Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions
The source of the three-good-things exercise. In a six-group, randomised, placebo-controlled online trial of five happiness exercises, three of them produced lasting increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms - among them the practice of writing down what went well each day.
Where the three-good-things practice comes from - a randomised, placebo-controlled trial, not a self-help book.
Seligman and colleagues ran a six-group, random-assignment, placebo-controlled internet study testing five candidate happiness interventions against one plausible control exercise.
Three of the five lastingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms.
Two did not. A paper that found three of five exercises worked is more trustworthy than one that found all five did, and the failures are why the surviving exercises are worth attention.
The practical residue is the dosage: write down a small number of specific good things, regularly, rather than attempting a long gratitude inventory once. Specific and repeated beats large and occasional - which is a claim about format, and one of the few the evidence genuinely supports.
Two of the five tested exercises did not lastingly work, which is the part usually left out. This was an internet-recruited, self-selected sample rather than a clinical population, and depressive symptoms were self-reported, so the paper does not support treating this as therapy for depression.
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Summarized by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
