What is positive psychology?
What Is Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology has been described as a scientific study of subjective well-being. This is the technical term for what we would call ‘happiness’ and the factors that enable us as individuals in order to grow and develop and sustain ourselves in a positive manner. Key to the approach is the focus on what actually works for us as individuals, as opposed to the continual analyzing of what has gone wrong or what we are not good at. This is particularly important given the current prevalence of mental health issues amongst our children and young people.
Statistics such as this make it clear that school-based staff should focus on the development of key skills to promote resilience and happiness. Mental health should clearly be linked to, or described as, an increase in the general degree of happiness, vitality, sense of self-worth, and achievement alongside an individual’s concern and empathy for others.
Why positive psychology?
In recent years there have been a plethora of initiatives in terms of supporting the emotional wellbeing and social and emotional skills development of children and young people. There is a national recognition of the importance of wellbeing in education which has grown in recent years to the extent that all of the nations of the United Kingdom have policies and advice in place for supporting wellbeing in education.
The goal of positive psychology is basically to enhance human strengths such as optimism, courage, honesty, self-understanding, and interpersonal skills.
Positive psychology provides a means of helping the individual to use inner resources as a buffer against setbacks and adversity in life whenever these crop up. Developing such skills helps to prevent individuals from becoming depressed. As Seligman states, ‘it’s not about how to heal; it’s about to have a great life’. Seligman and his associates developed an intervention designed to instill a sense of optimism which they defined as a positive way of construing the failures and setbacks that normally occur in life.
This is similar to approaches utilised in cognitive behavior therapy in which participants are encouraged to construe failures in a more positive light. For example, if you consider that failures are stable and pervasive then they will last forever and subsequently undermine everything that you try to do – this will ultimately lead to depression. However, if we can train young people and ourselves to view such setbacks and difficulties as temporary or affecting only a small part of our lives then the depression can be averted.
This is similar to approaches utilised in cognitive behaviour therapy in which participants are encouraged to construe failures in a more positive light. For example, if you consider that failures are stable and pervasive then they will last forever and subsequently undermine everything that you try to do – this will ultimately lead to depression. However, if we can train young people and ourselves to view such setbacks and difficulties as temporary or affecting only a small part of our lives then the depression can be averted.