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Winter 2011/12 | Vol 15 No 2

Research update

Mark de la Hey

Positive psychology may not help some personalities

Positive psychology exercises can actually bring people down if they have “needy” personalities, concludes a new study from York University in Toronto. Researchers defined needy people as those who are over-reliant on others and prone to feelings of helplessness. The study involved 772 adults from across Canada who were asked to perform one of three daily exercises: recalling five things they were grateful for over the course of the day, listening to three or four uplifting songs or recalling and writing about a particular memory from their early life (the control condition). They were also asked to complete questionnaires measuring depressive symptoms, physical symptoms, happiness and self-esteem. The results showed that participants who were highly self-critical experienced the greatest increase in happiness of all participants when they practiced the gratitude exercise. Self-critical participants also reported the greatest increases in self-esteem and larger decreases in physical symptom severity after both the gratitude exercise and the music exercise. Participants categorized as needy actually reported decreased self-esteem after the gratitude and music exercises and no improvement in happiness or physical symptoms. The authors had hypothesized that the music exercise would be of particular benefit to needy participants, so its failure was a surprise. They speculate that this failure might have occurred because the exercises were performed independently over the Internet and involved no interaction with other people, since needy people are known to “rely on having secure intimate bonds with others in order to experience well-being.”

Journal of Positive Psychology, July 2011, v. 6(4): 260–272. Susan Sergeant and Myriam Mongrain, Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario.