As mentioned in Treating Psychosis, we all have a tendency to focus on negatives or to seek out what might go ‘wrong’ in life. It is important to build our abilities and power by reminding ourselves of our strengths, qualities, unique personal characteristics.

The VIA Institute on Character website provides the opportunity to discover your very own personalized character strengths profile by taking a free personality test as well as explore information on character strengths that contribute to our own unique profiles. The classification system is comprised of 24 character strengths that fall under six broad virtue categories: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Knowing your unique makeup of character strengths is the first step towards living a happier, more authentic life. Take the VIA Survey here.

Authentic Happiness is a website developed out of the University of Pennsylvania that features many happiness and mood questionnaires for users to complete for free. The questionnaires measure emotion, engagement, life satisfaction, meaning, amongst others. To take some of the questionnaires for yourself, click here.

More Resources

Downloadable Resources from The Pursuit of Happiness

Dr. Rick Hanson’s CDs on Meditations for Happiness

The Science of Happiness Mini-Lessons

Learned Optimism Video for Depression

Happiness Quiz: How Happy Are You?

The New Era of Positive Psychology: Talk by Martin Seligman

Positive Psychology Worksheets

More resources in the Other Resources section of our website