Positive Psychology

This book is an output of the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre of the University of the West Indies. Our sincerest thanks to The University of the West Indies and the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre and the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, at the University of Niš (Serbia) for their support. Our earnest gratefulness to the staff at Wiley Publishers. To all those who provided technical and other kinds of support resulting in this publication, we would like to indicate our deepest appreciation. And to those we may have inadvertently overlooked in this acknowledgment, we say thank you for all the encouragement and assistance that you have rendered.

Derek Chadee and Aleksandra Kostić

Positive psychology conjures the notion of a soft approach to addressing hard psychological issues. Though this is far from the truth, academia quite often focuses on removing of the negative and thinking critically of issues that adversely impact on our lives. Focusing on the other side, the positive, somehow implicitly summons the notion of not assessing the core of a problem. Martin Seligman in 1998, recognizing the usefulness of critically assessing the cause and impact of the negative, also saw the need to focus theorization, research, policy, and a paradigm toward the other side of the coin – the positive. In fact, positive psychologists go even further to emphasize that by encouraging the development of positive attributes many of the negative issues may be systemically addressed.

Martin Seligman the father of positive psychology defined this area of psychology as “a scientific and professional movement with a new goal to build the enabling conditions of a life worth living” (2011) and studied not only the frailties and problems but the strengths and virtues of the human being (Seligman, 2002, p. 630). Later, Duckworth, Steen, and Seligman (2005) clarified positive psychology from clinical psychology noting that as a “scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits and the institutions that facilitate their development, a field concerned with well‐being and optimal functioning, positive psychology at first glance seem peripheral to mainstream clinical psychology. We believe otherwise.” In fact, they noted that positive psychology expands the emphasis of clinical psychology from distress and interventions for improvement and moving the discourse to continuance of well‐being. Taking this principle of positive psychology, its contributions toward well‐being expands beyond that of the clinical branch of the discipline of psychology. Gable and Haidt (2005) argued that the prominence of the negative in psychology may be a result of prioritizing of compassion, the history and pragmatism of focusing on distress and disease, the nature and theorization of psychology. But they also posited that a positive psychology in no way implies a negative psychology, nor prior or future theorization, and research outside of this emerging branch are not in any way inferior.

Core to the discipline is the fact that positive psychology has the characteristics of a scientific intellectual movement and has over a short period develop a paradigm of a mature science (Simmons, 2013). Seligman, Gillham, Reivich, Linkins, and Ernst (2009) acknowledged the growth of positive psychology as a scientific paradigm to study positive emotions, engagement, and meaning and the importance of these characteristics in the development of life satisfaction. But one may ask why the ease in which this discipline has so quickly navigated toward respectability. The answer obviously lies in the content of positive psychology and the simplicity of the assumptions and premises on which, over a hundred years prior, the discipline of psychology studied with interventions. However, psychology fell short of ensuring the continuance of the well‐being of the inner being (Duckworth et al., 2005). Simmons (2013) referred to an interesting quotation from Abraham Maslow’s classic book, Motivation and Personality , in a chapter titled “Toward a Positive Psychology”:

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)

The genesis of positive psychology has been attributed to the works of humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, and Marie Jahoda, who in 1958 wrote on the continuance of well‐being in patients (Duckworth et al., 2005). One can possibly say that the spirit of humanistic psychology manifested in positive psychology, one discipline in its evolution. However, Peterson and Seligman (2004, see also Simons, 2013) noted the reluctance of the humanistic school to emphasize scientific rigor.

Happiness and well‐being are partly influenced by positive emotions, engagement, and purpose (Seligman, 2008). Concerns about the past, present, and future influence our levels of contentment, serenity, somatic and complex pleasures, optimism, and hope (Duckworth et al., 2005; Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006). Our engagement is reciprocally conditional to strengths which are constructed on core virtues such as wisdom, integrity, and honesty. Purpose and life meaning are derived from interaction within the institutional core to our self. These three domains are not mutually exclusive but the ideal is a harmonious balance. The interplay of the three domains provide hedonic, emphasis on happiness and pleasure, and eudaimonic emphasis on life’s meaning, purpose, and satisfactions. Both hedonic and eudaimonic models were synergized by Seligman and Adler (2018; see also Altmaier, 2019) to understand a blended engagement in the derivation of happiness and life satisfaction. Seligman articulated this blend in the PERMA model which is an acronym for positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

Positive psychology has distinguished between the absence of the negative and the presence of the positive. Consider, cold is the absence of heat or poverty the absence of wealth, though debatable, these analogies have their insights but also their limits. Similarly, consider the issue of delinquency. The resolution of this issue by addressing the core causes of the problem means that the issue has been addressed with temporal and spatial specificity. But has the well‐being of persons involved with or affected by delinquency been addressed or sustained? Has the social environment and parties feel engaged, or have a greater sense of well‐being, or have more positive emotions? The positive psychology emphasis of beyond time and space limitations is a core distinguishing factor. Duckworth et al. (2005) observing that the positive is not simply the absence of the negative, noted with an example that the removal of incivility, revenge, and anger, does not necessarily lead to the presence of civility, cooperation, and loyalty. Both the former, removal of the negative, and the latter, creation and sustenance of the the positive, require different interventions.

Within this context and sharing the assumptions and theorization of positive psychology, the contributors to this book are from a wide range of cultures and have diligently articulated significant issues of interest on positive psychology to an international audience. Their contributions include the areas of altruism, positive creativity, science of well‐being, forgiveness, coaching for leadership, cyberpsychology, intelligence, responding to catastrophes like COVID‐19, time perspective, physiological and epigenetic, youth civic engagement, ups and downs of love, flow and good life, global perspectives on positive psychology, self and collective efficacy, positive psychology interventions, and positive orientation.