Flourish by Martin Seligman

Book Notes
  • Speed and IQ have a surprisingly strong relationship… IQ correlates with how fast people can perform with a 0.50 correlation (1) – page 108
  • Girls get higher classroom grades even though boys outperform girls by a little on IQ tests… girls’ superiority in self-discipline accounts for superior grades (2) – page 117
  • The kids with high self-discipline did not put on as much weight between fifth and eighth grade as the kids with low self discipline (3) – page 118
  • The citation rate of leading figures is not remotely bell shaped; rather there are only two or three giants who grab the lion’s share of glory and influence (4) – page 120
  • At every level of SAT, the grittier students got better grades than the rest, and the students with lower SATS tended to have more grit (5) – page 123
  • The coaches’ optimism predicted resilience just as well as the optimism of the whole team (6) – page 149
  • Men with the most optimistic style had 25 percent less CVD than average, and men with the least optimism had 25 percent more CVD than average (7)… People high in mastery had 20 percent fewer CVD deaths than those with an average sense of mastery, and people high in a sense of helplessness had 20 percent more CVD deaths than average (8)… Optimists had 23 percent of CVD deaths of the pessimists and 53 percent overall death rate of the pessimists (9) – pages 191-192
  • The higher the positive emotion, the lower the interleukin-6 and the less inflammation (10) – page 200
  • The blood of optimists had a feistier response to threat – more infection fighting white blood cells called t lymphocytes produced – than the pessimists (11)… Repeated episodes of stress likely mobilize the stress hormone cortisol and other responses that induce or exacerbate damage to the wall of blood vessels and promote atherosclerosis (12)… Women who score low in feelings of mastery and high in depression have been shown to have worse calcification of the major artery the trunk-like aorta (13)… People with high positive emotion show less of a fibrinogen response to stress than those with a low positive emotion (14) – page 207
  • The fit but fat individual has almost half the risk of death as the unfit fat individual (15) – page 217

 

  1. Reaction times and intelligence differences a population based cohort study
  2. Self-discipline gives girls the edge: gender in self discipline, grades, and achievement test scores
  3. Self-controlled children stay leaner in the transition to adolescence, Self control as a protective factor against overweight status in the transition from childhood to adolescence
  4. On the statistics of individual variations of productivity in research laboratories
  5. Development and validation of the short grit scale
  6. Professional baseball, basketball, and explanatory style: predicting performance in the major league
  7. Is the glass half empty or half full?  a prospective study of optimism and coronary heart disease in the normative aging study
  8. Mastery, sense of coherence, and mortality: evidence of independent associations from the epic norfolk prospective cohort study
  9. Dispositional optimism and all cause and cardiovascular mortality in a prospective cohort of elderly Dutch men and women
  10. Emotional style, nasal cytokines, and illness expression after experimental rhinovirus exposure
  11. Explanatory style and cell mediated immunity in elderly men and women, Optimistic expectancies and cell mediated immunity the role of positive affect
  12. Hopelessness and 4 year progression of carotid atherosclerosis the kuopio ischemic heart disease risk factor study, Impact of psychological factors on the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease and implications for therapy
  13. Positive and negative attributes and risk for coronary and aortic calcification in healthy women
  14. Positive affect and health related neuroendocrine cardiovascular and inflammatory processes
  15. Cardiorespiratory fitness and adiposity as mortality predictors in older adults