Varieties of Happiness: Mapping Lay Conceptualizations of Happiness in a Spanish Sample.

Research on lay conceptions of happiness is essential to determine what is investigated in happiness studies. Whereas psychological investigation has traditionally emphasized the importance of studying people's everyday conceptions and their relation to cultural and social factors to advance psychological theory, this line of research is still largely overlooked in the field. The Spanish context has also received very limited attention in the area. To fill these gaps, this paper examined 547 lay definitions of happiness in a sample of Spanish participants. The aims of the study were threefold. First, to map and classify the definitions elicited through an open-ended question using a bottom-up approach. Second, to analyze the relationship of happiness definitions with different sociodemographic factors. Third, to explore the relationship between happiness conceptualizations and two different happiness measures. The final classification yielded 39 codes, 15 categories, and 3 overarching types of definitions. Three main findings resulted from the study. First, happiness emerged as a highly heterogeneous concept characterized by diverse social, psychological, and theoretical descriptions. Social types of definitions stood out in the sample. Second, most definitions varied significantly with sociodemographic factors. Third, happiness scores tended to show no significant association with happiness definitions. Implications derived from these results were discussed. Altogether, the paper highlights the value of exploring lay conceptions of happiness to advance toward a more comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of what happiness means for -and, to a certain extent, of how it is experienced by- people of different cultural backgrounds and social settings.

Inverting the pyramid of needs: positive psychology's new order for labor success / Invirtiendo la pirámide de las necesidades: la psicología positiva y la nueva lógica del éxito laboral

ANTECEDENTS: Positive psychologists claim to have demonstrated a causal relationship between happiness and life success, with the former accounting for why people usually end up better off in life than others, especially at workplace. METHOD: In this paper we will analyse the role that happiness-based repertoires and techniques provided by positive psychologists are playing in the current labor sphere. RESULTS: Positive psychologists' repertoires and techniques do not only meet the emerging demands derived from the changes in the notions of «work» and «worker» in the last decades, but also introduce a whole new logic in the construction of professional workers' subjectivity, according to which happiness becomes a necessary psychological state that workers must first achieve and develop in order to attain job success at work. DISCUSSION: This emerging logic does not only circumscribe to the labor sphere, but also reflects a broader cultural and economic phenomenon

ANTECEDENTES: los psicólogos positivos defienden haber demostrado una relación causal entre la felicidad y el éxito en la vida, siendo la primera la razón de por qué hay gente a la que le va mejor que a otra, especialmente en el ámbito del trabajo. MÉTODO: analizamos el papel que juegan los repertorios y las técnicas de la felicidad de los psicólogos positivos en el ámbito laboral actual. RESULTADOS: los repertorios y técnicas de los psicólogos positivos no solamente satisfacen las nuevas demandas laborales surgidas en las últimas décadas a raíz de las transformaciones en las nociones de «trabajo» y «trabajador», sino que también introducen una lógica completamente nueva de la construcción de la subjetividad de los trabajadores, de acuerdo con la cual la felicidad deviene en un estado psicológico necesario que todo trabajador debe alcanzar y desarrollar con el fin de tener éxito. DISCUSIÓN: esta lógica emergente, sin embargo, no se circunscribe únicamente al mundo laboral, sino que es síntoma de un fenómeno económico y cultural más amplio

Inverting the pyramid of needs: Positive psychology's new order for labor success.

ANTECEDENTS: Positive psychologists claim to have demonstrated a causal relationship between happiness and life success, with the former accounting for why people usually end up better off in life than others, especially at workplace. METHOD: In this paper we will analyse the role that happiness-based repertoires and techniques provided by positive psychologists are playing in the current labor sphere. RESULTS: Positive psychologists’ repertoires and techniques do not only meet the emerging demands derived from the changes in the notions of “work” and “worker” in the last decades, but also introduce a whole new logic in the construction of professional workers’ subjectivity, according to which happiness becomes a necessary psychological state that workers must first achieve and develop in order to attain job success at work. DISCUSSION: This emerging logic does not only circumscribe to the labor sphere, but also reflects a broader cultural and economic phenomenon.

Psicología positiva y psicología popular de la autoayuda: un romance histórico, psicológico y cultural / Positive psychology and self-help popular psychology: a historical, psychological and cultural romance

En este trabajo analizamos las semejanzas y las diferencias que existen entre el discurso sobre el sujeto de la psicología positiva y el de la literatura de autoayuda. Para delimitar nuestro objeto de estudio definimos un conjunto de categorías y subcategorías psicológicas, al cual hemos denominado individualismo "positivo" y cuyo análisis cultural e histórico hemos desarrollado en otros trabajos. Además, comparamos otros factores como el tipo de vocabulario y el tipo de retórica que utilizan uno y otro tipo de literatura para defender sus argumentos. Para llevar a cabo estos análisis utilizamos una metodología de tipo mixto, en la cual combinamos el uso de la lexicometría, el ANOVA, el análisis de correspondencias y la recuperación de palabras en contexto, todo ello combinado con una discusión crítica de los textos apoyados en la bibliografía existente. El conjunto de hipótesis planteadas en este trabajo postulan que la psicología positiva y la literatura de autoayuda comparten unas raíces psicológicas comunes: persiguen el mismo horizonte de bienestar, utilizan conceptos y caracterizaciones psicológicas muy parecidas para hablar, describir y explicar al individuo, y desarrollan técnicas y prácticas similares con el fin de que los sujetos actúen sobre sí mismos en busca de su propia felicidad. También planteamos que esta comunalidad, sin embargo, no es compartida por otros tipos de psicología de objetivos prácticos e interventivos similares, como la psicoterapia cognitivo-conductual, tipo de literatura que también añadimos a los análisis. Los resultados obtenidos apuntan en la dirección del conjunto de hipótesis planteadas

In this paper, the psychological discourse about the subject provided both by positive psychology and by self-help literature is compared. To specify the object of analysis we define a set of psychological categories and subcategories, to which we have dubbed as "positive" individualism and which cultural and historical back-ground has been analyzed in previous works. Besides these categories, we analyze other aspects such as the kind of vocabulary and the type of rhetoric deployed by both kind of literature to defend their arguments. To carry out these analyses we used a mixed methodology, combining the word-count technique, the ANOVA, the correspondences analysis, and key-words in context. We added a critic discussion of the texts to the data obtained. The hypothesis set out here postulate that both positive psychology and self-help literature share common psychological roots: they defend the same idea of happiness in a similar way psychological concepts in order to describe and explain the individual, and develop analogous psychological practices and techniques aiming to help the individual to search his own well-being. We also postulate that this commonality is not shared by other psychological models, although they have a comparable interventional and practical vein, such as cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, which we also analyze in this paper. The results obtained are congruent with the set of hypothesis here suggested