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Positive Psychology, Prevention and Positive Therapy

Positive psychology aims to build positive qualities in life rather than solely focus on repairing problems. At an individual level, it cultivates traits like love, courage, and creativity. At a group level, it encourages civic virtues and institutions that promote citizenship. Positive prevention focuses on strengthening buffers against mental illness, like optimism, faith, and perseverance. Positive therapy incorporates building these human strengths to make psychotherapy more effective.

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502 views6 pages

Positive Psychology, Prevention and Positive Therapy

Positive psychology aims to build positive qualities in life rather than solely focus on repairing problems. At an individual level, it cultivates traits like love, courage, and creativity. At a group level, it encourages civic virtues and institutions that promote citizenship. Positive prevention focuses on strengthening buffers against mental illness, like optimism, faith, and perseverance. Positive therapy incorporates building these human strengths to make psychotherapy more effective.

Uploaded by

Shruti
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Positive psychology, prevention and positive

therapy
Positive psychology
• 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.
• At the individual level it is about positive personal traits—the
capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill,
aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality,
future mindedness.
• At the group level it is about the civic virtues and the
institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship:
responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation,
tolerance, and work ethic
• Nikki’s example- raising children is not about fixing them. It is
about nurturing their strongest qualities. The soul knows what
to do to heal itself.
Positive prevention
• Psychologists have always been concerned with
prevention of problems.
• The disease model fails in trying to prevent
problems from happening.
• Prevention can happen when we shift the focus
from correcting problems to creating strengths.
• Human strengths that act as buffers to against
mental illness are courage, future-mindedness,
optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic,
hope, honesty, perseverance, the capacity for flow
and insight, to name several.
Positive psychology
• a skill that all individuals possess but usually deploy in the wrong
place. The skill is called disputing (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery,
1979), and its use is at the heart of “learned optimism.”
• If an external person, who is a rival for your job, accuses you
falsely of failing at your job and not deserving your position,
you will dispute him. You will marshal all the evidence that you
do your job very well. You will grind the accusations into dust.
• But if you accuse yourself falsely of not deserving your job,
which is just the content of the automatic thoughts of
pessimists, you will not dispute it.
• If it issues from inside, we tend to believe it. So in “learned
optimism” training programs, we teach both children and adults
to recognize their own catastrophic thinking and to become
skilled disputers
Positive prevention
• This, then, is the general stance of positive
psychology toward prevention. It claims that
there is a set of buffers against
psychopathology: the positive human traits.
• We need to develop a nosology of human
strength— the “UNDSM-I”, the opposite of
DSM-IV.
Positive therapy
• Psychotherapy will be more effective when the following “building
of buffering strengths,” is done.
• Courage
• • Interpersonal skill
• • Rationality
• • Insight
• • Optimism
• • Honesty
• • Perseverance
• • Realism
• • Capacity for pleasure
• • Putting troubles into perspective
• • Future-mindedness
• • Finding purpose

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