POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGYPresented by K.J. Foster MHS 7402

April 13, 2015

What is Positive Psychology?

• Operates from a strengths model

• Does not operate from a pathology model

• Examines weakness but builds on and maximizes human strengths

• Emphasizes the positive side of human behavior

• Focus is on developing meaning, fulfillment, positive emotion and connection

• Addresses questions of happiness, vitality and meaning in life

The idea that people can become happier and healthier by bolstering and using their inherent strength is central to positive psychology

Positive Psychology

“Positive Psychology is the scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits, and the institutions that facilitate their

development.” – Martin Selgman, 2005

The belief is that individuals want more than just relief of suffering. The fostering of positive emotion and the building of character may help – both

directly and indirectly – to alleviate suffering and to undo its root cause.

“Our message is to remind our field that psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best.”

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2000

MOVING FROM WHAT’S WRONG TO WHAT’S STRONG

History of Positive Psychology• Prior to WWII• Curing mental illness

• Making peoples lives more productive and fulfilling

• Identifying and nurturing talent

• Post WWII• Treating abnormal behavior and mental illness

• 1950’s Humanist Thinkers• Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow (coined term “positive psychology”)

• 1998 Martin Seligman elected President of the APA

• 2002 International Conference on Positive Psychology

• 2009 World Congress on Positive Psychology

Who are the major players?

• Martin Seligman - Father of Contemporary Positive Psychology * Learned Optimism

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Pursuit of Happiness

• Christopher Peterson - Character Strengths and Virtues * Health and Optimism

• Carol Dweck - Growth Mindset

• Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling on Happiness

• Albert Bandura - Bobo Doll * Social Learning Theory * Self-Efficacy

• C. R. Snyder - Hope Theory

• Philip Zimbardo - Stanford Prison Experiment * Lucifer Effect * Heroic Imagination

Assessment

“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”

Happiness Level Interpretation31-35 Extremely Satisfied

26-30 Satisfied

21-25 Slightly satisfied

20 Neutral

15-19 Slightly dissatisfied

10-14 Dissatisfied

5-9 Extremely dissatisfied

A short test such as this can give only a general idea of your level of satisfaction and happiness. Your score will depend on your feelings about your life to date, your current circumstances, and the short-term effect of recent events.

• If your score indicates you are satisfied or extremely satisfied, you find most areas of your life to be very rewarding.

• If you score as slightly satisfied, neutral, or slightly dissatisfied, there are probably several areas of your life that you would like to improve. If so, there are a number of positive psychology strategies you may want to utilize from this presentation.

• If you score as dissatisfied to extremely dissatisfied, you may be reacting to recent bad events. However, if you have felt this way for a long time and are not feeling optimistic about the future, you may need to make significant changes in your life, and you might benefit from seeking help from a mental health professional.

Assessment

What does a happy life look like?

How do you measure happy?

Is there a difference between a happy life and a meaningful life?

Conceptual OrganizationTHE THREE DOMAINS OF “HAPPY”

• Pleasant Life = positive emotion about the past, present, and future. The pleasant life is a life that maximizes positive emotions and minimizes pain and negative emotions.

• Engaged Life = consists of using positive individual traits, including strengths of character and talents. The wise deployment of strengths and talents leads to more engagement, absorption, and flow.

• Meaningful Life = entails belonging to and serving positive institutions because meaning derives from belonging and serving something larger than oneself.

AssessmentMeasuring Subjective Well-Being

Subjective Well-Being is defined as “a person’s cognitive and affective evaluations of his or her life” – Ed Diener, World-Renowned Happiness Researcher

Among the most widely used well-being measures:

• Five-item Satisfaction with Life Scale

• Four-item Subjective Happiness Scale

• Two-item Fordyce Happiness Measures

AssessmentMeasuring Strengths of Character

The Engaged Life consists of using one’s strengths and talents to achieve flow. This requires measurements of positive character traits, talents, interests, and strengths.

Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (CSV) – Peterson & Seligman, 2004

• The Un-DSM

• Classifies strengths and virtues that enable human thriving

• Scheme relies on six overarching virtues that almost every culture across the world endorses: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

• Under each virtue, particular strengths are identified as criteria for meeting the virtue.

• Empirical findings support similarity of 24 character strengths world-wide: kindness, fairness, authenticity, gratitude, and open-mindedness were most highly ranked of the 24 with a very high correlation of .80 and defy cultural, ethnic and religious differences.

• Inventory of Signature Strengths Survey at www.viacharacter.org

AssessmentMeasuring Meaning

A Meaningful Life consists of attachment to, and the service of, something larger than oneself. To what and the way in which people connect varies greatly.

Due to choice of context, many researchers study meaning-making through interviews that allow for the exploration of a variety of topics.

Two-Hour Interview by McAdams & Colleagues

Life Narratives

Recommended self-reports:

20-Item Purpose in Life Test

Orientations to Happiness Questionnaire

Seligman’s PERMA

• Positive Emotions

• Engagement

• Relationships

• Meaning

• Accomplishments

Flourish

Positive Emotions

Engagement

RelationshipsMeaning

Accomplishments

TreatmentPositive Interventions

My Favorite Intervention

Interventions

• Identify signature strengths

• Use a signature strength in a new way

• Expressing your thanks

• Cultivate gratitude

• Gratitude Journal

• Say “no” to too many choices

• Identify and engage in flow activities

• Mindfulness

• Self-compassion

• Random Acts of Kindness

• A Look Back at Life

• One Door Closes, One Door Opens

• You at your best

• Three good things in life

• Search for the sacred

• Meditation

• Prayer

• Cultivating Forgiveness

Positive Psychology Psychotherapies

• Acceptance-based therapies

• Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)

• Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)

• Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)

• Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT)• Albert Ellis considered the “Unsung Hero of Positive Psychology”

Critics• Criticism: Positive Psychology ignores suffering and denigrates sadness.

Positive Psychology embraces the full range of emotions, including sadness, and attempts to help people become more resilient in the face of adversity.

• Criticism: Positive Psychology is religion in disguise.

There is no need to embrace a particular religious doctrine to appreciate and use these real and practical insights and techniques.

• Criticism: Happy people are foolish or naïve.

There is evidence that happy people are more able to look squarely at negative information and learn from it.

• Criticism: Happy people are unmotivated or lazy.

People who report being happy are more likely to perform better on the job and be conscientious workers.

• Criticism: Too little evidence from scientific research

Evidence-based Positive PsychologyAt least 100 positive interventions have been suggested, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.

Which ones actually work?

Fordyce (1977, 1983) – “Happy is as happy does” Intervention

Burton & King (2004) – Positive Writing Intervention

Emmons & McCullough (2003) – Gratitude Intervention

Lyubomirsky, et al. (2005) – Acts of Kindness Intervention

Seligman, et al. (2005) – Landmark Study of Long-term PP Benefits

Sin & Lyubomirsky (2009) – Enhance Well-Being & Decrease Depressive Symptoms

Huffman, et al. (2013) – Positive Psychology with Suicidal Patients

Feasibility and utility of positive psychology exercises for suicidal inpatients

Exercise Completed/Assigned

Change in Hopelessness

Change in Optimism

Utility Efficacy Modified Efficacy

Ease Modified Ease

Gratitude letter21/23 (91.3%)

1.00 (0.20) 1.13 (0.22) 3.84 (0.22) 5.90 (0.44) 5.59 (0.47) 3.69 (0.24) 3.50 (0.28)

Counting blessings25/25 (100%)

0.69 (0.19) 0.78 (0.20) 4.01 (0.20) 5.48 (0.40) 5.52 (0.46) 2.97 (0.23) 2.97 (0.27)

Personal strengths16/18 (88.9%)

0.81 (0.23) 0.79 (0.25) 4.25 (0.25) 5.79 (0.50) 5.29 (0.53) 3.91 (0.28) 3.53 (0.32)

Acts of kindness18/21 (85.7%)

1.20 (0.22) 0.83 (0.23) 3.59 (0.23) 5.65 (0.47) 5.02 (0.49) 3.91 (0.26) 3.55 (0.29)

Important, enjoyable and meaningful activities25/26 (96.2%)

0.59 (0.19) 0.78 (0.20) 3.87 (0.20) 5.22 (0.41) 4.86 (0.45) 3.75 (0.23) 3.51 (0.27)

Best self (accomplishments)22/25 (88.0%)

0.76 (0.20) 0.76 (0.21) 3.31 (0.21) 4.82 (0.42) 4.48 (0.45) 3.20 (0.24) 2.98 (0.27)

Behavioral commitment to values-based activities18/19 (94.7%)

0.50 (0.23) 0.58 (0.25) 3.49 (0.24) 4.60 (0.49) 4.32 (0.54) 3.38 (0.28) 3.17 (0.32)

Best self (social relationships)20/26 (76.9%)

0.84 (0.21) 0.53 (0.23) 3.79 (0.22) 5.17 (0.45) 4.12 (0.46) 3.93 (0.25) 3.19 (0.27)

Forgiveness letter24/30 (80.0%)

0.30 (0.19) 0.24 (0.20) 3.77 (0.20) 4.34 (0.41) 3.69 (0.41) 3.14 (0.23) 2.70 (0.25)

Overall189/213 (88.7%)

0.73 (0.09) 0.71 (0.10) 3.77 (0.10) 5.20 (0.21) 4.72 (0.22) 3.51 (0.12) 3.21 (0.12)

Scientifically Supported Interventions

HAPPINESS TRAINING

POSITIVE JOURNAL WRITING

GRATITUDE

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

ACTS OF KINDNESS

THREE GOOD THINGS

IDENTIFYING AND USING YOUR STRENGTHS

Questions & Discussion

References• Bernard, M. E., Froh, J. J., DiGiuseppe, R., Joyce, M. R. and Dryden, W. (2010) ‘Albert Ellis:

Unsung hero of positive psychology’, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(4), pp. 302–310. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2010.498622.

• Bolier, L., Haverman, M., Westerhof, G. J., Riper, H., Smit, F. and Bohlmeijer, E. (2013) ‘Positive psychology interventions: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies’, BMC Public Health. BioMed Central, 13(1). doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-119.

• Duckworth, A. L., Steen, T. A. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2005) ‘Positive Psychology in Clinical Practice’, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1(1), pp. 629–651. doi: 10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.1.102803.144154.

• Huffman, J. C., DuBois, C. M., Healy, B. C., Boehm, J. K., Kashdan, T. B., Celano, C. M., Denninger, J. W. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2014) ‘Feasibility and utility of positive psychology exercises for suicidal inpatients’,General Hospital Psychiatry, 36(1), pp. 88–94. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2013.10.006.

• Leontiev, D. A. (2013) ‘Positive psychology in search for meaning: An introduction’, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), pp. 457–458. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2013.830766.

References• Mongrain, M. and AnselmoMatthews, T. (2012) ‘Do Positive Psychology Exercises Work? A

Replication of Seligman et al. ()’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 68(4). doi: 10.1002/jclp.21839.

• Seligman, M. E. P. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014) ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’, Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. Springer, pp. 279–298. doi: 10.1007/978-94-017-9088-8_18.

• Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N. and Peterson, C. (2005) ‘Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.’,American Psychologist, 60(5), pp. 410–421. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.60.5.410.

• Sin, N. L. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2009) ‘Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: a practice-friendly meta-analysis’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(5), pp. 467–487. doi: 10.1002/jclp.20593.

• Snyder, C. R., Lopez, S. J. and Pedrotti, J. T. (2010) Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths. 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

• Wong, P. T. P. (2011) ‘Positive psychology 2.0: Towards a balanced interactive model of the good life.’, Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 52(2), pp. 69–81. doi: 10.1037/a0022511.