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Introduction to Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology is Not Positive Thinking

This distinction is important, but unfortunately there is a certain amount of confusion about these two ideas. We shall first examine positive thinking to enable it to be distinguished from positive psychology, before going on to consider positive psychology in its own right. Positive thinking has a history all of its own, brilliantly traced by Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This book traces the origin of positive thinking to a particular human malaise prevalent in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, which took the form of unexplained fatigue and mysterious physical symptoms. It occurred at the time when a Calvinist doctrine of joyless, work-oriented, fearful, sin-avoidant living was in the ascendant. While this religious perspective and its accompanying prescriptions of hard work and sobriety contributed to, and supported, the work ethic that helped make the US the country it is, it also reduced the amount of positive emotions in life, such as hope, joy, passion, interest and happiness. From our perspective we might suspect this malaise to have been a form of depression.

The recommended cure was frequently complete bed rest without stimulation - no reading, no company, bland food and in a darkened room. With the benefit of hindsight we might question the wisdom of such a prescription. At the time few did until Phineas Quimby came on the scene. Quimby had little respect for the medical profession and set himself up as an alternative healer. He identified Calvinism as the source of the problem, arguing that it was oppressive guilt that was laying his patients low. He eschewed the depression-inducing prescriptions and instead developed a talking cure 'through which he endeavored to convince his patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent' (Ehrenreich, 2009, p. 85). He suggested to his patients that they were essentially at one with this benevolent mind and that, through this power of connection, they could use the power of their mind to cure their own ills.

Such magical thinking, a belief that you can influence things by thinking, is not new. To anthropologists it is known as sympathetic magic and is prevalent in native, or unscientific, cultures; hence, perhaps, the close association between promoters of the benefits of positive thinking and shamanistic, Native American or other Native culture practices. Such an association isn't always benign. In 2010, three people died and 20 more were injured in a Native American steaming ritual run by self-styled spiritual guru James Arthur Ray (Harris, 2010). In addition to these sweat-lodge deaths, there is a history of people being injured by fire-walking, such as the 20 managers of the KFC fast-food chain in Australia who, in 2002, received treatment for burns caused by fire-walking (Kennedy, 2002). Again in July 2010 eight employees in Italy had to go to hospital with foot injuries from fire-walking, which were expected to take up to 10 days to heal (Hooper, 2010).

Sensible people try these forms of magical thinking or sympathetic magic because they offer hope and because they bypass other, harder routes to achieving what they want. But this isn't to say that, as with many things, there isn't some truth in it. Visualization does have an effect on human behaviour, but through the medium of our actions, not through the medium of the magic of our thoughts. It is unfortunate that positive thinking and positive psychology both contain the word 'positive' and that both make reference to the power of positive visualization. However, it is possible to distinguish the two fields.

How Positive Psychology Differs from Positive Thinking

The main difference is that positive psychology is subject to the rigours of scientific experimentation and endorsement, suggesting that the phenomena discovered are reliable and repeatable: if it worked in the studies, then under the same circumstances, it is likely to work again. Positive thinking deals more with the realm of anecdote and exhortation. It also takes up the tautological position that, if it didn't work, it's because you weren't positive enough (Ehrenreich, 2009). Positive psychology is about accruing a body of knowledge that is useful to people who want to live good, long, happy and productive lives, while positive thinking is about persuading people that what happens to them is their own fault. (Of course, this is usually presented in more upbeat fashion - that what happens to them is under their own control!)

Positive psychology literature can also be distinguished from positive thinking literature in that it accommodates the reality, and necessity, of negativity: it not only accommodates the reality of negative events, emotions, behaviour, and so on, but also recognizes their importance to human wellbeing. Negative emotions and outcomes are recognized and accommodated by positive psychology in at least three ways. First, within positive psychology there is a recognition that bad things happen to people through no fault of their own; there is such a thing as randomness. It is possible to live a life free from carcinogens (tobacco, alcohol, red meat or exposure to toxic agents) and still contract cancer at an early age. Bad luck if you will. Second, negative emotions can serve a useful purpose. Fear, anger, sadness, anxiety, stress, and so on are essential for alerting us to threats to our wellbeing so that we can do something about them. They are necessary to our survival. Finally, it is clear that some well-intended behaviour has adverse outcomes, due to a basic inability of people to understand all the causal relationships within which they operate. In other words, we are all susceptible to making mistakes with unforeseen negative consequences. That's life.

Positive psychology is further distinguished from positive thinking by the fact that it has 'body of knowledge' structures such as collegiate bodies, university departments, professors and rigorous accredited academic courses that work to collate and share information. It has all the paraphernalia of scientific discourse with peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences. Its practitioners apply to respected scientific bodies for research grants. Assertions made as fact can be checked, verified or refuted by others. People build on other's work and acknowledge their debts to them. Traditionally, within the scientific establishment this has meant that the discoveries made often remain within the ivory towers of academia, only seeping slowly into public consciousness. Now something different is happening.

Interestingly, in contrast to other lines of inquiry in psychology, and possibly in response to the changing world, the founding mothers and fathers of positive psychology undertook from the beginning to make a conscious effort to get the information they were gaining over the wall of the cloistered world of academia. They felt that what they were thinking about, learning about and discovering how to practise was too fundamentally important to human life to be isolated within a small closed community: the world needed to know. Accelerating the rate of transmission of knowledge from the specialist community to the general public is not without risk.

In attempts to make work more accessible to the public a fine line has to be trodden between the danger of 'dumbing down' the message and producing something in the style of an academic paper, with the attendant danger of discouraging potential readers by detailing the scientific journey in too great a depth. This is a point that Barbara Held raises in her critique of positive psychology, where she notes the over-reliance on a few key, and not entirely satisfactory, research events for statements of a causal relationship between happiness and longevity (2004, p. 16). Held also notes a lack of attention to mixed or contradictory findings and an emphasis on clear, simple messages for the public. Clearly, there are dangers associated with bringing an embryonic science to the public too quickly.

Such caveats notwithstanding, the field is demonstrating a commendable rigour in pursuing both an academic and a more general reading public. As I write a range of texts already exists. Those aimed at the general reader include, for example, Positivity (Frederickson, 2009), Authentic Happiness (Seligman, 2002) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (Buckingham and Clifton, 2002) - all aimed squarely and pragmatically at helping people improve their lives. Accompanying these on the positive psychology bookshelves are texts aimed more at practitioner or academic markets. These include Positive Psychology Coaching (Biswas-Diener and Dean, 2007), A Primer in Positive Psychology (Peterson, 2006) and Positive Psychology in a Nutshell (Boniwell, 2008) - all excellent integrated texts. For readers who like their academic information straight from the horse's mouth, there are rigorously referenced edited texts that pull together expert papers, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work (Linley, Harrington and Garcea, 2010). High on academic standards, they are richly referenced and make for dense reading.

This book aims to complement the existing field. Working to bridge the gap between academic rigour and accessibility, it hopes to avoid the Scylla of dumbing down and the Charybdis of interruptive referencing. This text aims to offer a...