Cocurricular Activities and Student Development: How Positive Nations Encourage Students to Pursue Careers in Psychology

Flow and Optimal Experience: Methodological Implications for Internationalizing and Contextualizing a Positive Psychology Concept. Part 2

“…Flow research is especially relevant to discussions of culture in positive psychology as it is one of the very few concepts that has be examined in depth in many places around the globe. For instance when one examines the list of human strengths and virtues catalogued and described in Peterson and Seligman's classic handbook [19], which may be described as an Un-DSM (in that in many senses it represents the opposite pole from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's catalog of psychological disorders) [14], one quickly notes that it is the rare concept that has a large international database of evidence to support it. Among the twenty-four specific strengths and six broad virtues (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence) classified there -few have the type of international data that would lead one to conclude that these concepts are cultural universals, though positive psychologists aim to include only such strengths and virtues, and it is true that there is some cross-cultural support from non-psychological sources, such as religious scriptures, and cultural histories.…”