What is Positive Psychology?

This post is part of my notes on a course I am taking at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. The course is titled Positive Psychology and is taught by Professor Denise Marigold, currently the Chair of Social Development Studies.

The questions here are from the course, and the answers are my own.

What are the aims of Positive Psychology and how do they differ from other areas of Psychology?

The traditional paradigm in Psychology is to study mental illness and how to treat it. This looks only at the negative aspects of human well-being, and how to get it to a neutral state. Positive Psychology is a new paradigm based on ancient ideas which removes that ceiling and aims to understand why some people and institutions can go beyond a neutral state and flourish.

What are some of the major influences on Positive Psychology from Philosophy?

As human well-being is such a central part of everyone's lives, it is no surprise that Positive Psychology has ancient roots in both Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions. In ancient China, the Confucian tradition looked at well-being from a collectivist perspective, emphasizing the utility of reciprocity and the golden rule. Taoism is another Chinese philosophical tradition which emphasized balance in all aspects of life, and an embrace of both the good and bad.

In the ancient West, such as the Babylonians, ancient Egyptians, and ancient Greeks, there was the idea of hedonism, which put pleasure at the core of human well-being. The classical Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato put more of an emphasis on rationality and thought happiness could come from truly knowing yourself and what your motivations are. Later Aristotle emphasized the goal of Eudaimonia, which could be found through a more balanced approach.

What are some of the important consideration to keep in mind about Positive Psychology?

Positive Psychology is not necessarily about positivity and, as Norman Peale put it in his 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking. It is easy to fall prey to the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc, as fancy Latin people would put it, or for the rest of us correlation does not imply causation. It may be empirically true that the happiest people may do X, but that does not mean that X caused that person to be happy.

In society there can be a conflict between ideas that people find to be useful beliefs, and those that are empirically accurate. For example, in the West there is the common mantra "if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything." Some may find this mantra useful and motivating, to keep them going in the face of adversity when striving for a goal. Logically though, if putting your mind to something implies you can achieve something, the contrapositive would be that if you can't achieve something, that means you didn't put your mind to it. While such a statement is hardly falsifiable, it places the blame for lack of achievement on the victim, ignoring all the various uncontrollable factors. If our goal in studying Positive Psychology is to take an objective view of what fosters human flourishing, such statements really don't give us a fully objective view.