Few areas of psychology have become as popular as positive psychology, but what is the revolution of positive psychology?Thanks to her, we began to realize the importance of our emotions.
At a time in the history of the Western world, after the dark period of the Middle Ages, with the movement of Lights, reason begins to gain ground in relation to faith prevailing until then, the logic of the Enlightenment reaches science and reminds us that neither the Earth is the center of the universe nor man is the center of nature.
- Nietzche symbolically killed the god until then untouchable.
- ” God is dead.
- ” which he paradoxically.
- Even if time suggested it.
- Does not mean that Nietzche thought that at some point God was alive.
It was Thomas Hobbes who said that the worst enemy is in our country, since man is the wolf of man, that is, it would be better if man had also died by man.
Following this flow, the dead, weakened, analyzed with magnifying glass, as if it were a grain of sand in an immense cosmos, psychology has also changed its gaze, has directed you to our most intimate processes: we talk about emotions.
This is how the 21st century becomes the century of emotions. Multiple intelligences, yes, but above all emotional intelligence. The one that helps us to confront the wolf of man, both the one that lives in the other people who accompany us and, above all, the one that lives within ourselves.
Perhaps the greatest success of psychology, and what characterizes the revolution of positive psychology, is that it knew how to change and change what irritated us, I will explain myself better. Those who have already studied psychology at the university, and have therefore already studied the methodology of this field, will remember that one of the biggest problems that may arise in research is the existence of atypical cases.
They’re called outliers. We are talking about cases that defever much than expected and the rest of the group, taking into account different sources of collection, such as a person taking notes very different from the group in an evaluation.
Many researchers will look at this topic and consider it a source of error, even there are a lot of statistical procedures that are used to ensure that this type of value outside the curve does not influence the data when concluding a research analysis.
In fact, I said that there was something irritating in psychology because one of the most common reasons for this type of abnormal or different data is that there was an error in measurement or coding (when the data is transmitted to the statistical calculation program).
Let’s look at an example. Imagine that a psychologist administers a test that wants to measure anxiety in a group of people, there are 15 questions, and in each of them we can score 1 or 0, so the maximum test score is 15. Once we put the data on the computer we realize that there is a person with a score of 113, logically this score is impossible. Chances are we’re wrong when we transmit the data.
This case is quite obvious, but there are others where the error is not so obvious or clear, if we had entered 11 instead of 1, the data would also be wrong but it would not have caught our attention, apparently there would be no unusual cases and we would not have done anything wrong.
If we go further, we can see a situation in which it would make a big difference: imagine that all but one people get a score between 2 and 5, we look at the data and perceive an outlier Our atypical person has a score of 14. Strange, isn’t it?
What are we going to do with this 14? Well, as we said before, statistics generate several solutions for our outlier. He thinks, as my dear director said at the time of the Masters, statisticians live for it. Solutions exist so much for one case that is distinguished from the others. and in some cases. Most of these solutions go in the same direction: try to limit your influence on analyzing people’s standards as much as possible. What counts to describe a set of things, after all, is the majority.
If you understand what we’ve been talking about so far, let’s set aside statistical methods to explain why we said there was a positive psychological revolution, its theme is not and has never been the expected scores, those that are around the average. , but those who move away precisely from the mean, being outliers and generally depreciated.
What happens during an appointment or therapy session is no exception to this reflection, eye, because what we often look for psychologists is that our patient or client is in the normal range, but approaching normal means approaching the mean. if I was far from that?
You can tell me that I am wrong and that psychology has already done so, researchers had already studied scores on an anxiety scale in a very high way, or who, during a conflict, has entered a deep depression. It had not yet been studied, however, who was an atypical subject?For good?.
For example, those who faced a potentially anxiety-causing situation showed controlled levels of anxiety or those who were able to recover very quickly after a potentially traumatic event.
Positive psychology said: “Do we have to start studying these atypical people in a direction that until a few years ago was completely ignored?Health management rather than disease management?Separately to minimize error”.
This change, at the same time, was a great injection of hope, it is a way of saying: we also have examples that tell us that we can be good, that the abnormal goes beyond the disease and the pathological, that there are anomalies that In fact , we want to be more common. It is the revolution of positive psychology.
Let’s look at these extraordinary themes before deleting them in the midst of statistics. They are the ones who can help us improve the average, because they have what is needed, they know the way: to memorize better, to be calmer, to be more resilient?
One of the main pillars on which cognitive psychology works is the one that affirms that we do not react to reality, but to what is perceived.
If we realize that a tiger is approaching and we do not realize that there is an obstacle that prevents it from throwing on us, it is normal for us to panic, but this does not mean, however, that this obstacle does not exist: the tiger may be linked to something that prevents it from reaching us, so it is impossible for anything to do to us , and our heart, however, begins to beat harder.
Working with what is perceived in the case of the tiger is a major inconvenience. Positive psychology, however, says that this distance, this filter of what constitutes the world we perceive, filtering our senses, is something that can be put in our favor.
Think about it: how many challenges did you face with the feeling that even before you started, you were totally lost?And how many challenges were so determined before he started that forced him to overcome much more complex and complicated obstacles?
Yes, this second case is what counts for positive psychology, the way it works. The revolution of positive psychology and its attention to emotions is precisely what can show us how to be extraordinary.