What is Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology was developed to help us flourish and learn from the best, after years of classifying and healing the worst of human experience. This broad and diverse study today encompasses a wide range of topics, drawing on Aristotelian and Maslowian theories and methods.
Traditionally, the focus of psychology has been on recognising and treating mental health issues such as depression. This is vital for people dealing with mental illness, yet it only gives a partial picture of mental wellness. Positive psychology is a relatively young discipline of psychology that focuses on promoting wellbeing and the building of a meaningful life filled with pleasure, engagement, positive connections, and accomplishment rather than what is clinically wrong.
It is “… the study of the factors and activities that contribute to the thriving or optimal functioning of people, organisations, and institutions,” according to Gable and Haidt (2005).
Positive psychology is not about putting on a pleasant face all the time. Life can be difficult, and disappointments and difficulties are unavoidable. Scientific study, on the other hand, has revealed that there are some tactics and abilities that can help people negotiate life’s problems more effectively and enjoy life more.
Positive psychology moves the scientific perspective from a focus on stress, disorder, and dysfunction to a focus on well-being, health, and optimal functioning. It offers a distinct perspective on human experience. Recent discoveries have resulted in the development of a shared paradigm that ties the study of positive feelings, strengths, and virtues to crucial life outcomes.
Recent research suggests that rather than established diagnostic categories of mental disease, difficulties in psychological functioning may be better treated as the lack, excess, or inverse of these qualities. Positive psychology’s main premise, that the study of health, fulfilment, and well-being is just as worthy of study as illness, dysfunction, and misery, has found favour with both academics and the general public.
Positive psychology’s single most important contribution has been to establish a collective identity—a common voice and vocabulary for scholars and practitioners of all stripes who share an interest in health as well as sickness, in realising potential as well as alleviating pathology.
Academic psychologists may specialise in aberrant, cognitive, developmental, or social psychology while still identifying as positive psychologists. Professional psychologists can operate in a variety of settings, including clinical counselling, education, forensics, health, and industrial/organisational settings, yet still consider themselves to be positive psychology practitioners.
Positive psychology is distinctive in that it transcends standard psychological dualities and divisions to offer truly integrative and cross-setting approaches to problem solving. A positive psychologist is as natural for a neuroscientist investigating positive affect as it is for a social psychologist exploring religious experience, a developmental psychologist studying resilience, or a health psychologist working to enhance health and well-being.
History of Positive Psychology
Even before Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, philosophers in Ancient Greece pondered over what it meant to live a virtuous life and how a person could aspire to find contentment.
In the late 19th century, a link was clearly established between local regions of the brain and specific motor skills and behaviour, and modern psychology transitioned from thought experiment to scientific inquiry. In 1874, one of the earliest psychologists, Wilhelm Wundt, published the seminal Principles of Physiological Psychology. Psychology as a research field blossomed in less than three decades, and theories like operant and classical conditioning shaped the behaviouristic paradigm of the early twentieth century.
Positive psychology became a prominent trend that emerged in the late 1990s and it has since grown in popularity. It is a discipline of psychology that focuses on the qualities, virtues, and talents that enable individuals and societies to prosper. Martin Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association, was the driving force behind it.
