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Positive psychology a branch of psychology that describes and promotes optimum human functioning. It is a collection of research into positive experiences, emotions, and relationships, and the way people organize themselves into high-functioning into organizations and institutions. Topics in positive psychology include flow (optimum experience), engagement, love, happiness, meaning, resilience, hope, optimism, authentic leadership, character strengths, and values. Though the positive perspective may seem familiar from the humanistic psychology movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a major difference is that unlike most humanistic psychologists, positive psychologists use the scientific method to test, describe and validate their concepts, measures and interventions. In the past ten years, since the time when psychologists researching these ideas have come together as a movement, thousands of empirical studies across all fields of psychology have validated these and other constructs used under the umbrella of positive psychology.

What Positive Psychology is NOT
Positive psychology has nothing to do with the New Age movement or any religion. It is not "pop" psychology, used by untrained and unscrupulous gurus to cash in on a fad. It is not a Panglossian denial of "reality", but rather a way of seeing the whole situation, not just the problem focus dictated by Western analytical tradition and the medical model of psychoanalysis. It does not deny bad situations, but seeks to use the good to transform them. It is not the imposition of (Western, Protestant, American) values onto people from other cultures -- indeed, more research and interest in positive psychology is currently taking place outside the US than within it.

Check out Momentum for interviews with positive psychologists and thoughts about using the science of optimum functioning in your life.