ABSTRACT
There are many good reasons to celebrate the positive psychology movement. As humanistic psychologists have long pointed out, to ignore resilience and growth as human characteristics renders a woefully incomplete picture of what it means to be a person (Damon, 2004; Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003; Ryan & Deci, 2001). Each of the five different components of Seligman’s (2011) notion of flourishing is a legitimate and important domain of human functioning that deserves researchers’ full attention: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement (PERMA). Certainly, the aims of positive psychology are laudable; we are hard-pressed to see a flaw in the motivation to expand our knowledge base of human strengths and virtues. Furthermore, positive psychology has considerable heuristic value, as documented by the remarkable amount of research generated in, scientifically speaking, a short period of time. For example, just five years after Seligman introduced the concept as APA President, Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson (2005) provided an impressive “progress report” listing eight major handbooks and edited volumes and “literally hundreds of articles [that] have appeared in the scholarly and popular press” (p. 411), in addition to a number of scholarly networks that have been established. While the longstanding work of humanistic psychologists should be acknowledged and credited, the positive psychology movement has piqued the interest of an expanded network of scholars. As a result, the research generated by positive psychology has moved the discipline forward on, at least, some fronts. It is safe to say that we understand something more today about, for example, positive emotions than we did fifteen years ago, and such an increase in knowledge is likely due to the positive psychology movement.
