04 Nov Newly Revealed Secrets to Flourishing
As you may well know, Positive Psychology is not just about happiness.
It is about happiness, but even more so it’s about thriving and flourishing.
These aren’t new constructs, but there are some new findings you might find interesting …
via Psychology Today by Bella DePaulo
KEY POINTS
- Every influential psychological approach to flourishing maintains that positive relationships are important.
- Self-worth and meaningful work also contribute to flourishing.
- Other important factors include money, food, housing, safety, and social justice.
“Would you describe yourself as someone who’s flourishing at this point in your life? Why or why not?” Those were two of the key questions asked during in-depth interviews conducted by an interdisciplinary team of scholars led by University of Connecticut anthropologist Sarah S. Willen. Their findings were reported in “Rethinking flourishing,” published recently in the journal SSM – Mental Health.
Lots of research on flourishing has come from the field of positive psychology, in which flourishing is described in terms of personal psychological characteristics and experiences. The most influential psychological perspectives on flourishing emphasize the importance of factors such as positive relationships, meaning and purpose, self-acceptance/self-esteem, engagement/flow, and positive emotions/happiness. Those researchers typically study flourishing by creating questionnaires that measure those kinds of factors, and then studying people’s answers to the questions they are asked.
Professor Willen and her colleagues took a different approach. They asked people to talk about their experiences of flourishing in their own words. In addition to asking the participants if they were flourishing and why, they also asked, “What would you say people in general need most in order to flourish—say, the top three things?”
Participants were 167 adults from the Greater Cleveland, Ohio, area. Eighty of them were community members; as a group, they were demographically similar to the nation as a whole, and the quantitative analyses of the data focused on them. The other participants were public health professionals, community leaders, clinicians, and metro-wide decision-makers.
When discussing the factors important to flourishing, the participants sometimes described the kinds of personal and interpersonal experiences that positive psychology scholars assumed they would. More importantly, they also pointed to the significance of other factors almost completely absent from the positive psychology perspectives that have dominated our thinking about flourishing for decades.
The Psychological Factors Important to Flourishing
Friends may be more important to flourishing than romantic partners or family
Every influential psychological approach to flourishing maintains that positive relationships are important. Willen and her colleagues found that, too. When coding the answers given by the people they interviewed, they did something that turned out to be very revealing: They looked separately at what their interviewees said about their spouses, romantic partners, and other family members and what they said about people who were not family, including friends, colleagues, mentors, neighbors, and community members…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE