1. Ratio: 21/1
A research on the psychological abstracts from 1967 to 2000 to find out how many abstracts on each aspects, the result shows below:
Anger: 5,584
Anxiety: 41,416
Depression: 54,040
Joy: 415
Happiness: 1,710
Life satisfaction: 2,582
The ratio between positive aspect and the negative is 21/1.
“The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half.”
----Abraham Maslow
“The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.”
----Martin Seligman
21/1 ratio is unhealthy but it reflects reality.
depression 10 times higher today than 1960
mean age for depression today is 14.5 (compared to 29.5 in 1960)
2. why more positive research?
Psychology as creative rather than merely reactive
Happiness is not the negation of unhappiness
Prevention through cultivating the positive
3. Question create reality.
“Human systems grow in the direction of what they persistently ask questions about.”
----Cooperrider and Whitney
The professor plays a game in the classroom. He gives a picture and asks the students to count how many geometric shapes on the screen in 30 seconds, when the time is up, the teacher not only wants the students to give the number, but also asks some other questions, for example, what is the time on the clock, what is color of the left-most geometric shape. Because the students focus on the question of the number of shapes, most of them can not answer other questions correctly.
So this game try to tell us that when we focus on one question, we probably ignore others. We focus on one part, and will forget others.
If only asking negative question, Good things do not exist. If we appreciate the good, the good grows.
This is also true on the relationship. We always ask what do we need to improve, if this is the only question to ask, and this will be the only question that they will see. They pay attention to the weakness and the things need to improvement, but they do not see many good things, which leads to break the relationship.
4. Passive Victim Vs. Active Agent （被动受害与主动接受）
self pity confidence
Blame responsibility
Frustration hope and optimism
Anger forgive/forget
“The message of the Positive Psychology movement is to remind our field that it has been deformed. Psychology is not just the study of disease, weakness, and damage; it also is the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is wrong; it also is building what is right. Psychology is not just about illness or health; it is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play. And in this quest for what is best, Positive Psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, self-deception or hand-waving; instead it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents in all its complexity.”
-----Martin Seligman
5.Happiness isn't the Negation of Unhappiness
Getting rid of the negative does not make positive.
Happiness don't spontaneously emerge once the painful experience goes away.
Seeking pleasure. Running away of unhappiness.
Thinking about the ability of enjoying food. If we have indigestion, it is very difficult to enjoy food. However, getting rid of indigestion does not guarantee that we can enjoy food.
6.Prevention through cultivating positive
Two model:
Health as the absence of illness. Taking away illness, we become healthy. Deal with the negative.
Illness as the absence of health. You are sick because you do not have enough health in your life. Cultivate the positive, we are essentially focusing on prevention.
“We have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future-mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, the capacity for flow and insight, to name several... We have shown that learning optimism prevents depression and anxiety in children and adults, roughly halving their incidence over the next two years... Similarly, I believe, that if we wish to prevent drug abuse in teenagers who grow up in a neighborhood that puts them at risk, that the effective prevention is not remedial. Rather it consists of identifying and amplifying the strengths that these teens already have.”
-----Martin Seligman
Positive psychology do not mean "to the exclusion of" the negative, it tells us not only focus on the negative, but also put resource on the strength, advantage, and so on. And sometimes focusing on the positive makes a big difference.
