Positive psychology is a thriving field with increasing political influence, yet there are few evolutionary studies that have had a tangible impact on rethinking mechanisms of well-being. This ...Element reviews existing literature and proposes synthesizing insights into human flourishing under an umbrella of multilevel selection (MLS). Conceptualizing quality of life as 'Happiness + Meaning = Well-being' draws attention to how people navigate between individual and group needs, and how they reconcile selfish pursuits with altruism and cooperation. We define happiness as the cluster of affects that reward individuals for solving adaptive challenges. We approach meaning as a reward that individuals experience when contributing to their community. By way of examples, we critically examine the Nordic well-being societies whose ethos and education advance prosocial values and practices and strike a balance between individualist and communitarian ideals. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The development of academic fields is often described through the metaphor of 'waves.' Following the instantiation of positive psychology (the first wave), scholarship emerged looking critically at ...the notions of positive and negative, becoming known as its second wave. More recently, we discern an equally significant evolution, namely scholarship that in various ways goes beyond the individual and embraces greater complexity. This includes going beyond the individual person as the primary focus of enquiry to look more deeply at the groups and systems in which people are embedded. It also involves becoming more interdisciplinary and multicultural, and embracing a wider range of methodologies. We submit that these interrelated ripples constitute a form of epistemological 'broadening' that merit the label of an incoming 'third wave.' This paper identifies the key dynamics of this wave, allowing appreciation not only of the field's leading edge, but also its developmental potential into the future.
Second/foreign language teaching has been found as one of the most emotional professions worldwide. To generate optimal academic outcomes and run an effective education, teachers and students' ...emotions and feelings must be positively cared for. Given the significance of emotions in L2 education, many studies have followed positive psychology (PP) and examined various positive constructs. Nevertheless, love, as a PP variable, has been ignored in education due to its cultural/religious sensitivities. Trying to dispel the myths, recently, a new trend called a "loving pedagogy" has started to find itself a place in second language acquisition (SLA) research and practice. Yet, proposing a model of its application and an agenda for its research has been overlooked by scholars in this domain. Motivated by this lacuna, this research article provided the conceptualization, definitions, research bases, practical models, and implications of a loving pedagogy for SLA practitioners and future researchers.
While there is a growing literature on "dark traits" (i.e., socially aversive traits), there has been a lack of integration with the burgeoning research literature on positive traits and fulfilling ...and growth-oriented outcomes in life. To help move the field toward greater integration, we contrasted the nomological network of the Dark Triad (a well-studied cluster of socially aversive traits) with the nomological network of the Light Triad, measured by the 12-item Light Triad Scale (LTS). The LTS is a first draft measure of a loving and beneficent orientation toward others ("everyday saints") that consists of three facets:
(treating people as ends unto themselves),
(valuing the dignity and worth of each individual), and
(believing in the fundamental goodness of humans). Across four demographically diverse samples (
= 1,518), the LTS demonstrated excellent reliability and validity, predicting life satisfaction and a wide range of growth-oriented and self-transcendent outcomes above and beyond existing measures of personality. In contrast, the Dark Triad was negatively associated with life satisfaction and growth-oriented outcomes, and showed stronger linkages to selfish, exploitative, aggressive, and socially aversive outcomes. This exploratory study of the contrasting nomological networks of the Light vs. Dark Triad provides several ways forward for more principled and data driven approaches to explore both the malevolent and beneficent sides of human nature.
Considerable prior statistical work has criticized replacing a continuously measured variable in a general linear model with a dichotomy based on a median split of that variable. Iacobucci, Posovac, ...Kardes, Schneider, and Popovich (2015-in this issue) defend the practice of “median splits” using both conceptual arguments and simulations. We dispute their conceptual arguments, and we have identified technical errors in their simulations that dramatically change the conclusions that follow from those simulations. We show that there are no real benefits to median splits, and there are real costs in increases in Type II errors through loss of power and increases in Type I errors through false–positive consumer psychology. We conclude that median splits remain a bad idea.
The age of COVID-19 calls for a different approach toward global well-being and flourishing through the transcendence suffering as advocated by existential positive psychology. In the present study, ...we primarily explained what self-transcendence is and why it represents the most promising path for human beings to flourish through the transformation of suffering in a difficult and uncertain world. After reviewing the literature on self-transcendence experiences, we concluded that the model of self-transcendence presented by Frankl is able to integrate both of the characteristics associated with self-transcendence. Afterward, we discussed how the self-transcendence paradigm proposed by Wong, an extension of the model by Frankl, may help awaken our innate capacity for connections with the true self, with others, and with God or something larger than oneself. We presented self-transcendence as a less-traveled but more promising route to achieve personal growth and mental health in troubled times. Finally, we presented the history of the development and psychometrics of the Self-Transcendence Measure-Brief (STM-B) and reported the empirical evidence that self-transcendence served as a buffer against COVID-19 suffering. The presented data in the current study suggested that the best way to overcome pandemic suffering and mental health crises is to cultivate self-transcendence.
Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) are intentional activities for increasing hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. One of the most puzzling questions about them is why, after more than twenty years ...of positive psychology research, there are not more of them. To address this shortage, this paper argues for a methodological innovation in the understanding and generation of PPIs. Instead of the current common practice of conceiving of them as basic units of cognitive, emotional, or behavioral activities, analyzing PPIs into their constitutive elements makes possible the identification of the specific components essential for effecting positive changes in different contexts. It also allows for the clarification of which components work best together. This approach can lead to a deeper understanding of existing PPIs and greater facility in the creation of new ones.
Following the recent special issue in Frontiers in Psychology, entitled “
The Role of Teacher Interpersonal Variables in Students’ Academic Engagement, Success, and Motivation
,” calling educational ...researchers worldwide to examine different teacher interpersonal communication behaviors that contribute to student-related academic outcomes, this conceptual review article is written to familiarize educational researchers, teachers, and students with main concepts in instructional communication and their role as the main pillar of successful teaching and learning processes. To this aim, by drawing on the positive psychology movement and the rhetorical and relational goal theory in instructional communication, we argue that positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors are facilitators of a wide range of desirable student-related academic outcomes. Then, to support our argument, we provide empirical evidence. In doing so, we introduce and define seven instances of positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors, namely teacher care, clarity, credibility, rapport with students, stroke, immediacy, and confirmation, and expound how they positively predict academic outcomes such as motivation, learning, engagement, involvement, class attendance, willingness to communicate, performance, and success in students. Subsequently, we highlight the critical role of teacher interpersonal variables in the foreign/second language classroom context. Next, we suggest some pedagogical implications with the potential to enlighten the practice of key educational stakeholders (i.e., teachers, students, teacher educators, materials developers, administrators, and teacher recruiters). At the end, the limitations in this line of research are identified, and avenues for future research on teacher interpersonal communication in both general education and language education domains are put forward for interested researchers.
The present contribution offers an overview of a new area of research in the field of foreign language acquisition, which was triggered by the introduction of Positive Psychology (PP) (
MacIntyre and ...Gregersen, 2012
). For many years, a cognitive perspective had dominated research in applied linguistics. Around the turn of the millennium researchers became increasingly interested in the role of emotions in foreign language learning and teaching, beyond established concepts like foreign language anxiety and constructs like motivation and attitudes toward the foreign language. As a result, a more nuanced understanding of the role of positive and negative learner and teacher emotions emerged, underpinned by solid empirical research using a wide range of epistemological and methodological approaches. PP interventions have been carried out in schools and universities to strengthen learners and teachers’ experiences of flow, hope, courage, well-being, optimism, creativity, happiness, grit, resilience, strengths, and laughter with the aim of enhancing learners’ linguistic progress. This paper distinguishes the early period in the field that started with
MacIntyre and Gregersen (2012)
, like a snowdrop after winter, and that was followed by a number of early studies in relatively peripheral journals. We argue that 2016 is the starting point of the current period, characterized by gradual recognition in applied linguistics, growing popularity of PP, and an exponential increase in publications in more mainstream journals. This second period could be compared to a luxuriant English garden in full bloom.
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