Positive Psychology Takes a New Look at Happiness

• Due to its fleeting and fickle nature, our levels of happiness cannot be gauged, measured or rated accurately.
• While earlier psychology focused on the bad apples, emphasizing on psychopathology, a relatively new approach to psychology is positive in nature, and focuses on psychological health.
• Positive psychology’s newer avatar focuses on the various virtues, meaning, resilience and well-being.

To address the disconnect between happiness and deeper levels of satisfaction, researches proposed a model that characterizes people as falling into one of four well-being types.

1. Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
2. Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
3. Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
4. Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.