Self-Help 2.0: Positive Psychology

[Stu]

I'm curious to see how many people have actually heard of positive psychology, and if you have, what do you think about it?

For those that don't know, in the past 7 or 8 years psychology has been shifting its focus away from fixing people with various mental problems like depression, social anxiety, etc.. and focusing more on a lot of the questions that those of us interested in personal development ask, like how to set effective goals or how to be happy. This new area of psychology is called positive psychology.

Personally, I think that positive psychology is going to change personal development and self-help in a big way (hence the 2.0), and I've started up a blog (in the sig) to follow its development. I think that it's going to:

1. Re-brand self-help so that it has a more legitimate, scientific image. In the discussion in this thread on the forums the talk turned towards broaching self-help to friends, and several people mentioned how friends had not been receptive to gifts of self-help books. Just about anyone here on this website knows that self-help works, but I think most of us know too that it's a tricky subject to bring up with friends and family because most people have negative feelings about self-help.

2. I know from all my reading in positive psychology that it has a lot more to offer than a lot of the self-help stuff thats out there now. I think the application of scientific methods to self-help questions is providing a lot of very in-depth and precise answers to questions like 'How can I be happier?'

One example of this is a study I recently wrote about in my post Is Happiness Contagious? (the answer is yes ) The researchers in this study tracked obesity in social networks and pinpointed to exact percentages how likely someone was to get obese if a friend, spouse, or sibling became obese, and the researchers are applying this same research to things like happiness and depression and finding that these things spread in social networks as well.

The point with the obesity study is that there are many self-help authors out there who will tell you that you are the product of your environment, and that being around happy people will make you happier. The difference is that unlike psychologists, self-help authors can't tell you why that is, they can't explain the details of it, and they can't give precise figures, all they can say is that you're 'more likely' to be happy. I think this is a really key difference and I think as more and more of this research makes its way out to the general public there's going to be a lot more interest in self-help because most people want to be happier but they also want to know precisely how and why self-help techniques will make them happier.

Ultimately, I think positive psychology is going to revolutionize self-help.

[Mark Lapierre]

Wow, no replies and only 3 votes!

This is a branch of psychology which leverages all the evidence-based methodology of modern science and applies it to the field of personal development (which we're all interested in) and no one has replied?! Not even to say "we already know what they're just discovering"?

Stu: I'm meeting with Seligman next week. Very much looking forward to it!

I think your point about precision is a very important one. Not only is it useful to know how any why certain techniques can make you happier, but also what techniques, and for whom, and under what circumstances. There is no such thing as "one-size-fits-all" despite what many in the self-help field have claimed throughout the ages. While some of the interventions proposed by positive psychology are not new to many people familiar with self-help, they are proven, and they have been identified as effective through means which don't rely on unverifiable, anecdotal reports.

PS: Good work on your blog. I'll get around to commenting soon I'm sure

[Neutral]

I use Evolutionary Psychology to understand human beings and myself as an individual.

I study other subfields of psychology but I find evpysch the most obviously true.

[Smarky]

Most of self help is complete bull and people are so stuck in that bull that they need even more bull to help them out of it.

Anything that cuts out the nonsense is of course welcome.

[Mark Lapierre]

Originally Posted by Neutral

I study other subfields of psychology but I find evpysch the most obviously true.

That's ironic since evolutionary psychology is necessarily the most difficult to verify. In other words there is nothing obvious about theories of our psychological evolution; the inferences we make are even more reliant on careful analysis than those which result from hypotheses we can test more directly, and even more at risk of misinterpretation or subjective bias.

That's not to say a lot of good work hasn't come out of the field! I'm a big fan of some of the work, and a huge critic of some of the rest.

[Stu]

Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre

Wow, no replies and only 3 votes!
Stu: I'm meeting with Seligman next week. Very much looking forward to it!

I'm very jealous.

Personally I would love to meet Tal Ben-Shahar, I managed to grab all the videos of his positive psych lectures at Harvard and they were amazing. 30 or so hours of him speaking was an excellent crash course in everything to do with positive psychology.