This is a resource that you can use online or in class. It is a great way to start a conversation with a student on the importance of just living for today.

The goal of this exercise is to explore the ways in which age, social integration, and well-being are related.

This resource provides access to the Northern California Training Academy's annual reports dating back to 2008.

This resource provides access to the Northern California Training Academy's Core for Social Workers Module 7 training materials. To learn more about the Academy, please visit humanservices.ucdavis.edu/academy.

Emotions don’t just feel good or bad, they also contribute crucially to people’s well-being and health. In general, experiencing positive emotions is good for us, whereas experiencing negative emotions is bad for us. However, recent research on emotions and well-being suggests this simple conclusion is incomplete and sometimes even wrong. Taking a closer look at this research, the present module provides a more complex relationship between emotion and well-being. At least three aspects of the emotional experience appear to affect how a given emotion is linked with well-being: the intensity of the emotion experienced, the fluctuation of the emotion experienced, and the context in which the emotion is experienced. While it is generally good to experience more positive emotion and less negative emotion, this is not always the guide to the good life.

This resource provides access to tips, tools, practice briefs, videos and courses relate to family time coaching in the field of child welfare and was compiled specifically for Northern California counties by the Northern California Training Academy. To learn more about the Academy, please visit www.humanservices.ucdavis.edu/academy

Subjective well-being (SWB) is the scientific term for happiness and life satisfaction—thinking and feeling that your life is going well, not badly. Scientists rely primarily on self-report surveys to assess the happiness of individuals, but they have validated these scales with other types of measures. People’s levels of subjective well-being are influenced by both internal factors, such as personality and outlook, and external factors, such as the society in which they live. Some of the major determinants of subjective well-being are a person’s inborn temperament, the quality of their social relationships, the societies they live in, and their ability to meet their basic needs. To some degree people adapt to conditions so that over time our circumstances may not influence our happiness as much as one might predict they would. Importantly, researchers have also studied the outcomes of subjective well-being and have found that “happy” people are more likely to be healthier and live longer, to have better social relationships, and to be more productive at work. In other words, people high in subjective well-being seem to be healthier and function more effectively compared to people who are chronically stressed, depressed, or angry. Thus, happiness does not just feel good, but it is good for people and for those around them.

Our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors play an important role in our health. Not only do they influence our day-to-day health practices, but they can also influence how our body functions. This module provides an overview of health psychology, which is a field devoted to understanding the connections between psychology and health. Discussed here are examples of topics a health psychologist might study, including stress, psychosocial factors related to health and disease, how to use psychology to improve health, and the role of psychology in medicine.

The educational materials "Future Ready: Financial Literacy" provide an overview of influences on health choices, emphasizing the impact of family, friends, culture, media, and technology. It encourages critical thinking, self-perception, and the creation of personal mission statements. The materials also highlight the importance of embracing natural appearance and being conscientious of media consumption for overall well-being.

Today the NIEHS is expanding and accelerating its contributions to scientific knowledge of human health and the environment, and to the health and well-being of people everywhere. It provides the following databases & galleries as resources to scientists: The Alu Pairs Database, The Biomarkers of Oxidative Stress Study (BOSS), Chemical Effects in Biological Systems(CEBS), The Drug Matrix, The Environmental Genome Project, The Environmental Polymorphisms Registry, The Human DNA Polymerase Gamma Mutation, The Microarray Center cDNA Clone Search, Mouse Genome Resequencing Project, The Nanomaterial Registry, The Roadmap Epigenomics Project Data, The SNPinfo Web Server and the Spin Trap Database.

This resource provides access to each edition of the Northern California Training Academy's child welfare practice journal Reaching Out.

The relationships we cultivate in our lives are essential to our well-being—namely, happiness and health. Why is that so? We begin to answer this question by exploring the types of relationships—family, friends, colleagues, and lovers—we have in our lives and how they are measured. We also explore the different aspects of happiness and health, and show how the quantity and quality of relationships can affect our happiness and health.

This resource provides a look at various publications concerning social worker health and wellness.

The following training videos are dedicated to helping child welfare workers learn practical skills to cope with the emotional tolls of their very important work. Throughout this series, child welfare workers will learn about the dynamics of secondary traumatic stress, self-care strategies, and a framework for coping with secondary trauma.

Use this resource to support student personal reflection, community building, and mental health.  Online and in-person courses can use this resource.

This is an OER textbook for Positive Psychology. It takes an historical approach and includes a section on areas in which a positive approach to psychology is most needed (e.g., the field of disability studies).

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Communication is key to business. If employees don’t communicate ideas or point out problems, organizations can struggle to improve efficiency and offer innovative products and services. That’s why leaders and organizations often encourage workers to voice their ideas and perspectives. If employees speak up and express their ideas and opinions, the thinking goes, then they’re not remaining silent about other problems or concerns. It turns out, that’s not the case. In an Academy of Management Journal paper, researchers analyzed multiple studies involving thousands of employees to understand the link between voice (how often employees volunteer constructive ideas or issues at work) and silence (the extent to which they intentionally withhold ideas or issues). The conclusion was that the two behaviors were virtually independent. The research found that voice and silence are driven by different psychological factors..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies, Christy Wenger argues for the inclusion of Eastern-influenced contemplative education within writing studies. She observes that, although we have "embodied" writing education in general by discussing the rhetorics of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies, we have done substantially less to address the particular bodies that occupy our classrooms. She proposes that we turn to contemplative education practices that engages student bodies through fusing a traditional curriculum with contemplative practices including yoga, meditation, and the martial arts. Drawing strength from the recent "quiet revolution" (Zajonc) of contemplative pedagogy within postsecondary education and a legacy of field interest attributable to James Moffett, this project draws on case studies of first-year college writers to present contemplative pedagogy as a means of teaching students mindfulness of their writing and learning in ways that promote the academic, rhetorical work accomplished in first-year composition classes while at the same time remaining committed to a larger scope of a writer's physical and emotional well-being.