1. +
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
MARTIN SELIGMAN

2. +
Martin Seligman

3. + 

Psychology should:
Be focused on strength as well as
weakness
 Be interested in improving as well as
repairing
 Help normal people live fulfilling lives as
well as healing
BELIEFS
 From Authentic Happiness to Well-Being
theory

4. +
AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS

5. +
Authentic Happiness
 Authentic Happiness Theory:
Topic: happiness
Measure: life satisfaction
Goal: increase life satisfaction
 Suggests happiness could be analysed into
three different elements – three „happy lives‟
 These lives can be independent of each
other.

6. +
THREE HAPPY LIVES

7. +
THREE HAPPY LIVES

8. +
The Pleasant Life
 Having as many positive emotions as you can: pleasure,
rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, etc.
 Shopping, watching tv, etc.
 Learning skills that amplify them

9. +
The Good Life
 About engagement and flow
 During flow, you cannot feel anything –
time stops, loses self-consciousness
during an absorbing activity.
 Seligman believes that the
concentrated attention that flow
requires uses up all the cognitive and
emotional resources that make up
thought and feeling.
 Using highest strengths to recraft your
life (work, relationships, etc)

10. +
The Meaningful Life
 Pursuit of pleasure and the
pursuit of engagement are often
solitary endeavours. Meaningful
life involves others.
 The Meaningful Life consists in
belonging to and serving
something you believe is bigger
than the self, and humanity
creates all the positive institutions
to allow this: religion, political
party, being green, the family, etc
 Knowing your signature strength
and using them to belong to
something larger than you are

11. +
Life Satisfaction
 Does Life Satisfaction = Pleasure +
Engagement + Meaning?
 15 replications over thousands of
participants
 To what extent do these each pursuits
contribute to life satisfaction?
 Pursuit of pleasure very little
 Engagement and Meaning highest
Pleasure matters when you have both
engagement and meaning – “the
cherry on top”!

12. +
Well-Being Theory
 Well-Being Theory:
Topic: well-being
Measures: positive emotion,
engagement, positive relationships,
meaning, and accomplishment
(PERMA)
Goal: increase flourishing by increasing
PERMA
 Five elements…

13. +
1) Positive Emotion
 Similar to the authentic happiness theory
BUT
happiness and life satisfaction are now under this element
rather than being the goal of the entire theory
2) Engagement
 Again, like in authentic happiness theory, one‟s thoughts and
feelings are absent during the flow state and only in retrospect
do they say “that was fun/wonderful”.
3) Meaning
 As retained from the Authentic Happiness Theory

14. +
4) Positive Relationships
 Premise that high points of ones life involves the presence of
others.
5) Accomplishment
 Often pursued for its own sake – „winning for winning‟s sake‟
 People who lead the achieving life are often absorbed in what
they do, often pursue pleasure and feel positive emotion when
they win and they may win in the service of something larger

15. +
GOAL – TO FLOURISH
 What is „flourish‟?
 An individual must have all the „core features‟ and three of the
six „additional features‟:
Core Features Additional Features
Positive emotions Self-esteem
Engagement Optimism
Interest Resilience
Meaning Vitality
Purpose Self-Determination
Positive relationships
 Administered items to > 2000 in numerous nations…

16. +

17. +

18. +
Authentic Happiness vs Well-Being
Theory
 Authentic happiness is one-dimensional: about feeling good
and claims that our goal in life is to maximise how we feel
 Well-being is about all five elements (PERMA) and about a
combination of feeling good as well as having meaning, good
relationships and accomplishment. The goal is to maximise all
five elements.
 In authentic happiness theory, the strengths and virtues fall
under engagement – in well-being, these strengths underpin all
five elements. Therefore, it is about using your strengths to
pursue more positive emotion, more meaning, more
accomplishment and to better relationships.

19. +
What are these „STRENGTHS‟?
 Values in Action (VIA) Strengths Survey and The Authentic
Happiness Inventory Questionnaire (amongst many others) on
www.authentichappiness.org
 Over 1.8 million surveys completed
 These tests measure various elements.
 Data collected helps form further studies to examine and
measure differences in affectivity after participating in positive
psychology interventions.