Understanding our best: eudaimonia’s growing influence in psychology

Excerpt

Since the conception of positive psychology over a decade ago, researchers have sought to explore the causes and consequences of optimal functioning. At that time, most positive psychologists adopted a view that the end-goal was to create a life full of frequent experiences of positive emotions, infrequent experiences of negative emotions, and an overall evaluation of one’s life as satisfying. This perspective was influenced by a call to create “a vision of the good life that is empirically sound while being understandable and attractive” [1, p. 5]. Seminal work by Ed Diener [2] and others on the measurement, causes, and consequences of “subjective well-being” were influential to this evolving field. …