This work presents the key notions to remember from the conference on the concept of positive psychology hosted by Rebecca Shankland on June 21, 2018 in Lyon.
Rebecca Shankland is a lecturer and a clinical psychologist specializing in health education. She turned to positive psychology after wondering about preventive interventions in the classroom. She observed that preventive interventions in classrooms to warn of the dangers of certain substances were very often counterproductive. Indeed, the information disseminated
during these interventions had a power to encourage the consumption of certain substances.
From then on she turned to health promotion, focusing on the development of psychosocial skills of young people. She founds that this work on themselves enabled them to better cope with the situations they encounter rather than relying on risky products or conducts. This change of point of view in preventive approaches has led to a shift towards so-called positive
psychology.
Positive psychology seeks to identify resources of people, factors of resilience and adaptation in order to achieve sustainable well-being and health behaviors. It focuses on what enables optimal functioning, unlike old paradigms which fixate on what goes wrong. It thus differs from the biomedical model which is centered on the disease, on the search for causes and risk factors, with a view to cure. In the field of psychology, we can take the example of couples therapy. Imagine a couple in difficulty to communicate, usually, the psychologist asks the difficulties that the couple meets to establish a diagnosis and to propose an adapted support.
Positive psychology proposes to diagnose the strengths and resources present and to rely on the moments where they manage to communicate satisfactorily in the couple, to move forward. This line of work allows people to have self-confidence since they identify their resources and their potentials that can be mobilized and therefore give them more hope in
relation to a possible improvement.
It is also different from personal development, even if they share the same field of well-being. Take the example of optimism, a factor of well-being often cited in personal development books with the injunction of “to be happy you must be optimistic”. Positive psychology recognizes the effect of optimism on well-being, but this is highly context-dependent. So for someone who is addicted to gambling, being optimistic will make them bet more and think they win. However, he will end up being more unhappy because he will have lost a lot of money. The same is true with risky behavior, the most optimistic will say “it only happens to others” and then adopt more risky behavior. Conversely, pessimism can be useful when it is defensive, it allows you to better prepare for an event, to be predictable by saying to yourself “in case I plan if something ever happens”. Positive psychology is thus more nuanced and not devoid of negative feelings, because they can be adapted in certain situation. In addition, it follows an experimental and quantitative approach, unlike the field of personal development.
Through this work, the goal was to better understand what positive psychology is, and what it is not, by using concrete examples to come to grips with this sometimes ambiguous concept.