What is positive psychology?

Positive psychology is a relatively new field of research within psychology. It is dedicated to researching and cultivating what makes life most worth living. It focuses specifically on the properties and conditions that are related to well-being and life satisfaction. It is an attempt to better understand the characteristics of people that contribute to a good life and enable people to get to know their strengths and talents in more detail and to apply them in everyday life.

The discipline was launched when Prof. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman (University of Pennsylvania, USA) started his term as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, where he appealed for promoting “new science of human strengths” with positive psychology. In 2000, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described in an article in American Psychologist the fundamentals and basic ideas of this new direction. The scientific study of the fundamentals of a good life and characteristics that favor life satisfaction and lead to people’s flourishing should since then form an “antipole” to the study of factors associated with pathological phenomena, which is predominant in psychology and psychopathology.

The investigation of the causes of well-being–even in people who feel no psychological distress–is based inter alia on the idea that the absence of disease might be necessary for well-being, but does not lead by itself to a "good" life and people’s flourishing. The ultimate goal of positive psychology could be conceived as making itself superfluous as a specific scientific discipline eventually. This would be the case if it is taken for granted again in psychology to study the positive aspects of life and if the research on the basics of a good life and the possibilities for increasing life satisfaction is treated equally as the research of the causes of pathological phenomena and their treatment.

The first important and successful steps have already been taken. To mention only a few of them: Peterson and Seligman (2004) proposed a catalog of 24 character strengths, which can be assigned to six virtues (the Values-in-Action classification of strengths and virtues, VIA), as a counterpart to the list of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The authors based their classification (somehow an “anti-DSM”) on multiple philosophical, religious, and psychological sources from various cultures. They incorporated traits as strengths and virtues, which were desirable and worthwhile across culture and nations. The authors describe the following universal virtues: Wisdom and knowledge (assigned character strengths are for example creativity, curiosity, or love of learning), courage (e.g., bravery, perseverance, zest), humanity (e.g., capacity to love and be loved, or kindness), justice (e.g., teamwork, or fairness), temperance (e.g., forgiveness and mercy, or modesty and humility), transcendence (e.g., spirituality, appreciation of beauty and excellence, or gratitude).

As an empirical science, positive psychology investigates positively evaluated phenomena, but by adopting an objective attitude. Positive psychology links ways of living to well-being, without being prescriptive on how people should live. Likewise, one is aware of the complexity of the conditions and that the positive aspects of humans experience and behaviors are multifaceted. Therefore, positive psychology distance oneself from establishing simplified panacea for a good life, which are often found in self-help books.