Positive psychology

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Traditional psychology tends to focus on control of negative emotions. Positive psychology can complement rather than replace traditional psychotherapy.

Various approaches aim to shift attention away from pathology.

Positive psychology is sometimes dismissed as so much happy talk. But practitioners say that their techniques provide a much-needed balance to psychiatry's traditional focus on psychic pain and pathology.

The term ‘positive psychology' is a broad one, encompassing a variety of techniques that encourage people to identify and further develop their own positive emotions, experiences, and character traits. In many ways, positive psychology builds on key tenets of humanistic psychology.

Carl Rogers' client-centred therapy, for example, was based on the theory that people could improve their lives by expressing their authentic selves. And Abraham Maslow identified traits of self-actualised people that are similar to the character strengths identified and used in some positive psychology interventions.

Although initially developed as a way to advance well-being and optimal functioning in healthy people, positive psychology techniques are now being promoted as a complement to more traditional forms of therapy.

For example, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, a well-known advocate of positive psychology, has described its core philosophy as a 'build what's strong' approach that can augment the 'fix what's wrong' approach of more traditional psychotherapy.

Another pioneer in the field, Harvard psychiatrist George E. Vaillant, sees positive psychology as a way to encourage patients to focus on positive emotions and build strengths, supplementing psychotherapy that focuses on negative emotions, like anger and sorrow.

In a talk about positive psychology, Dr. Vaillant cited the example of a standard psychiatric textbook used by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.

The textbook, he says, contains roughly a million lines of text, with thousands of lines devoted to anxiety and depression, and hundreds discussing terror, shame, guilt, anger, and fear. But only five lines in the textbook discuss hope, only one mentions joy, and not a single line mentions compassion or love.

To counter the traditional focus on pathology, Seligman and another psychologist, Christopher Peterson, have formalised the tenets of positive psychology in a book, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (CSV), which they created as a counterpoint to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV).

Just as the DSM-IV classifies a range of psychiatric disorders, the CSV provides details and classifications for various strengths that enable people to thrive.

The book identifies 24 character strengths, like curiosity and zest, organized according to six overarching virtues, such as wisdom and courage.

A number of different counselling and coaching strategies rely on aspects of positive psychology. Although it's impossible to review all of them in a single article, a few examples can help to provide a taste of how they may complement more traditional therapies.

Well-being therapy

As its name implies, well-being therapy tries to promote recovery from depression and other affective disorders by having a patient focus on and promote the positive, as well as alleviating negative aspects of life.

Developed by Giovanni Fava at the University of Bologna in Italy, well-being therapy is based in large part on the work of psychologist Carol Ryff and her multidimensional model of subjective well-being.

Ryff's model consists of six tenets: mastery of the environment, personal growth, purpose in life, autonomy, self-acceptance, and positive relationships.

In practical terms, well-being therapy is much like cognitive behavioural therapy. A patient keeps a journal to keep track of and recognise the positive events that occur each day. Next the patient starts recognising negative thoughts and beliefs that distract from or disrupt positive events.

The ultimate goal is to challenge and eventually change negative ways of thinking, to enable positive events to have more of an impact on the patient's life.

Positive psychotherapy

Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania developed positive psychotherapy as a way to treat depression by building positive emotions, character strengths, and sense of meaning, not just by reducing negative symptoms such as sadness.

This therapy uses a combination of 12 exercises (such as the following) that can be practiced individually or in groups.

Using your signature strengths Identify your top five strengths and try to use them in some new way daily.

Three good things Every evening, write down three good things that happened that day and think about why they happened.

Gratitude visit Write a letter to someone explaining why you feel grateful for something they've done or said. Read the letter to the recipient, either in person or over the phone.

This is one of the few forms of positive psychotherapy that has been tested in a randomiaed controlled trial. The study found that some exercises are more beneficial than others.

Integrating positive psychology in practice

Psychologist Carol Kauffman, director of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Initiative at Harvard's McLean Hospital, discussed four techniques for integrating the principles of positive psychology into more traditional types of individual or group therapy.

Reverse the focus from negative to positive Most people tend to dwell on negative events or emotions and ignore the positive ones - and therapy can encourage this. One way to reverse the focus is to use techniques aimed at shifting attention to more positive aspects of life.

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