Positive Psychology

A Critical Introduction

Giovanni Moneta

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350312159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Movements in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Happiness is fundamental to how we live our lives, but the meaning of happiness remains as contentious as it did when it was first debated thousands of years ago. Taking a critical approach to the subject, Positive Psychology investigates the debates that have shaped the psychological discussion of happiness, from theories of well-being to examining how psychotherapy can help foster positive mental health. Offering contrasting perspectives on each topic and examining a range of classic and contemporary research, this book encourages you to engage with positive psychology in a critical way while considering how the theory applies to our everyday lives. Whether you are new to the subject or want to develop your understanding of the complexities of the field, this lively and engaging introduction will enhance your knowledge not just of positive psychology, but of what happiness and well-being mean to you.

1 What Is Positive Psychology?

THE BIRTH OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Martin Seligman introduced the term positive psychology in his presidential address at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. He then fortuitously met Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi during a vacation in Hawaii, and together they set to provide the foundation of positive psychology as a long-term endeavour aimed at enhancing the way psychology chooses its research objectives, frames research problems, and contributes to the betterment of the human condition. In January 2000, the journal American Psychologists published an entire issue – often referred to as the ‘millennium issue’ – devoted to the theoretical foundation and research agenda of positive psychology. In the leading article, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) identified the key limitations of psychology as it emerged from the end of World War II, and outlined the directions for a renewed, ‘positive’ psychology.

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) pointed out that, before World War II, psychology had three missions: (a) understanding and curing mental disorders, (b) enhancing people productivity and sense of fulfilment, and (c) identifying talented individuals and helping them realize their potential. After the war, arguably because of the selective strategy used by research grant foundations, psychology increased its focus on the first mission and extended it to the understanding and prevention of all forms of human suffering. The key outcome variables became stress and its negative consequences to psychological and physical health. The key explanatory variables became negative environmental factors, such as disrupted families and inhumane work environments. Empirical research focused on how hostile and thwarted environments can cause stress and, in turn, psychological and physical disorder. In the study of the relationships among negative environmental factors, stress, and illness the individual tended to be considered as an essentially passive being, that is, as a mere respondent to incoming harmful stimuli.

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) contended that absence of mental disorder, albeit a positive condition, is not the best human beings could aspire to and accomplish. There is a wide range of positive psychological processes and outcomes that go beyond mere absence of illness. These positive aspects of human psychology are more easily noticed at times of catastrophe, chaos, and despair, when only some individuals manifest resilience, maintain a state of serenity, and guide others with their example. These people are definitely not passive beings: they adapt and proactively strive in the midst of challenge. These people have remarkable strengths, virtues, and resilience. If we could learn how to foster those strengths in everyone, then we would have achieved more than mere absence of mental illness. As such:

Psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best. Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger. It is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play.

(Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 7)

Finally, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi argued that the expansion of the first mission of psychology to the study of strength would also redirect psychology to its two neglected missions: enhancing people engagement and productivity and fostering talent development.

THE ORIGINS OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Positive psychology seeks the ‘better’ for human beings. What is the better? Positive psychology presents a wide range of views of the ‘better’. Nevertheless, the origin of the different views can be traced back to the classic philosophical definitions of hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. The former essentially states that the ‘better’ is a human condition characterized by happiness and pleasant emotions in the here and now, and a positive outlook on one’s own life in respect to the past, present, and future. The latter essentially states that the ‘better’ is a human condition characterized by optimal functioning, including absorption in meaningful and challenging endeavours, environmental mastery, resilience in facing challenges and setbacks, and lifelong organismic growth. Both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being can be called ‘happiness’ in everyday jargon, but they do represent relatively independent constructs. As such, hedonic and eudaimonic happiness do not necessarily co-occur in the same individual. Moreover, activities that foster one form of happiness do not necessarily foster the other form of happiness. Therefore, the definitional choice of what constitutes the ‘better’ for human beings heavily influences the strategies and techniques that different positive psychologists prescribe for the purpose of bettering the human condition.

Emotions are important for both the hedonic and the eudaimonic approach to well-being. Both definitions of the ‘better’ imply that happiness comes with abundance of positive, pleasant emotions and paucity of negative, unpleasant emotions. The difference is that, while for the hedonic approach emotions define well-being (e.g., feeling strong joy, interest, and love equates to being hedonically happy), for the eudaimonic approach emotions are a sign of well-being (e.g., feeling strong joy, interest, and love is a consequence of being eudaimonically happy). Either way emotions play a ubiquitous role in positive psychology. As such, positive psychology is grounded in a long tradition of emotion research, which classified emotions, examined their relationships, and identified their evolutionary functions.

Strengths, virtues, and resilience are all terms that refer to relatively stable characteristics of individuals, and implicitly assume that individuals differ in the extent to which they possess them. Therefore, positive psychology utilizes all the research methodologies that were developed in the field of personality psychology for the purpose of measuring state and trait variables. Moreover, all the strength constructs developed in positive psychology have some conceptual link to – and in some instances overlap considerably with – constructs that were previously studied in personality psychology. In particular, Rogers (1963) and Maslow’s (1968) phenomenological and humanistic theories of personality provided the conceptual foundation for the contemporary eudaimonic approach to well-being. As such, positive psychology is constantly interpreting its findings in relation, and sometimes in alliance with personality psychology.

The ambition of positive psychology is to change all people for the ‘better’. This raises the issue of whether there is a single ‘better’ for people from all cultures. Cross-cultural psychology began questioning the cultural invariance of personality processes and structures already in the early nineties (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 1994). Given that positive psychology and personality psychology are deeply intertwined, cross-cultural psychologists have begun questioning and testing the universality of indicators of well-being and of explanatory factors for well-being that were primarily identified on participant samples from Western cultures. Moreover, some of the key cross-cultural constructs have driven, rather then followed, numerous investigations in the field of positive psychology. As such, positive psychology is grounded in cross-cultural conceptions of how cultural values and ways to perceive the self and the others influence cognitive and emotional functioning.

THE CHILDHOOD OF POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Twelve years after the millennium issue, positive psychology has grown into a strong child. There are two peer-reviewed journals – The Journal of Positive Psychology and The Journal of Happiness Studies – entirely devoted to publishing theoretical and empirical research in the field of positive psychology. This is only the tip of the iceberg though: perusing the articles published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals spanning across different fields of psychology – including personality and social psychology, organizational psychology, and educational psychology – one can see that theories, constructs, and measurement instruments that were originally developed in the field of positive psychology are being utilized in research that is not formally labelled ‘positive psychology’. Positive psychology has thus been able to attract the attention of psychologists from all orientations, and has influenced their thinking and actions.

The fact that most of the research with a positive psychology connotation or nuance is published in ‘peripheral’ journals, and not in the two ‘core’ journals, constitutes both a threat and an opportunity. As the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1969) pointed out, core journals have the function to unite a ‘paradigmatic’ field of science, by providing a unified and coherent picture of what belongs to the field and what is external to it, including the topics to be dealt with in research, the methodologies that should be used, and the values that should guide the research endeavour and the interpretation of its results. As such, a key threat to positive psychology is that researchers who publish mostly in peripheral journals – and hence are not fully fledged positive psychologists – may with their work drive the field of positive psychology away from the ground that is agreed upon by the body of fully fledged positive psychologists. In turn, this external threat also constitutes a unique opportunity for positive psychology to grow in the direction of non-obvious research findings and applications.

Positive psychology is also facing threats and opportunities from within. The most obvious divide is the difference in the hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to what constitutes the ‘better’ for the human condition. Yet, this only is the tip of the iceberg: there are different emphases and areas within positive psychology, and these differences are so big that one wonders whether positive psychology is a coherent field of psychology or just a mishmash of views. As such, a key threat to positive psychology is that its internal divisions will prevent it from becoming what Kuhn (1969) called a fully fledged ‘paradigm’, that is a conceptually clear and coherent domain of knowledge that is managed effectively by a body of recognized experts and their institutions. In turn, this internal threat also constitutes a unique opportunity for positive psychology to become more far reaching and complex before ‘crystallizing’ into a stable paradigm.

Finally, positive psychology is facing both opportunities and threats from politics. Various national governments have developed a keen interest in positive psychology and launched exploratory research programmes aimed at promoting national well-being. For example, the British Government led by Prime Minister David Cameron has commissioned the Office of National Statistics to develop and administer a survey to measure national happiness (e.g., Cohen, 2011), and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had commissioned a team of researchers to develop an index of citizens’ happiness that could be combined with Gross Domestic Product to create a more comprehensive and satisfactory index of the well-being of nations (e.g., Easterly, 2011). These developments are a key opportunity for positive psychology to become more visible to the general public and to receive more research funding. In turn, this opportunity comes with a risk of seeing the concepts and theories of positive psychology translated into a wide range of administrative languages that might distort their original meaning and eventually lead to policies and practices that run against the agenda of positive psychology as we know it today.

THE GOAL OF THIS BOOK: FINDING AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

What, then, is positive psychology? As Alex Linley and co-workers (2006) put it, if you were to ask ten positive psychologists you would probably receive ten different answers. Taking this as a matter of fact, the only wise answer is to ask the reader of this book – you – to find the answer by yourself. This book was written to help you find the answer.

This book tries to accomplish its goal using three strategies. First, it proposes a unifying picture of the field of positive psychology organized by major topics, where each topic is dealt with in a separate and nearly self-contained chapter. Second, each topic-chapter presents approaches that differ in theoretical perspective, language, and research methods over and above the mere difference between the hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to well-being: seeing diverse arguments in close proximity is designed to help the reader detect, process, and possibly resolve controversies. Third, the review of the literature presents a balance of classic, root sources and recent sources: this is designed to help readers decide for themselves whether recent contributions to the field of positive psychology have an incremental value or are just a camouflaged repeat of what was said or found before in other fields of psychology.

A final note on criticism. Finding an answer to the question ‘what is positive psychology?’ requires critical thinking. Critical thinking is valued universally because it is the propeller of engagement in the subject matter, learning, and eventually scientific progress, but it comes at a price: negative emotions. Nobody likes to be criticized, and those who criticize typically do so because they are somewhat dissatisfied with what they read. As such, the reader of a critical introduction like the present one is bound to experience some level – hopefully moderate – of negative emotions. The reason for accepting such a reading mission is ‘no pain, no gain’, where the gain is engagement in the subject matter and learning. I hope that in reading this book your gain will largely exceed your pain.

THE NARRATED ROADMAP OF THIS BOOK

Overview

Every book that is designed both for independent reading and as support for teaching, such as this one, is reviewed by a number of anonymous referees who are experts in the subject matter and are actively involved in teaching it at undergraduate and/or graduate levels. A referee commented that, although each chapter could be read independently of the others, it would be better to read the whole book sequentially, from start to end, particularly if the reader is new to the field of positive psychology. Another referee added that, because some of the chapters are extensive and intellectually challenging, it would be good to provide some advance guidance to the reader.

This book is made of this introductory chapter (Chapter 1), a concluding chapter (Chapter 9), and seven intermediate, substantive chapters (Chapters 2–8). The first five substantive chapters tackle the core theoretical concepts of the field of positive psychology: the definitions and measures of well-being (Chapter 2), the workings of the self in seeking well-being (Chapter 3), the personality traits that foster or hinder well-being (Chapter 4), the set of dynamic variables – such as optimism and metacognition – that influence well-being and are potentially amenable to change (Chapter 5), and the key optimal state – flow – that fosters both achievement and well-being (Chapter 6). As a set, these theoretical chapters focus on the theoretical debates, empirical tests, and theoretical developments that have made positive psychology a distinct field of psychological research.

The remaining substantive chapters focus on applications of positive psychology to the real world: relations with partners, relations with work, and relations with children (Chapter 7), and psychotherapy (Chapter 8). These applied chapters are incl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. What Is Positive Psychology?
• 2. Positive Emotions and Well-Being
• 3. Positive Self
• 4. Positive Traits
• 5. Optimism and Self-Regulation of Emotions
• 6. Flow
• 7. Positive Relationships
• 8. Positive Therapy
• 9. Future Directions in Positive Psychology
• References
• Index