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Depressed people can benefit from greater strengths use.

The underuse of character strengths is an important problem to address.

Character strengths are changeable, especially perspective, kindness, humor, hope, and gratitude.

Use a behavioral "nudge" to improve your character strengths use.

I review about 100 character strengths studies per year. There are always a few studies that give me pause. I might see a counterintuitive finding, an idea I had not considered, or something that piques my signature strength of curiosity.

In this post, I share 5 surprising and interesting studies. These stopped me for a moment—literally—and I see immediate practical use from each.

These studies span many fields: workplace, coaching, clinical, and general audiences. I wonder if these studies give you an ah-ha, too!

1. Depressed People Can Improve Their Strengths

In this quasi-experimental study, 50 women with major depressive disorder were randomly assigned to eight positivity training sessions or a control condition. Positivity training significantly enhanced character strengths, improved time perspective (reducing past-negative and present-fatalistic while increasing past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future orientations), and increased self-awareness. This study shows character strengths are modifiable in clinical depression (Barzigar & Homaei, 2024).

Why is this striking? It is not typical for a positive psychology study to a) examine participants with an actual clinical disorder (it is, however, common in positive psychology studies to ask general questions about depression/anxiety); and b) it is novel to examine character strengths change amidst depression.

Practical strategy: If you’re helping someone with a clinical disorder like depression, bring character strengths into the assessment, the exploration of issues, and the treatment planning.

2. Spot Any Category of Character Strengths in Others

There are many lenses through which to view character strengths: signature strengths, lower character strengths, happiness strengths, achievement strengths, phasic strengths, and so on.

In a field experiment, 255 managers were randomly assigned to a strengths-spotting intervention focused either on employees’ signature strengths........

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