Customer Reviews

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Human Strengths

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This book is long overdue. It provides a great summary of the research related to happiness, motivation, hope and optimism, and self-esteem. It is perhaps best used as a reference for a college course, but it provides an accurate reflection of research and theory in this new field of psychology.

My professors chose this as one of the texts for a graduate level course in Positive Psychology one semester and have since stopped using it. The book was easy to read, but not very applicable to the true intent of positive psychology research, despite it's name. Moreover, nearly every example was clinical, and focused on disorder. This may be a useful book to "ease" clinically minded students into the idea of positive psychology and does offer a table of contents that covers most of the important bases if you are looking to learn a little more about positive psych, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to serve as an introduction, or even supplemental higher level reading in positive psych for most courses. Chapters are lacking in content and tend to stray into more clinical topics rather than discuss what the chapter title promises. If you're looking for a positive psych text for students check out the Primer by Peterson or the big Snyder & Lopez text.

A fairly technical book wrapped around the science of happiness, the measurement of happiness, and how that connects to a variety of human character strengths and virtues. Interesting reading for the psychologist that wants to break out of the rut of diagnostic and illness theory. My question is whether we truly believe we have a set point for happiness, or if we can choose to be happy.