The Wiley Handbook of Positive Clinical Psychology

Alex M. Wood, Judith Johnson, Alex M. Wood, Judith Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118468227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie clinique

Edited by the founder of the field, this is the first handbook on positive clinical psychology—a revolutionary approach that places equal importance on both the positive and negative aspects of mental health and well-being.

• The first handbook on positive clinical psychology, a revolutionary approach that places equal importance on the positive and negative aspects of mental health and well-being
• Brings together new work from authorities in positive psychology and clinical psychology to offer an integrated examination of well-being as it relates to personality, psychopathology, psychological treatments, and more
• Discusses theory, research, and practice across a broad range of topics such as optimism, positive affect, well-being therapy, childhood well-being, evolutionary perspectives, and clinical implementation
• Contains essential information for researchers, instructors and practitioners in clinical psychology, positive psychology, mental health, and well-being in general

Part I
Developing a Positive Clinical Psychology

1
Positive Clinical Psychology: An Introduction

Alex M. Wood and Judith Johnson

Positive Clinical Psychology (PCP) is not new. As shown in chapters throughout this book, clinical psychology has a long history of incorporating the positive into clinical practice. From Maslow (1954) onward there have been calls to change clinical psychology to focus more on the positive in life, and even the term “positive clinical psychology” has been used in the past (see, e.g., Duckworth, Steen, & Seligman, 2005; Maddux, Chapter 2, this volume). What is new is the movement from wise but isolated calls, often from outside clinical psychology, to a real impetus for change from within. PCP is built around a clearly defined shared set of aims that are increasingly considered mainstream within the field. We set out our mission statement in a special issue of Clinical Psychology Review (Wood & Tarrier, 2010, as clarified in Johnson & Wood, in press). This has proved seminal to the acceptance in mainstream clinical psychology of calls to increase a focus on the “positive” alongside the “negative.” PCP, as we envision it, aims to change the discipline of clinical psychology into one “which has an integrated and equally weighted focus on both positive and negative functioning in all areas of research and practice” (Wood & Tarrier, 2010, p. 819). The distinctive feature of PCP is the emphasis on integration; PCP points out the illogicality and impossibility of studying only the “positive” or the “negative” in clinical psychology (or for that matter, in any discipline), and it seeks to better integrate research and practice toward a joint focus on both. We are staggered by how much this message has resonated amongst clinical psychologists in the last six years, including the expert contributors for this book, to whom we are very grateful for enthusiastically contributing outstanding chapters. This Handbook, the first of its kind, represents the culmination of six years of increasing acceptance of PCP. It is built on decades of scholarship from the contributors to this book and others, without whom the development of PCP would not be possible.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the development of PCP and to overview the empirical and theoretical evidence as to why the movement is needed. This burgeoning area seeks to draw together the two fields of Positive Psychology and Clinical Psychology, which have generally developed independently of each other despite many convergences in research foci and aims. We suggest that further integration between positive and clinical psychologies could serve to advance the research, knowledge, goals, and practice of both. Our hope is that this book can contribute to this endeavor. We have been overawed by the responses we received from authors we approached to write on this topic for the book, each leaders in their field. As such, the book represents a bringing together of expert clinical psychologists, keen to consider how a recognition of the positive relates to their work, and the expert positive psychologists, keen to integrate their research with the wider clinical research base and move towards a PCP.

The Historical Development of Positive Clinical Psychology

Prior to the Second World War, psychology had the key aim of curing distress and fostering optimal functioning (see Linley, Joseph, Harrington, & Wood, 2006). In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was an urgent need within war-torn countries to explain and address the psychological distress and trauma that the war had created. Within clinical psychology, there was a renewed focus on curing distress, particularly that related to trauma (later known as post-traumatic stress disorder). Within social psychology, there was a focus on such topics as conformity that aimed to explain why the atrocities associated with the war had occurred. This was all valuable, and much needed, but it had two undesired side effects. First, it led to an over-focusing of psychology on distress and dysfunction. Second, and potentially more seriously, it led to distress and dysfunction becoming viewed as a discrete subject of enquiry, rather than as part of a broader enquiry into the full continuum of human functioning. In the United States, this process was accelerated by the development of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1947 (which exclusively focused on ill health) and the Veterans’ Administration in 1949. Both organizations funded excellent research and treatment, but by providing financial incentives (e.g., research grants) to study the dysfunctional side of the mental ill-health continuum, there was perhaps too much encouragement for researchers to focus on these topics. Furthermore, the tendency of academics to teach in their areas of research is likely to have led this focus upon poor mental health and distress to be transferred to their students. As such, it can be seen how well-meaning and valuable funding into distress led to new generations of psychologists viewing the discipline of psychology as one focused upon maladaptive, rather than adaptive, functioning. As Abraham Maslow warned over half a century ago:

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side. It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illness, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology has voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that, the darker, meaner half. (Maslow, 1954, p. 354)

This situation largely persisted throughout the latter half of twentieth century. A concerted attempt to reintroduce the “positive” into psychology arose from the positive psychology movement initiated by the American Psychological Association (APA) President Martin Seligman, with his joint special issue and the accompanying influential editorial (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). This, and the ensuing movement, had a huge impact on psychology in a very short space of time, with millions of dollars in funding, the development of new psychotherapeutic techniques, specialist masters courses across the world, and several special issues of journals and handbooks (see Linley et al., 2006). A quantitative bibliometric analysis (Rusk & Waters, 2013) charted the growth of positive psychology, showing that 18,000 papers linked to positive psychology topics have been published, and that there has been a steady year-on-year increase in the number of publications. In their 2011 census year, there were 2,300 papers published, representing 4% of those indexed by the representative PsychInfo® database. If these papers were classed together as a field, they would be at the median of disciplines indexed in the Journal Citation Reports®, and the 2011 impact factor would be 2.64, showing that the number of citations to the papers would respectably rank amongst other academic fields. The increase in number of papers was seen in each field in which the papers were published, including psychology (and all sub-areas), psychiatry, sports science, business, and management. This quantitative analysis showed that positive psychology can no longer be considered a minority or fringe endeavor.

The uncontroversial message from positive psychology was that psychology (and other fields) must consider the positive as well as the negative. The movement can be credited with raising the profile of topics that are considered “positive,” and making them as likely to receive funding and to be published as those considered “negative.” However, in the intervening years since the initial rush of enthusiasm, and despite the ever-growing impact of the field, the wider field of psychology has arguably become somewhat ambivalent about positive psychology (see Wood, et al., in press), and many critical pieces have been written against the movement (e.g., Bohart, 2002; Lazarus, 2003; Tennen & Affleck, 2003; Held, 2004; Coyne & Tennen, 2010; Coyne, Tennen, & Ranchor, 2010).

Perhaps one reason for this ambivalence within wider psychology relates to the movement’s lack of clear aims. The most distinguishable goal of the movement was that psychology should focus more upon the positive, a message which most psychologists endorsed. However, this perhaps led to a growing tension between those who wanted to integrate the study of the positive and the negative, and those who wanted to create a separatist field of positive psychology. Notably, Rusk’s and Water’s (2013) bibliometric analysis focused on papers on positive psychology topics, but many of these would not have been self-identified as “positive psychology”; they were just seen by the authors as “psychology.” The growth of the study of positive psychology topics is undeniable. The nature of the “movement,” whether there is even still a movement, the aims of this movement, and its consequences are more controversial. A separation (not often made by critics) needs to be clearly made between the research on topics associated with positive psychology (which, other than isolated examples, attract no more criticism than other areas of psychology) and a possible straw man of a positive psychology movement. It is on the latter most criticisms have been leveled.

The critical narrative around the positive psychology movement often seems to be dominated by concerns of separatism, with “positive” research and interventions sometimes seen to be developing in isolation from the wider literature. It could be argued that this branding of positive approaches within “positive psychology” helped to raise their profile and served to highlight the importance of their study. However, we would suggest that any separation between positive psychology and other fields – particularly from clinical psychology – comes at the cost of the advancement of each. Both positive and clinical psychology research psychological treatments, often in similar groups (e.g., those with depression), but sometimes independently and without either fully recognizing or utilizing the findings of the other. In failing to acknowledge the full influence from clinical psychology research, the positive psychology movement has failed to fulfil its full potential to influence clinical psychology in return. PCP aims to address these concerns through transforming the discipline of clinical psychology into one that equally studies and intervenes in topics branded as “positive” or “negative.” It is designed to utilize the great scholarship within positive psychology to the full effect within clinical psychology by making it inseparably a part of the fabric of the field.

The development of PCP is also aimed to help positive psychology research more broadly by making it accessible to new audiences and addressing some of the previous criticisms. Perhaps if there had been a greater focus on the message of those within positive psychology movement seeking to integrate positive with the negative (e.g., Joseph & Linley, 2006a,b), then greater advances would already have been made toward building a more holistic psychology. The danger that the positive psychology movement faces is that it will be dominated by a different separatist message, the content of which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part I: Developing a Positive Clinical Psychology
• Part II: Personality and Individual Differences
• Part III: Disorders
• Part IV: Positive Psychology Interventions in Clinical Practice
• Part V: Reinterpreting Existing Therapies
• Index
• End User License Agreement