professor of psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His BA is from Yale, his PhD from Stanford, and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science. He is past‐president of the American Psychological Association and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has been cited over 184,000 times in the professional literature, with an h index of 207. He is the author of Adaptive Intelligence (in press).
Sara Wilf is a doctoral student in the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches the development and practice of youth civic engagement with a focus on youth activism on social media. She received her BA from Brown University and her MPA from Columbia University.
Everett L. Worthington Jr. is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. He continues an active research, writing, and speaking career studying forgiveness, humility, hope, gratitude, patience, and other positive psychology topics. He originated the REACH Forgiveness intervention, which has been investigated in over 30 randomized control trials and continues to be studied and used around the globe. He also continues to do research in the hope‐focused approach to couple enrichment and therapy.
Laura Wray‐Lake is an Associate Professor of social welfare in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in human development and family studies from Penn State University. Her research focuses on how and why young people become civically engaged. She has published over 60 research articles and book chapters, including a 2020 SRCD Monograph on pathways to civic engagement among urban youth of color. Her work uses multiple methodologies and takes developmental, cultural, and contextual perspectives in studying youth civic engagement.
Dragan Žuljević, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and Business Studies, Dr Lazar Vrkatić, Novi Sad, Serbia. He received his PhD in psychology with a concentration in psychotherapy treatment evaluation. He authored over 100 research reports and publications focused on psychological treatment evaluation, resilience, mental health, and positive psychology. His current research is focused on practice and evaluation of acceptance and commitment therapy and contextual behavioral science.
Acknowledgment
This book would not have been possible if not for the contributions and dedicated commitment from a number of persons. We express our deepest and sincerest thanks to the following individuals for their invaluable contributions toward the successful completion of this volume. First, we say thanks to all of our diligent contributors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel Batson, Robert J. Sternberg, Massimo Agnoletti, Celina Benavides, Ilona Boniwell, Jolanta Burke, Gian Vittorio Caprara, Ed Diener, Stewart I. Donaldson, Scott I. Donaldson, Sandro Formica, Burkhard Gniewosz, Saida Heshmati, Jessica Kansky, Shari Young Kuchenbecker, Marija Pejičić, Vesna Petrović, Wendy‐Ann Smith, Sara Wilf, Everett L Worthington Jr., Laura Wray‐Lake, and Dragan Žuljević. A special thanks to Steve Dwarika, Mala Ramesar, and Shenelle Matadeen for their administrative assistance.
This book is an output of the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre of the University of the West Indies. Our sincerest thanks to The University of the West Indies and the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre and the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, at the University of Niš (Serbia) for their support. Our earnest gratefulness to the staff at Wiley Publishers. To all those who provided technical and other kinds of support resulting in this publication, we would like to indicate our deepest appreciation. And to those we may have inadvertently overlooked in this acknowledgment, we say thank you for all the encouragement and assistance that you have rendered.
1 Embracing Psychology Positively
Derek Chadee and Aleksandra Kostić
Positive psychology conjures the notion of a soft approach to addressing hard psychological issues. Though this is far from the truth, academia quite often focuses on removing of the negative and thinking critically of issues that adversely impact on our lives. Focusing on the other side, the positive, somehow implicitly summons the notion of not assessing the core of a problem. Martin Seligman in 1998, recognizing the usefulness of critically assessing the cause and impact of the negative, also saw the need to focus theorization, research, policy, and a paradigm toward the other side of the coin – the positive. In fact, positive psychologists go even further to emphasize that by encouraging the development of positive attributes many of the negative issues may be systemically addressed.
Martin Seligman the father of positive psychology defined this area of psychology as “a scientific and professional movement with a new goal to build the enabling conditions of a life worth living” (2011) and studied not only the frailties and problems but the strengths and virtues of the human being (Seligman, 2002, p. 630). Later, Duckworth, Steen, and Seligman (2005) clarified positive psychology from clinical psychology noting that as a “scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits and the institutions that facilitate their development, a field concerned with well‐being and optimal functioning, positive psychology at first glance seem peripheral to mainstream clinical psychology. We believe otherwise.” In fact, they noted that positive psychology expands the emphasis of clinical psychology from distress and interventions for improvement and moving the discourse to continuance of well‐being. Taking this principle of positive psychology, its contributions toward well‐being expands beyond that of the clinical branch of the discipline of psychology. Gable and Haidt (2005) argued that the prominence of the negative in psychology may be a result of prioritizing of compassion, the history and pragmatism of focusing on distress and disease, the nature and theorization of psychology. But they also posited that a positive psychology in no way implies a negative psychology, nor prior or future theorization, and research outside of this emerging branch are not in any way inferior.
Core to the discipline is the fact that positive psychology has the characteristics of a scientific intellectual movement and has over a short period develop a paradigm of a mature science (Simmons, 2013). Seligman, Gillham, Reivich, Linkins, and Ernst (2009) acknowledged the growth of positive psychology as a scientific paradigm to study positive emotions, engagement, and meaning and the importance of these characteristics in the development of life satisfaction. But one may ask why the ease in which this discipline has so quickly navigated toward respectability. The answer obviously lies in the content of positive psychology and the simplicity of the assumptions and premises on which, over a hundred years prior, the discipline of psychology studied with interventions. However, psychology fell short of ensuring the continuance of the well‐being of the inner being (Duckworth et al., 2005). Simmons (2013) referred to an interesting quotation from Abraham Maslow’s classic book, Motivation and Personality, in a chapter titled “Toward a Positive Psychology”:
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 illness, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology has voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that, the darker, meaner half.
(Maslow, 1954, p. 354)
The genesis of positive psychology has been attributed to the works of humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, and Marie Jahoda, who in 1958 wrote on the continuance of well‐being in patients (Duckworth et al., 2005). One can possibly say that the spirit of humanistic psychology manifested in positive psychology, one discipline in its evolution. However, Peterson and Seligman (2004, see also Simons, 2013)
