Lesson 1 - What is positive psychology and how is it different form other areas of psychology

What is positive psychology? How is different from other areas of psychology?

Positive psychology studies a wide variety of topics that range from happiness and optimism, to personal growth and strength. It focuses on developing the strengths of individuals instead of trying to reduce the negativity or cure mental illness. A large amount of work in psychology has gone into finding ways to alleviate the negative symptoms and thought patterns associated with mental illness. While this has been a fruitful path of study, producing an in depth understanding of many mental illnesses, as we as many beneficial treatments for them, the focus on working with the negative side of human cognition also limits the experience in that reducing the negative can at best lead to a neutral experience. Positive psychology aims to not only allow people to live without negative affect, but to move beyond that so people can truly thrive and get the most out of life. Positive psychology does have some criticisms in the arguments that it is not a quantitatively rigorous field of study. Additionally, people argue that focusing on the positive leaves the negative side of human emotion unattended and untreated, resulting in an incomplete psychology study. While some of the criticism make valid points, positive psychology does aim to provide a sound empirical study of psychological states, moving to understanding and describing beneficial cause-effect relationships in human experience. Overall, while positive psychology may have its own weaknesses, it offers a path to understanding how to get the most out of human life. Every person has in common the desire to avoid pain and suffering and move to pleasure and happiness. While other psychological fields of study have focused on the avoidance of pain, positive psychology aims to study the other half of the basic human desires.

In our poster, we focused on a couple different focus areas of positive psychology: finding a balance between different areas, such as pleasure, engagement and meaning, to promote a fulfilling life, and the idea that we can analyze the positive psychology of someone through their past, present, and future.

One of drawings is a house with stairs leading from the basement to the top of the house. This drawing is meant to represent the idea that positive psychology is focused on moving from a neutral state to a positive state, instead of reducing the negative aspects of a person's experience. For example, a person's experience may be quantitatively measured on a scale from negative to positive, such as from -8 to 8. A large portion of psychology today is focused on reducing mental illness, or reducing the negative affect of people, for instance, going from a -8 to a -3. Positive psychology differs in this regard in that it is not just trying to reduce negative, but also trying to move beyond into the positive.

Additionally, we drew a lotus in order to represent the balance that positive psychology states must be obtained in order to achieve a fulfilling life. The balance must be between engagement, pleasure, and meaning. The balance of these three aspects of life experience are imperative to experiencing a fulfilling life.

The final drawing was meant to represent a timeline of psychology and how there have been different branching that have diverged in different directions. For instance, a lot of philosophical ideas about living a virtuous life came from the Greeks, such as Aristotle. There has been waves of different psychological ideas that have come throughout history, including humanistic, behaviorism, and others.

Some aspects that were not drawn but noted on the board included the idea that positive psychology focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses of people - going back to the goal of moving people into a positive mindset instead of just reducing their negative affect. Additionally, positive psychology also notes that a person's experience can be seen in their past, present and future. Other aspects that were not written but are also applicable to the study of positive psychology are three nodes: the subject node, which focuses on the past, present and future experience of a person, the individual node, which focuses on individualistic characteristics, and the group node, which focuses on sociological factors.

In summary, the main idea behind positive psychology is that instead of focusing only on dealing with the negative side of human cognitive thought - which inevitably results in a ceiling to what we can experience as humans - we need to push beyond and find ways to get the most out of life.