All Article Archives

Chinese Positive Psychology

What is the Ancient Chinese Secret to Resilience and Happiness?

Paul T. P. Wong

Posted Dec 1, 2017

The Chinese people might have been through the process of natural selection, bred to adapt to all kinds of extreme adversities over the past six-thousand years. The collective history of having endured and survived numerous natural disasters, oppressive regimes, and foreign occupations has endowed Chinese people with the character strengths of endurance and patience.

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A Brief Manual for Meaning-Centered Counseling

Paul Wong

Posted Nov 19, 2017

This manual grows out of MCC workshops I have given in the last ten years to psychologists, counselors, coaches, and other mental health professionals all over the world. The feedback I have received from attendees and alumni of these workshops confirm that MCC’s focus on positive motivation and the transformation through meaning has been very helpful for those devastated by the tsunami of life.

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Control in the uncontrollable – the case of cancer

Isla Carboon

Posted Nov 1, 2017

A sense of control is fundamental to our wellbeing. An awareness of our agency and efficacy underpins the motivation for much of our behavior – without a belief that we can successfully act upon our environment to fulfill our needs, we no longer have a foundation upon which to proceed…

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Academic Integrity: A Letter to My Students

William M. Taylor

Posted Oct 1, 2017

…would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated his way through medical school? Or would you feel comfortable on a bridge designed by an engineer who cheated her way through engineering school? Would you trust your tax return to an accountant who copied his exam answers from his neighbor?…

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Counter-Therapeutic Myths that Prevent People From Forgiving

Kenneth E. Hart

Posted Sep 1, 2017

…There is tremendous controversy among behavioral scientists about what ‘authentic’ forgiveness is. However, everyone agrees on one thing. It’s a shift away from angry interpersonal emotions and related aggression and desire to do harm. This essay discusses the various meanings that have been attached to the term ‘forgiveness.’…

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Exploring learning styles: developing a flexible teaching approach: reflections on Pedagogy Saturday VI

Rebecca Rischin

Posted Aug 1, 2017

If only one size did fit all…. If only teaching were as easy as one plus one equals two–a mathematical problem with a single solution. But teaching involves people, not numbers, and while numbers can be plugged into formulae to yield predictable equations, people cannot. They are not perfect squares; they come in many shapes and sizes; they act and react in such a way that similar problems must frequently be approached from different angles…

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The 12-Step Tsunami Trauma Survival Guide

Paul T. P. Wong, Ph.D., C. Psych.

Posted Dec 31, 2016

The Asian tsunami trauma is a different category of natural disaster in terms of scale and impact. Unlike most natural disasters, which tend to be one-time blows at a specific geographic location, the Asian tsunami catastrophe is almost worldwide in its scale; and its devastating impact on poor and highly populated nations may last for a generation…

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The Art of Dying

An afternoon with Art Buchwald and Dave Barry

Ridley Pearson

Posted Dec 30, 2016

Last summer, I learned how to die. Not that I want to practice everything I learn (how often do you actually use that high school trig?). In fact, I wouldn’t mind waiting a while on that one, but it was interesting to sit at the feet of a master…

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A Psychiatrist’s Approach to Death

Orville S. Walters

Posted Dec 29, 2016

Men have tiptoed around the subject of death for centuries. They have avoided speaking the word death by using many euphemisms. But in recent years the taboo has been lessened by a great deal of writing that deals explicitly with death. Research papers, magazine articles and books have multiplied prodigiously. So much, in fact, has been written that the Journal of the American Medical Association recently carried an article titled “Dying is Worked to Death.”

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Control in the uncontrollable – the case of cancer

Isla Carboon

Posted Dec 28, 2016

A sense of control is fundamental to our wellbeing. An awareness of our agency and efficacy underpins the motivation for much of our behavior – without a belief that we can successfully act upon our environment to fulfill our needs, we no longer have a foundation upon which to proceed.

Read more