Today, Jeremy’s blog is a listed stop on the online book tour (cool idea) for the book, Situations Matter by Sam Sommers. Jeremy had already published one article on the book – Why Men are Better than Women at Math. But he liked it so much that he signed up to write another article so that he could join the online book tour. We are running that article here simultaneously.

In their article, Beyond Positive Psychology, McNulty and Fincham give some specific examples of research on relationships where certain contexts cause apparent contradictions of Positive Psychology findings. Forgiveness, optimism, and kindness may all be harmful in certain contexts.

Sometimes I feel as if the entire field of positive psychology is embroiled in a massive, one-sided debate. I hear many psychologists arguing vehemently for the importance of not turning our back on the negative. But who’s on the other side?

The Society of Behavioral Medicine recently published a debate on the health implications of positive psychology between Lisa Aspinwall and Richard Tedeschi on the one hand and James Coyne and Howard Tennen on the other. Positive psychology for health care has been a bit of a controversial subject since some feel that too much positivity or optimism can be damaging to health or cause people to be lax about their health.

Martin Seligman presents his new model for well-being under the codename PERMA, an acronym for the five pillars of well-being that he identified after decades of research. But what about physical health? Movement, exercise, fitness, mobility, touch, and so on are all physical aspects of life that are critical to well-being, and yet they seem to be left out of the PERMA model. Did Seligman allow his psychologist experience to narrow his field of vision to only the psychological domain?

Positive psychology was created to address an overwhelming bias in the psychological and social sciences towards a deficit based approach to mental health. The question becomes, once this bias is corrected, does positive psychology simply fade away, leaving a more holistic, balanced and integrated psychology behind in its stead? Or will we always need this new domain to keep us from lapsing back to our focus on the dark side?

OK, so you’ve taken the VIA Survey to determine your character strengths. You’ve taken the Strengthsfinder 2.0 test to get another perspective on what your strengths are. You are finally ready to use this new-found self-knowledge to turn your job into your calling. But you may still be scratching your head and wondering, how do I do it?

As a new parent, I can tell you that there seems to be a surprising lack of guidance from science about how to have (and raise) a child. Since Catherine and I first learned …

In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, opens the door and lets anyone interested come in and learn about the secrets to his company’s success. This is not the first door he’s …

I’ve been thinking about how to sum up the main topics of positive psychology. Many people think of Chris Peterson’s three word summary, “Other people matter.” This phrase, powerful in its brevity, …