Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Psychology 1504 Positive Psychology
Psychology 1504 Positive Psychology
Positive Psychology
House keeping
• Feedback or questions
• In case of an emergency…
• … we’ll take a PP-break
• Powerpoints and videotape on website
• Active note-taking
• Overlap with 1508?
The Road to Positive Psychology
• Humanistic Psychology (50’s)
– The Third Force
• Reaction to behaviorism
• Reaction to psychoanalysis
• Lacked rigorous methodology
Meet the Grandparents
“In pursuit of
knowledge, every day
something is acquired;
in pursuit of wisdom,
every day something
is dropped.”
Lao Tzu
Information is not enough
“What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—
information is always better than ignorance, no matter
what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is
the belief behind the information, the belief that
information will change the world. It won’t.”
Archibald MaCleish
Information is not enough
“Humanistic philosophy [offers] a new conception of
learning, of teaching, and of education. Stated simply,
such a concept holds that the function of education, the
goal of education—the human goal, the humanistic goal,
the goal so far as human beings are concerned—is
ultimately the ‘self-actualization’ of a person, the
becoming fully human, the development of the fullest
height that the human species can stand up to or that
the particular individual can come to. In a less technical
way, it is helping the person to become the best that he
is able to become.”
Abraham Maslow
It is not about providing definitive answers
concerning the good life
It is about identifying the right questions
Ratio: 21/1
Focusing on the Negative
“The science of psychology has been far more
successful on the negative than on the positive
side; it has revealed to us much about man’s
shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little
about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable
aspirations, or his psychological height. It is as if
psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only
half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker,
meaner half.”
Abraham Maslow
Accentuating the Positive
“Negative”
Research
Negative
Experiences
Happiness Spiral
“Positive”
Research
Heisenberg
Uncertainty
Principle
Positive
Experiences
“Human systems grow in the direction of what
they persistently ask questions about.”
Cooperrider and Whitney
Happiness isn’t the Negation of Unhappiness
neurosis, anger, anxiety, wellbeing, satisfaction, joy
depression, psychosis
-_______________________ excitement, happiness
0 ____________________
+ Disease Model Health Model