Content area
Full Text
Positive psychology has emerged as an important domain in the field of psychology. In the past one and half decade, it has received wider scholarly attention resulting in numerous theoretical and empirical works that have appeared in many peer-reviewed journals. This paper attempts to develop an understanding of the this evolving domain of psychology, trace its philosophical foundations, explore its linkages with other domains of psychology, especially, the existential psychology and humanistic psychology and map its growth in the recent past. This paper begins with the introduction of positive psychology and presents an overview of its historical development. Then it attempts to explore the philosophical foundations of positive psychology as well as its linkages with two sub-domains of psychology the existential psychology and the humanistic psychology. Thereafter, it provides an overview of the emergence and growth of PP in the past 18 years. Finally, it concludes highlighting some of the limitations of this paper.
Keywords: positive psychology, historical and Philosophical foundations
Positive Psychology (PP) is a developing subdomain of psychology that has emerged as an important field of inquiry in the past 18 years. Significant development in PP is primarily because of the overwhelming responses received from the scholarly community to the call of the president of American Psychological Association (APA), Martin Seligman in 1998, who after realizing that the postWorld War II psychology is mainly focused on "the diagnosis, treatment, and scientific study of mental illness" (Gantt & Thayne, 2014, p. 186), made a call to the scholarly community to focus its attention to the positive features of human existence that makes life worth living. Thus, the contemporary PP movement, even though is of relatively recent origin, has grown remarkably in less than over two decades. Numerous PP related publications including popular books, scholarly journals, and handbooks have come up and publication of PP related articles in thejoumals of other fields such as education, public health, social sciences, management, sport sciences, business is growing steadily (Rusk & Waters, 2013).
The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the evolving subdomain of psychology the PP, trace its philosophical foundations, explore its linkages with other subdomains of psychology, especially, the existential psychology and humanistic psychology and map its growth in the recent...