• Body dissatisfaction is common, and people experience varying degrees of it. You can learn to feel better about your body, but it’s likely to require some attention to your current thought patterns and habits.

• Body image can be improved by focusing on the aspects of your body that you genuinely appreciate, are grateful for, and the ways your body enables you to experience the world.

• You can defend your body image by filtering out negative external influences, such as appearance-focused content on social media and television.

• Your body image can benefit if you think about your health habits – especially your eating and physical activity patterns – in terms of self-care rather than self-punishment.

Research has shown that the state of your mental health has an impact on your physical health; thus, ameliorating mental health problems might improve physical health, extend lifespan, and reduce healthcare costs. Not every tool or practice works for every person. It takes some experimentation to learn which techniques effectively calm your fight-or-flight response and engage your rest-and-digest recovery system. Those who are willing to try might just gain a competitive edge. Mentally strong people are willing to learn new modes of self-development, adapt to our constantly changing world, take responsibility for their improvements and periodic failures, and assume control of their lives. They do not let negative environments or distractions deter them from their goals. The research-based practices here are divided into exercises that address specific obstacles to mental strength (perfectionism, imposter syndrome, pessimism, emotion regulation, and self-awareness of introversion, extroversion, and neurosignature strengths) and proactive strategies to empower your rest-and-digest system (growth mindset, mindfulness, meditation, nature therapy, creative play, and interacting with dogs).

This chapter begins with a brief review of the history of virtue science. It went out of favor in psychology for most of the twentieth century, but after renewed interest in philosophy in the latter part of that century, virtue research has burgeoned in psychology in the twenty-first century. The interest in virtue research is partly due to the positive psychology movement, which focuses on human strengths and well-being. Despite its valuable contribution, three elements of positive psychology have continued to plague virtue research as it is atheoretical, conceptualized as a diagnostic scheme, and ambivalent about values and morality. Nevertheless, virtue science is off to a good beginning, boasting scores of empirical studies. Most virtue scientists have left the ill-conceived notion of “diagnosing” virtues behind. These studies remain siloed and noncumulative due to the absence of clear theory in virtue science and a tendency to neglect conceptualizing virtues. Virtue research also remains limited by its ambivalence toward values and morality. To remedy this fragmentation, this chapter proposes the STRIVE-4 Model, with its clear conceptualization of virtues and the dozens of hypotheses that follow from it. This model provides a way to build a unified and cumulative virtue science.

This chapter summarizes an optimistic perspective of the progress that has been made and what is known about suicide, while highlighting the questions that remain. We point out that many traditional understandings of suicide focus on risk factors, problems, and deficits and suggest there may be a role of more positive constructs, such as resilience, optimism, hope, gratitude, and others. We discuss the potential role of resilience – at the individual, community, and societal levels – in reducing suicide, and how positive psychology can inform suicide prevention efforts. Interventions to build psychological capital, resilience, personal strengths, or community empowerment may be beneficial. Indeed, positive suicidology, and even critical suicidology to a certain extent, attempt to incorporate these aspects.

Optimism is belief in a brighter future. In this chapter you will learn how optimistic people think and what they do. Optimists acknowledge the challenges they face but focus on what they can do to change their situation. You will read of how people we interviewed remained optimistic in very challenging situations. We share four ways to build optimism: shifting your attention to focus on things within your immediate control, savoring positive events, staying active, and challenging negative thoughts that are neither helpful nor realistic.

This chapter describes positive interpersonal processes: interactions between people that actively enhance their close relationships. It begins by describing the field’s shift toward studying positive processes and highlighting the utility of considering positive phenomena as unique from negative phenomena. Then, it reviews three interpersonal behaviors that have been shown to enhance relationships and describes the evidence supporting their benefits. First, spending time together (particularly spending time on novel and exciting activities) enhances relationships by enabling partners to meet their self-expansion needs in ongoing relationships. A second positive process is co-experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, amusement, and excitement, which augment and sustain positive experiences and facilitate interpersonal synchrony. Finally, this chapter reviews the benefits of communicating affection and the individual differences in how and how often people express affection.

Book 2 of De Officiis is devoted to an exploration of the utile, what is beneficial or advantageous for humans in pursuing desirable objectives, and the resources needed to achieve them. As Section 1 discusses, it focuses on the human resource that someone intent on a successful political career will best harness, and on outlining the methods for attaining it. That outline then provides Cicero with a basis for the main body of the book, which has two main parts, the first expounding the methods he endorses for achieving glory, with an accent on the need for justice in pursuing it, the second examining liberality, and good and bad ways of exercising it. Section 2 turns to the detail of his analysis of the complexities of liberality and its vocabulary. Section 3 asks whether glory is the main pay-off he sees as the fruit of liberality, and argues that gratitude is of no less importance. A brief conclusion notes that the cohesion of the res publica emerges as the primary object of appropriate human concern, and comments on Cicero’s view that in its safeguarding lies simultaneously our main advantage and the ultimate focus of the social virtues of justice and beneficence.

Story of escaping the Holocaust and concentration camps. Becoming refugees. Lessons of adaptation. As we age, change is inevitable. Those who are successful are willing to make the necessary alterations to their current lifestyle. It’s all about adaptability. Two types of people as they age: Denialists and Realists. Anticipating and planning adjustments to your everyday way of doing things can make a tremendous difference in well-being. Ultimately, happiness comes from the inside, not the outside. It is understanding that each of us is a precious human life. If we can learn to adapt as we grow old, and be grateful, it allows us to find a new fullness of joy.

Emotion motivates prosocial behavior, and interest in this topic usually focuses on empathy. This chapter explores other emotions that can also motivate prosocial action and the research directions and practical implications that follow. It opens with consideration of two perspectives on the association of emotions and prosocial behavior offered by Malti and Thompson, and then proceeds to discuss research concerning the following prosocial emotions: happiness derived from assisting another, moral pride derived from prosociality, indignation over observed harm, empathy and sympathy, and gratitude. Guilt as a moral and possibly prosocial emotion is also discussed. The shared element of these prosocial emotions is that they derive from a personal connection between an observer and another’s emotional experience. An overview of the research on emotional development and emotion regulation follows to explore how this connection emerges developmentally. The conclusion summarizes much-needed areas for further research along with the implications of these ideas.

Creating a map to healthy aging. Discoveries I never knew. Real joy. New ways to age, going deeper, finding greater meaning. Even amidst sorrow, a love of life. Chapter summarizes key aging discoveries and what makes for good aging. Words of Lucille, at 102: “I’m not sure what follows this precious life on earth, but my faith gives me, not fear, but a grand sense of wonder about it. In life and death, we have only to do one thing: Simply, let love in.

Seneca’s treatise On Benefits is the sole surviving representative of a long tradition of Stoic thought on the act of kindness (euergēsia), that is, gift-giving or the supererogatory favor. The work is rich in philosophical content. Favors (beneficia or benefits) are defined strictly in terms of intent, in such a way that the will of the giver becomes interdependent with the receiver’s willingness to reciprocate. In unpacking this definition, the Stoic author finds it necessary to speak not only about the theory of action but also about the observable effects of action, since enacted benefits impose different obligations on the recipient. Moreover, the assessment of motives and the expectation of gratitude create an intersubjectivity of giver and receiver that is revealing for Stoic ideas of friendship. Finally, Seneca takes a strong position on the autonomy even of benefactors who are unable to act otherwise, such as divine givers and entirely virtuous human agents, with implications for questions of volition and freedom.

A concern that people ought to be given what they deserve, in both positive and negative senses, lies deep within the human psyche and strongly influences our sense of reciprocity. Views on the level of reward or punishment that a person deserves for their actions will differ across persons, places and time, but, I argue in this chapter, depend substantively upon some combination of intentions and outcomes. Using these characteristics, I propose a taxonomy of actions, ordered from most to least blameworthy, with, for example, it being suggested that for any particular level of harm an intentional yet unrealised harm is more blameworthy than an unintentional yet realised harm (a similar taxonomy can be developed for the positive domain of praiseworthy actions). The taxonomy is focused upon people’s actions towards others, but I finish the chapter with a discussion of desert in relation to people’s intentions towards themselves. Ultimately, I contend that the strength and sustainability of public sector services and welfare systems, not to mention our private relationships, rely upon the recognition that desert underpins our notion of justice.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

Leithart takes Thomas Aquinas to Starbucks to illustrate how gratitude between persons is complicated by commercial transactions. But rather than eliminating gratitude, Leithart finds a place for gratitude in a money economy, when it is subordinated to the divine economy of love, which is founded on the notion of God as giver.

Forstenzer gives an account of Cornel West’s prophetic understanding of gratitude, itself a distillation of West’s existentialist world-view. As Forstenzer shows, gratitude is the foundation upon which West builds the conditions for overcoming the injustices of racism and inequality which are achieved through the mobilization of social movements. Westian gratitude is, above all, a recognition of those who came before, as well as a hope that sustains the long road to justice.

Khalil evaluates the discourse of gratitude in positive psychology through the Sufi understanding of divine benefaction and gratitude (shukr). Building on the work of Andalusian scholar Ibn ‘Arabi, Khalil disputes the uncritical account of gratitude as a universal good. Rather, if exercised for the wrong reasons, or towards the wrong benefactors, gratitude can become a vice.

Emmons explores how a virtue ethics account of gratitude may address ways in which people experience negative effects of gratitude. On the one hand, virtue ethics would question whether harmful expressions of gratitude should be considered gratitude in the first place. But on the other hand, aligning gratitude indiscriminately with the good strips it of meaning and power. To resolve this dilemma, Emmons argues a more careful understanding of gratitude is needed.

Ralston compares the works of Schleiermacher and al-Ghazali on the relationship of gratitude with divine providence. Ralston illustrates the utter dependency of gratitude with Schleiermacher’s own reflections at the death of his young son, Nathanael.