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Introduction
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March 2013 - present
Publications
Publications (198)
The Western-centricity of psychology means it has inherited some of the key ontological categories and distinctions at the heart of Western cultures. This paper identifies four such distinctions that have been particularly influential in psychology: mind-body; subjective-objective; self-other; and inner-outer. Together, these have created a pervasi...
Throughout history, people have observed aerial events that appeared extraordinary and anomalous. In earlier eras, these were often interpreted through a lens that invoked special classes of divine beings, such as angels (who, compared with gods, are regarded as more likely to interact with humans). Today, in our ostensibly secular scientific age,...
Objective:
It is increasingly appreciated that mental health may not just involve a relative absence of mental illness, but the active presence of positive psychological desiderata. However, research attention on mental illness and health has tended to remain siloed and disconnected-proceeding along parallel tracks-with their potential relationshi...
Ethics – perhaps the quintessential snooze button of coaching. Rarely is the topic, and indeed ethical mastery itself, embraced by practitioners. Instead, ethics is often viewed as a set of obligations and rules for what 'not to do'. However, here the authors assert that ethics is powerful and potential-filled, with the capacity to take a transform...
Recent decades have seen a surge of scientific interest in happiness. However, its theoretical conceptualization is a work in progress. Much of the literature focuses on two main forms: hedonic (encompassing life satisfaction and positive affect) and eudaimonic (encompassing phenomena such as character development and meaning in life). However, thi...
As the field of positive psychology aims to build and strengthen the well-being of individuals, its repertoire of empirically validated strategies designed to do so is growing. Kuwait’s “Boomerang” anti-bullying theatre programme designed to increase social kindness in schools is an example. The tools of applied theatre were taught to facilitators,...
Although psychology has tended to focus on the individual, paradigms have emerged looking at people in context, such as social psychology. More recently, these have included fields attending to humans’ ecological context, such as ecopsychology. However, little has been conducted on spatial orientation, on how humankind has understood itself in rela...
A wealth of research has suggested the West tends toward individualism and the East toward collectivism. We explored this topic on an unprecedented scale through two new items in the 2020 Gallup World Poll, involving 121,207 participants in 116 countries. The first tapped into orientations toward self-care versus other-care (“Do you think people sh...
Our understanding of well-being, and related concepts such as health and flourishing, is shaped by the metaphors through which we think about such ideas. Current dominant metaphors—including a pyramid, ladder, and continuum—all have various issues. As such, this paper offers two other metaphors which can better do justice to the nuanced complexitie...
Over recent decades, scholarship on wellbeing has flourished. However, this has been critiqued as Western-centric, firstly in terms of the location of research participants and scholars, and moreover in terms of the very ideas and values through which wellbeing is understood. In response to such issues, the Global Wellbeing Initiative-a partnership...
Vitality has been underappreciated and underexplored by academia at large. This oversight is potentially explained by the Western-centric nature of most fields, with vitality having been comparatively neglected in the West relative to elsewhere. One explanation for this lacuna is that vitality is not easily pigeonholed within the ontological catego...
We discuss certain critiques of the research literature on flourishing. We fully agree with calls for greater attention to qualitative work, to cultural differences, and to questions of power and justice concerning flourishing. We argue, however, that in spite of notable differences in understandings of flourishing across cultures, there is also a...
In this commentary, we offer some remarks concerning distinctions that might be drawn between psychological well-being, emotional well-being, well-being more generally, and flourishing. We put forward a flexible map of flourishing to help understand the relative place of these and other terms, and their respective nestings. We discuss some of the c...
Recent decades have seen an intensification of scholarship on wellbeing. Looking ahead, the next frontier may be engaging with the possibility of non-human forms of wellbeing. This paper reviews the main candidates for what these forms may be, limiting its considerations to entities that are living and capable of conscious experience. However, what...
Scholarly understanding of happiness continues to advance with every passing year, with new ideas and insights constantly emerging. Some constructs, like life evaluation, have been established for decades, generating extensive research. Cantril’s “ladder” item on life evaluation, for example – the question in the Gallup World Poll upon which this r...
Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been don...
This research continues the advances in applied positive psychology by measuring and exploring the factors which contribute to the happiness among people living in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. This research provides a province-wide account of subjective well-being (SWB), which is defined as a person’s cognitive and affective evaluation of hi...
Art and aesthetics have long been understood as central to human well-being and flourishing. However, the academic study of these phenomena has been critiqued for its Western-centricity and general lack of cross-cultural engagement. As such, this article aims to broaden our appreciation of the contours of aesthetics by engaging with relevant “untra...
Introduction
Human flourishing is a multidimensional concept characterized by a state of complete wellbeing. However, much of the prior research on wellbeing has principally focused on population averages assessed using a single item of wellbeing. This study examined trends in population averages and inequalities for a multidimensional index of wel...
Background:
Having a purpose in life has been linked to improved health and wellbeing; however, it remains unknown whether having "Ikigai"-a related but broader concept in Japan-is also beneficial for various physical and psychosocial outcomes.
Methods:
Using data from a nationwide longitudinal study of Japanese older adults aged ≥65 years, we e...
The past 150 years have seen remarkable advances in the study of wellbeing. To appreciate the value and significance of these developments, this paper offers a historical perspective on their dynamics, arguing that we have seen four great waves of wellbeing scholarship in the modern West. I begin by exploring the wave metaphor itself, and then prop...
Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been applied in many contexts, including educational sectors of K-12 and various graduate schools, such as medical and law schools. Research shows that highly competitive students are likely to benefit from mindfulness practices. However, few STEM-focused colleges have been able to assess its value and ap...
Background: Over 50% of the world uses social media. There has been significant academic and public discourse around its negative mental health impacts. There has not, however, been a broad systematic review in the field of Positive Psychology exploring the relationship between social media and wellbeing, to inform healthy social media use, and to...
Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic across academia, with a burgeoning array of research into its different aspects. Among the most dynamic and interdisciplinary work in this arena are studies exploring the myriad factors that influence it. These span multiple topics and fields of enquiry, from physiology and identity to politics and econo...
The age of COVID-19 calls for a different approach toward global well-being and flourishing through the transcendence suffering as advocated by existential positive psychology. In the present study, we primarily explained what self-transcendence is and why it represents the most promising path for human beings to flourish through the transformation...
Cite: Hughes, P., & Lomas, T. (2021). ‘How do young men experience meaning in life?’ European Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 5, 13, 1-13.
Background: Despite indications that the presence of meaning in life is associated with potential benefits for common crises men face, few meaning in life studies examine this population, and a lack of...
Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across numerous academic fields. However, the literature can sometimes imply it is predominantly a modern concern. Relatedly, critics have argued that contemporary scholarship on happiness is Western-centric, yet in so doing can appear to suggest that happiness is mainly a Western preoccupati...
What does it mean to speak of waves of academia? Essentially, it implies new phases of development in a given field. But the metaphor itself is revealing. It suggests dynamic fluidity rather than stepwise, punctuated change. Moreover, rather than phases having clearly delineated boundaries, they are blurry and overlapping – just as one ocean wave c...
Positive psychology approaches have been shown to play a vital role in protecting mental health in times of challenge and are, therefore, important to include when studying the psychological outcomes of COVID-19. While existing research has focused on individual psychological health, this paper focuses on collective wellbeing and collective posttra...
This presentation suggests there have been four waves of wellbeing scholarship in modern times: (1) the instantiation of psychiatry and psychotherapy around 150 years ago, which focused on ameliorating mental illness; (2) the emergence of humanistic psychotherapists and psychologists from the 1930s onwards, who turned their attention to more positi...
The relevance of balance and harmony to wellbeing has been under-appreciated in psychology. Even though these concepts have received considerable attention across different contexts (e.g., work-life balance), this literature is fragmented and scattered. There have been few attempts to bring these disparate threads together, or to centre these conce...
This study seeks to understand the role that courage plays in the development and practice of coaches. Courage is mentioned frequently in the coaching literature, but this research is the first study to investigate its significance. Within the precepts of constructivist grounded theory, which is appropriate for the investigation of under-represente...
The untranslatable word desenrascanço, a Portuguese construct related to people's ability to skilfully negotiate complex issues and to solve them with originality and creativity, was studied using a common medical complex scenario-multimorbidity. An online qualitative survey was carried out in the last trimester of 2018. A total of 117 general prac...
The West is usually portrayed as relatively individualistic. It is further argued that this tendency has influenced academia, leading to an underappreciation of the importance of prosociality. In the interest of exploring this topic, an enquiry was conducted into conceptualisations of prosociality across the world’s cultures. This enquiry focused o...
The relevance of balance and harmony to wellbeing has been under-appreciated in psychology. Even though these concepts have received considerable attention across different contexts (e.g., work-life balance), this literature is fragmented and scattered. There have been few attempts to bring these disparate threads together, or to centre these conce...
As positive psychology expands its range of strategies to raise levels of flourishing, many interventions have been identified with new ones emerging. The positive arts offer a new avenue; one such intervention is drama and theater that can benefit subjective and social wellbeing as these offer individuals the opportunity to empathize with others,...
In the last two decades, the proponents of positive psychology have expanded its evidence base to include multiple constructs and interventions pertaining to wellbeing. In recent years, the proponents of second wave positive psychology have encouraged a more synergistic and multi-dimensional view of wellbeing. This paper suggests that a meta-theore...
Background: Psychology is open to the charge of being Western-centric, with its understanding and conceptualisation of topics such as wellbeing influenced by the mainly-Western cultural contexts in which it has developed. As such, efforts are underway to explore and incorporate ideas and perspectives from non-Western cultures.
Aims: One such effort...
The development of academic fields is often described through the metaphor of ‘waves.’ Following the instantiation of positive psychology (the first wave), scholarship emerged looking critically at the notions of positive and negative, becoming known as its second wave. More recently, we discern an equally significant shift, namely scholarship that...
Positive psychology has fruitfully interacted with numerous other disciplines, creating new hybrid paradigms. One such instance involves coaching and coaching psychology, which share the field's focus on enhancing wellbeing and performance across life domains. As a result, there is an emergent interest in exploring their interaction with positive p...
The environment is widely recognised to be in peril, with clear signs of a climate crisis. This situation has many dimensions and factors, but key among them are the often-destructive ways in which humans interact with the natural world. Numerous cultures—particularly more industrialised and/or Western ones—have developed predatory and disconnected...
Positive psychology has been critiqued as Western-centric, influenced by the mostly Western contexts in which it has developed. English is its dominant mode of discourse, for example, which has shaped its understanding of its subject matter. To generate a more comprehensive cross-cultural 'map' of wellbeing, the author is creating a lexicography of...
The article has been accepted for publishing in the Journal of Positive Psychology and so the final version may differ slightly from this one.
Background: Psychological resilience may be central to Positive Psychology as one way to face the dark side of life. But is resilience training universally effective? This paper initiates a systematic revie...
در حالی که پیچیدگیهای زندگی معاصر آسیبپذیری انسان را تشدید کرده است، در عرضۀ خدمات روانشناختی، اولویتهای متعارض و معضلات اخلاقی در مرکز توجه هستند. هیچ مجموعۀ واحدی وجود ندارد که بتواند راهنماهای اخلاقی یا استانداردهای کاملی را برای گسترۀ پیچیدگیهای انسان دربرگیرد. بااینحال، مجموعهای از ارزشهای فراگیر و اصول، ما را بهسوی تصمیمگیریهای اخل...
Since much of the empirical work within Positive Psychology has taken place in
English-speaking Western countries, there is concern that the resulting concepts and
theories of well-being reflect a bias towards Western (and more specifically Englishinfluenced)
ways of thinking. However, efforts are underway in the field to enhance its
intercultural...
اصول اخلاقی بیعیب و نقص، شاید نوعی ایدئال آرمانگرایانه باشد، چراکه متخصصان روانشناسی مثبت هم همانند سایر انسان¬ها جایزالخطا، آسیبپذیر و ناکامل هستند. پیچیدگی¬های زندگی معاصر ازجمله زندگی اینترنتی در حال گسترش، تغییرات نامنظم آبوهوا، بحران¬های پناهندگان، هویت¬های در حال تحول و دوقطبیسازی اقتصادی فزاینده، آسیبپذیری انسان را تشدید می¬کند. در عر...
The science of wellbeing has come a long way from the early days of measuring wellbeing via a nation’s GDP, and wellbeing measures and concepts continue to proliferate to capture its various elements. Yet, much of this activity has reflected concepts from Western cultures, despite the emphasis placed on wellbeing in all corners of the globe. To mee...
The environment is widely recognised to be in peril, with clear signs of a climate crisis. This situation has many dimensions and factors, but key among them are the often-destructive ways in which humans interact with the natural world. Numerous cultures-particularly more industrialised and/or Western ones-have developed predatory and disconnected...
Difficult emotions and cognitive states are recognised in second wave positive psychology as being a gold mine for personal growth. The growing body of knowledge in positive psychology gives coaching psychologists a perimeter to work with, whilst archetypal shadow analysis, rooted in Jung’s teachings, gives depth and insight. While definitions of c...
This chapter offers an overview of the intricate connections between meditation and emotion. It begins by outlining a framework for understanding meditation, whereby practices can be classified according to four key parameters: behaviors of mind; object; attitude; and form. It also introduces some basic ideas around the nature of emotions, and affe...
A beautifully illustrated dictionary of words from around the world that describe experiences of happiness for which there are no equivalents in the English language.
Have you ever had a feeling that you couldn't quite describe because there was no word in English that captured it? Our ability to fully experience moments of joy in our lives can be...
As positive psychology has developed as a field, questions have arisen around how to ensure best practice, including with respect to ethics. This issue is particularly pertinent vis-à-vis its applied dimensions, such as positive psychology interventions by students and graduates of MAPP programmes. However, the field has hitherto lacked clear ethic...
Although London’s multicultural nature is often celebrated, this ideal has come under challenge, especially post-Brexit. Consequently, there is need for a greater appreciation of the nature and value of cultural diversity in London. An innovative means to achieving this is through studying untranslatable words, which reveal phenomena that have been...
What does it mean to speak of a ‘second wave’ within positive psychology? Essentially, the notion of a wave implies a new phase of development in a given field. But the metaphor itself is revealing. It implies dynamic fluidity rather than stepwise, punctuated change. Moreover, rather than phases having clearly delineated boundaries, they are blurry...
These guidelines are the result of a collaborative and independent working group led by Aaron Jarden, Tayyab Rashid, Annalise Roache and Tim Lomas. The guidelines are independent of any organisation or association; however, numerous parties have been involved in the development and refinement of this first iteration. It is the authors’ intention to...
Efforts to improve the well-being of healthcare professionals include mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). To understand the value of such initiatives, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of empirical studies pertaining to the use of MBIs with healthcare professionals. Databases were reviewed from the start of records to January 2...
Definitively identifying a particular activity as a positive psychology intervention can be difficult. The issue is compounded by lack of clarity around where the boundaries of positive psychology itself lie, and how it intersects with conceptually-related disciplines. A case in point is coaching, which shares positive psychology's interest in enha...
The notion of spirituality is increasingly prominent in academic and cultural discourse alike. However, it remains a nebulous concept, capable of diverse interpretations, particularly cross-culturally. In the interest of exploring this diversity, yet also with the aim of identifying common themes, an enquiry was conducted into conceptualizations of...
Mainstream psychology can be considered relatively Western-centric, as reflected in the fact that its discourse and theorising is mainly in English, influencing how it conceptualises its subject matter. However, English itself is a complex product of multiple cultural influences, including the widespread borrowing of words from other languages. To...
Scholars are beginning to appreciate the work-related 'drivers' of wellbeing, i.e., the ways work may promote or hinder employees' wellbeing. This paper brings a multidimensional perspective to bear on this topic by providing: (a) a multidimensional overview of these drivers; and (b) a multidimensional analysis of how they actually 'drive' wellbein...
In thinking and talking about wellbeing, people often deploy spatial metaphors, such as identifying positive and negative affect with “up” and “down” respectively. However, there has not yet been a systematic investigation of how wellbeing is represented through metaphor. To shed light on this topic, a content analysis was conducted of spatial meta...
Although the notion of virtue is increasingly prominent in psychology, the way it has been studied and conceptualised has been relatively Western-centric, and does not fully account for variations in how it has been understood cross-culturally. As such, an enquiry was conducted into ideas relating to virtue found across the world’s cultures, focusi...
Anger is common problem for which counselling/psychotherapy clients seek help, and is typically regarded as an invidious negative emotion to be ameliorated. However, it may be possible to reframe anger as a moral emotion, arising in response to perceived transgressions, thereby endowing it with meaning. In that respect, the current paper offers a ‘...
Although semiotics has historically been a focus of interest in psychology, its impact over recent decades has been fairly muted. Moreover, no systematic efforts have been made to study and understand it from a positive perspective, i.e., the way sign-systems are or can be “positive.” As such, this paper introduces the notion of “positive semiotics...
The Mindfulness Based Flourishing Program (MBFP) is an online 8-week intervention developed for enhancing wellbeing with the use of mindfulness practices, through targeting a range of positive variables. The efficacy of the MBFP has been demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial, and in order to further establish it as an intervention with wide...
Given the demanding nature of many professions, efforts are ongoing to develop initiatives to improve occupational wellbeing, including mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). To assess the efficacy of MBIs, meta-analytic procedures were conducted on 35 randomized controlled trials derived from an earlier inclusive systematic literature search (cov...
The concepts of grit and positive leadership are central to extraordinary performance. However, to date there has been little empirical analysis of the relationship between a leader’s level of grit and their capacity to implement positive leadership strategies and practices. This correlational study explores these linkages, taking grit subfactors i...
Background: Linguists have often remarked upon the polysemous nature of love, whereby the term encompasses a wide diversity of emotional relationships. Several typologies have been constructed to account for this diversity. However, these tend to be restricted in scope, and fail to represent the range of experiences signified by the term ‘love’ in...
Qualitative research of the lived experiences of pregnant women taking the Mindfulness-based flourishing programme (MBFP).
Have you ever had a feeling that you couldn't quite describe, because no English word exists for it?
Indeed, without such a word, it's difficult to remember or understand the feeling, and to talk about it with other people. This applies to all aspects of life, but most of all that most sought-after of feelings, happiness, where our ability to both...
Mainstream psychology can be regarded as largely Western-centric, with its concepts and priorities biased towards Western ways of thinking and understanding. Consequently, the field would benefit from greater cross-cultural awareness and engagement. To that end, this article offers one means of engagement, the study of “untranslatable” words (i.e.,...
How embracing untranslatable terms for well-being -- from the Finnish sisu to the Yiddish mensch -- can enrich our emotional understanding and experience.
Western psychology is rooted in the philosophies and epistemologies of Western culture. But what of concepts and insights from outside this frame of reference? Certain terms not easily translata...
A prominent criticism of positive psychology is that is has been shaped by its Western context, and yet that this 'situatedness' often remains unacknowledged. Consequently, this paper offers an archaeological analysis of conceptualisations of happiness in the West. More specifically, the paper explores the emergence of significant ideas relating to...
This book presents an innovative new approach to the study of wellbeing, intersecting psychology, linguistics, and cross-cultural scholarship. It begins by introducing a cartographic theory of language, proposing that words enable us to map our world, and thus to understand and navigate our lives. However, different cultures map the world in differ...
Teenage boys are a source of considerable concern in society, with generally poorer health, educational, and social outcomes than their female counterparts. Of particular concern are “at-risk” adolescents, who by definition are liable to poorer outcomes than peers not deemed at-risk. However, there are indications that activities such as mindfulnes...
