Richard P. Johnson - The Power of Smiling: Using Positive Psychology for Optimal Health & Healing

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Positive psychology is thescientific study of well-being; its a unique and contemporary sub-disciplineof psychology that focuses on what contributes to, not detracts from, humanhappiness. Positive psychology is a relatively new branch of traditional psychology. Certainly Norman Vincent Peale, in his world renowned book The Power ofPositive Thinking , served as a vanguard to the sub-discipline of positivepsychology. Other authors, notably Salvatore Maddi, Ph.D. and Suzanne Kobasa,Ph.D. in their landmark book The Hardy Executive: Health Under Stress exposed other aspects of what was to become positive psychology.

It wasnt until ProfessorMartin Seligman, Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania produced vigorous,hard-data research that clearly demonstrated the value of what he termedpositive psychology, did it become a respectable scion of the more staidtrunk of traditional psychology. Positive psychology is now universally seenas a practical framework for motivating positive challenge and peakperformance. Today, Dr. Seligman is the recognized champion of positivepsychology. He seeks to answer the question, the question, "what allowssome people to live optimally?" in his book Learned Optimism, How toChange Your Mind and Your Life . He asks why some people seem toconsistently

- Move forward with optimism.

- Expect good things to happen.

- Find something to be grateful for.

- Notice beauty even in the bleakest of times.

- Acknowledge the good stuff of living.

- Give of themselves to others.

- Tolerate stress.

- Smile more easily.

- Have strong life principles that guide them.

- Snap out of bad situations or moods.

- Live more alert, active, and fulfilling lives.

Traditional psychology hasbeen criticized almost from its beginnings as being too pathology oriented,that is, trying to discover what was wrong with a person, a relationship, anorganization, and the like. Consequently, clinical psychology has developed amammoth lexicon of mental illnesses all codified in the Diagnostic andStatistical Manual, 5th Edition (DSM). The DSM is acomprehensive, even exhaustive, tome that attempts to pinpoint each and everyvariant of abnormal human behavior and describe each in detail so that allclinicians of psychology can speak the same language.

The effort is certainly anoble and necessary one, yet by only describing abnormal behavior and ignoringthe best of what the human species can generate, it seems to skew all humanbehavior in a negative direction. Traditional psychology starts with thequestion,