Positive psychology – The second wave

It is nearly twenty years since Martin Seligman used his 1998 American Psychological Association presidential address to inaugurate the notion of ‘positive psychology.’ The rationale for its creation was Seligman’s contention that psychology had hitherto tended to focus mainly on what is wrong with people, on dysfunction, disorder and distress. There were of course pockets of scholarship that held a candle for human potential and excellence, like humanistic psychology. Nevertheless, on the whole, he argued that concepts such as happiness did not attract much attention or credibility in mainstream psychology. Emerging to redress this lacuna, positive psychology soon became a fertile new paradigm, encompassing research into a panoply of processes and qualities that could be deemed ‘positive,’ from overarching constructs such as flourishing, to more specific concepts like hope.