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).