Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Positive Psychology, the BEST!


"In the long run, money does not account for happiness"

"Faith and relationship have significant influence on how happy people are"

How do those statistic make you feel? Despite greed and examples of power-hunger that exist around the world, good feelings can be the best way to fulfill one's happy life.



Humanistic had long emphasized the importance of devloping human potential. Martin Seligman conducted animal experimentations testing whether helplessness is learned. Over time, he shifted his focus from the negative aspects of behavior to the more positive, thus introducing the concept of positive psychology. Positive psychology overlapped humanistic perspective in many ways. Human growth and understanding of the subjective experiences were the important focuses of the concept, although the knowledge about subjective experiences by itself was not enough to develop a scientific understanding of behavior. Positive psychology mentioned the importance of personality traits and social context of behavior, which were ignored by the humanistic approach. According to the positive psychology, personality traits influenced behavior across a variety of situations, while social context was concerned with understanding how communities and cultures affect experience and growth, and also how each person choose to interact with his/her social environment to inspire heathly growth. The value of relationship was greatly valued in positive psychology. Seligman introduced his view of psychology called positive psychology, which enabled us to study the human behavior by means of positive thoughts and optimistic perspective.

As I through texts on the positive psychology, I enjoyed it as much as Maslow's theories and ideas. Personally, I agree that to truly understand human behavior, psychologists should pay great attention to what is good about each individual, not just collective assumptions that imply how human behaviors are results of sexual or aggression drives! I also feel that studying the personality traits of different individuals will contribute to the understanding of human as a whole. Moreover, social context should be even more heavily emphasized, because I believe that environment (eg. in diffeten situations) plays a major role in determining the behavior of an individual. Successful relationships such as community, love, friendship, family, or even owner-pet can contribute to the development of a person's healthy growth.
With those said, I feel that positive psychology is useful and enjoyable to rely on as an approach to understand human behavior


~Daniel

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