Positive Psychology - 1
Positive Psychology:
The Study of ‘That Which Makes Life Worthwhile’
Corey L. M. Keyes
and
Jonathan Haidt
March 4, 2002
Introductory chapter of: Keyes, C. L. M., & Haidt, J. (Eds.) (2003).Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well lived. WashingtonDC: American Psychological Association.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all” – Oscar Wilde.
Positive psychology aims to help people live and flourish, rather than merely to exist. The term “positive psychology” may seem to imply that all other psychology is in some way negative, but that implication is unintended and untrue. However the term “positive psychology” contains a softer indictment, namely, that psychology has become unbalanced. In the years since World War II psychology, guided by its funding agencies and the rising social conscience of its practitioners, has focused on helping people and society solve serious problems. Clinical psychology has focused on mental illness, social psychology has focused on prejudice, racism, and aggression, and cognitive psychology has focused on diagnosing the errors and biases that lead to bad decisions. There are good reasons to spend more time and money on illness and problems than on health and strengths. Utilitarianism, compassion, and a concern for equality suggest that people in great pain should be helped before those who are not suffering. But there are at least two costs to focusing on illness, problems, and weaknesses.
The first cost is an inappropriately negative view of human nature and the human condition. We teach students about the many ways the mind can go wrong, and about the frightening prevalence rates of depression, child abuse, and eating disorders. We teach students that people are fundamentally selfish creatures whose occasional good deeds are accidental products of self-esteem management. Is such cynicism and pessimism really justified?
Positive psychology is realistic. It does not claim that human nature is all sweetness and light, but it does offer a more balanced view. Most people are doing reasonably well in life, and have the capacity to thrive and flourish, even when -- or especially when -- confronted with challenges, setbacks, and suffering (see Ryff & Singer, this volume; Wethington, this volume). Most people have experienced powerful feelings of moral elevation and inspiration that are unconnected to any need for self-esteem (see Haidt, this volume). Positive psychology aims to balance out the overly negative picture painted by psychology to date.
The second cost of focusing on illness, problems, and weaknesses is that psychology restricts its focus and forgoes the possibility of making rapid scientific progress in unexplored fields. It may be more important to understand the causes of depression than the causes of happiness, and it may be more important to understand the causes of delinquency than the causes of good citizenship. But is it infinitely more important? It cannot be wise for psychology to encourage all of its best young researchers to tackle illnesses, problems, and weaknesses, leaving untouched many scientifically interesting and important questions. Even if one is primarily concerned will alleviating suffering, the chapters in this volume show that a full understanding of optimism, hope, well-being, vital engagement, goals, satisfactions of work and play, and community involvement may lead to therapies and interventions that reduce psychological suffering where Prozac and psychotherapies have failed.
In short, positive psychology is a view within scientific psychology that aims to achieve a balanced and empirically grounded body of research on human nature and social relations. In particular, positive psychology says that more work is needed in the areas of virtues, character strengths, and the social, psychological, and biological factors that enable human beings to flourish.
It is Time for Positive Psychology
The story of the 20th century in the behavioral and social sciences was “two steps forward, one step back.” There were many steps forward: increased life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, reduced high school dropout rates, and reduced poverty among the elderly. Yet despite progress in many fields, other social indicators have gotten worse. Rates of depression are high in adults and rising among our youth (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). There are more effective talk and drug therapies available now for depression than ever before, yet the benefits of these treatments are short-lived or partial. In their review, Keyes and Lopez (2002) argued that decades of mental illness research have made it possible to better treat more broken down people, but it has not made it possible to prevent more people from breaking down.
While the Gross Domestic Product increased steadily during the last half of the 20th century, the U.S. took several steps backwards socially (see Miringoff & Miringoff, 1999). There were steady increases between 1970 and 1996 in rates of child abuse, child poverty, and adolescent suicide. During that same period, the number uninsured for health care increased, rates of many violent crimes increased, and real wages diminished. Fewer individuals belonged to civic organizations and volunteering declined, while the disparity between the wealthiest and poorest Americans increased. In polls, most Americans grant that something is wrong with, and missing in, life in the U.S.: life has become too materialistic, morality has waned, and the sense of community and social responsibility have faded (Myers, 2001; Putnam, 2000; Schorr, 1997).
Yet people aspire to a more meaningful and fulfilling life. The percent of high school seniors who say that “making a contribution to society” is an “extremely important” life goal has increased steadily from 18% in 1976 to 24% in 1996 (Council of Economic Advisers, 1998). In the New York Times Magazine survey, adults were asked what they would do with 3 extra hours in a day that would make them more satisfied. Almost two-third would spend time with family and another 11% with friends (Egan, 2000). While people cannot create a 27 hour day, they can cut back to create more time in the 24 hour day. Thus, there are an increasing number of voluntary downsizers -- adults who cutback on work in terms of position, time or pay. Schor (1998) found that downsizers are motivated by a desire to create a life that is more healthy, meaningful, and balanced, with more time for loved ones and less focus on material wealth.
It is time for mainstream psychology to catch up with the struggles of the majority of humanity that is searching for ways to make life meaningful. Almost 40 years ago, Abraham Maslow (1965) proclaimed that “Psychology ought to become more positive and less negative. It should have higher ceilings, and not be afraid of the loftier possibilities of the human being” (p. 27). Maslow and others created humanistic psychology, clearly a forerunner of positive psychology in its goals and concerns, and people flocked to its call. Over time, however, too many people with non-scientific agendas joined the humanists, and after 1969 the movement was taken over by the psychotherapeutic counterculture (Taylor, 2001). The mission of making mainstream psychology more positive and less negative was never accomplished.
Psychology remains today ill equipped to help individuals to live healthier and more meaningful lives. It has a full box of tools to work on stress, disease and dysfunction, but preventing the worst from happening does not equal promoting the best in people. Ryff and Singer (1998) argued that psychology needs to move beyond its status as a “repair shop” if it is to become a science that assists people in their pursuit of better, healthier, more meaningful lives. Senator Robert Kennedy issued a similar challenge to the entire nation in 1968, shortly before his assassination, with these words:
“The gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile” (Guthman & Allen, 1993, p. 330, emphasis added)
The purpose of this volume is to begin to study “that which makes life worthwhile”, and to investigate some possible mechanisms for promoting the ranks of healthy, productive, happy, and flourishing individuals.
Flourishing: Toward a Life Well-Lived
Flourishing, for Keyes (2002; this volume), exemplifies mental health. Not only are flourishing individuals free of mental illness, they also are filled with emotional vitality and they are functioning positively in the private and social realms of their lives. Far from being "supermen" or "superwomen," flourishing individuals are truly living rather than merely existing.
Positive psychology is not self-help, but it is research that is meant to help people. Similarly, this book is not a manual on “How to Flourish,” but it offers empirically grounded advice for getting more out of life. We, the editors, often felt inspired to make changes in our lives as we read these chapters and we hope that you will too. The chapters fit into four categories representing major imperatives about living a good life: 1) Rise to life’s challenges, making the most out of your setbacks and adversities; 2) engage with and relate to other people; 3) find fulfillment in creativity and productivity; and 4) look beyond yourself and help others to find lasting meaning, satisfaction, and wisdom in life.
Rise to Life’s Challenges. Positive Psychology aims to better understand how individuals can negotiate, resolve, and grow in the face of life's stressors and challenges. Ryff and Singer's chapter, aptly entitled "Flourishing Under Fire," reviews the large and still growing literature on human resilience, which has become a central construct in research on human development. The authors examine how individuals remain or become healthy despite risk and adversity, illustrating the relevance of resilience throughout the human lifespan, and they simultaneously stress the importance of integrating the biological substrate of resilience with extant paradigms that emphasize the psychological aspects of resilience.
In her chapter on turning points and personal growth, Wethington merges two important literatures. First, she draws on John Clausen's seminal work on psychological turning points to place individuals within the ongoing challenge of life course transitions and changes. Second, she focuses on an important marker of human health -- personal growth -- which originates with Aristotle's conception of Eudaimonia and has been operationalized by Carol Ryff. Wethington provides us with a better understanding of how and when individuals are likely to learn important lessons about life, about themselves, and about other people as they experience psychological turning points, which are major transformations in views about the self, identity, or the meaning of life.
Last, Peterson and Chang review the large literature on optimism and its connections to human flourishing. The motivating question behind this research has been how individuals respond to adversity and setbacks as well as success and achievement. Using dispositional and cognitive (i.e., explanatory styles) conceptions of optimism and pessimism, Peterson and Chang illustrate how optimism is a protective factor and how pessimism is a risk factor for physical and mental disease. However, in an important message for Positive Psychology, Peterson and Chang also show how culture and context may moderate the relationship of optimism and pessimism with health outcomes. They review research showing that the usual connections of optimism and pessimism with health outcomes may be inverted in collectivistic cultures, where pessimism may act as a protective factor and optimism may operate more like a risk factor.
Engage and Relate
When John Donne said “no man is an island” he was foreshadowing one of the major ingredients of flourishing: reaching out and engaging with others, and with one’s environment. The three chapters in this section work together to show how people create lives that feel rich and meaningful.
Theorists from Aristotle (“man is a social animal”) through Freud (“love and work”) have stressed the importance of social relationships for human happiness. But Reis and Gable’s chapter goes further, making the valuable distinction between positive and negative psychological processes at work in close relationships. Based on a wide ranging review, Reis and Gable argue that positive processes (based on appetitive systems in the brain) should be seen and studied as functionally independent of negative processes (based on aversive systems). Yet as in so much of psychology, researchers have focused on the negative -- on conflict, and on the role of relationships as buffers against stress -- and assumed that the positive aspects of relationships were due to the absence of negatives. Reis and Gable show us what a “positive psychology of relationships” would look like, a psychology that explores the active ingredients of such things as intimacy, affection, and shared fun.
While Donne’s island metaphor clearly refers to relationships with other people, the chapters by Emmons and by Nakamura and Czikszentmihalyi show us that flourishing requires another kind of reaching out: the setting of goals, followed by active and energetic engagement with those goals. Emmons reviews research on the kinds of personal goals or “strivings” that people pursue, and on the relationships between goal pursuit and subjective well-being (happiness). He tells us that goal pursuit is not uniformly good; the costs and benefits of striving vary with the kind of goal pursued, and he offers an intriguing taxonomy of the “big four” domains of striving. Emmons’ work has important clinical applications, as can be seen in his description of his recent work with people suffering from degenerative neuromuscular diseases. In a group of people whose objective well-being is clearly declining, the manner in which individuals set goals and strive to reach them turns out to be a major determinant of subjective well-being.
Nakamura and Czikszentmihalyi build on Emmons’ work to tell us how people can enter a state of “vital engagement” with the tasks they undertake. They tackle the big question of meaning in life directly, asking how a sense of meaning emerges in daily life. They begin with an analysis of the psychological state of flow, a state of full absorption in an activity that challenges one’s abilities and reduces one’s sense of self-consciousness. Flow is deeply pleasurable, but Nakamura and Czikszentmihalyi point out that flourishing must entail more than just stringing together periods of deep pleasure. The great contribution of this chapter is to put forth a theory of flow-derived emergent meaning. Building on classic social interactionist theorists (e.g., John Dewey and G. H. Mead), they illustrate how a sense of meaning emerges over time as people experience flow in activities that link them to larger pursuits and to other people.
Find fulfillment in creativity and productivity. As Seligman reminded us during his APA presidency, one of the original missions of psychology was to promote creativity and fulfillment. Somewhere this mission was lost. The authors in this section seek to reclaim that mission for psychology.
Hence, this section begins with Cassandro and Simonton's chapter on creativity and genius. These authors review a rich literature describing the nature, kinds, and measures of creativity and genius. While the chapter draws on historical exemplars of creativity and genius, it challenges Positive Psychology to discover how these cultural goods can be nurtured in more members of successive generations. Cassandro and Simonton show us how the products of creators have enabled flourishing for the rest of us, and how the process of creativity may also promote flourishing in the creator.
Wrzesniewski and Rozin’s chapter focuses on the concept of fulfillment in daily life. The authors point out that most of our lives are taken up with work, leisure and eating, and it is therefore here that we should think about how to get more out of each moment of our lives. The chapter then inquires into the mechanisms whereby individuals might gain such fulfillment by looking at how orientations toward work, play, and food affect what people get out of those activities. For example, Wrzesniewski and colleagues reviews research showing that individuals have distinct orientations toward employment: People may view work as a calling, as a career, or as a paycheck (instrumentally). Rather than argue that more people need to view work as a calling in order to gain more satisfaction from work, these authors suggest that a Positive Psychology of work should seek to better understand how contexts may be shaped to provide satisfaction for all people. Thus, rather than simply shape the person to the situation, these authors remind us that a positive psychology also should shape the situation to fit the individual.