Hello! Read on if you want to know more about me. In short, I'm a positively minded social-personality psychologist pursuing peace. 

My name is Anjali Mishra. My early life was spent in New Delhi, India until age 18 after which I went to the United States in 2003. My thinking and ideas tend to reveal this perfectly balanced bicultural background. I completed my undergraduate degree in Psychology at George Mason University with an Honors project that initiated my research interests. After independently working with a community sample of older adults as an undergraduate researcher and as a team on other lab projects, I continued with research at University of California, Davis from 2007 to 2013 through my PhD. My early years in academia were strongly shaped by positive psychology. As an undergraduate, I found much encouragement to continue with my research, apparent by accolades such as the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award-Honorable Mention and The Psychology Senior of the Year Award, both received in 2006.

 

At UC Davis, I conducted several longitudinal studies on gratitude, well-being, and the psychological benefits of writing. My dissertation title was ‘Gratitude and Coping: Writing about the perceived benefits of stressful life events. Though I’m not a quantitative minor, I kept myself informed about state-of-the-art analysis and measurement by attending six statistics courses in graduate school. After 2013, my main focus was the teaching of psychology. Teaching gave me the interactive space to exercise research ideas in the form of class activities, some of which will be shared today as well. So far, I have taught 60 psychology classes, mostly across the United States at institutions including UC Davis, Northern Arizona University, James Madison University, and Hanover College. 

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From 2019 to 2021, I was at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution located in Arlington, Virginia. Knowledge from this discipline gave me the much-needed perspective to complete my previously limited worldview shaped mainly by positive psychology and social-personality psychology. The impact of real-world problems and conflicts became much more visible to me as a result of this learning. My understanding of social psychological barriers enhanced, and I was able to envision the value of positive psychological approaches in conflict and resolution facilitation settings. The consolidation of academic knowledge of my past decade found proper voice when attempting to answer the engaging and thought-provoking questions studied as part of this interdisciplinary field.

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You'd be able to gather from my posts over time how I was not particularly academically interested during my childhood years and became genuinely focused by my mid-teenage years, so much so that I went from being the second last in my class in 9th grade to being a topper in a related subject after 2 years (I was made to stand up due to failing in Social Studies and applauded in the same exact classroom, a bizarre story of pure coincidence I'll tell sometime later).  Until my early teens, I was mainly engaged in extracurricular activities, which is what helped me a lot later in life when I faced life in all shapes and forms. I'm a firm believer in hard work, perseverance, and discipline shaping life strongly. My early experiences help me aid my students whenever they might be struggling or feel despair academically. 

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Currently, I'm an Assistant Professor of Psychology at FLAME University, Pune, Maharashtra, India. 

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The purpose of this blog is to share intellectual and any life-shaping ideas that come to my mind, in an informal way, to make the world a better place.

 

 

 

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