Positive

• Relationships and the good life

  Good life is a positive connection to others, encompassing the ability to love, trust, enjoy happiness and forgive

  Relationships a seen as achievement

  The absorption and engagement lead to you feeling that you are living the good life
• Relationships and free will

  40% variance in happiness due to intentional activity like nurturing social relationships and getting back in touch with someone

  Free will to improve relationships therefore increasing our wellbeing
• Relationships and authenticity of goodness and excellence

  Entering relationship allows us to nurture key character strengths ( generosity and kindness) and celebrate character strengths

  Research shows when individuals show more appreciation of partners character strengths leading to positive outcomes
• elements of the good life

  Pos connection to others

  Pos individual traits

  Life regulation qualities
• Assumption focus on the good life

  Pleasant life: happiness from pursuing positive emotions in relation to past, present and future

  Good Life: happiness comes from pursuing activities that positively absorb and engage us

  Meaningful life: happiness comes from a deep sense of fulfillment by living for a purpose larger than oneself

  To achieve the good life we must develop natural strengths and virtues that lead to gratification
• assumption: authenticity of goodness and excellence

  feelings of goodness and excellence are as natural as feelings of stress and anxiety so should have equal attention

  signature strengths should be nurtured to transform our lives

  This can act as a buffer from future mental health problems

  Too much focus on disorder and distress means achievement and success is overlooked
• assumption: acknowledgment of free will

  we are in charge of our emotions, self directing and adaptive

  happiness isn’t a result of genes or luck but recognising strengths and working on them to minimise negativity

  more investment in relationships increases overall happiness ( Seligman and Deiner)
• weakness: nomothetic

  ignores individual differences

  ethnocentric based on western ideas of autonomy and fulfilment

  impersonal and superficial view

  EG forcing optimism. on anxious defensive pessimists can damage their performance
• weakness: measuring happiness

  happiness is different for everyone

  Neuroscience allows objective measure of emotional experience of happiness-> is happiness a discrete emotion measured in confined time in the lab or does it run along a continuum with other emotions?
• weakness not a new idea

  Celebrate as a new movement, but humanistic work is ignored by seligman (maslows hierarchy) claims to be in advance and humanistic as it is scientific ignoring the qualitative so a narrow view
• strength: free will

  empowering as we have control of our own destiny

  freedom to grow and develop strengths with no restrictions or predetermined behaviour

  develop character strengths to enhance life, fulfilling free will is necessary for content life and to flourish

  Use free will to elicit change
• strength: a shift in focus

  shifts attention from negative to positive states and celebrating human character

  Focus on disorder and disease limits understanding and fails to encourage growth
• strength: application

  School stress management, occupational psychology and therapy

  resilience training in the US Army to improve emotional resilience and reduce incidents of stress symptoms and building mental toughness by identifying signature strengths

  positive psychology curricular in education involves intentional activity to improve well-being
• Aim of positive psychology

  To begin to catalyse a change in focus of psychology from preoccupation with only repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities