Positive interventions are one of the building blocks for the application of positive psychology in our day-to-day lives. In this course taught by Dr. James Pawelski, we explore positive interventions through theory, research and practice. We provide learners the basic tools for using and measuring positive psychology in professional or personal contexts. Suggested prerequisite: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science.
3.1 Introduction to Character Strengths and Virtues
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Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions
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University of Pennsylvania
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Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology
From the lesson
Identifying and Using Character Strengths
Meet the Instructors
James Pawelski, Ph.D.Director of Education and Senior Scholar
Positive Psychology Center
Welcome to the third week of our course on the theory, research,
and practice of positive interventions.
In the first two weeks,
we focused on some of the conceptual underpinnings of positive psychology.
We differentiated between the powers we all have
to fight against things we don't want in the world, and
the powers we have to help grow more of the things we do want.
We used a thought experiment and
talked about these powers in terms of a reversible cape.
We talked about the importance of the red side of the cape and
noted how most of us tend to overuse that side.
To enable us to use our powers in a more balanced way, we emphasize the importance
of focusing on how to use the green side more frequently and more effectively.
In the first two weeks, we also emphasized the scientific grounding of positive
psychology, discussing some of the methods positive psychologists use to test
positive interventions, trying out some of the questionnaires ourselves and
looking at some of the results of the research.
We focused specifically on the topics of positive emotions and savoring, and
experimented with positive interventions in these areas.
I hope you've been able not ony to learn some things about the field of positive
psychology, but also to experience some of its benefits in your life as well.
This week we will be taking up another core area of
positive psychology research and practice, character strengths and virtues.
I mentioned earlier in the course that positive psychology research is often
a green cape approach to topics that have largely been thought about
in red cape terms.
Barbara Fredrickson's broaden and build theory of positive emotions for
example shows how positive emotions differ in their function and
value from negative emotions.
Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff's work on savoring explores various
ways of responding to good events in our lives in contrast to coping
which involves various ways of responding to negative events in our lives.
And the work on character strengths and virtues is very similar.
Now I don't know if you've heard of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, this
manual also known as the DSM is put out by the American Psychiatric Association, and
is enormously helpful to psychiatrists and psychologists in diagnosing mental illness.
Now if you're ever having a day where you're just feeling
too happy about yourself, and your life, and the world and
you want to moderate your mood, you can pull out a copy of the DSM and
look through the hundreds of ways in which the human mind can go wrong.
Now, again, this is an important tool to have in diagnosing mental illness so
that we can try to cure or at least treat it.
And when positive psychologists looked at the DSM, they said,
okay this is important but where is the good news?
Where are all the descriptions of mental orders, of mental strengths?
And so as a complementary response to the DSM, they created the Values in Action
Classification of character Strengths and Virtues, known for short as the VIA.
Now before we turn to this classification in more detail,
it's important to keep in mind that although work on positive emotions,
savoring, and character strengths can be seen as a green cape complement to
negative emotions, coping, and mental disorders,
this does not mean that the positive topics are any less real, or
less important than the red cape topics more traditionally studied by main
stream psychology.
Positive emotions, savoring, and character strengths are more than just the absence
of negative emotions, aversive events, and mental disorders.
So let's turn now to the Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues.
This project came out of the area of positive youth development.
The Mayerson Foundation teamed up with positive psychologists
to try to figure out how best to help youth realize their full potential.
In particular, they decided to focus on the development of good character.
And of course, good character is something that is important for
all of us throughout our lives, whether we're children, adolescents, or adults.
But what is good character?
How can it be defined?
How can it be assessed and how can it be cultivated?
Marty Seligman invited Christopher Peterson to head up a team of
psychologists and other researchers to come up with answers to these questions.
Chris Peterson was a psychology professor at the University of Michigan.
I first met Chris and Marty some 16 years ago when they were undertaking this
project and they invited me to participate in this really exciting work.
Under Chris's leadership the team decided to define character in terms of specific
character strengths.
And the team developed a list of criteria for
what would count as a character strength.
So here are some of the criteria for character strengths.
First of all,
it's important to emphasize the difference between character strengths and talents.
Talents tend to be things that are more fixed and automatic.
Things that maybe we're just good at and we don't have any kind of control over it.
You might think of an example like perfect pitch.
There are some people who are just able to know when a tone
is middle C, and when it's off, they can recognize that too.
And it seems to be something that's just a natural talent, you have it or you don't.
A second criterion for
character strengths is that they're valued across time and culture.
The goal of this classification was not simply to come up with strengths that
are valued in one particular social context, but
strengths that are universally valued for human beings wherever they're located.
So psychologists looked across time and across culture to see what kinds
of strengths were valued in the ancient world, in ancient Athens,
in the ancient Asian cultures, China and other cultures nearby.
They look to medieval lists of virtues, they look to more contemporary sources,
to see what kind of things are valued across all of these lists,
across all of these parts of human experience.
So for example,
punctuality is something that is valued in certain cultures quite a bit.
Whereas in other cultures, it's not so much.
It's not so important.
And so punctuality is not on the list in the classification because it's not
something that's equally universally valued.
Another criterion of character strengths is that they're not merely the opposite or
the lack of some negative trait.
Rather in themselves, there's some kind of positive trait that can be cultivated.
Furthermore, they're morally valued, that is to say,
they're important as ends in themselves and
not just as means to other things, so take the example of love of learning.
Clearly, we value love of learning because when we learn things, we can then
get jobs or establish careers that we otherwise wouldn't be able to have.
But beyond the consequences of the learning,
there's something about the love of learning itself, just the motivation to
get in and learn things that's valued across cultures, across time.
These character strengths furthermore involve the will.
And so they can be cultivated,
there's something that we can do to help increase these strengths.
And it's important to keep them distinct from other character strengths.
So the goal was to create a list of strengths where each strength would be in
its own right, important in its own right, and wouldn't overlap with other strengths,
or wouldn't be a composite of other strengths all wrapped up into one.
The final criterion I'll mention is a very important criterion
particularly from the standpoint of the science of positive psychology.
And that is, that each of these character strengths must be measurable.
Otherwise, it'd be hard to know whether somebody has it or not, and
whether they're moving forward in the process of cultivating it further.
So, I invite you to do the homework exercises now.
And in the next section, we'll take a look at each of the character strengths and
virtues in the classification.
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