POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND

COMMUNICATION SKILLS
3. Applications of Positive Psychology
Dr. Maryam Farzand
[Link]@[Link]
 Applied Positive Psychology
• As an applied science positive psychology is at the core of skillful application of
ideas.
• Positive psychology has tasked itself with the promotion of wellbeing in a way that
differentiates it from generic self-help through an empirically-validated and
theoretically-justified process.
• The central aim of this science and practice of improving wellbeing is to generate
positive intervention, design tools, activities, and practices as well as generate
recommendations to promote and enhance wellbeing in every context.
Today positive psychology perspectives are evident in many areas of human endeavor. Some of
those include:
• education
• public health
• healthcare
• social and human services
• economics
• political science
• neuroscience
• leadership
• management
• organizational sciences
Education
• Many believe that positive psychology can go a long way in revitalizing and
reforming our schools and educational systems.
• Applying it in education will track factors relating to hope, engagement, and
wellbeing of students across the nations.
• By measuring and promoting what is right with students, positive psychology is
expected to double hope, help build more engaged school environments, and boost
wellbeing, and ultimately turn every school into a great place to learn.
• Researchers have seen that mentally and physically healthy learners want to learn
more.
• Students who experience more autonomy and have a greater sense of control over their
own learning want to learn further.
• Learner whose teachers will become good role models for learning and creativity have a
potential of engendering school populations that are more curious, innovative, and
socially caring.
• Intrinsically motivated students will enjoy learning more.
• Learners who experience positivity in their lives through cultivations of joy, interest,
gratitude, hope, serenity, pride, amusement, inspiration, and love will create upward
spirals of wellbeing in school environments.
• The more of an attractive future students will see for themselves, the more likely they
will succeed in and beyond school.
• The better the teaching matches the intellectual strengths, talents and types of
intelligence of learners, their character strengths and their preferred styles of
learning, the more engaged they will be.

• Aesthetically rich and sense stimulating learning environments will contribute to

the larger number of teachers and students experiencing learning as a journey
of discovery in which the individual learner plays a central role.
Health
• According to Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson, a major shift in mental health
practice and research occurred with the birth of positive psychology, and today it
unites the theory and knowledge on positive functioning and advances the much-
needed work on positive mental health (2005).
• Psychological wellbeing is no longer understood as only the absence of mental
illness, but also conceptualized as the simultaneous presence of positive
psychological resources, such as positive affect and satisfaction with one’s life, self-
acceptance, personal growth, purpose, autonomy, competence, and relatedness
(Ryan & Deci, 2001).
• Health and wellbeing can be enhanced, according to Shelley Taylor, through the
cultivation of psychosocial resources of:
optimism
social support
sense of mastery
self-esteem
active coping skills (Donaldson, 2011).

• 30 years of empirical research into the relationships between psychosocial resources

and health has proved that positive psychology interventions have a potential of playing
a central role in creating positive social environments and improving health and
wellbeing throughout society.
• Application of positive psychology in the context of health has also been well
researched in case of treating depression.
• Nancy Sin, Matthew Della Porta, and Sonja Lyubomirsky demonstrate that
positive psychology interventions have been successful not only in enhancing
wellbeing but also in reducing depressive symptoms (Donaldson, 2011).
• While Sin, Della Porta, and Lyubomirsky provided caution that not all happiness
Positive Psychology Interventions (PPI) will be as equally effective with a
dysphoric population as with healthy individuals, they conclude that stand-alone
PPIs can complement traditional treatment for depression quite well
(Donaldson, 2011).
Work and Organizations
• Organizational effectiveness is often conceptualized through workplace
engagement and the crucial questions that many practitioners of positive
organizational psychology are trying to answer is how to develop the key
resources necessary for the cultivation of greater engagement like using
one’s strengths, managing one’s emotions, and finding one’s work
meaningful.
• According to Ia Ko and Stewart Donaldson, some of the examples where the
science of positive psychology is being applied to improve work and
organizations include:
leadership and organizational development
workplace coaching
organizational virtuousness
psychological capital (2011).

• For example strength-based intervention, which through the use of leadership

coaching have been widely embraced within businesses.
• International Coaching Federation (ICF), a regulatory organization for the
coaching profession, has some 18,696 coaches who are members in 114
countries, many of who specialize in positive workplace and leadership coaching.
• Psychological Capital (Psych Cap) interventions, developed by Luthans et al.
(2010), have also been used to effectively enhance psychological resources of
hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and resilience.
• This two-hour training program was designed to generate positive expectations
for the future by designing personally-meaningful work-related goals. A sense of
mastery was promoted by making concrete plans to help achieve these goals.
• Optimism was increased by solving different pathways towards the goals and
planning for overcoming challenges and obstacles.
• And resilience was fostered by reflecting on one’s strengths and other personal
resources that could be helpful in the pursuit of these goals.
• Pursuit of meaning at work makes also for an important application of positive psychology
in the work environment.
• The key to cultivating meaning in an organization as well as on the individual level is in
achieving integrity of identity, values, and action where what we do is reflective of who we
are and what we value.
• The approach of Rosso et al. defines meaning at work in terms of expression of values,
orientation towards work and work-related identity (2010).
• Cultivation of values at work can be further differentiated into:
 concrete values with substantial positive outcomes
 self-reward values where work is intrinsically fulfilling
 symbolic values which define how much significance a person and their culture attribute to
an occupation (Persson et al., 2001).
• Work orientation has been identified into three types of perspectives on the work itself:
1. viewing one’s work activities and pursuits as a job or simply a means to an end like
earning money
2. a career where works is a route to achievement
3. a calling where one sees they work pursuit as an intrinsically fulfilling vocation (Bellah
et al., 1996).
• While Persson et al.’s model for cultivation of different types of values lists them as all
conducive to the pursuit of meaning at work, Bellah et al.’ s orientation model
represents a hierarchy where the experience of one’s job as a calling is the most
meaningful (Donaldson, 2011).
• There are many more contexts for applying the science of positive psychology like
clinical psychology and therapy, self-help and pop-psychology, social work,
bibliotherapy (also referred to as book therapy, reading therapy, poetry therapy or
therapeutic storytelling), creative arts, optimal performance, sports, life coaching,
stress management, and public policy, to name a few.

• Positive psychology interventions can be designed to address a specific setting

like organizations or family or it can target a desired area of improvement like
the experience of positive feelings or development of good character.
Major Areas of Research in Applied Positive Psychology

• What makes Applied Positive Psychology (APP) practical and accessible is its
ability to offer interventions not only relevant to institutions and important
areas of human endeavor but also to every individual.
• It includes studies in different areas of psychology (e.g., social, personality,
clinical, development, health, and organizations).
• Today application of positive psychology can target specific individual goals
around wellbeing and allows us to address a variety of life situations in which
people reach out for wellbeing interventions.
Positivity Applied
• Ongoing research in positive psychology has identified a number of scientifically
supported benefits of positive emotions.
• Positive emotions broaden people’s awareness beyond the narrow confines of
negativity and this increased openness can help set people on positive trajectories of
growth toward emotional stability, a greater level of personal resources, and increased
social integration and emotional stability (Donaldson, 2011).
• Positive emotions have also been found to fuel resilience in the face of adversity and
can help support a foundation for a greater ability to resist downward spirals.
• Research in the science of emotions also reveals that people have far more control over
what emotions they experience through their daily intake of positive emotions and
keeping the negative ones in check.
Positive Character Traits
• What does it mean to be a good person? Positive psychology has brought this important
conversation back to life and has refocused scientific attention on character as a pillar of
psychological wellbeing (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
• Good character is what we look for in our teachers and students in classrooms, our
leaders and our colleagues at work, what parents look for in their children, and what
friends look for in each other.
• Good character, in essence, is a well-developed family of positive traits.
• Positive character traits, according to Park and Peterson (2003), enable close
relationships and positive experiences, which in turn improve individual and societal
well-being in families, communities, schools, and organizations.
• From the perspective of APP, the cultivation of good traits is exemplified through
identifying and fostering strengths of character.
• Growing evidence shows that character strengths not only indicate but also cause
healthy development over a life span as well as can prevent a number of undesirable
life outcomes.
• The research program known as the Values in Action (VIA) Project has tasked
themselves with identifying and classification of strengths of character.
• Through various measures and assessment of individual differences in the strengths and
the comparative studies of character strengths, it has created a comprehensive
vocabulary of qualities possessed by a person worthy of moral praise.
• Their research also found that certain strengths can buffer us against stress and
the negative effects of trauma, and therefore have a potential of preventing or
mitigating disorders in their early stage, namely:
hope
perspective
Kindness
social intelligence
self-control (Donaldson, 2011).
• Many desired outcomes are associated with good character.
• Character strengths help people thrive and often lead to success in leadership and
academic achievement, help promote tolerance and the valuing of diversity, foster
development of an ability to delay gratification and lead to expressions of kindness and
altruism (Park, 2004).
• Some of the other major topics of interest in positive psychology include:
Happiness Resilience
Optimism and helplessness Transcendence (the quality of being able to go
beyond normal limits or boundaries)
Mindfulness Positive neuroscience
Flow Prospection (the act of anticipating, foresight)
Flourishing Grit and self-control
Hope Imagination
Positive Relationships Values
Positive thinking Meaning and Purpose
Positive institutions
LIFE Model of Applied Positive Psychology
• A model was developed by Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan of the MSC program in
Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London (2014).
• Their multidimensional conceptual model of wellbeing called Layered integrated
Framework Example (LIFE) is a theoretical framework created by placing two
binaries of human experience subjective versus objective and individual versus
collective.
• The LIFE model for wellbeing deals first and foremost with mind/body
dichotomy, and secondly with psychosocial dichotomy which acknowledges
individual versus collective reality.
• These two modes of existence, as a discrete individual and a part of social and cultural
networks with agency (action) versus communion (sharing or exchanging of intimate
thoughts and feelings, especially on a mental or spiritual level) and autonomy versus
belonging, create a matrix of four quadrants which are domains in the LIFE model of
welling:
1. individual-subjective (the mind), subjective experience of conscious thoughts,
feelings, sensations, as well as unconscious dynamics
2. individual-objective (the body/ brain), all aspects of physiological functioning and
behavior
3. collective-subjective (culture), shared meaning and values in a space where we have a
common sense of meaning-making and interpretations
4. collective-objective (society), material and structural aspects of social networks like
socioeconomic processes.
• Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan argue that this framework promotes wellbeing
in an integrated way.
• While we could talk about applying positive psychology interventions to
specific domains like education or health that often represents only part
of the picture that relates to a specific context.
• Addressing wellbeing through a multidimensional model, on the other
hand, takes into account the functioning of a whole person and can be
applied to any area of life.
Working with the Mind to Make Life Better
• Subjective domain, where research in positive psychology has been most rapidly growing, is the
root domain because psychology predominantly concerns itself with subjective experience.
• Subjective domain is also an area where most constructs pertain to mental health.
• Positive psychology conceptualizes wellbeing in mental health as a presence of the triad of
following elements:
a) pleasant life and Subjective Well-being (SWB)
b) engagement and flow
c) meaning, also referred to as psychological wellbeing
• This domain also includes other desirable psychological qualities like emotional intelligence and
hope as well as negative construct like sadness and depression.
• The four levels when working with the mind to make life better and examples of
associated interventions are as follows:
1. consciousness and conscious awareness can be increased through exploring Positive
Psychology Interventions related to the development of awareness and attention like
meditation and mindfulness.
2. embodiment and embodied sensations can be developed through body awareness
therapies.
3. emotions and emotional intelligence can be addressed through interventions that
increase compassion and gratitude.
4. cognitions can be influenced positively through narrative restructuring exercises and
methods that combine emotions and cognitions like the emotional intelligence
interventions.
• From the perspective of Applied Positive Psychology, the subjective domain has the largest
number of interventions.
• Cultivation of attention and awareness are key to most PPIs and can be trained through
meditation as a form of self-regulation practice that brings mental process under greater
voluntary control, as well as many mindfulness-based practices that cultivate awareness of
sensory experiences, body position, and internal sensations, and access awareness.
• IPPs like meditation can also be effectively used to train focus and prime executive function and
behaviors of the mind to stop the mind from wandering through:
 switching and disengaging from distractions
 selective redirecting of focus back to the meditative objects like breath, smells, mantras, images,
and sounds
 cultivating neutral positive attitude through love-kindness meditation
 form and physical posture through meditative movement like yoga
• Cultivation of positive emotions through the application of positive psychology interventions
is not just about feeling good, but it is meant to develop greater emotional management
skills.
• We want to cultivate meta-emotional skills so we can reflect on emotions, which in turn
provides for effective coping strategies that can help us deal with either the stressor, one’s
reaction to it, or even the tendency to avoid stressors altogether.
• Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) model, for example, conceptualizes Emotional Intelligence (EI)
as comprising four hierarchical branches:
1. emotional awareness and expression
2. emotional facilitation of thought and the ability to generate emotions
3. understanding emotional patterns
4. strategic management of emotions
• It included explanations of the key concepts and role-play to illustrate the importance of EI in
week one.
• Session two involved identifying emotions, especially in other people through decoding facial
expressions and empathic communication.
• Session three dealt with expressing and using emotions to solve problems, and session four
covered emotional management in the form of theoretical group discussions around coping
strategies and their effectiveness, meditative mind-body exercises and role-play activities.
• Another emotional self-awareness intervention was developed to reduce pain in people with
fibromyalgia and combined mindfulness exercises with education, written emotional disclosure
about stress and gradual re-engagement (Hsu et al., 2010).
• From an integrated perspective, consciousness techniques worked well when combined with
emotional disclosure, cognitive tasks of writing and behavioral practices.