DIY Workbooks

More and more people are seeking to use self-help materials to build better mental health. We are eager to help. In the Positive Psychology Research Group, we have created a number of 80-page workbooks that people can work through on their own to build their virtues or character strengths. In keeping with my philosophy, we want to give them away—just like we are giving away leader and participant manuals to run small groups and DVDs to illustrate how to run those groups. But, in the same way as with the group materials, we want to give away materials that have been investigated by scientific methods and found to be effective, and also published in refereed scientific publications.

So, we have created several workbooks, but not all of them are available. As we get the studies published so you can be assured you are getting an evidence-based workbook, we will post them. Thus far, we have investigated the following: forgiveness (secular), forgiveness of Christians who have offended other people in their church, humility, patience, self-forgiveness, self-control, and positivity. We have had two articles accepted, on forgiveness (secular) and humility. Here are those workbooks. The others will be posted as they are scientifically vetted.

Note: We are interested in scientists and students who might be willing to run additional studies with these workbooks. If you are interested in that, please email me (eworth@vcu.edu) and I can send you the workbooks you wish to test scientifically. If you are a psychotherapist and would like to use one of these with a client, I am willing to send it to you (even before we have a scientific study supporting its effectiveness) and let you read it and use your professional judgment about whether to use it (again, email me). From our research, we believe these are indeed efficacious, but we do not want to release it for general use until it receives an OK from masked scientific review and acceptance for publication.