Happiness,excellence, and optimal human functioning revisited: Examining the peer-reviewed literature linked to positive psychology

Since the original call by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) for a new science of happiness, excellence, and optimal human functioning, there has been an explosion of activity in, acclaim for, and criticism of positive psychology. The purpose of this study was to identify and examine the peer-reviewed literature linked to the positive psychology movement. An extensive systematic review identified 1336 articles published between 1999 and 2013. More than 750 of these articles included empirical tests of positive psychology theories, principles, and interventions. The results show a fairly consistent increase in the rate of publication, and that the number of empirical studies has grown steadily over the time period. The findings demonstrate that positive psychology is a growing and vibrant sub-area within the broader discipline of psychology, committed to using the same rigorous scientific methods as other sub-areas, in pursuit of understanding well-being, excellence, and optimal human functioning.     

Being imitated, conformity, and social influence: An integrative review

The recently developed literature on the effects of being imitated and the social influence function of imitation are reviewed, as is related literature on conformity from social psychology. Then, this research is considered within a number of theoretical contexts, but especially within the conceptual framework of Byrne's elaboration of effectance motivation. Finally, questions are raised which need to be addressed in future research.     

What is the Good Life? Positive Psychology and the Renaissance of Humanistic Psychology

Positive and humanistic psychology overlap in thematic content and theoretical presuppositions, yet positive psychology explicitly distances itself as a new movement, despite the fact that its literature implicitly references its extensive historical grounding within humanistic psychology. Consequently, humanistic psychologists both celebrate diffusion of humanistic ideas furthered by positive psychology, and resent its disavowal of the humanistic tradition. The undeniably close alignment of these two schools of thought is demonstrated in the embracing of eudaimonic, in contrast to hedonic, conceptions of happiness by positive psychology. Eudaimonic happiness cannot be purely value-free, nor can it be completely studied without using both nomethetic and idiographic (i.e., quantitative and qualitative) methods in addressing problems of value, which identifies positive psychology clearly as a humanistic approach, despite its protestations.     

Consumer spaces as political spaces: A critical review of social,environmental, and psychogeographical research

The purpose of this review is to critique the social and environmental psychology literature on spaces and places with a focus on consumer culture and neoliberalism. By drawing on social theory and the Continental philosophical literature, the review argues that an alternative approach to knowledge production is required. To this end, recommendations are provided for what a psychogeographical approach in social and environmental psychology could look like. It argues that such work could be of benefit to academic and local communities by exposing the social costs and consequences associated with consumer culture and neoliberalism.     

Positive organizational psychology,behavior, and scholarship: A review of the emerging literature and evidence base

The positive psychology movement seems to have stimulated new research and applications well beyond the discipline of traditional psychology. Among the various areas of inquiry, research and scholarship about positive organizations have received considerable attention from both researchers and practitioners. The current review examined the scholarly literature published between 2001 and 2009 on positive organizational psychology to provide a detailed picture of the current state of the field. This review sought to discover the overall growth rate, trends, and prevalent topics in the literature. It also aspired to provide an understanding of the empirical evidence for each topic through in-depth reviews. The findings suggest that there is a growing body of scholarly literature and an emerging empirical evidence base on topics related to positive organizations. Strengths, limitations, and implications of building a practical knowledge base for making significant improvements in the quality of working life and organizational effectiveness are discussed.     

A citation network analysis of career mentoring across disciplines: A roadmap for mentoring research in sport

ObjectiveGiven our limited understanding of mentoring in sport, reviewing research from other disciplines has the potential to advance knowledge in this context. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to synthesize and evaluate the mentoring literature across disciplines in order to bridge existing knowledge and to situate the mentoring in sport literature.DesignA citation network analysis.MethodA comprehensive literature search was conducted to locate influential career mentoring articles, books, and book chapters across all disciplines. Subsequently, this body of literature was evaluated using citation network to (a) identify the major career mentoring disciplines, (b) locate the most influential career mentoring texts, (c) evaluate the transfer of knowledge across disciplines, and (d) situate and evaluate the mentoring in sport literature.ResultsThe literature search resulted in a mentoring network of 1,819 texts and 10,951 citation links. Five major mentoring disciplines emerged: academic medicine, industrial and organizational psychology, education, nursing, and psychology. The industrial and organizational psychology and academic medicine disciplines were the most substantial mentoring disciplines. Further, the findings suggest the literature is relatively disconnected within and across disciplines. In regard to sport, the mentoring research represented 1.47% of the full-network (29 texts and 50 citation relations) and is interwoven into the industrial and organizational psychology literature.ConclusionGiven the limited sport texts uncovered in the citation network analysis, sport scholars can stand to benefit from the wealth of existing career mentoring literature in other disciplines. Accordingly, the identification of seminal career mentoring disciplines and texts serves to provide sport mentoring scholars with a roadmap to further promote the advancement and dissemination of mentoring knowledge and research.     

Graduate school mentoring in clinical,counselling, and experimental academic training programs: an exploratory study

This study focused on graduate student mentoring within clinical, counselling and experimental psychology programs. A nationwide survey of 336 psychology graduate students indicated that counselling students reported higher levels of socioemotional support in their mentoring relationships, as well as higher overall levels of satisfaction, compared with clinical and experimental students. Clinical and experimental students, however, reported higher levels of selected outcome variables, such as research productivity. The relationships between mentoring qualities and several outcome variables were noted and discussed. This study adds to the developing literature concerning graduate student mentoring within professional psychology training programs.     

Swampscott in International Context: Expanding Our Ecology of Knowledge

In this paper, I offer reflections as someone from outside the United States about the Swampscott conference. I refer to Fryer and Fox's (The Community Psychologist, 24, 2014, 1) critique of the “Swampscott discourse” and its role in fixing the birthplace of community psychology. While the critique is important, I note the growing references to international community psychology and the need to view the discipline as a product of social political realities in different contexts, as well as dynamics of dominance and marginality in knowledge production in psychology. The work in the Global South presents opportunities to contribute to developing a decolonizing community psychology through expanding the ecology of knowledge.     

Cumulating Evidence about the Social Animal: Meta‐Analysis in Social‐Personality Psychology

Like most scientific fields, social‐personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta‐analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta‐analysis, as they pertain to social‐personality psychology. Meta‐analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified reports and putting their findings and methods into a database, (iii) analyzing that database, and (iv) interpreting the results and reporting them. Use of meta‐analytic strategies has paralleled the knowledge explosion in social‐personality psychology, but must be used and consumed with careful discernment if the cumulated evidence about the social animal, Homo sapiens, is to have maximal value.     

Comprehensive psychological services at the secondary level utilizing student paraprofessionals

This article notes references in school psychology literature which focus on dissatisfaction with role, claiming that the field has remained reactive and narrow in scope in spite of major statements calling for more expansive roles during the past several decades. A broad, comprehensive paraprofessional training/supervisory model utilizing secondary level students is described; the model incorporates twelve paraprofessional involvement areas as part of a total high school psychological services delivery system. It is noted that individual client data and program evaluation have portrayed student improvement rates ranging from 50% to 90%, increased consumer satisfaction with psychological services, and increased visibility and knowledge of the psychologist's role among total school population. Suggestions for further research and evaluation are discussed.     

Psychologists' role in family-centered approach to practice, training, and research with young children

Family-centered, community-based, coordinated care for children with special needs is presented as the best practice model for providing services to children and families. Psychologists must learn to play an active role in this frame-work that both integrates psychology with other health and education disciplines and uses the broad spectrum of psychological knowledge about families, development, community organization, and intervention strategies. Key principles of family-centered child psychology affect practice research and training. The psychologist becomes part of a team created to support families as the primary care-givers of their children. Training programs must reorganize the types of experiences both in the classroom and the field to train new psychologists within this model. As mandates for family-centered care affect policies at the state and federal levels, research will remain a critical factor in understanding the effects of these policy shifts on child and family functioning and the delivery of services.     

Confusions in Psychological Skills Training

A critical examination of the idea of psychological skills training is undertaken. Questions are raised concerning the conceptual validity and generalizability of programs that attempt to train psychological skills us a means of “giving psychology away.” Although the critique presented is primarily conceptual, specific references and illustrations are drawn from recent research and theorizing in applied psychology, as well as from published literature in counseling and psychological education.     

Indigenous theorizing in a complex world

Indigenization in psychology leads to modes of theorizing based within local knowledge communities and defined in terms of culturally relevant criteria. The present study offers a conceptualization of the social psychology of science in terms of complexity theory. The value of alternative choices in advancing psychological knowledge is shown by a knowledge landscape whose shape depends on the diversity of paradigms within the community. Dominance by a single paradigm (such as a Western world view) leads to a single-peaked landscape where advances in knowledge are judged using only the criteria of that paradigm. Here, the most effective form of working is incremental step-by-step research; but this ignores the historical context of the indigenous community and runs the risk of promoting a kind of psychology that is irrelevant to its values and priorities. Indigenization is presented as a complexification of the knowledge community building on a diversity of world views, leading to a rugged, multiple-peaked knowledge landscape. Four features of working on rugged landscapes are examined: path dependence, showing the importance of history for shaping the direction of research; fostering research progress through seeding of multiple starting points; the benefits of locally dense networks within knowledge communities; and the role of policy-makers in tuning knowledge landscapes. Examples are drawn from the development of indigenous psychology within a number of countries.     

I Knew It All Along,Unless I Had to Work to Learn What I Know

After receiving knowledge regarding some topic, people usually overestimate their prior topic knowledge. Two experiments investigated whether people would claim less prior knowledge if they worked to earn their present knowledge. In Study 1, students finishing a psychology course claimed less precourse psychology knowledge if they reported devoting more effort toward the course. In Study 2, the knew-it-all-along effect was stronger for participants who were simply given the answers to questions than for participants who studied for 20 minutes to learn the answers. Both cognitive and motivational factors can account for the observed effects of effort investment on retrospective knowledge judgments.     

Integrating gay, lesbian, and bisexual issues into mainstream psychology.

Despite the growing clinical and research literature dealing with gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) issues, mainstream psychology has tended to ignore much of the work that has been done in this area. This article illustrates how clinical and research writings on GLB issues continue to remain invisible to mainstream psychology in such areas as life span development and aging, teenage suicide, substance abuse, victimization and abuse, and family and couple relationships. It also deals with some of the determinants of well-being among GLB individuals, such as family support, and notes the benefits accruing to mainstream psychology from studying GLB issues. A network of family members within psychology having GLB relatives has been formed--AFFIRM: Psychologist Affirming Their Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Family--and is dedicated to supporting its own family members, encouraging other family members to do likewise, supporting research and clinical work on GLB issues, and closing the gap between GLB clinical and research work and mainstream psychology.     

The virtue of multiculturalism: personal transformation, character, and openness to the other

The social, intellectual, and moral movement known as multiculturalism has been enormously influential in psychology. Its ability to reshape psychology has been due to its ethical force, which derives from the attractiveness of its aims of inclusion, social justice, and mutual respect. The cultivation of cultural competence, presented as a developmental process of acquiring self-awareness, cultural knowledge, and skills, is an important emphasis in the multicultural literature. The authors place the cultural competence literature in dialogue with virtue ethics (a contemporary ethical theory derived from Aristotle) to develop a rich and illuminating way for psychologists to understand and embody the personal self-examination, commitment, and transformation required for learning and practicing in a culturally competent manner. According to virtue ethics, multiculturalism can be seen as the pursuit of worthwhile goals that require personal strengths or virtues, knowledge, consistent actions, proper motivation, and practical wisdom. The authors term the virtue of multiculturalism openness to the other and conclude by describing how attention to cultural matters also transforms virtue ethics in important and necessary ways.     

Parent-offspring conflict theory: an evolutionary framework for understanding conflict within human families

Decades of research demonstrate that conflict shapes and permeates a broad range of family processes. In the current article, we argue that greater insight, integration of knowledge, and empirical achievement in the study of family conflict can be realized by utilizing a powerful theory from evolutionary biology that is barely known within psychology: parent-offspring conflict theory (POCT). In the current article, we articulate POCT for psychological scientists, extend its scope by connecting it to the broader framework of life history theory, and draw out its implications for understanding conflict within human families. We specifically apply POCT to 2 instances of early mother-offspring interaction (prenatal conflict and weaning conflict); discuss the effects of genetic relatedness on behavioral conflict between parents, children, and their siblings; review the emerging literature on parent-offspring conflict over the choice of mates and spouses; and examine parent-offspring conflict from the perspective of imprinted genes. This review demonstrates the utility of POCT, not only for explaining what is known about conflict within families but also for generating novel hypotheses, suggesting new lines of research, and moving us toward the "big picture" by integrating across biological and psychological domains of knowledge.     

Local institutionalization, discontinuity, and German textbooks of psychology, 1816-1854

In the context of social and intellectual developments and the changing role of German universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, which led to the local institutionalization of the discipline of psychology at German universities, the structure and content of textbooks of psychology are discussed. Textbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century had a pedagogical function in training teachers, in socializing students into the field, and in providing students and readers with knowledge about the subject matter, methodology, and topics of psychology. The textbooks, representative of influence, philosophical-psychological orientations, and different decades in the first half of the nineteenth century, are reconstructed with regard to the definition of psychology, the ways of studying the soul, and how to conceptually organize the field. The textbooks by Herbart, Beneke, and Waitz, which were written within a natural-scientific programmatic vision for psychology, are contrasted with the traditional philosophically intended textbooks of Reinhold, Mussmann, George, and Schilling. Fischhaber's textbook for Gymnasien is summarized. Issues regarding the continuity of psychology are discussed, and discontinuous developments in the history of German psychology are identified.     

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK FOR ISLAMIC COGNITIVE THEORIES

The Islamic psychology (IP) community in Europe has recently witnessed a heated debate about the credentials required to participate in the theoretical substantiation of IP and Islamically integrated psychotherapy and counseling. This debate has provided convenient circumstances for Muslim psychologists and Islamic scholars alike to rethink their roles within the flourishing movement. Specifically, the discussions hint toward the importance of adopting a collaborative research methodology for IP, in particular for basic research. The methodology of choice will need to define the necessary qualifications and responsibilities of scholars and psychologists in a collaborative research process (personal collaboration) and evince its capability to appropriately marry knowledge and data, diverging research methods, and perspectives, concepts, and theories from Islamic studies and contemporary psychology (content‐related collaboration). Here, we devise and offer a case illustration of an Islamic Psychology Basic Research Framework (coined the SALAAM Framework). This framework uses the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) Model of Interdisciplinary Research, developed by the IIS at the University of Amsterdam. Our first aim is to appropriate the IIS model for the IP literature by applying the model's research process phases and technique for the integration of disparate bodies of knowledge—that is, the identification of common ground—to methodological approaches in the contemporary IP literature. Our second aim is to exemplify the devised SALAAM Framework using the relatively unexplored area of Islamic cognitive theories (ICTs), which remain underdeveloped in contemporary psychological literature, primarily because of a lack of commensurability with the nomenclature of contemporary psychology. We thus provide a primer on the potential scope of ICTs. Toward the end of this article, we discuss the potential of the project of interdisciplinary construction of Islamic psychological theory, and the ability of the SALAAM Framework to establish a research program in IP that centers on cognition. We finally offer our reflections on the distinctiveness of Islamic psychologies in comparison to mainstream and Christian psychology.     

Work Sample Exams and Gender Adverse Impact Potential: The influence of self‐concept,social skills,and written skills

We clarify the existing literature on gender differences in work sample exams by disentangling such differences on work sample exams from other predictors (e.g., situational judgment tests). In fact, we note that there are only two articles specifically related to gender differences in work sample exams. Based on theory and literature from social psychology, neuropsychology, and applied psychology, we propose that the three constructs of self‐concept, social skills, and writing skills are likely to influence work sample gender differences. We tested our hypotheses on two samples of managers. We found in one instance that males scored higher on a technical exercise, but there was stronger support for females, on average, scoring higher on exercises that involved social skills and on exercises that involved writing skills. Work samples that targeted a broad array of knowledge, skills, and abilities were associated with higher overall scores for females (ds of ?.37 and ?.34) and, thus, were unlikely to be associated with gender‐based adverse impact against females.