)The $11 billion self-help industry is built on the idea that you should turn negative thoughts like “I never do anything right” into positive ones like “I can succeed” But was positive thinking advocate Norman Vincent Peale right Is there power in positive thinkingResearchers in Canada just published a study in the journal Psychological Science that says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they areThe study’s authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin by citing older research showing that when people get feedback which they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better If you tell your depressed friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, you’re just underlining his faults In one 1990s experiment, a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write essays opposing funding for the disabled When the essayists were later praised for their sympathy, they felt even worse about what they had writtenIn this experiment, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students’ self-esteem The participants were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes Every 15 seconds, one group of students heard a bell When it rang, they were supposed to tell themselves, “I am lovable”Those with low self-esteem didn’t feel better after the forced self-approval In fact, their moods turned significantly darker than those of members of the control group, who weren’t urged to think positive thoughtsThe paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than fight them In the fighting, we not only often fail but can make things worse Meditation (静思) techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective Call it the power of negative thinking(1)What do we learn from the first paragraph about the self-help industry ( )