Positive

Subdecks (3)

Cards (64)

  • 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