Pitfalls of positivity–new perspectives on the futility of negating negativity

Abstract

The claim that “thinking positive” betters one's life has become pervasive in our contemporary culture. Proponents of this style of reasoning, including the head of the positive psychology movement, Martin Seligman, claim their goal is to create a field focused on human well-being and the conditions, strengths and virtues that allow people to thrive, and back their standpoint with a great number of studies.

However, critics of the movement have, first of all, pointed out flaws in some of the concepts and studies backing them, and second, performed experiments of their own which show not only that forced positive thinking doesn’t help, but can sometimes be harmful.

More worrisome than disputes in the therapeutic community is the tendency of mass media and our commodified society to abuse these approaches, the end result being a whole scope of popular psychology books which promise wealth, happiness and ideal partners to those prepared to “believe”, and the presence of a horde of self-appointed gurus promising easy answers and quick solutions. This is only a symptom of our contemporary postmodern condition, one well phrased by the Slovenian philosopher Žižek - “the commandment of the ruling ideology is ‘enjoy!”’.

From philosophers of negativity (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer) to psychotherapists dealing with automatic negative thoughts, we come to our proposed field of research in the “neuroscience of negativity”, a search for the biological underpinnings of positivity/negativity, focusing primarily on their relation to Cloningers’ dimensions of personality and mood disorders.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.