Positive Psychology

Conceptual Overview

Positive psychology has a long history; however, the term is commonly attributed to former American Psychological Association (APA) President Martin Seligman. In 1998, Professor Seligman gave a speech to the APA espousing the virtues of positive psychology. In his speech, Seligman highlighted that all great civilizations, at their peak, focused their efforts on excellence. For Seligman, it is time that Western cultures focus on those things that allow societies to flourish. He followed up his speech with a seminal article in the APA journal, American Psychologist, coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 2000. The article now underpins most major contributions to the practice, theory, and research of PP.

Generally, the fundamental ideal driving PP is to reorient psychology back to the study of those things that improve life, primarily through understanding and enhancing those things that are generally termed positive. For advocates of PP, psychology was originally oriented toward understanding and developing virtues, personal growth, inner strengths, self-actualization, and esteem. However, increasingly psychology moved toward the study of abnormality and pathology (the study of disease). According to advocates of PP, the result of the orientation meant that, to understand positive psychological functioning happiness, psychologists primarily concerned themselves with understanding depression and other psychological disorders. [Page 1267]In essence, the argument of PP is simple: to understand depression one must study depression, to understand happiness, one must study happiness.

As a domain of theory and research oriented toward the positive, the field of PP primarily concerns itself with the subjective experience of hope, happiness, and contentment in realizing positive psychological well-being within individuals, communities, and societies as a whole. The aim of the approach is to identify the positive individual traits, such as courage, love, interpersonal skill, aesthetics, strength of character or perseverance, forgiveness, future mindedness, spirituality, excellence, and wisdom among other things. Most relevant to organization studies, however, PP is directly concerned with how organizations (e.g., government, private, and public) and institutions (e.g., families, communities, democracies) can promote civic behaviors such as social responsibility, altruism, tolerance, and work ethic.

The PP philosophy has influenced a number of areas and is enjoying phenomenal growth in popularity across both scientific and nonscientific communities. The proponents of PP range from spiritual healers through to medical researchers. The movement has directly influenced the practice of a broad range of professionals, including teachers, psychotherapists, consultants, motivational speakers, social workers, organizational psychologists, consultants, and so on. Practitioners, underpinned by PP philosophies, offer a range of workshops, seminars, and coaching, including happiness seminars, positive parenting workshops, and positive management consulting. As an example, in 2007 Harvard University offered a happiness course based on PP; in its first year the course attracted more than 800 students, more than any other courses offered at Harvard. The movement enjoys similar positive coverage in the media around the world, especially in North America, Australia, Asia, and the United Kingdom.

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