Positive psychology: Its sources and contents
In 1998, when Martin Seligman was elected as the president of the American Psychology Association (APA) he extended a clarion call to psychology to focus on wellbeing and happiness as it does on pathology and psychological disorder (Seligman, 1999). The stream of psychological accent that followed is referred to as ‘positive psychology’. This is not a new school of psychology but only a new movement. It draws its sources from the history of psychology; and its interests are similar to that of humanistic psychology, but it differs sharply from it in that positive psychology embraces an empirical approach. It is the focus on existential questions with an empirical grounding that makes positive psychology unique (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 13; see also Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001).
For a long time, psychology was focused on understanding, treating and preventing psychological disorder. The positive psychology movement challenges this focus on a disease model of human nature, without denying the existence of human problems. It invites scholars and therapists to direct their efforts towards the study of positive affect, happiness and wellbeing. Positive psychology sees happiness or wellbeing as an outcome of a pleasant life: “pursuit of positive emotions about the present, past and future”, engaged life: “using your strengths and virtues to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of life”, and meaningful life: “use of your strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are” (Seligman, 2003, p.127). These three contributing factors to wellbeing have an internal hierarchy. That is, due to heritability and habituation (Bartels & Boomsma, 2009; Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978), pleasures do not consistently contribute to happiness as much as meaningful life does. At still another level, meaningful life provides life satisfaction, gratification and wellbeing. Good life, which is a combination of engaged life and meaningful life, is also understood in the Aristotelian sense of ‘eudemonia’- doing and living well. In the recent years, positive psychology has begun to explore wellbeing and happiness in the parlance of Greek philosophical terminology of hedonia and eudaimonia (Deci & Ryan, 2008). While hedonia refers to those aspects of wellbeing that arises from pleasure oriented activities, eudaimonia refers to fulfilment of our potential as human beings. Furthermore, positive psychology literature makes some distinction between psychological wellbeing, social wellbeing, and emotional wellbeing (Keyes & Lopez, 2002).
Watch VIDEO1: What is positive psychology?
Watch VIDEO2: Seligman’s presentation at TED.
DOWNLOAD CLASSNOTES PDF: PP 1 Introduction
READING MATERIAL
Gable, S. L., & Haidt, J. (2005). What (and why) is positive psychology? Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 103-110.
Seligman, M. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14.
Friedman, H. (2008). Humanistic and positive psychology: The methodological and epistemological divide. Humanistic Psychologist, 36(2), 113-126.