Positive Psychology

What Is Positive Psychology? Definition and Core Concept

Positive psychology is the scientific study of the conditions and processes that allow people, groups, and institutions to flourish. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as a field of theory and research that focuses on the psychological states, individual traits, and social institutions that enhance subjective wellbeing and make life most worth living. It is not a rejection of clinical psychology. It is a deliberate widening of the lens, so that psychologists study human strength with the same seriousness they study human suffering.

The core claim of positive psychology is simple but has proven radical in practice: the absence of mental illness is not the same thing as the presence of wellbeing. A person can be free of depression, anxiety, and disorder and still not be flourishing. Positive psychology researchers set out to define, measure, and cultivate the specific ingredients of a flourishing life, treating happiness, meaning, and character strength as legitimate objects of scientific study rather than vague philosophical ideals.

This distinction matters enormously for students of psychology, education, and counseling. Introductory psychology coursework traditionally organizes itself around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual model of pathology. Positive psychology asks the inverse question at every step: what does the healthy, thriving version of this process look like, and can it be taught?

What Makes a Topic “Positive Psychology” Rather Than General Psychology?

Not every study of happiness belongs to positive psychology, and not every positive psychology study is about happiness. What separates the field is its explicit focus on strengths, virtues, and optimal functioning as primary variables, not as an afterthought to a disorder-focused design. A study on how depression damages memory sits in clinical psychology. A study on how gratitude improves sleep quality sits in positive psychology, even though both studies might use identical statistical methods drawn from standard research methods in psychology.

Positive psychology is also explicitly plural in its unit of analysis. It studies the individual (traits, emotions, character strengths), the interpersonal (relationships, altruism, love), and the institutional (schools, workplaces, and civic structures that either support or suppress human flourishing). A complete answer to “what is positive psychology” has to include all three levels, not just the individual-level happiness research that dominates popular coverage.

Why Does the Distinction Between Wellbeing and the Absence of Illness Matter?

Corey Keyes’ concept of “languishing” captures this gap precisely: a person can screen negative for every clinical disorder and still describe their life as empty, stagnant, and joyless. Positive psychology treats languishing as a legitimate target for intervention in its own right, not as a lesser concern than diagnosable illness. This reframing has real consequences for how universities design student support services, how the NHS structures preventative mental health resources in the UK, and how U.S. employers think about workplace wellness beyond an employee assistance hotline.

The History and Origins of Positive Psychology

The term positive psychology did not begin with Martin Seligman. Abraham Maslow coined the phrase decades earlier, using it in the final chapter of his 1954 book Motivation and Personality. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and his concept of self-actualization anticipated much of what the modern field would formalize, but the idea remained a minor thread in psychology for the rest of the twentieth century.

The turning point came in 1998, when Martin Seligman used his inaugural address as president of the American Psychological Association to challenge the field’s near-total focus on pathology. Seligman argued that psychology after World War II had drifted almost entirely toward diagnosing and curing mental illness, largely because of how government and insurance funding was structured, and had lost interest in the field’s other original mission: helping ordinary people live more fulfilling lives. His 2000 paper with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Positive Psychology: An Introduction”, is widely treated as the field’s founding manifesto.

Who Are the Field’s Founding Figures?

Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist previously known for his research on learned helplessness, became the field’s most visible spokesperson and its most prolific institution-builder. He went on to found the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and to develop the PERMA model in his 2011 book Flourish.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, had already spent two decades studying the state of deep absorption he termed flow before joining Seligman as positive psychology’s co-founder. His flow research remains one of the field’s most empirically robust contributions, independently verified across sports, music, surgery, and creative work.

Christopher Peterson, working at the University of Michigan, partnered with Seligman to build the VIA Classification of character strengths, explicitly modeling it as a positive counterpart to the DSM. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina developed the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion, giving the field its first serious theoretical account of why positive emotion matters biologically, not just subjectively.

How Did the Field Formalize So Quickly?

Positive psychology grew unusually fast for a new subfield, and the reasons are traceable. Seligman used his APA presidency to direct funding toward the area, the Templeton Foundation provided early grant support for gratitude and character research, and the University of Pennsylvania launched the world’s first Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program in 2005, creating a pipeline of trained practitioners almost immediately. A 2023 bibliometric analysis of positive psychology research traces this rapid institutional build-out and documents the field’s growth from a handful of papers in 1999 to thousands of peer-reviewed studies within two decades.

The PERMA Model: Five Pillars of Flourishing

The PERMA model is Martin Seligman’s most widely cited theoretical contribution and the closest thing positive psychology has to a unifying framework. Introduced in Flourish (2011), PERMA identifies five measurable elements that together define wellbeing, replacing Seligman’s earlier and narrower concept of “authentic happiness.” As the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center explains, PERMA answers the fundamental question of what enables individuals and communities to flourish, and it has since been used to design school curricula, corporate wellness programs, and national wellbeing indices.

Seligman set a deliberately strict bar for what counts as a PERMA element. Each of the five must contribute independently to wellbeing, be pursued by many people for its own sake rather than as a means to something else, and be defined and measured separately from the other four. A multidimensional study applying PERMA to adolescent wellbeing confirms that these five domains hold up as statistically distinct factors even in large school-based samples, which is part of why the model has proven durable rather than merely popular.

What Does Research Say PERMA Actually Predicts?

PERMA is not just descriptive; researchers have tested whether it predicts outcomes people actually care about. Studies summarized by the Positive Psychology Center report significant positive associations between PERMA scores and physical health, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and PERMA has also been shown to predict lower psychological distress independent of prior distress levels. A systematic review on physician burnout found that PERMA-based interventions helped reduce burnout and improve wellbeing among practicing physicians, extending the model well beyond its original student and general-population samples.

Is PERMA a Complete Theory, or Just a Framework?

Even Seligman has been careful about this distinction. Researchers proposing the PERMA+4 extension for workplace wellbeing note that Seligman himself clarified PERMA as a framework for organizing wellbeing research rather than a fully specified causal theory, and called for further work to expand and test the construct. PERMA+4 adds physical health, mindset, environment, and economic security, arguing that Seligman’s original five elements say little about the material and physical conditions that make flourishing possible in the first place. This is a useful nuance for any essay: PERMA is a widely used and empirically supported organizing model, not a finished, uncontested theory.

Character Strengths and Virtues: The VIA Classification

If PERMA describes what flourishing looks like, the VIA Classification of Character Strengths describes the raw material people use to get there. Developed by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman and published in their 2004 handbook Character Strengths and Virtues, the VIA Classification identifies 24 measurable character strengths organized under six broad virtues that the VIA Institute on Character confirms appear consistently across cultures, religions, and philosophical traditions.

The project was explicitly designed, as the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths entry explains, to be the positive psychology counterpart to the DSM: instead of cataloging deficits and disorders, it catalogs strengths that are universally valued and morally significant. Every person possesses all 24 strengths to some degree; what varies is the rank order, and a person’s top four to seven strengths are termed their signature strengths.

What Are Signature Strengths, and Why Do They Matter More Than Weaknesses?

Positive psychology’s strengths-based approach deliberately departs from what Peterson and Seligman called the deficit model. Rather than asking what is wrong with a person and trying to fix it, the VIA framework asks what is right and asks how it can be used more often and more deliberately. Research summarized by the American Psychological Association’s continuing education materials on positive interventions notes that the majority of parents and adults still instinctively focus on weaknesses over strengths, which is precisely the imbalance the VIA framework was designed to correct.

Using a signature strength in a new way each day is one of the most tested positive psychology interventions in the literature, with effects on life satisfaction that persist for months after the exercise ends in some studies. For students exploring how character traits interact with broader personality structure, personality psychology fundamentals and applied personality psychology research provide useful complementary frameworks, since character strengths sit at the intersection of trait psychology and moral philosophy.

Is the Six-Virtue Structure Scientifically Settled?

Not entirely, and a rigorous essay should say so. Factor-analytic studies cited in the Values in Action Inventory entry have found that the 24 strengths do not always cleanly sort into the proposed six virtues when tested statistically, with some researchers instead finding a simpler one-factor or four-factor structure. This does not undermine the practical usefulness of the 24 individual strengths, which remain well validated, but it is an important caveat about the theoretical tidiness of the six-virtue grouping specifically.

Key Theories: Flow, Broaden-and-Build, and Learned Optimism

Beyond PERMA and the VIA Classification, three additional theories carry most of the empirical weight in positive psychology research. Understanding all three, and how they connect, is what separates a surface-level summary from genuine command of the subject.

What Is Flow, and Why Did Csikszentmihalyi Study It?

Flow is the state of complete absorption in an activity, where self-consciousness disappears and time seems to distort. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it as occurring when a person’s skills are precisely adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, within a goal-directed activity that provides clear, immediate feedback on performance. Csikszentmihalyi developed the Experience Sampling Method specifically to capture flow as it happened in daily life, pinging participants at random intervals to record what they were doing and how absorbed they felt, rather than relying on retrospective self-report.

Flow sits at the intersection of skill and challenge. Too much challenge relative to skill produces anxiety; too little produces boredom. The activity has to sit in a narrow channel between the two. This is why flow research is heavily cited in education and workplace design: tasks pitched correctly against a person’s current ability level are far more likely to produce sustained engagement, one of the five PERMA elements, than tasks that are too easy or overwhelming.

What Is the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotion?

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory offers the clearest biological account of why positive emotion matters beyond simply feeling good. Fredrickson argues, as summarized in her own account of the theory’s development, that positive emotions broaden a person’s momentary thought-action repertoire, in contrast to negative emotions like fear, which narrow attention toward a single fight-or-flight response. Joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, and contentment sparks the urge to savor and integrate experience.

Crucially, this broadened mindset is not just pleasant in the moment. Over time, according to broaden-and-build theory, it builds durable personal resources: physical resources through play, social resources through bonding, intellectual resources through curiosity-driven exploration. A person who regularly experiences even mild positive emotion accumulates resources that later protect against stress and adversity, an idea directly relevant to resilience research and to the neuroscience of emotion more broadly.

What Is Learned Optimism, and How Does It Connect to Seligman’s Earlier Work?

Before founding positive psychology, Martin Seligman was best known for research on learned helplessness, the finding that animals and people who experience repeated uncontrollable negative events eventually stop trying to escape them, even when escape becomes possible. Seligman’s later concept of learned optimism is, in many ways, the deliberate mirror image of that earlier finding: if helplessness can be learned through a pessimistic explanatory style, optimism can be taught through the same mechanism run in reverse.

Learned optimism training focuses on how people explain setbacks to themselves along three dimensions: whether the cause is permanent or temporary, pervasive or specific to one area of life, and personal or external. People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to view setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal; a failed exam becomes evidence that “I always fail” and “I’m bad at everything.” Cognitive restructuring techniques drawn from this research underlie the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Resiliency Program, which has been tested in schools as a way of reducing adolescent depression risk before it starts.

Positive Psychology Interventions That Work

A positive psychology intervention (PPI) is a deliberate, tested activity designed to increase wellbeing, distinct from casual advice like “just think positive.” What separates a genuine PPI from generic self-help is that it has been tested in randomized controlled trials, typically against an active control condition, with wellbeing measured before and after using validated instruments.

The Gratitude Journal: The Field’s Most Replicated Finding

The best-known PPI traces back to a landmark study by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, who randomly assigned college students to keep either a weekly gratitude journal, a hassles journal, or a neutral events journal. Students in the gratitude condition reported exercising more regularly, experiencing fewer physical symptoms, and feeling more optimistic about the week ahead compared to the other two groups. A follow-up daily version of the study found gratitude journaling also increased reported alertness, enthusiasm, and energy relative to a downward social comparison exercise.

The core mechanism, as this 2003 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology argues, is that a conscious, structured focus on blessings redirects attention away from the negativity bias most people default to, producing durable rather than momentary shifts in mood. This single study has since been cited more than two thousand times and remains the anchor citation for gratitude research across psychology, medicine, and organizational behavior.

Do These Interventions Actually Work for Everyone?

Meta-analyses generally find small-to-moderate positive effects across PPIs, but the field has become increasingly careful about overselling them. Effect sizes vary widely by population, by how well the intervention fits a person’s personality (a highly social person may benefit more from a gratitude visit than a solitary savoring exercise), and by whether the practice is sustained past the study period. Positive psychology researchers now talk about “person-activity fit” as a key moderating variable, meaning the same intervention can help one person and do nothing for another. This is a critical nuance for an academic essay, since simply citing “gratitude journaling works” without this caveat overstates the evidence.

For students designing their own applied research project, case study methodology guidance and qualitative versus quantitative data planning are directly relevant to structuring a rigorous test of a positive psychology intervention.

Positive Psychology vs Traditional and Humanistic Psychology

Students frequently confuse positive psychology with two adjacent fields it draws from but does not replace: clinical psychology and humanistic psychology. Getting this distinction precise is one of the most commonly tested points on psychology exams covering the subject.

Positive psychology is frequently described as the empirical, research-driven descendant of humanistic psychology, sharing its optimistic view of human potential but insisting on quantitative measurement where humanistic psychology relied on therapeutic insight and philosophical argument. Abraham Maslow, a founding humanistic psychologist, literally coined the term “positive psychology” a half-century before Seligman built the empirical infrastructure to test it rigorously.

How Does Positive Psychology Relate to Clinical and Abnormal Psychology?

Positive psychology does not compete with clinical treatment for serious mental illness; it complements it. A person recovering from major depression still needs evidence-based psychotherapy approaches targeting the disorder itself. Positive psychology interventions are increasingly used alongside such treatment, not instead of it, to help patients rebuild the positive emotion, engagement, and meaning that illness has eroded, once symptoms are stabilized. Researchers explicitly caution against using PPIs as a substitute for treating trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, since building strengths on top of unaddressed clinical symptoms can mask rather than resolve underlying distress.

Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Why These Traits Exist?

A related but separate question, often raised in coursework, is why positive traits like gratitude, hope, and cooperation exist at all from an evolutionary standpoint. Evolutionary psychology offers complementary explanations here: traits like reciprocal altruism and social bonding likely conferred survival and reproductive advantages in ancestral environments, which is part of why Fredrickson frames broaden-and-build in explicitly evolutionary terms, describing positive emotion as a “well-designed solution” to recurrent adaptive problems rather than a random byproduct of brain chemistry.

Applications in Education, Work, Clinical Practice, and Sport

Positive psychology moved out of the laboratory quickly, and its practical applications are now some of the most heavily funded areas of applied psychological research in both the U.S. and UK.

Positive Education in U.S. and UK Schools

Positive education applies PERMA and character-strengths research directly to curriculum design. Geelong Grammar School in Australia and a growing number of UK independent and state schools have built wellbeing curricula around Seligman’s framework, and the Penn Resiliency Program has been trialed across U.S. middle schools with the explicit goal of reducing adolescent depression risk through learned-optimism training rather than waiting for clinical symptoms to appear. Universities have followed a similar path, building on the kind of goal-setting theory of motivation research already used in academic advising to design first-year student wellbeing programs.

Positive Organizational Psychology in the Workplace

In organizational settings, positive psychology has produced its own applied subfield, sometimes called positive organizational scholarship. Concepts like job crafting, where employees are encouraged to redesign their own roles around their signature strengths, and strengths-based performance management have been adopted by major U.S. and UK employers as an alternative to purely deficit-focused annual reviews. This connects directly to established workplace motivation theory, since strengths-based management is, at its core, an application of intrinsic motivation research to daily task design.

Clinical and Counseling Applications

Positive psychotherapy, developed by Seligman and colleagues, adapts standard cognitive behavioral techniques to explicitly build positive emotion and meaning alongside symptom reduction, rather than treating symptom reduction as the therapy’s sole endpoint. This approach is increasingly taught in counseling psychology training programs internationally, reflecting a broader shift toward integrating strengths-based work into standard clinical practice rather than treating it as a separate wellness add-on.

Sport and Performance Psychology

Flow theory has found some of its most direct real-world application in elite sport, where coaches deliberately structure training difficulty to keep athletes in the flow channel between boredom and anxiety. Olympic training programs in both the U.S. and UK now routinely incorporate flow-state coaching language, alongside more traditional performance psychology drawn from behavioral conditioning research.

Key Entities, Organizations, and Researchers

Positive psychology is anchored by a small number of specific people and institutions whose names recur throughout the field’s literature. Citing them accurately, rather than vaguely gesturing at “researchers,” strengthens any academic treatment of the topic.

Martin Seligman and the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center

Martin E. P. Seligman remains the field’s central figure, holding the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology chair at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. The center houses the world’s first Master of Applied Positive Psychology program and continues to publish PERMA-based research spanning education, the military, and clinical practice.

The VIA Institute on Character, Cincinnati, Ohio

The VIA Institute on Character, a nonprofit founded in tandem with Peterson and Seligman’s original classification project, maintains and continues to validate the VIA Survey, which has now been completed by respondents in more than 190 countries. It remains the single most widely used instrument for measuring character strengths in both academic research and applied coaching contexts.

Barbara Fredrickson and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Barbara Fredrickson, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill, developed the broaden-and-build theory and continues to lead the PEPLab, one of the field’s most active laboratories studying the physiological effects of positive emotion, including its links to cardiovascular health and social connection.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Claremont Graduate University

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his later career at Claremont Graduate University’s Division of Behavioral and Organizational Science, where he continued flow research until his death in 2021. His Quality of Life Research Center remains active, applying flow theory to organizational design and creativity research.

The American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association served as the institutional launchpad for the field through Seligman’s 1998 presidency and continues to publish positive psychology research through its flagship journal American Psychologist, alongside continuing-education materials that train practicing clinicians in evidence-based positive interventions. Students researching the field’s professional standards should also review the APA’s ethical principle of integrity, which governs how psychological research, including positive psychology studies, must be conducted and reported.

The Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley

The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, functions as one of the field’s leading public-facing research and dissemination hubs, translating peer-reviewed gratitude, compassion, and mindfulness research into practical guidance for educators, parents, and clinicians, and hosting original research data from studies like Emmons and McCullough’s gratitude work.

Criticisms and Limitations of Positive Psychology

No comprehensive treatment of positive psychology is complete without its criticisms, and a strong academic paper is expected to engage with them directly rather than presenting the field as settled science. A 2023 systematic review published in The Journal of Positive Psychology identified 32 separate sources raising 117 distinct criticisms of the field, spanning theoretical, methodological, and practical concerns.

The Toxic Positivity Critique

The most publicly visible criticism concerns toxic positivity: the concern that an overemphasis on positive emotion can lead people, or institutions, to suppress or invalidate legitimate negative emotion. As clinical psychologists have documented, active suppression of unwanted emotion is associated with measurable physical harm, including cardiovascular and respiratory strain, which is the opposite of what a wellbeing-focused field should be producing. Positive psychologists generally respond that this criticism describes a popular distortion of the field rather than the field itself, since peer-reviewed positive psychology explicitly studies negative emotion alongside positive emotion and does not advocate suppressing it. Viktor Frankl’s concept of “tragic optimism,” finding meaning through and alongside suffering rather than by denying it, is often cited as the field’s actual position, in contrast to the toxic-positivity caricature.

Sampling and Cultural Bias

A large share of foundational positive psychology research, like most of psychology generally, has relied on WEIRD samples: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations, often specifically undergraduate students at elite universities. Critics argue this limits how confidently findings generalize to lower-income populations, non-Western cultures, or older adults, and researchers responding to these critiques have called for more diverse international samples and cross-cultural replication before treating PERMA or VIA findings as universal.

The Replication and Credibility Crisis

Positive psychology has not been immune to psychology’s broader replication crisis. Reviews cited in the field’s own self-critique literature note debates over publication bias, small underpowered samples, and questionable research practices affecting some early positive psychology findings, including public disputes over the statistical validity of Fredrickson’s original “positivity ratio” claim, which was substantially revised after independent statistical critique. A rigorous student answer should treat individual findings, like PERMA’s five-factor structure or gratitude journaling’s core effect, as reasonably well replicated, while treating more specific numerical claims from the field’s early years with appropriate skepticism.

The Individualism and “Victim-Blaming” Critique

A further line of criticism, associated with writers like Barbara Ehrenreich, argues that positive psychology’s heavy focus on individual mindset and personal strengths can inadvertently place responsibility for suffering on individuals rather than on the social, political, and economic conditions that produce it. A person told to practice gratitude while facing job insecurity or systemic discrimination may reasonably experience that advice as dismissive of their actual circumstances. Responsible positive psychology, in response, increasingly emphasizes “positive institutions,” fair schools, humane workplaces, functioning social safety nets, alongside individual-level interventions, rather than treating flourishing as a purely personal project.

Positive Psychology Across Culture and the Lifespan

Positive psychology research increasingly distinguishes between how wellbeing is expressed and pursued across different national and cultural contexts, and across different life stages.

United States vs United Kingdom: Institutional Differences

In the United States, positive psychology has grown heavily through private university research centers and corporate wellness programs, reflecting a broader U.S. tendency toward individually purchased or employer-sponsored mental health resources. In the United Kingdom, positive psychology concepts have been absorbed more directly into public institutions, including NHS-commissioned wellbeing initiatives and state school curricula, reflecting the UK’s more centralized public health and education infrastructure. Both countries share the same underlying research base but differ in how findings get translated into policy and practice.

Does Flourishing Look the Same in Individualist and Collectivist Cultures?

Cross-cultural psychologists have raised a specific and testable question: does the Meaning and Accomplishment axis of PERMA, both of which can be defined individually or collectively, function the same way in more collectivist societies as it does in the individualist U.S. and UK samples where PERMA was originally validated? Some cross-cultural replications find the five-factor structure holds reasonably well; others find that relationships and communal belonging carry disproportionately more weight in collectivist cultural contexts, a nuance any comparative essay should acknowledge rather than assuming PERMA travels unchanged across every cultural setting.

Positive Psychology Across the Lifespan

Positive psychology research spans childhood positive education programs through adult workplace interventions to positive aging research, which studies how older adults maintain high wellbeing despite declining physical health, a phenomenon sometimes called the “wellbeing paradox” of aging. Adolescence has received particular research attention because it is a period when explanatory style, one of the core mechanisms behind learned optimism, is still forming and unusually responsive to structured intervention, which is part of why school-based programs like the Penn Resiliency Program specifically target this age group rather than adults.

Understanding how social and emotional factors shape cognitive development more broadly gives useful context here, since positive psychology interventions in childhood and adolescence interact directly with the developmental processes already studied in mainstream developmental psychology.

How to Study Positive Psychology for Exams and Assignments

Positive psychology shows up across high school psychology electives, undergraduate psychology majors, education programs, and MBA organizational behavior courses. Here is how to approach it strategically.

Anchor Every Claim to a Named Researcher and Study

Examiners and markers reward specificity. “Positive psychology says gratitude helps” is a weak sentence. “Emmons and McCullough’s 2003 randomized study found gratitude journaling improved life satisfaction and reduced physical symptoms relative to a hassles-journal control group” is a strong one. Get in the habit of naming the researcher, the year, and the comparison condition whenever you cite a finding, following the same standards expected in academic research paper writing generally.

Always Pair a Theory With Its Criticism

As covered above, positive psychology is an actively contested field, not a settled one. Pairing PERMA with the PERMA+4 critique, or gratitude journaling with the person-activity-fit caveat, signals to a marker that you understand the research as a live scientific conversation rather than a fixed list of facts to memorize. This mirrors the standard expected in academic research technique guides, which stress engaging critically with sources rather than simply summarizing them.

Distinguish Description From Prescription

A subtle but important distinction: positive psychology as a scientific field describes what correlates with or causes flourishing. It does not, by itself, prescribe that everyone must pursue happiness as a life goal. Conflating the two is a common source of lost marks, since it confuses an empirical research program with a philosophical or self-help position.

Frequently Asked Questions About Positive Psychology