What is Positive Psychology and Why Does it Matter?

The world is objectively getting better. Over the past 30 years alone, the percentage of people in absolute poverty, living on less than $1.25 per day, has decreased from over 50% of the population to around 15% (Diamandis & Kotler, 2012). 30 years ago, 12 million kids were dying every year, but thanks to vaccines and work in public health, that number is down to around 5 million today (Garfield, 2018). We’ve eradicated entire diseases. For example, cases of Guinea worm, a parasite that affected more than 3 million people 30 years ago, is down to mere thousands thanks to advancements in medical technology. Infant mortality is down. Crime rates are down. Child labor is down. All incredible things, and yet humanity isn’t flourishing. How can that be?

In recent years, psychologists have come to realize the absence of illness alone does not equate a life of well-being and flourishing. The field of psychology has historically focused on addressing problems in clinical populations, resulting in significant advancements in our ability to better understand life altering ailments, like depression and anxiety. On the other hand, the field contributed little to advancing our understanding of how to cultivate well-being and build lives full of positive emotion, meaning, and achievement. As Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) put it, “the exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living.” In 1998, Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association, and the direction of psychological research took a turn northward. The central theme of Seligman’s presidential term? Positive psychology. In this new era of psychology, the absence of illness was not going to be the end of the story. Psychology was going to begin researching and understanding what it means to flourish and how to create more well-being. In the year of the election, 20 years ago, there were 53 publications on Google Scholar that mentioned ‘positive psychology’ and just over 1,000 that mentioned ‘subjective well-being.’ In the year 2017, the same searches on Google Scholar reveal over 16,000 and 20,000 publications related to each topic respectively. The era of positive psychology has officially begun.