Positive psychology
In the beginning and for many years after, psychology concerned almost exclusively pathologies, diseases and defects of the human mind. In those days, the field used to deal in trying to fix the mind and document their problems. A few years ago psychologists began to examine seriously the opposite side. Now, a new branch, which is called positive psychology, studying such phenomena as positive emotions and their causes, good feelings, and "subjective well staff" (Saavedra 3).
The principles
For starters, the name of positive psychology was created less than fifteen years ago in 1998 (Fredrickson 74) by a psychologist named Martin Seligman. He undertook to fix the shortage of dealing with healing and prevention perceived among his colleagues. In addition, Seligman is director of a center at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to positive psychology. It was not the first research had ideas of being, but is associated with the cohesive and modern movement. William James, in 1902, wrote one of the first relevant to positive psychology (Gable and Haidt 104) words. Additionally, this field is based on the school of humanistic psychology Psychologists 50s as Maslow and Rogers that time did research development as a person.
The need
Some current positive psychology scientists insist that this distinct branch is transitory. Refer to the desire to balance the macro-psychology and then there will be the need for the distinction because there will be equal numbers of scientists for each aspect. Psychologists Gable and Haidt, however, note that while the "positive" adjective seems to indicate the negativity of other branches, most investigations are neutral (104). They also note that the imbalance shown more prominently in clinical psychology. It is necessary to realize that positive psychologists take into account the defects and diseases of the mind, but believe that good can work to prevent bad to some extent. They work in an area where there are not enough academic works.
The goals
To return to the field itself, Martin Seligman proposed three "pillars". He listed the positive and subjective experience, positive individual characteristics and positive institutions and communities (Gable and Haidt 108) as the most essential disciplines of the field. However, these communities are investigated list unless the other; psychology remains largely devoted to the study of the individual. The positive psychologists try to answer questions like, "How are positive emotions?", "What factors correlate more directly with the subjective perception of happiness?", Etc. Even before this, however, scientists had to redefine the measures to incorporate the scales of emotion, relationships, etc.
The Pyramid of Maslow
To better explain what is positive psychology, summaries of the work of scientists in the field will be presented. Maslow began his research by examining the lives of prominent as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt persons, and
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Frederick Douglas, instead of the mentally ill (Gwynne). However, Abraham Maslow became famous for his "hierarchy of human needs" (see Figure 1).
SAW. Over pyramid
Come you can see, each level contains human needs, with the most basic at the base of the pyramid. Maslow postulated that more stripes to the base had to be satisfied before the highest effort. That is, not breathing, nor can we think about job security without ever feel physically secure, a person does not care about developing friendships. To defend human potential, Maslow changed direction with respect to the trend of the field. In addition, his thoughts were the basis for positive psychology and welfare studies.
Albert Bandura
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Albert Bandura ( "Albert Bandura")
Another pioneer of positive psychology, Albert Bandura, still works as an academic psychologist at Stanford, his residence since 1953. Bandura is famous for the development of and research into a concept called "self-efficacy" (comes from the English word " self-efficacy "). This term really want to refer to the perceptions and beliefs that a person about their capabilities to produce effects ( "Albert Bandura"). Bandura has found that these beliefs I have a big role in feeling, thinking, motivate, and behave. Monografias.com
Information Monografias.comFuentes of efficacy (this figure is based on one of Staples et al.)
As shown in Figure 2, Bandura listed some four sources of information to make judgments about his own self-efficacy (adapted from Staples and Mejia et al.):
1) Carry out tasks by skill and personal evaluation
2) vicarious experience or, that is, compared to the successes of others
3) social persuasion (even to comment on the execution of a task)
4) The influence of physiological and emotional states
For these four factors, a person conceptualizes its ability to control life. Moreover, this self-efficacy helps explain react to stress levels, individual goals, career choice, and many more psychological phenomena. The complete works of Albert Bandura have contributed greatly to the field of positive psychology.
Ed Diener
Currently, there are many scientists beginning and continuing research in the field today. Ed Diener, well known in psychology, has worked hard to define and measure happiness or subjective well-being (Diener). A significant finding of Diener and his colleagues is that most people in the world have who are happy most of the time. The world does not seem to be the hellish place sometimes think it is. In addition, the team of scientists from Diener says that self-reports of welfare itself are valid under its agreement with other similar measures as reports by other people and the same biological measures. According to these experts, it appears that frequent and positive feelings are sufficient for joy, although not intense. Diener team has supported scientific research and has published lot of knowledge as well.
Ed Diener (Diener)
Diener studies, plus all positive psychology, has the power to enrich everyday life. Instead of psychology only serving to help people with mental illness, anyone can help with the outcome of each study. This growing field concerns us all to maintain health and do not need "the other side" of psychology. Studying good only serve to make merry over the world, to understand its factors.
Phenomenology, in particular, has a lamentable history of collusion with the apartheid regime in South Africa, while experimental and laboratory approaches for studying social psychology group conflict there have been established as true critical resources. Psychoanalysis has enjoyed prestige and power in mainstream psychology in parts of Scandinavia as "ego psychology" and as Lacanian theory in parts of South America. In these areas, radical alternatives have had to look to other academic areas to find theoretical support. While theoretical activity has been one of the major sources of radical work has occurred in France (Sève, 1978), or commonly called "Psychology Review" in Germany (Tolman, 1994) and by extension in Denmark, has operated, on the other hand, as mainstream psychology in the bureaucratized states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to the nineties. In this line, the Berlin Kritische Psychologie tried to build a "science of the subject" and although their work often claimed connection with practice also allowed a purely academic and scientific work that did not need to connect with users of psychology services ( Tolman and Maiers, 1991). The rejection of that particular science does not solve the more general problem at hand. We can also mention that approaches "postmodern" more radicals have apparently been used, India is an example that comes to mind, to sustain cultural practices of oppression. Such example clearly shows that what may seem more critical ostensibly within an academic discipline can, if necessary, do not constitute itself as a critic of the oppression of women in other parts of the world. (Mitter, 1994).
The radical margin
In the radical margin within psychology are those who have brought to light the ideological assumptions and power games of discipline. The development of a "disciplinary reflexivity" in psychology (Wilkinson, 1988) presented debates and forms of organization that have been developed in other feminists human and political sciences, and certain institutional fora, such as the journal Feminism Psychology (Psychology feminist) have provided a space for academic initiatives and practices that pointed sexism, heterosexism, racism and class oppression discipline (Kitzinger et al., 1992; Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1994; Walkerdine, 1996). Critical psychology, in so far as it is possible for an activity that includes men and women working to challenge and change the so-called discipline, it is also a "feminist psychology."
latest versions of critical reflection on the morality and politics of psychology (Prilleltensky, 1994), self-called "Psychology Review" (Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997) or "Critical Social Psychology" (Ibanez and Iniguez, 1997) now include feminist perspectives. And in turn, their own feminist perspectives in the discipline have developed a self-critical reflection, a progressive deconstruction and strong connections with practice (Burman, 1998, Burman et al., 1995). One of the individual efforts of feminist psychologists has been committed to their right to organize and women separately. In some contexts, such as the UK, it has been necessary to argue that there is a specific intellectual domain that requires a different academic organization. In other contexts, such as Scandinavia, the organization of women in psychology has given the shelter of a trade union activity, which has made it possible to connect, beyond the discipline with broad issues related to practice and oppression.
Outside of psychology
While all this occurs, a number of radical critiques "outside" of psychology have led to the development of new models on the mind and new practices that allow us to understand and reconfigure social relationships. This "outside" is not, of course, completely external to the complex-psy. Networks theories and institutions related to the mind and behavior and shaping the complex-psy in Western culture (and the rest of the world, now penetrated and organized precisely for that culture) includes the most diverse explanations and "alternative" ( ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985). It would be more accurate to say that the "outside" are, rather, on the margins of the complex-psy. Sometimes, rarely, they escape the assumptions of the latter, but always must adopt and adapt ideas circulating around it. Critical psychology works with these externals as allies, who have an idiosyncratic externals of what makes understanding psychology and, for that reason, sometimes more sophisticated understanding.
different disciplines
Some of the most vibrant theoretical resources for internal critiques of psychology, either humanism of Critical Theory or post-structuralism, have been held in neighboring disciplines. Psy-complex explanations that rest on the work of Foucault, for example, have been developed in the journal Ideology & Consciousness (Rose, 1979) to arrive later psychology (Ingleby, 1985). However, the main source of critical reflection on the emergence of complex-psy comes from sociology (Rose, 1985, 1989). This should not lead us to idealize the developments that occur in other disciplines, and critical psychology should include both critical sociology as more skeptical traditions of mainstream online in other disciplines that have more to do with action and experience. The division between psychology and sociology is a good example of a purely academic division of labor that encourages people to believe that what they do as individuals and what they do in society are separate compartments.
The arguments of the "new paradigm" that appear in the seventies and the "discursive turn" of the eighties, and these are just a few examples, brazenly ransacked the theories of "ordinary language" of the mind and the "social construction" of the actually that was in philosophy and sociology; and while these theories seemed really new to many psychologists / as, the fact was that there was already a substantial body of authors elsewhere helping radicals. Discussions in the journal PsychCritique or British Ideology & Consciousness, for example, lay in the tradition of work of the Frankfurt School or French post-structuralism. Current debates on racism that exist in psychology include concrete examples of analysis of journals and textbooks (Billig, 1979; Howitt and Owusu-Bempah, 1994), as well as research that speak of fascist movements (Billig, 1978), however , conceptual and theoretical explorations of Orientalism and the "otherness" that permeate the psychological images of race only been properly developed in postcolonial literary theory and cultural studies (Said, 1978; Spivak, 1990). It is still rare to find analyzes the place of psychology in networks operating relationships that exist between the world over-industrialized and the so-called "third world" (Sloan, 1990).
Outside the discipline
Recent innovators have read a little more and gone a little further to import deconstructive ideas about textuality there in literary theory and postmodern explanations about space exist in some types of geography. Critics psychologists can travel with them occasionally and visit distant and outside academia places and also, of course, contemplate the theoretical contributions of some of those people who make a progressive work in the real world. As examples we can cite here three domains.
First we can talk about education and how radical approaches have tended to develop outside the United States and Europe. US and GB the old movement of private "free school" was an inspiration for those who believed that there might be better ways to understand and implement the development, but this tended to disappear with Reagan and eighties. The project of "awareness" as a part of the research carried out in Latin America has provided alternative models of what could be the evolution of the infant, the ways in which this process of evolution extends throughout life without being restricted to the infant stage and connections always have these processes with the suppression or development of political consciousness. The work of Paulo Freire in Brazil and Orlando Fals-Borda in Colombia has borrowed elements from the best traditions of action research, giving, however, a radical twist to American ideas and forging a close connection between research, action and "empowerment" [1]. The general approach of participatory action research that has been fought both in Latin America has also been developed in Indonesia.
In this work we found important methodological contributions, since the participatory action research was part of a new way to produce and reflect on the knowledge that has managed to break with the notions of traditional psychology and has to substantiate the practice of the researcher in the social reality beyond simply determining the choice of its reference texts, a difference that this work has moved away from the sociological "fundamental theory" of American liberal tradition. The politicization of educational and social psychology in Latin America has much of the practice of participatory research, and where there has been ideas imported from Europe, these have been integrated and recovered from the progressive perspective (Montero, 1987). The work of social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró in El Salvador, killed by the military regime in 1989, has been a very special inspiration (Aron and Corne, 1994; Pacheco and Jimenez, 1990). Psychologists / as critical / as there and here are indebted to their work.
Secondly we can speak of social work and here we include community work, health work, mental health and relief work and volunteer non-governmental organizations and the discussions that have been generated from it on issues such as subjectivity and social change that have nothing to do with mainstream psychology. Psychology as an academic enterprise has been in perpetual demarcational dispute with philosophy, however, this has not been the case in the practice of psychology, a practice that has found grounds for their action in social work. Forgotten connections with radical social work practice could help to invigorate critical psychology. Exploring the interrelationships between work and personality in the writings of Lucien Sève (1978), for example, it has developed precisely in the radical social work that has been in the UK (Leonard, 1984). In the difficult conditions that had the radical psychology under the apartheid regime in South Africa when the mainstream phenomenology of discipline was operating closely with the regime, the main activity of "/ as psychologists / as critical / as" paralleled and common to carrying out anti-apartheid activists in communities and places of social work. In the Organisation for Appropriate Social Services in South Africa (OSSASA), the / the psychologists / as not worked as psychologists, but rather as a part of a broad movement of resistance and social support (Nicholas, 1994). Radical research exposing police torture was able to use the rhetoric of social science to frame and contextualize statistics and explanations of the victims (Foster, 1987). Similarly, the journal Psychology in Society (Psychology Society) operated as a point of resistance for many activists in psychology and more general social work (precisely, after the fall of the apartheid regime, there were proposals from some of these activists to create a division of "Psychology Review" in the Psychological Society of South Africa).
As a third example, we can mention the range of developments that have occurred in therapy. The demand for therapy as an alternative to drug treatments has been a radical humanist demand from the fifties. It is in this line that the connection between an interest in a particular type of service and necessary reflection on the institutional conditions that frustrate create a context in which various therapies, powerful and radical, flourished. Both the US and in the UK, the radical psychology movement brought together advocates and critics of therapy (Brown, 1973; Radical Therapist Collective, 1974). Here he, however, a paradox: the main criticisms of psychiatry and psychotherapy have come from the libertarian right-where we unfortunately have to include Szasz (1961) - United States before left the Kingdom Kingdom, retreated left around the liberal Laing (1965) and later followed in their travel to psychotherapy (Sedgwick, 1982). This trend, resisted by some (Asylum, would be an example), has taken many different forms in different groups and ideological currents, I include here the movement of personal growth that is reflected in the journal Self and Society and psychodynamic and feminist currents encuentraron voice that Humpty Dumpty and later in the Women's Therapy Center. The Collective of Radical UK Science (1984) who founded the journal Free Associations, partly on the premise that the English psychoanalysis was "the-left-of-center" has similarly modified his political ambitions throughout this decade (Cooper and Treacher, 1995). Even among the hardest with the individualistic humanism of therapy, it has often opted for a version of psychoanalysis (Jacoby, 1977).
The radical psychoanalysis, in the work of Marie Langer (1989) in Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico and Nicaragua, for example, has tended to develop outside psychology to be later acquired by psychologists. Moreover, in some cases, psychoanalysis has been combined with political resistance, as in the case of the work of Slavoj Zizek "s (1989) Esolovenia. His works, were first discussed in philosophy and cultural studies for later reach the forum of psychology. Part of the key to explaining this situation is found in the fact that radical tendencies have often been silenced by the conservative psychoanalytic establishment (Jacoby, 1983). this also explains why radicals have identified psychoanalysis with repression and have concluded that the project itself therapy is oppressive (Rush, 1977; Masson, 1990). again, we must be careful not to imagine that other disciplines offer perfectly finished for psychology progressive alternatives and seek allies who are working as part of the radical opposition in different academic domains and professional practices.
Some currents within family therapy, often led by those who have a first training in social work, have relied on discursive and deconstructionist ideas to transform systemic therapy and make it a much more liberating thing. Deconstructionist ideas can be taken, as often happens in American literary theory as the foundation for developing relativistic, cheerful and relentless rejections of political commitment. What is politics, they say, but another mere text (e.g., de Shazer, 1991)? However, in places like Australia or New Zealand, these ideas have been used to develop ways of demystifying effects of therapy and "empowering" (White and Epston, 1990). As is the case with the debates between relativism and realism or tension between the methods of qualitative and quantitative research in psychology, we need to bring the radical impulse of this family therapy to our forum, and critical psychology should approach the political project narrative therapists when it is connected to issues of power, abuse professional and social justice (Waldegrave, 1990; Epston, 1993). At this point, precisely, we can see a radical break with family therapy, since the family is not seen as locus of pathology, but are, in particular, systems of speech that trap people in families and in a familialist ideology those who consider themselves part of the problem (Parker, 1999).
In and against psychology
Critical psychology stretches across the boundary that separates the inside and outside of the discipline. This first is not only "interdisciplianria" in the sense that it relies on arguments that come from a wide range of professional fields and academic, but rather can be characterized as "transdisciplinary" in the sense that questions the boundaries that have established and monitored schools and training institutions or training there in the discipline; It extends, ultimately, from the farthest margins of the complex-up centers psy psychology. Critical psychology should be mobile and tactical in its journey through this area, and the map of "margins" and "centers" that may result from such movement is different from what has been mapped by cartographers of the mind.
margins
If by the time we leave aside the systematic circumvention has been given the developments there in others, it is possible to identify in traditional psychology two trends inter related that help monitor the border between what is usually considered "inside" and it is recorded as "outside" of a proper scientific understanding. A trend is leading to the professionalization of psychology as a discipline and the eventual state regulation of both psychological and psychological treatment skills. The other trend is the exclusion of certain groups that are branded unable to say anything rational about psychological processes because they themselves are victims of a "cult" pathological psychology. The severity of the criteria for professional registration in Australia is nothing more than a response to threats scientifists, and professional psychological associations in other countries have done more to be enthusiastic followers of the Australian example. They released the British Psychological Society in the UK accusing the Neuro-Linguistic Programming paradigm quackery. For critical psychologists, the question should not be whether the Dianetics or said programming are properly psychologies (although we know or need to know better how are absurd or dangerous), since we are always surprising us that the proper psychology is anything but rather wonder whether any system of psychology operates as oppressive or as a system of empowerment.
Even those psychologies have been criticized as a "cult" by the FBI can be a source of useful radical theories and practices. As the weed, a cult is something that grows in the wrong place. We should ask: "wrong" for whom? and sometimes we should ask if we could not be before something right for us. We do not feel any desire to align ourselves with the psychological establishment to cast out the debate to those / as offering something valuable for anti-racist, feminist or workers (Newman and Holzman, 1993, 1997) At the same time practices, we will try to be critical each alternative and contemplate the range of ratings that this work do radicals (Harris, 1995). It is important to note here that the "critical psychology" does not exclude in principle to the "psychology-popular", but rather wonders policies that body as well as the contexts of those functions. The work of Freire and Fals-Borda in Latin America, for example, is a variety of "psychology-popular" and should remain so. Rather than being the "margins" of our universe, these discussions should become the center and should address the activities of psychology "mainstream" as if it were strange marginal enterprises that need to be understood and analyzed as practices of "cult" .
centers
The centers of the world / as psychologists / as critical / as are not really the abstract debates that occur in magazines, but the forms of self-organization operating in psychological theory and practice. For example, the various self-help groups springing around different themes have had to develop ways of psychology and help to keep them. Academic psychology, professional and mainstream is not particularly useful in this regard, so that there have been attempts to bring back the self-help movement to the frames of traditional psychology have not done anything but turn them off. Such is the case of groups of support "schizophrenia" first controlled psychiatrists and later the pharmaceutical industry (Breggin, 1991).
One of the myths about self-help groups is that they are parochial and limited in its approach by the local particular context and problems. This myth is reinforced by the traditional opposition between the discipline of psychology as "center" and those outside, as if they were living in the provinces. Indeed, discussions on self-help movements have much to teach psychologists / as. The movement of radical psychiatry in the UK, for example, was refounded as a result of intensive discussions on the reforms that were carried out in Italy and the experiment of Trieste, with Basaglia (1987), mental hospitals were closed and re they -emplazaron by a series of community mental health centers managed by users and staff employed. The first issues of the publication of "democratic psychiatry" Asylum were full of material on Trieste (e. Jenner, 1986) and, therefore, of discussions on radical movements in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, etc.
