Positive Psychology: The Science of What’s Right With You
- Tess Howells
- Mar 11
- 3 min read
What is Positive Psychology?
If you’ve ever wondered why some people seem to navigate life with a sense of purpose and fulfilment while others struggle despite having ‘everything they need’, you’re asking the kind of question that positive psychology was built to explore.
At its heart, positive psychology is the scientific study of the factors that contribute to individual and community thriving - built on the premise that people don’t just want to survive or get through the day - they want to enhance their personal level of happiness and wellbeing through experiencing connection, meaning and purpose.
And unlike traditional psychology, which has historically focused on diagnosing and treating what’s wrong, positive psychology flips the lens - looking instead at what’s strong, what’s working and what can be built upon.
It’s a distinction that might sound subtle, but the impact has been profound.
Where Positive Psychology Began
At the turn of the new millennium, something interesting was happening in the world of psychology.
A growing number of respected psychologists were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the results that had come from traditional psychology's focus on problems and difficulties with life.
Despite decades of research and clinical practice focused on mental illness, dysfunction and ‘what’s broken’, the results weren’t matching the effort. People weren’t getting happier. In fact, quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, the western world - despite increasing prosperity - was experiencing unprecedentedly high levels of anxiety, depression and dissatisfaction.
Sound familiar?
It was this growing frustration that gave rise to the positive psychology movement.
Enter Dr Martin Seligman
Dr Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania is widely regarded as the founder of Positive Psychology, and he continues his work today.
Rather than working within the DSM-IV - the prevailing classification system for mental disorders at the time (now the DSM-V) - Seligman wanted to develop something different: an alternative framework that classified human strengths and virtues, rather than disorders and deficits.
To do that, he assembled a team of researchers and set them a pretty ambitious task.
They spent years reading, analysing and classifying major religious and philosophical texts throughout human history, searching for common threads - ubiquitous human virtues that could lead us to live a fulfilling life.
What they found was remarkable.
As Seligman describes it:
"…we read Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Bushido (the Samurai Code), the Koran, Benjamin Franklin, and the Upanishads – some two hundred virtue catalogues in all. To our surprise, almost every single one of these traditions - flung across three thousand years and the entire face of the earth - endorsed six virtues."
The Six Ubiquitous Virtues
Those six virtues - found consistently across three thousand years of human thought - are:
Wisdom and Knowledge
Courage
Love and Humanity
Justice
Temperance
Spirituality and Transcendence
Each of these virtues is further broken down into what Seligman called Strengths of Character – twenty-four in total.
If you’d like to explore your own strengths, Dr Seligman’s website at www.authentichappiness.org offers a number of helpful inventories.
The one I've used most often with my own clients, and highly recommend, is the VIA Signature Survey of Character Strengths.
It produces a personalised, scaled summary of your primary strengths, and I’ve found it to be a wonderful starting place for two things: acknowledging the strengths you already have, and identifying those you might like to develop further.
PERMA: The Five Elements of Wellbeing
Building on this foundation, Seligman went on to develop his Five Elements of Wellbeing Theory, known as PERMA:
P - Positive Emotion
E - Engagement
R - Positive Relationships
M - Meaning
A - Accomplishment
The beauty of PERMA is in its simplicity and its breadth.
It gives us a clear, practical framework for thinking about what a flourishing life looks like.
Apart from being used by therapists, PERMA has been adopted by schools, businesses and government agencies – and I believe it remains just as relevant today.
Want to Go Deeper?
Seligman is now expanding his thinking further into what he calls "Prospective Psychology" - studying how thinking about the future shapes current behaviour.
It's a fascinating evolution of the work, and one worth watching.
If you’d like to know more about Martin Seligman, positive psychology, its development by other researchers, and how it continues to help us navigate being the best version of ourselves for the benefit of all humanity, you can explore further through my book:
It’s a great place to start if you’re keen to dig deeper into how positive psychology can make a real difference in your everyday life.
You can also visit www.authentichappiness.org or www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu – both of which offer a broad range of free information and resources, whether you’re a curious individual, a student of psychology or someone working in education, business or community health.
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