Positive Psychology Research Paper

Positive Psychology
An Introduction
Martin E. P. Seligman
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions promises to improve quali~. ' of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless. 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. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance are ignored or explained as transformations of more authentic negative impulses. The 15 articles in this millennial issue of the American Psychologist discuss such issues as what
What psychologists have learned over 50 years is that the disease model does not move psychology closer to the prevention of these serious problems. Indeed, the major strides in prevention have come largely from a perspective focused on systematically building competency, not on correcting weakness.
Prevention researchers have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, and the capacity for flow and insight, to name several. Much of the task of prevention in this new century will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to understand and learn how to foster these virtues in young people.
Working exclusively on personal weakness and on damaged brains, however, has rendered science poorly
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equipped to effectively prevent illness. Psychologists need now to call for massive research on human strengths and virtues. Practitioners need to recognize that much of the best work they already do in the consulting room is to amplify strengths rather than repair the weaknesses of
Positive Personal Traits
The second section includes five articles dealing with four different personal traits that contribute to positive psychology: subjective well-being, optimism, happiness, and selfdetermination. These are topics that in the past three decades have been extensively studied and have produced an impressive array of findings--many of them unexpected and counterintuitive.
The first article in this set is a review of what is known about subjective well-being written by Edward Diener
(2000), whose research in this field now spans three decades. Subjective well-being refers to what people think and how they feel about their lives--to the cognitive and affective conclusions they reach when they evaluate their
January 2000 • American Psychologist

existence. In practice, subjective well-being is a more scientific-sounding term for what people usually mean by happiness. Even though subjective well-being research relies primarily on rather global self-ratings that could be criticized on various grounds, its findings are plausible and coherent. Diener 's account begins with a review of the temperament and personality correlates of subjective wellbeing and the demographic characteristics of groups high