Positive Psychology's Three Waves: Diener's Metrics, PP 2.0 and WEIRD Data

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For most of its first century, psychology centered on disease and dysfunction, aiming to bring patients from distress back to baseline. The episode traces positive psychology's roots to Aristotle's eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics and to Abraham Maslow, who used the term in a 1954 book chapter and removed it from the 1970 edition because he felt science was not ready. In 1998 Martin Seligman made it the central theme of his presidency of the American Psychological Association. Researchers then had to measure happiness, through Ed Diener's 1980s tripartite model of subjective well-being, Carol Ryff's six-factor model, Seligman's three paths and finally the PERMA model.

The later turns are about limits. Critics described toxic positivity, the suppression of negative emotions that the episode links to cardiovascular and respiratory harm, and Richard Lazarus argued emotions cannot be sorted strictly into positive and negative. That produced second wave positive psychology, or PP 2.0, which treats anxiety, strategic pessimism and anger as useful. The field also faced the fact that its foundational studies drew on WEIRD populations, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, which prompted a third wave focused on groups, systems, indigenous wisdom and economic inequality.

• PERMA stands for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement, with achievement defined as intrinsic mastery rather than status.
• Researchers built an alternative to the DSM that lists 24 character strengths under six virtues.
• In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's model, flow arises only when high challenge meets high skill, while low challenge and low skill produce apathy.
• The PASS program used self-paced mastery learning to keep each student in that zone of optimal challenge.
• In many collectivist cultures, chasing personal high-arousal joy can be seen as selfish, and contentment and group harmony are valued more.