Warrior

Course Overview

Week 1

Achieving Authenticity: Overcoming the Impostor Syndrome

Seemingly, one’s successes should be a source of positive emotions. Yet for many, success produces the opposite emotional effect. Approximately seventy percent of individuals report experiencing intense anxiety as a result of their accomplishments. This is often due to feeling that they “faked” their way to success and are not as capable as others think they are, or they feel they are otherwise unworthy of the positive recognition they’ve received.

Week 2

Reframing Faults: Guilt vs. Shame

While the previous week’s lesson concerns how to best foster positive emotions in the wake of success, this week’s lesson focuses on how even our shortcomings can engender positive emotions if we approach them in the right way.

To do so, this lesson draws on Helen B. Lewis’s influential distinction between shame and guilt and more recent work by June Price Tangeny that has followed.

Week 3

Redeeming Guilt: The Upside of Negative Emotions

The previous week’s lesson focuses on the utility of guilt to foster positive emotions, but as this week’s lesson explains, not all guilt is good guilt. In explaining why this is so, this lesson further elucidates the fundamental distinction between positive and negative emotions, citing literature from a variety of sources regarding the affective, behavioral, and cognitive differences distinguishing them.

Week 4

Peering through Pain: Building Resilience

Another common hindrance to positive emotions is the inevitability of suffering in our lives. It is estimated that approximately fifty percent of individuals have experienced a traumatic event at some point in their lives, yet individuals’ responses to such occurrences vary markedly. For some, the result is a vicious cycle of debilitating negative emotions, whereas others are less affected from the outset and quickly recuperate. The difference between these two types of responses is “resilience”: the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, and other significant sources of stress.

Week 5

Finding Fulfillment: Getting Off the Hedonic Treadmill

It’s a common experience: We finally attain a long sought-after goal—whether it be a material possession, a position of status, or some other accomplishment. Yet the much anticipated joy disappears as quickly as it came, leaving us feeling just as unfulfilled as we felt previously. Behind this is the phenomenon of “hedonic adaptation” (a.k.a., the “hedonic treadmill”): the human tendency to return to an affective set-point shortly after experiencing positive (or negative) changes in circumstance. As a result, the positive emotions prompted by achievements are inevitably short-lived and are soon replaced by emotional equilibrium.

Week 6

Rewarding Relationships: Including Others in Ourselves

Relationships: depending upon how we cultivate them, relationships can be our greatest source of positive emotions or a wellspring of negativity and stress. This week’s lesson sheds light on how to develop our relationships by delving into the psychology of what a close relationship is, most fundamentally. This week’s lesson examines the pioneering work of Arthur and Elaine Aron, whose “Inclusion of the Other in the Self Scale” (IOS) has become a widely used and well validated measure of relationship closeness.