positive psychology part one

Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly & Seligman, E., P., Martin.  (2000)  Positive psychology:  An introduction.  American Psychologist.  55(1).

Positive Psychology: An Introduction

The goal of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in the focus of psychopathology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities.  Prior to World War II, there were three distinct missions of psychology.  These were curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent.

After WWII, the focus shifted towards curing mental illness (largely due to monetary distribution), and human beings were seen more as passive foci, experiencing external stimuli that elicited various responses.  As such, the disease model of psychology was formed, making it a scientific field focused on solving disorders; here, the second two goals of improving the lives of all people and identifying and nurturing genius were secondary at best.

A prominent researcher of the time, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, was troubled with such an attitude.  In his opinion, the science of human beings needed to understand both what was and what could be; psychology needed to be more than the study of pathology, weakness, and damage, but also the study of strength and virtue.  As it became clear that the disease model of psychology was not progressing towards prevention, there was a shift towards building competency rather than correcting weaknesses.  Certain buffers, including courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work-ethic, hope, honesty, and perseverance, seemed to mediate mental illness, fueling a movement intent on amplifying strengths rather than repairing weaknesses.

The resulting shift saw individuals as decision-makers with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, as well as helpless and hopeless.  This movement served to restore psychology's briefly forgotten goals of making normal people stronger and more productive and actualizing high human potential.  Within this framework, the field of positive psychology began to flourish.

Positive psychology essentially consists of three guiding elements.  On the subjective level, the focus is on valued subjective experiences, which include well-being, contentment, satisfaction, hope and optimism, and the capacity for flow and happiness.  From a personal perspective, it is about positive personal traits such as capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom.  At a group level, the concern is with civic virtues and institutions that move individuals towards better citizenship, including qualities such as responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work-ethic.  In one sentence, positive psychology is about identifying and nurturing the strongest qualities and finding niches in which to best live out those strengths.

There are a number of other important forces guiding the progress of positive psychology.  One of these is the role of the positive experience, or the questions of what qualities make one moment better or worse than the next or what distinguishes happy from unhappy individuals.  A second concern is with the positive personality and how humans function as self-organizing, self-directed adaptive entities.  Lastly, there is the important consideration that people and experiences are embedded in a social context and the ways that individuals change and are changed by their environments.

A number of perspectives have emerged to explain how the above forces affect individuals.  From the evolutionary perspective, the primary barrier to positive states of mind is the difference between the ancestral environment from which we evolved and our current environment, as posited by David Buss and others.  In addition to this belief, he theorizes that evolved distress mechanisms, are often still functional; an example of this would be jealousy alerting individuals to make sure of their spouse's fidelity.

Another realm involves positive personal traits, which include subjective well-being, optimism, happiness, and self-determination.  To a large extent, this area deals with how a person's values and goals mediate between external effects and the quality of experience.  As suggested by Epicetetus, it is not what happens to people that determines how happy they are, but how they interpret what happens.  Optimism, then, is seen as involving cognitive, emotional, and motivational components that intersect to affect an individual's view of the world.  In terms of self-determination, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci suggest that personal well-being and social development are optimized when the human needs for competence, belongingness, and autonomy are met.  Such people are intrinsically motivated, able to fulfill their potentialities, and able to seek out progressively greater challenges.  Barry Schwartz, though, warns that excessive autonomy may lead to depression and dissatisfaction, as the burden for autonomous choices can become too heavy.  He suggests that cultural constraints are necessary for leading a meaningful and satisfying life.