User:Makiah26/Positive adult development

Positive adult development

The development of people has focused on children as put forth by Freud, Piaget, and Binet. Research in positive adult development supports the theory that development occurs during adulthood. [8]. Recent studies indicate that such development is useful in predicting things such as an individual's health, life satisfaction, and degree of contribution to society. [2]. In those studies, those that were older rated higher than those that were younger.

Kindness

Teaching Kindness

Studies have shown that through programs and interventions that kindness can be taught and encouraged during the first 20 years of life. [6] Further studies show that kindness interventions can help improve wellbeing with comparable results as teaching gratitude. [4] Similar findings have shown that organizational level teaching of kindness can improve wellbeing of adults in college. [3]

Self-kindness

See also self-compassion

Self-kindness means to act in a generous and considerate manner when oneself is going through pain, struggles or hardships as opposed to ignoring them or self-criticizing. This is different from self-esteem, which is more of evaluation of oneself, where self-kindness is more about how you treat yourself.

Creativity

Behaviorism on creativity

Skinner attributed creativity to accidental behaviors that are reinforced by the environment.[5] Spontaneous behaviors done by living creatures reflect past learned behavior.[1] In Karen Pryor's book Don’t Shoot the Dog she refers to how she reinforced a dolphin to display novel behaviors. This is what one can attribute to both those who are creative and those who appreciate creativity. A behaviorist may say that prior learning caused novel behaviors to be reinforced many times over and the individual has been shaped to produce increasingly novel behaviors. [9]

References

1.Abra, J. (1988). Skinner on creativity: A critical commentary. Leonardo (Oxford), 21(4), 407-412. doi:10.2307/1578703

2.Bidzan, M., Bidzan, L., Bidzan, M., Knietzsch, J., Jurek, P., Bidzan-Bluma, I., et al. (2020). A polish and german population study of quality of life, well-being, and life satisfaction in older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 585813. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.585813

3.Datu, J. A. D., & Lin, X. (2021). The mental health benefits of kind university climate: Perception of kindness at university relates to longitudinal increases in well-being. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 17(3), 1663-1680. doi:10.1007/s11482-021-09981-z

4.Datu, J. A. D., Valdez, J. P. M., McInerney, D. M., & Cayubit, R. F. (2022). The effects of gratitude and kindness on life satisfaction, positive emotions, negative emotions, and COVID‐19 anxiety: An online pilot experimental study. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 14(2), 347-361. doi:10.1111/aphw.12306

5.Epstein, R. (1991). Skinner, creativity, and the problem of spontaneous behavior. Psychological Science, 2(6), 362-370. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1991.tb00168.x

6.Malti, T. (2021). Kindness: A perspective from developmental psychology. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 18(5), 629-657. doi:10.1080/17405629.2020.1837617

7.Reed, A. E., Chan, L., & Mikels, J. A. (2014). Meta-analysis of the age-related positivity effect: Age differences in preferences for positive over negative information. Psychology and Aging, 29(1), 1-15. doi:10.1037/a0035194

8.Staudinger, U. M. (2020). The positive plasticity of adult development: Potential for the 21st century. The American Psychologist, 75(4), 540-553. doi:10.1037/amp0000612

9.Sumner, S. (2021). How can we talk about creativity? The Psychological Record, 71(4), 503-507. doi:10.1007/s40732-021-00505-7