article, the big differences are: "1)  People expressed more negative views of politicians in Web surveys than in phone surveys."  "2)  People who took phone surveys were more likely than those who took Web surveys to say that certain groups of people – such as gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and blacks – faced “a lot” of discrimination ."  "3)  People were more likely to say they are happy with their family and social life when asked by a person over the phone than when answering questions on the Web ."     The social psychologist in me likes this as an example of the Social Desirability Bias. When spea...

Recently, a Facebook craze asked users to list three things you are thankful for for five days. Data scientis ts Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine,  Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic  at Fa cebook have analyzed this dat a to better understand the patterns of gratitude publically shared by Facebook users. The data analysts broke down data by most frequently listed gratitude topic: Most frequently "liked" gratitude posts: (lots of support for our friends in recovery, which is nice to see). Gender differences in gratitude...here is data for women. The wine gratitude finding for women was not present in the data for men. Ha. Idiosyncratic data by state. I would say that Pennsylvania's fondness for country music rings true for me. How to use in class: This example provides several interesting, easy to read graphs, and the graphs show how researchers can break down a single data set in a variety of interesting ways (by gender, by age, by state). Add...

When I'm not busy thinking about statistics and research methods, I like to think about positive psychology. I like to think about it so much that I co-authored a positive psychology book with Rich Walker (Winston-Salem State University) and Cory Scherer (Penn State - Schuylkill). The book is called Pollyanna's Revenge and published by Kendall-Hunt . And the book makes a case for the fact that (contrary to many pop-psych reports) there are many good side effects to being a Pollyanna and that our minds engage in all manner on non-conscious processes that help us maintain positive affect (with special attention paid to the role of the Fading Affect Bias and memory in maintaining good moods). As I am wont to do, I have started a blog and twitter for the book. This week's posting, all about positive psychology data repositories (with plenty of downloadable data that can be used in the classroom, cha-ching), can be found at the Pollyanna's Revenge blog .  Cross...

I am teaching positive psychology for the first time this semester. One way to quickly teach students that this isn't just Happy Psych. 101 is to show them convincing data collected by an international organization (here, the United Nations) that demonstrates the link between positive psychology and the well-being of nations. This data isn't just for a positive psychology class: You could also use it more broadly to demonstrate how research methods have to be adjusted when data is collected internationally (see item 4) and as examples of different kinds of data analysis (as described under item 1). 1) Report on international happiness data from the United Nations . If you look through the data collected, there is a survival analysis related to longevity and affect on page 66. A graphic on page 21 describes factors that account for global variance in happiness levels across countries. There is also a lot of data about mental health care spending in different nations. 2 ...