character-building

(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter).

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psychology

A review of Mar­tin Seligman’s lat­est book, Flour­ish: A Vision­ary New Under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness and Well-Being.

- By Jill Suttie

As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty to rad­i­cal­ly change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­o­gy had been pre­oc­cu­pied sole­ly with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it. He called for a psy­chol­o­gy that would uncov­er what makes peo­ple cre­ative, resilient, opti­mistic, and, ulti­mate­ly, hap­py. The “pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy” move­ment was born.

Yet in his lat­est book, Flour­ish, Selig­man tries to pro­vide some­thing of a course cor­rec­tion for pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy. [Read more…] about A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Review of Mar­tin Seligman’s Lat­est Book