Positive Psych - Happiness 101

D.T. Max has an 11-page piece on the Positive Psychology movement, titled Happiness 101 in the New York Times magazine section today. (Jan 7, 2007)

The growing field is the area of specialization of Martin Seligman

Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”

Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so

Excerpts:

...the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality.

Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being.

“Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.

A nice review of Barbara Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory is presented, with a review of he work in Michigan with Compuware to improve productivity.

For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)

Incidentally, a nice piece by Fredrickson in Science and Theology News is still cached and can be found with a Google search on "Barbara Fredrickson broaden and build."  Even from the title "Joy and love genetically encoded"  it's clear she's struggling with how to fit altruism and positive traits into the reductionistic Darwinian model that tries to make everything explainable by Dawkins' "selfish genes" - that is, a single-dimensional fitness-for-survival  function operating at a single level of biolife.

I've argued here before that a multi-level model with co-evolving fitness functions is almost certainly a stronger model, and, for those who care, "Turing complete."
(see my prior posts "The God Delusion by Dawkins", "Looks like UP to me" and "Technical comment on up Darwin and Dawkins")

The Times skips over most of the work on the impact of positive psychology on team performance and on high-reliablilty organizations.  See my post "Virtue drives the bottom line" for references to academic studies in that area.

Some more tibdits from the Times article today:

Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.”

...researchers at the University of Kentucky  ... showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers.

Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else.

Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership.

And some criticisms

critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools

[is it just:] If you are not optimistic, fake it.

But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground.

Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off

Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway.

technorati tags:Positivepsychology, psychology, depression, therapy, CBT, happiness, joy, virtues, Fredrickson, Seligman, Cameron, Dawkins, Darwinian, religion, science