PSYC 104 Yunsu Shin Can Psychology Make Us Happier Many people today are struggling with mental illness According to a recent study 9 6 million people in the United States suffer from severe mental illness which interferes with their daily lives In fact these mental illnesses often lead to individual suicide and in fact the number of people dying from suicide is twice as many as the number of people who have died from AIDS disease and the cost of the United States the other day due to mental illness Mental illness has a huge impact on individuals and society costing more than 300million dollars In the modern era where most people live in a state their basic needs are satisfied it is natural to become interested in happiness but as much as they are interested in happiness people also experience a lot of frustration on the path to seeing happiness In order to treat those who experienced frustration and to make them happy again a movement of positive psychology has emerged and positive psychology has become an important field to solve these modern problems However there are many difficulties as it is a field that requires a theoretical approach to the human mind and something that cannot be described So through this paper I m going to find out if positive psychology can make people happy Specifically I will analyze the pros and cons on whether positive psychology can make an individual happy and introduce the future direction that positive psychology should take Also based on these articles I will clarify my position and support my thoughts with specific examples and evidences This article says that it means a positive subjective assessment of happiness and positive feelings for it In other words promoting individual happiness in any way can be defined as fixing the way they look at them and helping them experience more positive and fewer negative emotions rather than changing and denying objective situations In the second article we present positive psychology as one of the ways to increase happiness and argue whether this can actually make us happy by dividing it into pros and cons However while both positions can be based on agreeing with those are limitations to use positive psychology interventions to create expectations the difference between the two positions appears in terms of severity of limitations arguing that they are stress sever interventions and flexibility However the opposite side argues that there is a genetic component that determines an individual s happiness that is out of control and therefore disagrees that positive psychology can make an individual happy In this regard although this article has shown many examples of positive psychology being involved in an individual s life and actually being proven to be effective I don t think positive psychology can make an individual happy I think positive psychology has many limitations in making individuals happy First individual happiness has a genetic area that cannot be controlled by individuals According to the article David Lykkn and Tellegen s 1996 experiment on the genetics of happiness in twins shows that the genetic rate is about 0 5 which means half of the happiness an individual feels is caused by a human gene Since the inheritance of an individual cannot be changed by acquired efforts it can be said that positive psychology has limitations in contributing to individual happiness The second reason is that although there have been many experiments through this article to prove the influence of positive psychology on individual happiness there are some unclear aspects of the proof For example studies of the effects of positive psycology interventions introduced in this article on individuals show that acts of kindness have increased 0 4 points of happiness and expressing gratitude by 0 15 points but this experiment is impossible to determine what the value means because there is no information on scale or criteria There is a limit to the positive psychology interventions presented in positive psychology and I think that learning how to be happy in real life and that makes an individual happy is difficult to apply to a person with complex emotions Also a 1978 study published by Brickman Coates and Janoff Bulman found that individual tragedies and personal tragedies can be adapted to problems as one might say People who had become great fortune returned to their preexisting levels in a year following the event I think it is a theory that lacks explanation Finally not acknowledging the serious limitations of positive psychology and emphasizing that happiness is something that can be learned through people s will and effort can lead to a false perception that happiness is the only object to pursue According to this article it also said that Evolutionary and personality psychologists agree that negative emotions exist because they serve a purpose In other words negative emotions have a reason for existence and judging from personal experience some negative emotions tension and stress are helpful in life For example from my experience I think some negative thoughts and concerns have been helped to concentrate on the test and furthermore if I get a good score on the test I can get a greater sense of happiness than when I took the test without tension In other words negative emotions may attract greater happiness in the future so focusing on denying and eliminating negative emotions is a big limitation of positive psychology I could compare on a same topic from two opposite aspects I think this is important and one of the remarkable characteristics in this article This is because when you read the text from various fields you can see the advantages and disadvantages that were not seen when reading the text written only in one aspect The article also states that it is the remaining task of positive psychology to study this kind of distinction rather than falsely claiming that everyone has the same ability for everyone to increase their happiness In other words these two aspects of the article will be used to specifically set the direction for positive psychology to go forward to compensate for deficiencies and to maintain and develop strengths I ve learned a lot from this article but one of the most impressive readings is what I learned about the different types of positive psychology interventions Although I chose that positive psychology could not make an individual happy reading this part made me feel that
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