Philadelphia,June 2009

The first world conference in positive psychology was the most stimulating and exciting psychology conference I have attended. The active participation of so many leaders in the field enthusiastically sharing their insights , research  andmethodology was truly inspiring, quite apart from the eclectic mix of delegatesfrom all over the world.  A measure of the enthusiasm was the fact that attendance was so full at all the workshops and symposia . 

The keynote speakers on the first evening of the conference were Martin Seligman and Phillip Zimbardo, both past presidents of the American Psychological Association who debated whether human nature was good or bad.

Zimbardo, well known for his book “ The Lucifer Effect” which details how the infamous Stanford “prison guard” experiments in the late 60sbrought out the most negative and brutalising effect on the “guards” drew the parallel between these experiments and what happened in real life in the internment centres after the Iraq war. His conclusion: certain conditions can be guaranteed to bring out the worst aspects of human nature.

Seligman’s reply focused on the opposite: how conditions can be created to bring out the best in human nature and how the sum of happiness can be increased in individuals as well as in whole societies by adopting more life enhancing positive institutions. He set out the goal of the conference: to increase world happiness and life satisfaction by a measurable degree.

The theme of creating psychological wealth on a society wide level was a constant during the conference.  Ed Diener has spent his lifetime gathering statistics on the happiness and satisfaction levels of different nations e.g why are the Danes one of the happiest nations? what are they doing “right” and how can other countries learn from them? Lord Layard, a British economist also addressed the conference on the theme of creating more health and psychological well being for the greatest number of people.

Mikhal Cziksenmihalyi’s inspiring talk on the evolution of human consciousness was so well attended that the overflow had to be accommodated by video link in the adjoining area.

Workshops and symposia were varied, detailing applications of positive psychology in education, business, coaching, community health and even clinical settings.

There was an impressive contingent of delegates from Australia where Martin Seligman had completed a six month residency in a private secondary school (GowlongGrammar) training the staff in positive psychology interventions,  integrating initiatives into the curriculum at all levels and measuring effects on students and staff, and there were several presentations by key personnel in the school who had been  involved in the total change in organisational climate.

Two other Australians presented  very diferent workshops. Anthony Grant from Sydney University presented a very entertaining workshop on research in coaching and its application to positive psychology. I was particularly interested in George Burns  workshop on the use of storytelling and metaphor in therapy.  His work built on the tradition of using metaphor to influence the unconscious in the tradition of Milton Erickson and Jay Haley.

Ilona Boniwell of the University of East London conducted a symposium discussing the development of subjective  well being measures. There were also contributions from some of her graduate students who had conducted research on holistic interventions such as massage and creating more positive self image to lessen the impact of severe and life threatening illness.

One of the mos tpopular symposium was that of the  “PosSquad” composed of James Pawelski, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Barbara Fredrickson whoall gave us fascinating insights into their work in progress.  I was particularly interested in Barbara Fredrickson’s work using loving kindness meditation in a business setting : on the face of it, it seemed such an unlikely intervention to even be adopted ,never mind having a measurable positive impact in such a setting! Barbara spoke of how her research on the positivity ratio had influenced her to make life transforming changes.

In his closing address Martin Seligman commented on the large representation from graduate students, and how that predicted a very bright future for positive psychology.

He also pointed out a new “column” that of positive health , to be added to the other three columns on which positive psychology rests.(see article what is positivepsychology). Again, for someone like myself, who has been so involved in promoting the idea of  building positive health (as opposed to simply the absence of disease) through the Irish Association of Holistic Medicine, it was good to hear the multi million dollar funding he had just received for research in this field.

All in all, it was a very inspiring conference with a very good balance between research and its application.