Eudamonic Wellbeing

Eudamonic wellbeing is another wellbeing theory, but focuses on what the hedonic approach does not acknowledge: meaning. Eudamonic wellbeing is influenced more by the internal environment of a person than their external environment. The happiness stems not from low negative affect and high positive affect, but attributing a meaning and contentment with one's current place in life. There are three approaches to eudamonic wellbeing, all of which have different requirements to achieve happiness yet all involve a social component, autonomy, and competence in abilities.

The actualization of human potential has six components. These include self acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations, environmental mastery, and autonomy. This theory is concerned with inner happiness coming from accepting who you are and feeling in control of your environment and how you interact with it and others.

Seligman came up with authentic happiness. His theory focused on the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. The pleasant life is closer related to hedonic wellbeing, but the good and the meaningful lie fully within the eudamonic approach. The meaningful life looks at finding some guiding force in life bigger than oneself such as religion or family and the good life is more about finding flow within tasks.

The third approach is the self-determination theory. This theory has elements of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy allows one to make his or her own choices without outside influence. Competence is having control to create a desired outcome for the individual. Relatedness is connecting with other groups of people.

These three theories all focus on contentment with oneself, which is often a popular theme in today's pop culture. Many songs focus on struggles of accepting who you are. After fully accepting who you are can you achieve true happiness in life. No matter of outside influences can bring true happiness if you can't accept your true self.

"Cause I'm beautiful to me. Doesn't that mean a thing? I feel lovely just the way that I am" - Sara Haze Lovely

Hedonic Happiness (Subjective Wellbeing)

   Hedonic happiness stems from three qualifications, which when met, lead to happiness and a feeling of wellbeing. The first is satisfaction with the life that one has. This satisfaction is often a comparison between the ideal that one is striving for and the reality of life and what is being achieved. When the ideal is finally met, then satisfaction has been met. The other two focus on positive and negative affect. High positive affect is similar to having a feeling of accomplishment or having positive aspects of life. Low negative affect is low negative influences in life such as worries or stressors.

 Subjective wellbeing focuses more on outside influences leading to satisfaction and wellbeing. There are two ways of perceiving the wellbeing. There is top-down arguments and bottom-up arguments. A top-down argument is one that focuses on wellbeing causing something else to happen. An example of this would be that a person who has accomplished subjective wellbeing gets married to their partner. Their happiness and satisfaction led to their meeting and marrying their partner. A bottom-up argument is the opposite. The positive event increases the happiness and satisfaction. Marrying your partner leads to increased subjective wellbeing.

First Day of Class

Group 5 Board for explaining "What is Positive Psychology?"

   The focus of positive psychology is on the balance between wellness and happiness versus the traditional psychology view of focusing on the negatives and mental illnesses. Traditional psychology is centered around the negatives aspects of life such as challenges and illnesses impacting mental health. Positive psychology has taken an approach looking at how to improve and achieve true happiness with the self by focusing on one's strengths.
    There are three nodes in positive psychology: subjective, individual, and group. The subjective focuses on not only the experiences of the present, but of the past and future as well. The tendency would be to focus on the negative experiences as these stand out in the mind, but to achieve happiness there needs be emphasis on the happy memories of the past and the present and what positive events are in the future. The individual has focus on oneself, but does not look at flaws or other parts of the self. It focuses on virtues such as courage, love, and bravery which are all seen as characteristics of a good person. The group node emphasizes the positive relationships in a group. These involve things such as citizenship and work ethic. The group works hard together and have a sense of belonging to the group.
  Martin Seligman had a leading role in the development of positive psychology. He focuses on well-being coming from five areas and represented by the acronym PERMA. This stands for positive emotion, engagement, relationships (of a positive type), meaning, and accomplishment. Positive emotions keep the mind focused on the happiness and satisfaction you experience and not emotions like anger or sadness that bring a person down. Engagement is becoming so ensconced in a task that one is no longer self-conscious and fully focused on a task. The relationships are positive when they make someone happy or add to their happiness because strong relationships bring genuine happiness to people. Meaning is referring to finding a purpose in life not for oneself but for the greater good. IT is finding religion, family, or other construct to focus on to benefit others without doing it for yourself. Accomplishment does not refer to winning in itself. A person can gain happiness from meeting a goal or finishing a task in the manner in which they wanted to and not for only the sake of winning a competition.
  With Seligman's five parts of well-being, the individual can flourish and obtain genuine happiness.This happiness leads to a healthier mental state, an increase in self-esteem, stronger self-determination, more optimism, and a more resilient person. Flourishing allows an individual to enjoy life and make the most of their life. Positive psychology in a newer concept but is continually being researched and built up to help move away from the focus on mental illness and towards mental well-being.