Positive psychology is a movement within academic psychology that focuses on building more of whats right in your life, rather than fixing whats wrong.  It disputes the notion that you need to dwell on and express negative emotions in order to bring about change and instead proposes that you savour, enjoy and appreciate the good times. It represents a shift in focus from studying human misery (the disease model ) to studying what it is that makes life worth living (human potential).  The focus of research has switched to creating a science of human strengths and how these strengths can be nurtured and developed.

Professsor Martin Seligman, one of positive psychology’s prime movers , defines Positive Psychology as the scientific study of optimal human functioning that aims to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive.

This of course, as Seligman points out, is good news for the man or woman in the street: the average person generally does not want to know how they can be less miserable, they want to know how they can be happier.  They don’t want to know how they can move from minus 3 in their lives to a minus 1, but how they can move from a plus 2 to a plus 5 .

Seligman sees Positive Psychology as standing on three main pillars:

the study of positive emotion eg. joy, love, laughter,

the study of positive strengths and virtues eg. generosity, gratitude, hope/optimism

the study of positive institutions eg. strong family, community.

Rather than therapy, which often comes too late, positive psychologists are interested in positive prevention. Researchers have discovered that strengths such as hope, future-mindedness,  interpersonal skills, strong sense of values, perseverance, the capacity for intimate relationship, flow and insight all act as “buffers” against developing mental problems. For instance, a young person who is future-minded, who is interpersonally skilled, who derives flow from sports or hobbies is much less at risk for substance abuse, self-harm, involvement in crime etc. Positive prevention is about identifying and amplifying strengths and personal and interpersonal resources. 

Surprisingly, it has also been found that people with these strengths also live longer and healthier lives (see the Nun’s Story on the positive emotion page).

It is important to distinguish Positive Psychology from positive thinking. Positive thinking is mainly based on the writings of the inspirational Norman Vincent Peale. They do share a common philosophical outlook, for example, a belief in free will but positive thinking is more intuitive and relies on the anecdotal, whereas positive psychology is scientifically grounded in research and its interventions are testable.

Similarly, it shares common ground philosophically with humanistic psychology based on the work of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, both of whom had an interest in uncovering human potential.  Maslow felt that psychology should study the fully functioning human being and stressed such concepts as self-realization, peak experiences, and connection with the transcendent. Carl Roger’s work in creating humanistic psychotherapy, and his interest in helping people to lead more authentic lives, has been hugely influential in the field of counselling and therapy, but there was no rush within academic psychology to research what contributed to authentic living or how could it be fostered, until the more recent development of positive psychology.

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