Future Perspectives on Positive Psychology:A Research Agenda

Just over two decades ago, Martin Seligman's inaugural lecture as the new president of the APA marked the dawn of Positive Psychology. Seligman called for a science of positive subjective experiences, positive individual states/traits/behaviours, and positive societal factors that improves the quality of life and wellbeing. Since then, this sub-discipline of psychology has shown extraordinary and inspiring growth in both the academy (e.g. research papers/books) and practice (e.g. establishment of professional associations, annual conferences). Positive psychology has increased our collective understanding of the factors that make life worth living, the drivers that enhance wellbeing and the elements that undermine them. It has given birth to many new theories, research models and methodologies that aim to measure, interpret, model and optimize the conditions that lead to flourishing individuals and thriving societies. It has also spawned a magnitude of sub-disciplines ranging from positive ageing, positive coaching, wellbeing therapies, positive relationships, positive health, positive organizational psychology etc. Despite building out its own identity, positive psychology has also been adopted in many adjacent fields like organizational studies, education, health, risk management, and even architectural sciences.In its relatively short life, positive psychology has provided new insights into the human condition and innovative means to solve complex individual, organizational and societal problems. Positive psychology has brought balance to psychology by establishing a platform to focus on more than just "fixing what is wrong" through focusing on optimizing what already works well. As a collective, we believe that positive psychology can continue to play a vital role in the future by deepening our understanding of 'positivity' and developing practical tools, methodologies, and interventions to enhance people, organizations, and societies' functioning.But what does the future of positive psychology hold? What are the strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results of positive psychology? And how can we, as a collective, build out the credibility and impact of the discipline's future? For us, these are some of the most challenging goals of positive psychology. With the rapid development of the field, detailed research and practice 'roadmaps' are required to direct the discipline's collective energies.This book address such by collating a series of research agendas about the future of positive psychology in different speciality areas. Specifically, the aim was to identify the limitations in our current understanding of the different theories, models, methods and interventions on which positive psychology is built and propose a roadmap for addressing such in the future. This aided in setting a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound research agenda to direct the future development of positive psychology. Contributions discuss the current state of theory and research in positive psychology and presents a research agenda for future research

Ideological distinction. The political ideologies of social psychologists in the East and West.

The problem of “liberal bias” among personality and social psychologists has been widely discussed in recent years (Haidt, 2011; Duarte et al., in press; Inbar, Lammers, 2012). Most of these discussions extrapolated findings observed in American and Western European social psychology to the whole discipline. This article presents a first insight into regional differences in the political opinions of Western, and Eastern social psychologists. Based on the characteristics of intellectuals in Eastern European countries as reproducers of existing structures of dependence, we hypothesised that Eastern European psychologists would not express a “liberal bias” but instead, at least in the domain of economic opinions, that they would support rather conservative political solutions. An empirical study of social psychologists from Hungary, Poland, the USA and the UK supported this hypothesis. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that, despite forming the majority in the field of social psychology, Polish supporters of a free market economy were reluctant to express their views in public. Finally, based on the European Values Survey, we compared the economic attitudes of European social psychologists with the attitudes prevalent in their countries (i.e. Hungary, Poland and the UK). This comparison suggested that Hungarian and Polish social psychologists hold more procapitalist stances on economic issues than the poorest segments of the societies they live in, whereas British social psychologists supported state interventionism to a greater extent than the poorest sections of their society

Exploiting physiological changes during the flow experience for assessing virtual-reality game design.

Immersive experiences are considered the principal attraction of video games. Achieving a healthy balance between the game's demands and the user's skills is a particularly challenging goal. However, it is a coveted outcome, as it gives rise to the flow experience – a mental state of deep concentration and game engagement. When this balance fractures, the player may experience considerable disinclination to continue playing, which may be a product of anxiety or boredom. Thus, being able to predict manifestations of these psychological states in video game players is essential for understanding player motivation and designing better games. To this end, we build on earlier work to evaluate flow dynamics from a physiological perspective using a custom video game. Although advancements in this area are growing, there has been little consideration given to the interpersonal characteristics that may influence the expression of the flow experience. In this thesis, two angles are introduced that remain poorly understood. First, the investigation is contextualized in the virtual reality domain, a technology that putatively amplifies affective experiences, yet is still insufficiently addressed in the flow literature. Second, a novel analysis setup is proposed, whereby the recorded physiological responses and psychometric self-ratings are combined to assess the effectiveness of our game's design in a series of experiments. The analysis workflow employed heart rate and eye blink variability, and electroencephalography (EEG) as objective assessment measures of the game's impact, and self-reports as subjective assessment measures. These inputs were submitted to a clustering method, cross-referencing the membership of the observations with self-report ratings of the players they originated from. Next, this information was used to effectively inform specialized decoders of the flow state from the physiological responses. This approach successfully enabled classifiers to operate at high accuracy rates in all our studies. Furthermore, we addressed the compression of medium-resolution EEG sensors to a minimal set required to decode flow. Overall, our findings suggest that the approaches employed in this thesis have wide applicability and potential for improving game designing practices

Learning Together: Evaluating and improving Further Adult and Vocational Education through practice-focused research

This paper argues that the relationship between educational research and educational practice cannot be reduced to the simple application of knowledge gained from research conducted by others. It contends that far from teachers being passive consumers of knowledge produced by others, often in the form of ‘blueprints’ or ‘recipes’ for good practice, teachers are in fact creators of new educational knowledge as well as potential generators of and contributors to educational theory. It asserts that the new learning involved in putting an idea, concept or theory from educational research into educational practice is a process of inquiry and therefore an important and legitimate form of educational research. The paper discusses how an approach to the continuing professional development of teachers, based upon practice-focused educational research and inquiry-based pedagogy, coupled with a programme of dedicated research support, can enable teachers to produce significant, well-theorised and systematic educational research, leading to improvements in educational practice. This paper concludes that a practicefocused and inquiry-based model of educational evaluation and improvement offers education and policy professionals in the Vocational Education and Training sector (and potentially in the schools sector) an alternative to current technical-rational, top-down approaches to inspection and improvement in educational contexts. Keywords educational evaluation, educational improvement, educational research, further, adult and vocational education (FAVE)