Criticism of Positive Psychology - Meetup积极心理学的批判的聚会.ppt

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGYGOOD OR BAD? What is PP? The field of positive psychology has grown dramatically over the past decade and has many exuberant supporters and evangelists. Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, they emphasize human strengths and virtues, happiness, and the potential to derive positive meaning from stressful circumstances. Critics Writers and pychologists such as Lazarus Barbara Held Barbara Ehrenreich Eugene Taylor James Coyne have offered critiques of positive psychology Criticisms Failure to sufficiently recognize the valuable functions played by “negative” emotions like anger, sorrow, and fear; Its slick marketing and disregard for harsh and unforgiving societal realities like poverty; Its failure to examine the depth and richness of human experience; Its growing tendency to promote claims without sufficient scientific support (e.g., the relationship between positive psychological states and health outcomes, or the mechanisms underlying “posttraumatic growth”). What ‘negative’ psychology? PP’s claim that psychology has over-emphasized the negative is inaccurate. Psychology is mostly neutral: perception, memory, language, volition etc. A lot of positive before PP (e.g. Jahoda’s positive mental health, Humanistic psychology, Bandura’s self-efficacy, decades of stress and coping research (positive reappraisal, acceptance, social support) How do we know what is good or positive? What people think is good – but can we trust them? (e.g. they may be spoiled or suffer from ‘status anxiety’). People’s experiences of positive subjective states (what feels good) – but can we really rely on feelings? Value assessment based on norms, beliefs, or culture – whose norms and beliefs? If some are right some must be wrong. Scientifically objective – but science does not deal with value judgements, does it? Conceptually objective – how far can we go with philosophy before going too far? Historically or universally objective – can we rely on the p