Know Thy Positive Self

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7(1), 511-535. doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526 Today I read this review on the train from Mainz to Amsterdam, the swinging train made me a little bit impatient, so the reading experience is not so good.  In this classic review, Bonanno et al., (2013) pointed out that using new analytic method -- latent growth mixture modelling -- could overcome the disadvantages of two previous approach (i.e., psychopathology approach and  the trauma event approach).  figure 1, adapted from Banonno (2004) The interesting results from the latent growth mixture modelling are that higher percentage of resilience was found.  Then this paper reviewed factors that influence resilience: personality, exposure, SES etc. The trait self-enhancement was specially mentioned in the personality factors. Also interesting to me...

Dranovsky, A., & Leonardo, E. D. (2015). The power of positivity. Nature, 522, 294. doi:10.1038/522294a Ramirez, S., Liu, X., MacDonald, C. J., Moffa, A., Zhou, J., Redondo, R. L., & Tonegawa, S. (2015). Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour. Nature, 522, 335. doi:10.1038/nature14514 I didn't totally understand the experiments in Ramirez et al (2015), but it reads like a lot of works had been done by the authors.  The basic idea is simple: if we re-activated the positive memory of mice that currently depressed, the positive memory will decrease the depressive behaviours. This basic idea was clearly illustrated by Dranovsky & Leonardo (2015), see below Of course, the actual experiment is more complicated, as well as the figures: The above figure is the figure 1a of Ramirez et al. (2015). So, there are 6 groups. The key manipulation is the positive experience, which was exposed the mice to a female conspecific in a ...