Made in the UAE : an indigenous positive psychology for the United Arab Emirates
Date
2015
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Volume Title
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract
Positive psychology focuses on the creation of positive emotions and positive experiences in the lives of individuals, groups, and societies. It examines the positive aspects of people’s lives and its research aims are to study the reasons for individuals and groups to excel. The founders, Martin Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (2000), argue that traditional psychologists ignore people who want to be happy if they don’t have a mental disorder. As such, although the psychologist’s goal is to help, they often just help individuals to better cope with misery. In other words, they argue that mainstream psychologists have been so programmed to see only what is wrong with a person that when someone doesn’t necessarily have any sort of pathology but wants to simply improve his or her life, psychologists have nothing to say. Clients such as these end up feeling disappointed in therapy—and often grow worse—as they are not given the skills to move forward.
Description
This book chapter is not available at CUD collection. The version of scholarly record of this book chapter is published in Mental Health and Psychological Practice in the United Arab Emirates (2015), available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137558237_8.
item.page.type
Book chapter
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Keywords
Positive emotion, Positive psychology, Support autonomy, Character strengths, Happiness study
Citation
Lambert, L., & Pasha-Zaidi, N. (2015). Made in the UAE: An indigenous positive psychology for the United Arab Emirates. In: C.Y. Al-Karam & A. Haque (Eds.), Mental Health and Psychological Practice in the United Arab Emirates (pp 83-91). New York : Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558237_8