Positive psychotherapy.

By Martin E. P. Seligman, Tayyab Rashid, A. Parks. American Psychologist, 2018

1,189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Positive psychotherapy (PPT) contrasts with standard interventions for depression by increasing positive emotion, engagement, and meaning rather than directly targeting depressive symptoms. The authors have tested the effects of these interventions in a variety of settings. In informal student and clinical settings, people not uncommonly reported them to be "life-changing." Delivered on the Web, positive psychology exercises relieved depressive symptoms for at least 6 months compared with placebo interventions, the effects of which lasted less than a week. In severe depression, the effects of these Web exercises were particularly striking. This address reports two preliminary studies: In the first, PPT delivered to groups significantly decreased levels of mild-to-moderate depression through 1-year follow-up. In the second, PPT delivered to individuals produced higher remission rates than did treatment as usual and treatment as usual plus medication among outpatients with major depressive disorder. Together, these studies suggest that treatments for depression may usefully be supplemented by exercises that explicitly increase positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf0c6dcd26301a9f38b83a2ec744a33d2e177fa2

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Citations in the corpus

Using personal and psychological strengths leads to increases in well-being over time: A longitudinal study and the development of the strengths use questionnaire (2011, result): “Further, confidence in the results are increased by (a) convergence with the findings of experimental interventions to increase strengths (Seligman et al., 2006), and (b) non-significant relationships with measures of negative affect; it seems less likely that a pure statistical artifact would…”
Building Positive Resources: Effects of Positive Events and Positive Reflection on Work Stress and Health (2013, methodology): “Although research evidence is impressive for the beneficial effects of positive refocusing on stress and well-being (Seligman et al., 2006), existing research is limited in two important ways.”
Effects of positive interventions and orientations to happiness on subjective well-being (2011, background): “The meaningful life results from individuals using their signature strengths and talents to belong to and serve something with a perceived higher purpose than the self, such as community service (Seligman et al., 2006).”
Finding the golden mean: the overuse, underuse, and optimal use of character strengths (2019, background): “…reignited this work as an important component of strengths-based approaches (Biswas-Diener, Kashdan, & Minhas, 2011; Linley, 2008; Niemiec, 2014; Rashid & Seligman, 2018) and is aligned with the direction of what other scholars in the field have argued for (Fowers, 2008; Schwartz & Sharpe,…”
The effect of positive work reflection during leisure time on affective well-being: Results from three diary studies (2016, background): “Given the dearth of research that focuses on interventions that target positive behaviors (Semmer, 2011), our randomized controlled experiment to evaluate the three-good-things intervention (Seligman et al., 2005, 2006) in the work context makes a unique contribution to the literature.”
Integrating Positive and Clinical Psychology: Viewing Human Functioning as Continua from Positive to Negative Can Benefit Clinical Assessment, Interventions and Understandings of Resilience (2017, background): “, 2014) and group therapies (e.g., Cheavens et al., 2006; Seligman et al., 2006) have also been developed and tested.”