Positive Psychology

The Science of Well-Being

John Zelenski

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526485311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Positive Psychology brings together a range of research and a comprehensive review of the more recent work and lessons learned since the founder's original vision of this field. Organised into five sections: An Introduction, Positive Experiences, Personality Processes, External Influences, and Applications, this text provides a thorough introduction to an interesting and challenging area in Psychology. With a final look at the future of Positive Psychology, and its potential to inform social change and how useful this knowledge can be when considering the well-being of entire societies, this text is an enlightening read and invaluable resources for students.

Strongly guided by empirical work this text encourages the reader to think critically and go beyond the facts.

Key features:

• Provides a framework for teaching and understanding global trends in Positive Psychology.
• Inclusion and a review of up-to-date research.
• Using storytelling and happiness's intrinsic appeal to foster interest in the methods we use to answer important questions in Positive Psychology.
• Online resources including student self-tests, and links to additional web content.

Part I Introduction

1 Describing the Science of Positive Psychology

Introduction

Imagine you wake up to a new day, have a small breakfast, and then open your web browser to see the headline “Government begins adjusting tax policy to maximize happiness”. How would you react? Whether it’s along the lines of “Impossible – they’ll have no money” or more “It’s about time!”, that headline is becoming increasingly likely. Leaving aside the specifics of tax policy, many countries’ governments now want to measure citizens’ happiness. They are working with social scientists to develop national indicators of well-being, and a core component of these measurements will involve asking people how happy they feel.

For example, in 2010 UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that government would begin measuring the happiness of its citizens (Stratton, 2010). The idea is that this would provide a useful tool in developing government policy. With these data, the UK Office for National Statistics noted a small increase in happiness over 2013, and some suggested that hosting the Olympics in London might have contributed to this (BBC News, 2013). The UK’s happiness index is similar to Bhutan’s long popularized measure of gross national happiness (see Musikanski, 2014). Such measures are often justified by contrasting them with economic indicators. Governments have long relied on economic data to make decisions. As one example of an economic indicator, gross domestic product is the full sum of a country’s economic activity. It is carefully assessed, and its changes are frequently reported in the media. However, as American Robert Kennedy (1968) articulated in a moving speech at the University of Kansas, “it measures everything … except that which makes life worth living”. It

does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country …

Kennedy was describing a limitation of economic indicators. Although they are meant to measure (at least proxies of) progress and quality of life, they do it in a way that leaves important gaps because they focus on money. There may always be ineffable aspects of human nature that resist quantification, but governments are now assessing ‘the things that matter’ more broadly by asking people how happy they are. The idea is that by measuring well-being more directly, societies can adjust policies to increase it. This argument has rapidly gained popularity over the last few years.

Kennedy’s speech is over 50 years old, and its sentiments can be traced back even further. Then why do we see countries beginning to take national happiness indicators seriously now? The answer to that question takes us to a beach in Hawaii, a fitting setting for the beginnings of the positive psychology movement. On this beach, two influential psychologists had a chance meeting while on holiday with their families: Martin Seligman, who was well known for research on learned helplessness in dogs and then learned optimism with people, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose distinctive name is nearly synonymous with work on the state of total absorption known as flow. As he later recounted (Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2011), the two began talking about the future of psychology, and found common ground in thinking that it could become broader or, specifically, more positive. They noted that mainstream psychology seemed to focus on mental illness, maladaptive behaviour, irrationality, prejudice, aggression, and so on, but that much less work focused on happiness, optimal performance, and exceptional abilities.

Professors often have lofty conversations like this, and most of them achieve few tangible results. This conversation was an exception. Seligman was about to become president of the American Psychological Association, a large and powerful organization of researchers, teachers, practitioners, and students in the USA. With the prominence of the APA presidency, the resources of that organization, and a tremendous amount of skill and effort, musings on a Hawaiian beach became a force for change in psychology; they hatched the positive psychology movement.

A detailed history of how this was accomplished is probably not the best way to tempt students into this fascinating area of psychology, so I will keep it brief. In a nutshell, Seligman and Csiksenztmihalyi began by contacting prominent psychologists and asking them to nominate young ‘rising stars’ who might be interested in the movement. They selected a group of promising scholars and, at a luxurious resort in Akumal, Mexico, together developed a manifesto that provided an initial definition of positive psychology. It described positive psychology as being about optimal human functioning, and it created a roadmap for implementing the new movement (see www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/opportunities/conference-archives). This involved putting the ‘political’ machinery of psychology into action, for example with special issues of journals, research funding, lucrative research prizes, networks of scholars who promoted each other’s work, and so on. The early days of the positive psychology movement are represented by special issues of the prominent journal American Psychologist, first with a series of articles by senior researchers in January 2000, and then by more junior researchers in March 2001.

Undergraduate and graduate courses in positive psychology began to appear, along with webpages, handbooks, and textbooks. (For a more critical history, see also Yen, 2010.) Undoubtedly, the current popularity and scope of positive psychology owe much to the US movement that took shape at the turn of the millennium. Yet the content of positive psychology has a much longer, broader, and more international history. The movement collected and highlighted previous research on positive topics, while also generating a burst of new studies and applications (Rusk & Waters, 2013). But we are getting ahead of ourselves. What is this positive psychology anyway?

Defining Positive Psychology

Cramming a comprehensive description of an entire sub-discipline into a single sentence is unlikely to succeed, and this is certainly true with positive psychology. Many definitions have been proposed; after searching publications on positive psychology, Hart and Sasso (2011) assembled a collection 53 definitions! For our purposes, positive psychology is the parts of psychology that deal with (positive) experiences, dispositions, contexts, and processes, in individuals and groups, that facilitate well-being, achievement, and harmony. To unpack this a bit, psychology is the science (i.e. research) of mental life and behaviour, and the application of that knowledge (e.g. in therapy, personnel selection, policy recommendations). Psychology is about people’s thoughts, feeling, social interactions, habits, dispositions, responses to environments, and so on, and understanding how these develop and change over time, their physiological correlates, and their associations with health or lack thereof. Positive psychology is the positive parts (topics or perspectives) within this enterprise. This sounds simple enough, but things become more complex when we take time to consider what we mean by ‘positive’ – it can be understood in many different ways. Our working definition uses the terms ‘well-being’ (health and happiness broadly), ‘achievement’ (success, fulfilment), and ‘harmony’ (considering individuals, groups, and environments) as shorthand clarifications, but there is much more to consider.

It is probably impossible to come up with a set of ‘necessary and sufficient’ criteria that provide an ironclad definition of positive psychology. We will explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and some seem clearly better than others. Nonetheless, it is probably best to view positive psychology as made up of things that have a ‘family resemblance’ (cf. Mervis & Rosch, 1981). With some thought and practice, you will be able to identify topics that are part of the positive psychology family, even if you cannot come up with a single rule that is distinctive and applies to each. This is not uncommon. For example, think of the category ‘bird’. We might think of defining birds as creatures that fly, but penguins and kiwis do not fit. We might think that only birds have feathers, but then so did some dinosaurs, so the feathers rule seems overly inclusive. It is not essential that we define pos...