Tim Lomas

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Peace is regarded as a universal good, as reflected in its selection as the very first word of the United Nation’s motto: Peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet. However, most academic attention focuses on “outer” forms (i.e. relational, societal, intergroup), with relatively little attention to “inner” varieties (i.e. tranquil states of...

The World Happiness Report is the leading source of global well-being rankings and is based on a single life evaluation metric: the Cantril Ladder, which asks participants to rate their life on a ladder between the best and worst possible life. On this scale, wealthier nations score higher, and the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway...

Prior research suggests that cross-national cognitive interviewing can provide preliminarily insights into the extent to which survey items that will be employed in large-scale global research might be understood similarly or differently across countries. Against the backdrop of the recently launched Global Flourishing Study, we used multinational...

Psychology and related fields have historically been Western-centric, influenced especially by the ideas and values of the United States. Consequently, aspects of life that have been relatively neglected in Western cultures have been similarly overlooked in the literature. This includes balance in life (notwithstanding select instances of interest,...

Subjective wellbeing has increasingly attracted attention across academia and beyond (e.g., policy making). However, the research literature has various shortcomings, including (1) conceptual confusion around key constructs, (2) limited and fragmented understanding of contextual dynamics, and (3) a lack of cross-cultural consideration. This paper r...

For over ten years the World Happiness Report has influentially ranked nations on self-reported life evaluation as measured by the Gallup World Poll. Inspired by this endeavour, this paper aims to broaden our understanding of global flourishing by assessing an expansive battery of 38 items relating to wellbeing in the World Poll, encompassing 386,6...

Antecedents of wellbeing across different socio-cultural contexts is a question that psychologists and other social scientist continue to grapple with. Although evidence supporting higher educational levels as being beneficial for wellbeing is significant, there are still contradictory findings, necessitating further exploration into this relations...

Great efforts have been expended studying how people’s childhood affects outcomes later in life. Although attention has mostly focused on ‘negative’ outcomes, such as mental illness, paradigms like positive psychology have encouraged interest in desirable phenomena too. Yet amidst this ‘positive turn’ some desiderata have still received scant engag...

Recent years have seen increasing public attention and indeed concern regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Hypotheses for such phenomena tend to fall into two classes: a conventional terrestrial explanation (e.g., human-made technology), or an extraterrestrial explanation (i.e., advanced civilizations from elsewhere in the cosmos). How...

Love is widely recognized as one of the most important, desired, and consequential aspects of the human condition, and thus has rightly been the focus of much academic attention. However, this interest has tended to concentrate on specific forms of love-especially romantic and familial forms-to the exclusion of others. One such overlooked form is l...

Academic interest in well-being has blossomed in recent years, to the point that numerous forms of well-being have now been proposed, covering myriad aspects of the person (e.g., mental, physical, social, spiritual) and of life more broadly (e.g., communal, economic, environmental). This proliferation of forms raises the question of how they might...

The topic of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAP) has risen to increasing prominence recently, as exemplified by the Congressional UAP hearing in July 2023. Indeed, some observers interpreted the event as “disclosure” – a process by which authorities, long suspected to have withheld evidence that some UAP are genuinely anomalous (e.g., extrater...

Despite the rising global interest in well-being and its various dimensions, research in this area has been criticized for its Western-centric conceptual and geographical emphasis. In this cross-sectional study, we leverage more than 30 indicators of well-being from three years of Gallup World Poll (2020–2022) data to explore the diversity of well-...

Th e distinction between East and West is among the most prominent and infl uential cross-cultural tropes in both academic scholarship and public discourse. However, in most cases, this attention tends to focus narrowly on certain instances or iterations of this binary. In particular, Edward Said's infl uential analysis of 'Orientalism' has led to...

The topic of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAP) has historically been regarded with skepticism by the scientific community. After a period of relative openness and ambivalence in the 1950s and 60s, it eventually became generally categorized as a “paranormal” concern and dismissed as a legitimate focus of inquiry. However, the issue has risen...

This study uses three years of repeated cross-sectional data (N = 386,654) from the multinational Gallup World Poll (representing >90 % of world's population) to explore differences in the well-being of rural and urban inhabitants. We performed a series of descriptive analyses comparing rural and urban residents on 30 indicators of well-being, both...

Prior research suggests that cross-national cognitive interviewing can provide preliminarily insights into the extent to which survey items that will be employed in large-scale global research might be understood similarly or differently across countries. Against the backdrop of the recently launched Global Flourishing Study, we used multinational...

Although many theistic and non-theistic faith traditions emphasize a person’s relatedness with the sacred as a key ingredient in their religious/spiritual life, the experience of religious/spiritual connection has yet to be explored in geographically and culturally diverse populations around the world. In this study, we leveraged nationally represe...

Concepts like flourishing, well-being, health, and happiness are of increasing interest across many fields, from psychology and medicine to politics and economics. However, these terms are used in diverse and contested ways, which makes it hard to find common ground and understanding. To attempt to help remedy the confusion, this paper offers an ov...

Over the past several years the question of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) has commanded increasing interest. Attention has generally focused on two main classes of hypotheses: a conventional terrestrial explanation (e.g., human technology), and a more extraordinary extraterrestrial explanation (i.e., an intelligent civilization from elsewh...

The Cantril Ladder is among the most widely administered subjective well-being measures; every year, it is collected in 140+ countries in the Gallup World Poll and reported in the World Happiness Report. The measure asks respondents to evaluate their lives on a ladder from worst (bottom) to best (top). Prior work found Cantril Ladder scores sensiti...

The recently proposed Global Comparison Framework (Lomas, 2023) lays out a rich array of dimensions of flourishing and their determinants on which the nations of the world might be compared. Despite its capaciousness and comprehensiveness, however, the GCF's reliance on a contemporary snapshot of global diversity still presents scholars engaged in...

Over recent years, the issue of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) has increasingly captivated attention and even concern, as reflected in the US military establishing a UAP Task Force in 2020. However, the discourse and debate around this important topic are beset with misunderstandings and a general lack of knowledge and information. One prom...

Psychology has paid relatively little attention to low arousal positive states like calmness. One explanation for this lacuna is the Western-centric nature of the field, and the related suggestion that such states are undervalued in Western cultures compared to high arousal ones, in contrast to Eastern cultures, which possibly place greater value o...

Recent years have seen increasing public attention regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Hypotheses for such phenomena tend to fall into two classes: a conventional terrestrial explanation (e.g., human-made drones), or an extraterrestrial explanation (i.e., advanced civilizations from elsewhere in the cosmos). However, there is also a t...

Contemporary cross-cultural research on flourishing and development has been limited by a focus on Western populations and typically Western priorities, and by attention to only a few indicators of flourishing, such as life satisfaction, life expectancy, or GDP per capita. This paper highlights some significant challenges for robust cross-national...

Having long been critiqued as Western-centric, psychology is increasingly attuned to the need to conduct more cross-cultural research. However, there is relatively little clarity, consensus, or nuance on how best to conceptually “carve up” and assess different peoples and places. Arguably the two most common distinctions are East versus West, and d...

Using instruments comprising ordered responses to items are ubiquitous for studying many constructs of interest. However, using such an item response format may lead to items with response categories infrequently endorsed or unendorsed completely. In maximum likelihood estimation, this results in non-existing estimates for thresholds. This work foc...

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,...

A concise and engaging exploration of how we understand happiness. What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it's elusive. As a concept—despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject—it's poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psychologist Tim Lomas offers a concise and engaging ov...

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...

Objective: Despite the growing research in Coaching Psychology, there is little literature on the psychology of coaching adolescents within community settings. This study aimed to explore youth work practitioner experiences to gain insights into how vulnerable adolescents are supported in their emotional wellbeing within the domain of Coaching Psyc...

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 combination of positive psychology (PP), specifically second wave (SWPP), with coaching and mortality awareness (MA), has not previously been researched. This limits our understanding of coaching within the context of more emotionally challenging, or emotionally mixed, experiences; this study addresses this gap. Objectives: The purpose of the r...

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...

Lexicography (listed by alphabet)

Lexicography (listed by language)

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...

Lexicography (listed by theme)

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...