Many might associate psychology first and foremost with the study of disorders and mental illnesses, but one Experimental College class is focusing on a more optimistic branch of the field.
"Positive Psychology: Theory and Application," is a new course taught by Debra Levy, a teaching fellow at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Levy is also a personal life coach who teaches individuals and organizations to use positive psychology in their lives.
Positive psychology is a relatively new branch of the science. Its origins are relatively recent and can be traced to 1998, when Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chose it as his theme during his year as president of the American Psychological Association.
"I realized that my profession was half−baked. It wasn't enough for us to nullify disabling conditions and get to zero. We needed to ask, "‘What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?'" Seligman once said in an interview with Time magazine.
Positive psychology focuses on what actions people can take to improve their happiness levels and satisfaction with life.
"Positive psychology is the study of why are happy people happy, why are successful people successful, what contributes to healthy development?" Levy said. "The field of psychology, since World War II, has really looked at what goes wrong, so mostly at abnormal development. Why are people anxious, why are people depressed?"
According to Levy, research conducted by Seligman found that people who focused on three good things that happened to them every day were happier during difficult times.
"One thing that does is it gets you to change your focus. It gets you to change your focus to what is working and what is going right," Levy said.
A key to positive psychology is optimism, according to Levy. "Optimism is: Look, finals are going to be hard, but you're going to get through it. Optimism helps people look at challenging times as temporary and contained," Levy said. "Pessimistic interpretations say … ‘Oh this is awful, these are the worst times … my life is always this stressful and nothing good will ever happen.'"
Levy was the lead teaching fellow in Lecturer Tal Ben−Shahar's course Positive Psychology at Harvard from 2007 to 2009.
While Ben−Shahar was at Harvard, the class was the most popular class at the university, with 855 students enrolled in 2006, according to the Boston Globe. Ben−Shahar has since taken a lecturer position at the University of Pennsylvania.
Levy approached the ExCollege about teaching the class, as she wanted to teach positive psychology in a more intimate setting. "It's a perfect match for a positive psychology course because by nature of teaching it, it's experiential learning," Levy said.
Levy hopes the course can return to the ExCollege next spring semester, whether or not she teaches it.
Readings for the course include "The How of Happiness" (2007) by Sonja Lyubomirski, "Creating Your Best Life" (2009) by Caroline Adams and Ben−Shahar's own "Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment" (2007).
Levy acknowledges that some findings of positive psychology may seem like common knowledge but stressed the field's importance. "In some ways it's like, ‘Yeah that's obvious,' but … the scientific research has proven that it's effective. Part of our class is that we want to introduce people to the range of different strategies and interventions people can use to pick the one that's right for them," Levy said.
"A big part of the field is that people need to know their strengths and use them," Levy said, citing cross−cultural studies which found that people possess a combination of 24 character strengths.
The University of Pennsylvania has a free online survey (available at Authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) that ranks these 24 strengths (such as leadership, fairness and caution) in participants and gives them their top five, or signature strengths.
"Research has found that people that know their strengths do better and that we need to know our strengths more," Levy said.
According to Levy, the discipline of positive psychology overlaps heavily with other disciplines, especially cognitive psychology. "It's an eclectic group of psychologists to begin with," Levy said. The only psychology program in the country to give a master's degree in positive psychology is University of Pennsylvania, and Claremont College in California is the only school to offer a doctoral degree in the field, according to Levy.
As positive psychology is such a new field, Levy admits it has not yet reached full−scale acceptance among other psychologists, but thinks this is a common phenomenon. "When behaviorists started, people said ‘Oh, what's with behaviorists, what are you doing with pavlovian tests?' I actually think the field of positive psychology is gaining ground as it becomes bigger and more known and more and more research happens," Levy said.
"This isn't new age kind of science. This isn't like ‘The Secret' [2006]; This is a field within psychology that's research−based," she added.
Only about a third of the students in the class are psychology majors, according to Levy. "People who have never taken a psychology course before have chosen the class, and the class has been very interactive," Levy said.
One way students were interactive was by planning a Positive Psychology Day for their final project, which is occurring today. "We're doing Positive Psychology Day at the end of the semester; when people are often obviously stressed out," Levy said.
Sophomore Julia Zinberg, a psychology major, is one of the students who will be working to spread positive psychology today.
Students will be promoting the day with flyers, posters and positive psychology t−shirts. There will be a savoring board in Tisch library, where students can write down good things that happened to them during the day that they want to savor. "[Savoring] is something that has been proven to increase happiness significantly, so that's part of positive psychology," Zinberg said.
Students planning Positive Psychology Day also created a Facebook.com event and encouraged students to post positive things that happened to them that day on the event's wall.
Students in the class will be performing "random acts of kindness" that include giving people free hugs and leaving post−it notes with compliments on them around campus.
"It's a branch of psych that's pretty new. There's no classes offered in the psychology department at Tufts [about positive psychology]," Zinberg said.
"It's a really good branch of psych to study, because I feel like it adds more of a balance to the discipline by focusing on what makes people happy versus; what makes them unhappy and how to fix that. It's very practical. What you learn in it is things you can implement; to improve your life long−term," Zinberg said.
Freshman Sydney Rubin and about half the students in the class decided to work on a website to promote positive psychology for their final project, PositivePsych.webs.com.
"For each of the ideas that we brainstormed, we had to do research on it to see how feasible it was. I was assigned to the website and once I saw how easy it was it sort of took off from there and I thought it was a really good idea," Rubin said.
The website serves to inform visitors about the basics of positive psychology and how they can use it in their everyday life. It also includes a list of articles about recent news in the field of positive psychology.
"As a class, we always figured that these are really good tips that college students in particular can use," Rubin said.
The website stresses that students suffering from stress, anxiety or depression should still seek counseling. "Obviously, it's not a counseling thing, but we thought it would be a good idea to have some sort of resource there that anyone at Tufts and even outside of Tufts can use," Rubin said.
Rubin was one of the students who does not have a background in psychology, but took the class because it seemed like an interesting topic.
"I think that it pertains so much to life, so I'm not really sure what I'm going to major in, but I know the stuff you learn from positive psychology is about how to live your life and how to think; so it's for people from all disciplines," Rubin said.
