In the short decades since the introduction of positive psychology instigated broader interdisciplinary research, interest in happiness has been growing in academia, the media and public policy. Numerous critiques of these developments have been forwarded from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary traditions. This article discusses three such criticisms: the culture‐bound and normative character of happiness, ‘bad science’ and scientism, and diminished subjectivity and individualisation. It is argued that criticism, particularly internal criticism, evidences the maturity of the field. However, the depth of some critiques may also indicate that interest in happiness is bound with broader cultural preoccupations and is likely to be superseded.
This paper critically examines the current National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and National Health Service guidelines on weight management and the avoidance of obesity (NG7). We demonstrate that the guidance is unlikely to produce the desired effect of enabling people to reduce or control their weight through the twin strategies of dieting (primarily using the calories-in, calories-out approach) and increasing their levels of exercise. The paper provides a critical examination of these guidelines and concludes that they are unlikely to encourage maintenance of 'healthy' weights or prevent obesity, are not based upon particularly strong evidence and are misguided in maintaining a persistent focus upon weight rather than other indicators of health. Moreover, we suggest their promotion may produce a number of unintended consequences, including perpetuating body-related stigmatisation and anxieties. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We analyse the rise of 'mindfulness' in English language media discourses and contextualise it in terms of its expression of a persistent underlying 'psychological imagination' in contemporary thinking about social problems. An inversion of C. Wright Mills' much-cited sociological imagination, the psychological imagination draws on medical-scientific authority to treat social problems as private concerns rooted in individual biology, mentality and behaviour. We analyse the roles which academic claims-making, commercial interests and mass mediatisation have played in the rise of mindfulness from the late 1970s onwards. We first map the translation of mindfulness from Buddhist philosophy into Western psychotherapy and popular psychology before considering its emergence and expression in the public sphere of news media claims-making. We argue that where the sociological imagination 'promised' above all the treatment of private troubles as public issues and insights into the 'human variety' produced by myriad ways of living, the psychological imagination promises the isolation of public issues as private concerns rooted in individual biology, mentality and behaviour. The psychological imagination permeates the expression of mindfulness as a solution to social ills and symbolises the comparative decline of assumptions implicit in Mills' 20th century rousing call to social scientists.
Drawing on a study of UK national broadsheets, this article examines the emergence and spread of happiness as a social problem in the UK by drawing on the theoretical insights of social problem constructionism and related social movement theory in terms of the processual, rhetorical, and contextual factors involved in the construction, transmission, and institutionalisation of new social problems. In particular, issue ownership in the realm of process and flexible syntax, experiential commensurability, empirical credibility, and narrative fidelity in the realm of rhetoric are argued to have played an important role in the discursive spread of the happiness problem in this public arena. A socio-political context hospitable to de-politicised and highly personalised constructions of social issues is argued to have played a major contextual role in the construction of the ‘happiness problem’.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.