INTRODUCTION
POSITIVITY
Positivity is freely available to us to improve and bless our lives. Although positive thinking is part of this message, the concept of positivity is far more powerful and profound than just thought. The joy, the wonder, the sparkle, the hope, and the inspiration of positivity will change your life for the better. And we all need it! Stress and bad news abounds. Our beautiful world seems on the edge of disastrous global warming, ceaseless wars and economic peril. Don't look to newscasters for loving or charitable words. Sensationalism and hatemongering seem to be the new norm.
We know that love, social cooperation and all the positive emotions do make us feel good, so why aren't we all living in blissful happiness? As Fredrickson points out, positivity is more fleeting and transient than negativity. Negative emotions have their root in the fight and flight syndrome, necessary when we face danger but producing chronic stress when continuously activated by the problems of modern life. The skill we must learn is to actively let go of our negative reactions as soon as possible and reach out to positive emotions. That may mean putting aside, as soon as possible, our frustration, anger, blame, bitterness and depression and actively focusing on the positive side of life. The HeartMath skill of breathing peace and love into the heart, is extremely helpful in making this transition. Fredrickson describes the "positively ratio" as the "amount of your heartfelt positivity relative to the amount of your heart-wrenching negativity."

ATTITUDE
Changes in attitudes across time are considered to be the result of three general processes: generation (or cohort) replacement, life-cycle (or age), and period effects. Generation replacement represents changes in the attitudes at the level of the nation that occur not because individuals change, but because the attitudes of older, dying generations are being superseded by the attitudes of the young. It is a process of change that is relevant to attitudes that we develop as part of our early socialization, and that remain fairly fixed across the rest of the life course.
Differences in the attitudes between generations are a result of growing up in different times. A good example is religious affiliation. Most people develop a faith very early in life and whilst life events can mean that this faith feels stronger at some times than others, it generally remains constant throughout the life course. However, because new generations are being born into an increasingly secularized world, religious affiliation is in a steady decline. This type of change is also known as inter-individual change as it describes change that occurs as a result of differences between individuals.
Alternatively, change in attitudes can be intra-individual, occurring because the attitudes of individuals change. This can be as a result of a specific event, for example as happened during the late 1980s when, as a nation, we became less tolerant of homosexual relationships following the AIDS epidemic. The type of intra-individual change described above is called a period effect because changes in attitude are a result of the context (or period) in which people are living. There is however another kind of intra-individual change that relates to a person’s age. This change is termed an age effect, or more appropriately a life-cycle effect, because it is a change that relates to reaching or passing through different stages in the life course. This could include entering the world of work, paying taxes, getting married (or not), buying a house, having children (or not), retiring and so on.
Whilst these three general processes describe changing attitudes over time, in truth, changes that occur across society are often a combination of generational, period and life-cycle processes. Changes that are associated with new stages in the life course will always be situated in a particular context or period and will also be shaped by the period in which a person grew up. Quite often it has been the task of the researcher to try to identify which of these three processes is the dominant driver of change.
On an issue like homosexuality, which most often is asking about the way ‘other people’ live their lives, the effect of a more secular and individualized world is that we have become more tolerant of other people’s choices. This shows up in the research as a combination of a period and generational effect. Barring outside shocks such as the AIDS crisis, we would expect attitudes to continue to change in a more liberal direction.
Attitudes to divorce and marriage may be closer to home – the majority of people have personal experience of intimate relationships. Perhaps this is why changes in attitudes in this area are more a case of life-cycle effects as individuals move into the age brackets where they are themselves forming and dissolving relationships.
The case of cohabiting parents is a complex combination of these. There are strong generational effects as we would expect for an ‘other people’s lives’ issue. But there are also complicated overlays of life-cycle effects, older individuals, who notably held the most conservative views on parenthood and marriage, were the most likely to change their views on this issue over time. As the number of children born to unmarried parents grows, the personal experience of becoming a grandparent of a child in a cohabiting household might be leading older people to take a more liberal view on this issue.
In the case of care of the elderly, there seems to be a period effect of a growing realization of the need to care for one’s parents – perhaps an ‘other people’ type attitude in the sense that it is the principle of caring for ones parents that has seen an improvement over time. This apparent increase in altruism however is counteracted by those in the age groups that are actually providing the care, suggesting again that life-cycle effects are more important when the experience is personal.