THERAPY AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGYthose people who experienced some adverse events were happier and
psychologically healthier at the end of the study than those people who’d
suffered no adverse events.
What about positive psychology in the workplace? A 2002 survey by
the Corporate Leadership Council involving over 19,000 employees
from 80 companies across 7 industries in 29 countries found that
productivity was on average between 21 and 36 percent higher when
managers focused on staff strengths. According to Alex Linley, our
strengths are not merely those things we’re good at, they’re activities
that energize us the more we do them – rather like the way driving
causes the alternator to charge a car battery. The trick for a fulfilling
life, he says, is to discover your unrealized strengths, marshal the
strengths you do know about, manage your weaknesses and keep your
“learned behaviours” in check – they’re the things you’re good at but
which you don’t find energizing.
All this emphasis on positivity is not without its critics. For example,
in her 2009 book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive
Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich blamed too much
optimism for the banking crisis (see also Chapter 19) and other evils.
Ehrenreich, a former cancer patient, challenged claims that a positive
attitude is health-giving, and she warned that pressuring patients to see
the sunny side of their ill health can be cruel, especially if they deterio-
rate and blame themselves for not being positive enough.
Recent research also suggests that thinking positively as a way
to combat negative emotions doesn’t work for everyone. In a paper
published in 2009, Weiting Ng and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign asked 68 students to imagine being rejected from
eight graduate schools, to report how that made them feel, and then to
say what mental strategies they’d used to cope with the imaginary news.
The key finding was that students who scored high on the personality
dimension of neuroticism (see Chapter 11) tended to experience more
negative emotion, even if they employed effective coping strategies such
as thinking about how they could learn from the experience. It was a
similar story in follow-up studies in which students were coached how
to use positive thinking coping strategies and asked to recall a real-life
bad event that they’d experienced. For students high in neuroticism, the
positive thinking didn’t prevent the imaginary or remembered bad news
from making them feel miserable.
If this seems like a downbeat note to end on, perhaps we should heed
the advice of the child psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips, who