Positive Psychology

Attaining well-being or happiness is an age-old pursuit, with scientific discourse dating back to the Greek era. The growth of research on well-being in the past 20 years has revealed that despite individuals in the United States being twice as wealthy as they were 40 years ago, they are 10 times more depressed. Material acquisition may not be the road to happiness, as is widely believed.

Researchers in the field of positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to understand that which is healthy in human behavior, have used investigative methods that, for example, provide insight into people's daily lived experiences. This has generated a great deal of information about their daily actions, thoughts, and feelings. Researchers are rediscovering what Benjamin Franklin knew many years ago: “Happiness is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.”

Of course, one's lived experience may vary greatly depending on age, culture, gender, geographic upbringing, and socioeconomic status. There is a large component of life that is biologically determined: body type, physical characteristics, and a predisposition to certain ailments, for example. In contrast, there is also an aspect of living that is determined by, for example, one's approach to thinking and feeling about life.

There have been several approaches to understanding a positive psychology. Many of these studies have found that an individual's personal resources, such as intelligence, health, attractiveness, income, and education, are the most important individual difference variables to happiness. Overall, it is believed that an individual's temperament (whether it be nature or nurture), cognitive abilities, goals, culture, and coping skills have a central mediating influence on life events and an individual's sense of well-being. A happy person in today's Western society has a profile of a [Page 855]positive temperament, has a resilient ability to look on the positive more than the negative, does not focus on bad circumstances, lives in an economically developed society where food and shelter are not the focus of one's primary efforts, has friends, and is able to make progress toward reaching his or her goals (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999).

It should not come as a surprise that Americans have embraced positive psychology, with its emphasis on self-betterment, and made the pursuit of happiness an industry unto itself. In 2000, more than 30 million inspirational books were purchased in the United States. Happiness is very much part of our culture narrative, so much so that it is written as a right in the Declaration of Independence, which emphasizes the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.”

Today, researchers have a wealth of data regarding individual physical and material well-being, but it has not been until recently that we have begun to understand why some people experience life with more well-being then others. The field of positive psychology is leading the way in this understanding.

Positive psychology is described as a focus on mental health rather than mental illness. It is a field of psychology that moves away from focusing on the traditional approach of examining the pathology of human functioning, and rather investigates that which is healthy in human behavior, such as courage, hope, joy, optimism, forgiveness, and resiliency. Researchers in positive psychology have been leading the way in asking questions about positive traits, fostering excellence, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction, using the scientific method to better understand the complexity of human behavior (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

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