By Morgan Mitchell - September 15, 2016
An art piece on forced positivity by Arnika Müll entitled "Happy, happy, joy, joy."
Everyone has heard “Just look on the bright side!” or “Happiness
is a choice—so choose to be happy!” Countless self-help books on choosing
happiness line the shelves of bookstores; You Are a Badass by Jen
Sincero has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 32 weeks;
and The Power of Positive Thinking by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale,
published in 1952 and translated into 15 languages, is still popular today. The
idea that you can be happy if you simply choose to be has been integrated into
America’s military,
classrooms
and workplaces
to improve coping skills, performance and mental health.
But as the movement’s popularity grew, it started being used to
shame people with depression, anxiety or even occasional negative feelings. The
August and October issues of Motivation and Emotion, the official
journal of the Society for the Study of Motivation, have studies that prove the
shaming is real. The study from the August issue, conducted by Karin Coifman
and colleagues, concluded
that when people acknowledge and address negative emotions toward their
relationships or chronic illnesses, it helps them adjust their behavior and
have more appropriate responses. Those negative emotions, in turn, benefit
their overall psychological health. The October study, conducted by Elizabeth
Kneeland and colleagues, concluded
that people who think emotions are easily influenced and changeable are more
likely to blame themselves for the negative emotions they feel than people who
think emotions are fixed and out of their control.
While these studies are important, they aren’t the first to
suggest positive psychology can be dangerous. For years, psychologists have
been studying emotions and how they affect everyday life, success and
self-esteem. These studies found that even though positive psychology can help
some people achieve happiness, it can be harmful to others, leading to feelings
of failure and depression.
Despite these recent findings and years of research pointing out
the negatives of positive psychology, the infatuation lives on. Some experts
believe bombarding people with these bromides and self-help books that
implicitly say they are at fault for not being happy may be a factor in the
rise of depression rates in the U.S.
Positive psychology’s approach to mental health management has
its roots in the humanistic psychology developed by Abraham Maslow and Carl
Rogers in the 1950s. The term “positive psychology” first appeared in Motivation
and Personality , Maslow’s 1954 book, as the title of a chapter that
states, “The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative
than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings,
his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his
achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if
psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful
jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half.”
The tenets of positive psychology were codified in the positive
psychology movement, established in part by former American
Psychological Association President Martin E.P. Seligman in 1998. Positive
psychology was featured in The Washington Post in 2002, made the cover
of Time and was featured in Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine in
2005 and The New York Times Magazine in 2007; in 2006, it was the
subject of a six-part BBC series. Seligman’s positive psychology book, Character
Strengths and Virtues, has been cited by over 4,000 publications since its
publication.
Since 2009, the Penn Resilience Program, run by the U.S. Army’s
Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program, has been widely used to help
soldiers and family members develop coping skills and behaviors, increase
capability, ensure education about and promotion of preventive measures that
encourage self-awareness, deter high-risk behaviors and support healthy
alternatives that produce positive outcomes. The Penn Resilience Program has
trained more than 30,000 Army soldiers on how to teach the resilience skills to
tens of thousands of other soldiers.
Seligman runs the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive
Psychology Center, which is the training hub of the program’s Master Resilience
Training program for noncommissioned officers.
In 2012, psychologist Neil Frude co-founded a company called the
Happiness Consultancy to help boost levels of happiness, well-being and
resilience in company workforces. Over a year, every member of a company
working with Frude does a four-week course in positive psychology. Frude told
Fast Company Inc.’s Co.Create
site that positive psychology has been adopted as a management tool by many
Fortune 500 companies in recent years.
The adaptation of positive psychology for business management
and the armed forces has helped the approach spread into popular culture. But
as it's grown more and more popular, positive psychology has taken on a new
tone—one with a more simplistic message of “positive thinking.”
Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, says
that badly executed studies published in the name of positive psychology
started showing up in many places after Seligman coined the term. Most of these
claimed that optimism and positive thinking led to a happy life. But, as social
psychologist Carol Tavris has argued,
most of these studies have been shot down by better studies.
In recent years, critics have become concerned that this
simplistic form of positive psychology can do more harm than good. It’s “the
tyranny of the positive attitude,” says Barbara Held, a psychology professor at
Bowdoin College. “By TPA, I mean that our culture has little tolerance for
those who can’t smile and look on the bright side in the face of adversity.”
Even in cases of profound loss, Held says, people are supposed to get over
their sadness within weeks, if not sooner. “The TPA has two component parts:
First, you feel bad about whatever pain has come your way, then you are made to
feel guilty or defective if you can’t be grateful for what you do have, move
forward [or] focus on the positives. This is the double punch, and it’s the
second part that does the most serious damage.”
Research bears that out. A 2012 study undertaken at the
University of Queensland and published in the journal Emotion found that
when people think others expect them to not feel negative emotions, they end up
feeling more negative emotions. A 2009 study published in
Psychological Science found that forcing people to use positive
statements such as “I'm a lovable person” can make some feel more insecure.
Further, New York University psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have
found that visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make
people less likely to achieve it.
Researchers have also found that people in a negative mood
produce better quality and more persuasive arguments
than people in a positive mood, and that negative moods can improve memory.
Norem is working to understand why some people don’t respond
well to positive psychology and respond better to negativity—an attitude she
calls “defensive pessimism.” Her studies
show that by thinking about everything that could go wrong and processing these
negative possibilities, defensive pessimists relieve anxiety and are often able
to avoid those pitfalls. Several studies suggest that forcing optimism or a
positive mood on an anxious defensive pessimist can damage performance on tasks
ranging from solving math problems to playing darts.
“The majority of positive psychology interventions are designed
to help make people feel better, to improve their mood,” says Norem. “Just
trying to raise the mood of people who are anxious may make them temporarily
feel better, but it tends to lead to poor performance because it doesn’t make
their anxiety go away. The anxiety is there and has to be dealt with.” And for
some, defensive pessimism is what helps them deal. Norem believes that 25 to 30
percent of the American population consists of defensive pessimists—but it’s
not just the defensive pessimists who suffer from culture’s interpretation of
positive psychology.
“Catchphrases like ‘It’s all good’ shut down conversation about
how people are really feeling,” says Norem. “If they’re having a bad day, it
would really help to talk to their friends about it, but this whole idea of ‘We
have to be positive all the time’ has saturated society, and there’s no
audience.”
Another potential hazard of positive thinking is denial. Barbara
Ehrenreich, the award-winning journalist and author of Bright-Sided: How
Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, partly blames the 2008 economic
crisis on people’s refusal to consider negative outcomes, like mortgage
defaults. Psychiatrist Dr. Mark
Banschick argues that positive thinking can become a way of avoiding
necessary action. People might say everything is fine even when it isn’t and
avoid fixing the problems in their lives. Beth Azar wrote in an article
published by the American Psychological Association that there is a widespread
and overblown confidence in the power of the positive, including the
misperception that people can stave off illness with optimism.
The best way to combat the TPA, Held and Norem say, is to
acknowledge that there are no simple answers to the complex problems people
face—especially the all-encompassing and ongoing pursuit of happiness.
Most important, people need to realize that there is nothing
wrong with feeling bad when life takes dark turns. “It’s OK not to be positive
all the time, and it’s unrealistic to believe that you can be happy every
moment,” Norem says. “That’s not a character failing; that’s a full emotional
life.”
http://europe.newsweek.com/positive-thinking-myth-498447?rm=eu
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