Class 3: Eudemonic Wellbeing compared to Hedonic Well-being

Eudemonic Wellbeing proposes that wellbeing is found in the actualization of human potential. The theory then offers 3 approaches to achieving self actualization: psychological well being, authentic happiness, and self determination. In Psychological well being, we attempt to meet 6 goals: self acceptance, personal growth, finding a purpose in life, making positive relations, environmental mastery and autonomy. In Authentic happiness, we want good flow and a meaningful life. The self determination theory proposes that we need autonomy to freely choose actions according to ourselves, competence or the ability to affect the environment we are in and attain the desired outcome, and relatedness, or connecting and caring with other group members.

We can compare Hedonic and Eudemonic Well-being by looking at Maslow's Hierarchy of need's pyramid. Eudemonic happiness occupies the top 3 layers, and the while Hedonic happiness refers broadly to a pleasant life, or the bottom 2 layers.

Hedonic Happiness focuses more on tangible needs for a happy life, whereas eudemonic well being focuses more on finding meaning. 

Class 2: Hedonic Happiness; Top Down/Bottom-Up Arguments

Hedonic Happiness is also known as subjective well being (SWB). A individual's SWB is determined by 3 factors, one's satisfaction with life (or how closely their reality aligns with the ideal they had for life), high positive affect, and low negative affect. Affects are the emotions associated with experiencing momentary events. Hedonic Happiness can be explained in two different models, top-down and bottom-up. The top-down theory suggests that Hedonic Happiness produces certain outcomes. For example, people who are happy have a higher chance of doing well in job interviews and thus securing a well paying job. The bottom-up theory instead suggests that particular variables increase happiness. For example, people who are rich feel a sense of security and are well taken care of, which leads to happiness.  

Class 1: What Is Positive Psychology? How is PP different from other Fields of Psychology?

For years, psychology has focused on mental illness, and way to combat this and help people. Positive Psychology balances this traditional approach by instead focusing instead on people's strengths and weaknesses. This is represented on our poster by a comparison a small weak looking man versus a body builder. 

We can understand there to have been 4 waves of psychological discourses and theories within 2 time periods. The first time period, focused on controlling attitudes with leading theories such as Behaviorism by Skinner. Next, psychologists studied how the upbringing of people can contribute to developing people's norms and socializing them to society; major theories included Piaget's study of development. During the third period, the focus was on how individuals can participate. Positive Psychology developed out of the fourth and current wave, in which we focus on how individuals can influence society. Now, instead of humans being subjects of society and others, psychologists explore how individuals can take charge of their own lives. 

On our poster, we first discussed the 3 nodes of positive psychology: subjective, individual, and group. The subjective node encompasses positive experiences across all points of time. The individual node focuses on the characteristics of a "good person" (love, talent, courage, etc). The group node focuses on citizenship, tolerance, work ethic, ect. We depicted each of these nodes with representative pictures. 

The other main part of our our poster was an explanation of the Well Being Theory of Positive Psychology, which is a construct containing 5 elements: Positive emotion, engagement (flow), meaning (having a higher purpose), accomplishment (for its own sake), and positive relationships (to share experiences).