Gabriele Oettingen – Carol's Notebook

Author: Gabriele Oettingen

Gabriele Oettingen is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on how people think about the future, and how this impacts cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Oettingen studied biology in Munich and subsequently worked at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, Germany, and at the Medical Research Council, Unit on the Development and Integration of Behaviour, Madingley, Cambridge, England. Simultaneously she did her PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to conduct research at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. She worked at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin while also gaining a Dr. habil. degree in psychology at the Free University Berlin. She accepted a professor of psychology position at University of Hamburg in 2000, and since 2002 is a professor of psychology at New York University. She lives in New York City and in Hamburg, Germany.

I mentioned before that I've been doing The Science of Well-Being class on Coursera. Another book the professor, Laurie Santos, mentioned was Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabriele Oettingen, and she interviewed the author for one of the segments, so I picked it up. If I spend 80% of my reading this year on mysteries and being happy, I think that'll be a good year. The blurb above gives a good summation of the book. Oettingen and others have done a lot of research on wishes, how they affect our actions, and what helps us achieve or not achieve them. She shares the results of a lot of studies, mostly college kids - who are probably the easiest to recruit - but other groups too. She also shares individuals' experiences, people she's worked with through training sessions or friends. Interestingly enough, the science demonstrates that it is not necessarily helpful to fantasize about achieving some wish because it makes us feel relaxed, and thus...