positive psychology

n. Positive psychology is a newly christened approach that takes seriously as a subject matter those things that make life most worth living. The field was named in 1998 as one of the initiatives of Martin Seligman in his role as president of the American Psychological Association. Today's positive psychologists do not claim to have invented notions of happiness and well-being, to have proposed their first theoretical accounts, or even to have ushered in their scientific study. Rather, the contribution of contemporary positive psychology has been to provide an umbrella term for what had been isolated lines of theory and research and to make the argument that what makes life worth living deserves its own field of inquiry within psychology, at least until that day when all of psychology embraces the study of what is good along with the study of what is bad. – CPe, NP