1.16 (V) Positive Psychology
So what are some of the common misconceptions about positive psychology? We hear a lot about positive psychology in the popular media, we hear stuff on the TV, we hear self-help gurus promoting positive thinking. What are some of the common misconceptions? Well one of the key ones is that you have to be happy, that positive psychology is just about happiness. What positive psychology is about is about the scientific study of human flourishing and of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and organizations and communities to thrive. And I'm here to tell you that it's not about that over-caffeinated, big smiley face that says, "You can do anything." And in a sense, this has been around for many many years. You know, the scientific study of human flourishing. It's been part of what psychology has done for a long time. But in 2000, Professor Martin Seligman really wanted to make a stamp on the field of professional and academic psychology and he kind of launched this notion of positive psychology when he was president of the American Psychological Association. So the roots of positive psychology go back many many thousands of years to the ancient Greeks, but much more recently, they've emerged in psychology, primarily in the 40s and the 50s, with the work of Maslow. Many people contributed, but Maslow is seen as being one of the key kind of founding fathers. And he talked about the needs that need to be met in order for people to self-actualize. Self actualize is really when people become - you can put in the words of pop psychology - the best you can be although that sounds somewhat trite. But it's really that time when you feel connected, when you feel that your life has meaning and purpose, and you feel you are yourself in a genuine, authentic way. So Maslow's idea was that your basic needs were physiological; you had to have food, you had to have the biological functions working well. And then the next layer of needs that needed to be met were the safety or security needs. You need to feel safe, you need to feel secure in your environment. And then the next layer of needs on top of that where the belonging needs - the need for social connection, very very important, you need to feel. As human beings, we're almost preprogramed to feel connected to other people and there's great research in the positive psychology literature to show the more that we're connected to other people, the more well-being we have, the more resilient we become. And some fascinating studies using social network analysis that show how positivity and negativity are spread through our social networks. That belonging, very important. And then the next layer of needs are our esteem needs; we need to feel like we hold ourselves in esteem and that others hold us in esteem. And his idea was that once you've met those kind of basic needs, only then could you move into self-actualization, only then would you become fully self-actualized. Now, Maslow's framework has been hugely influential. It's been very difficult to empirically validate because some of those concepts are quite vague, but nevertheless, it provided an important springboard for psychology to study the human growth, the human potential movement. Happiness really means living a rich, full, and meaningful life and that means embracing and working with the painful warts and all. That happens, you know. Happiness is not just about feeling good, it's also about accepting. It's about accepting who we are and accepting the world around us. Implementing change when we can, but also recognizing the boundaries of that change. In a sense, you know, it's been fantastic to see the emergence of positive psychology because it's given this kind of discourse a place within society. The downside of that kind of popularization, of course, is that some of these concepts have become over popularized and, in a sense, maybe the meaning has been watered down. So lets think about some of the correlates of happiness. What kind of things, you know, correlate or align with happiness? Well, some of those are quite obvious, you know, physical health is important to correlate of happiness. Social connectedness is a very important correlate of happiness, you know. Religiosity and spirituality, a believing in some sort of power greater than yourself or a sense of connectedness to nature or the world, however you want to put it, is really important. Work satisfaction is hugely important, as is genetic influence. In fact, genetics probably account for 50% of the variance between individuals and happiness. And there's not much we can do about genetics, but there is a lot of things that we can do to moderate the effects. So let's talk about what it is that people do to make themselves happy. And I guess the first thing we need to talk about is money. As an old mentor of mine said to me many years ago, he said, "Tony, you know, it's always easier to feel spiritual with a few bob in the bank." And to some extent, actually, that's true. Let's talk about some Australian research in this regard. Robert Cummings, for many years, has conducted a very large scale survey with over 2000 Australians. It's done on a very regular basis, the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index. And what they look at is things like standard of living, health, achievement in life, relationships, safety, community, connectedness, future security, spirituality, religion. And they get people to rate their personal well-being on a scale of 0 to 100. And this is typically the self-reported scales; It's typically how people do this kind of well-being research. There are limitations, of course, with self-report scales, but when you have these large scale studies, you know, they do very reliably measure how people feel and you can relate those to kind of more objective factors. Interesting enough, the average score on these kind of scales is about 75 out of 100. So people would, on average, score themselves, you know, 75. They'd give themselves a distinction, in academic terms, in personal well-being. So one of the things that Robert Cummings looked at was the relationship of well-being to money. And I have to say, this finding has been replicated many times around the world in a number of different populations. And it is true that lower levels of income are significantly related to low personal well-being. So if you don't earn very much money, actually, it's quite hard for you to really reach the upper levels of well-being. So let's talk about that for a moment here. So if you have really low levels of income, you know, well below the average, actually, it's quite difficult. You tend to have quite a low well-being compared to the general population. And as you move up in your income, your levels of well-being do rise. But there reaches a point, you know, and that point is around when you get to about $100,000 a year income in Australia, it comes a point where, actually, money doesn't make you much happier. You have to earn a lot of money to really kind of get much more happy. So to say that money is not related with happiness is not strictly true. There is a complicated relationship where... And, in many ways, this harks back to Maslow's notion, is that when you have enough to take care of the basic needs, well-being and happiness have got much better grounds to flourish and grow. And I think this is an important point, really, that our policymakers should be looking at. And this is just one example of one of the many ways that the findings of positive psychology could inform social and governmental policy. Just to summarize now as we wrap up. Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life worth living. Happiness is much more than just feeling good. Happiness means living a rich, full, and meaningful life and sometimes that's painful. Happiness is about engaging and becoming who you really are. So let me just leave you with a couple of questions here. Based on what we've spoken about today, what are you going to do to improve the quality of your life and what are you going to do to improve the quality of the lives of the people around you?
