Positive Psychology: The Science of Well-Being

The study of human thoughts, feelings and behaviour is a brief description of what positive psychology is. As a research field, positive psychology explores deeper topics such as happiness, gratitude, self-confidence and well-being, just to name a few. NIE Associate Professor Arief Liem from the Psychology and Child & Human Development (PCHD) Academic Group and Office of Education Research shares with us more about the concept of positive psychology, and his most recent research study on academic motivation and engagement.

Q: Share a little about yourself and your research interest in positive psychology.

I am currently an Associate Professor with PCHD at NIE and am interested in sociocultural understanding of motivation, engagement, and well-being. I also am serving as an Associate Editor for Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology and the Editor of a book series Research on Sociocultural Influences on Learning and Motivation published by Information Age Publishing. At NIE, I teach educational and developmental psychology related courses at the postgraduate levels.

I came across Martin Seligman’s book Flourishing, which is one of the major resources in positive psychology to date. This then brought me to other positive psychology references. My interest in positive psychology has grown since.

In the world with a lot of challenges and uncertainties, staying proportionately positive is the way to go. In the context of the pandemic that we are in, positivity is a “vaccine” that protects our mental health. It makes us more resilient and be in a better position to see the light along the dim tunnel we are walking through. The light gets brighter and brighter as we continuously embrace positivity. This is in fact what Barbara Fredrickson suggests in her broaden-and-build theory (of positive emotions), one of the major perspectives in positive psychology. Positivity begets positivity inside and outside.

Q: Describe your most recent research study, Harnessing Positive Psychology Principles in Fostering Academic Motivation/Engagement and Wellbeing of Low-Progress Learners in Singapore (OER 06/20 GADL).

OER 06/20 GADL is the programmatic research that seeks to harness positive psychology principles in fostering the academic motivation and engagement and well-being of low-progress students. It is a collective effort of PCHD colleagues. There are 5 focused areas in it.

First, we try to come up with a multidimensional measure of well-being for use with adolescent-aged students in Singapore. These dimensions are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and sense of accomplishment. Second, we wish to identify psychological assets of Normal Academic students who academically do well despite the background challenges they have (e.g., coming from a single-parent family, low SES). We call them positive deviant students.

The last three areas are related to interventions. These interventions share a similarity in that they aim to promote low-progress students’ well-being. They differ, however, in their underlying theories, target constructs, and modes of delivery. One of the intervention seeks to promote low-progress students’ motivation and engagement through an identity-based motivation, another seeks to reduce test anxiety, and the other seeks to foster different dimensions of well-being through a well-being mobile application. So, focusing on different interventions is important because low-progress students do not come from a homogenous population. They have different needs that, we hope, to address through these different interventions.

Q: How do you think Singapore can support our lower progress students in terms of their academic motivation and personal well-being?

First, we need to identify the reasons underlying their lack of motivation and well-being. Different individuals have different antecedents for their struggles. Some may be so because of their high anxiety and for some others, may be due to their inability to see the relevance of what they do in school with their future.

One way of supporting our lower-progress students’ school motivation and well-being is by tapping on their future selves. They, or many of us adults for that matter, are often engaged in a myopic attitude towards life, in that we tend to be preoccupied with what makes us feel good at the present moment (hedonic way of doing things) or ruminating about the past that we cannot change.

One possible reason that students lack school motivation and engagement is because of their short-sighted view of their school life which can itself be stressful and mundane. This leads students to be academically unmotivated and disengaged while at the same time academic expectations (as communicated by peers, teachers and parents) continue to pressure the students. As a result, this compromises their well-being too.

Identity-based motivation intervention is one that urges students to explore their future possibilities in different areas of life (e.g., education, career, family life, contributing member of the society) and help them see the link between the future and their school life, by charting these pathways, identifying challenges that they may encounter along the way, and empowering them with possible solutions to these challenges.

In other words, we hope they are able to see that their future begins today. This, hopefully, will strengthen their academic motivation and well-being. For the latter (well-being), it is because they would be more optimistic about their future.

Q: Which areas on student well-being in Singapore do you think merit further attention and research?

Different areas of well-being (positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and sense of accomplishment) are important in their own right. However, if I could pinpoint one, that would be a sense of accomplishment which is different from the actual achievement.

Sense of accomplishment is more subjective, depending on the student’s own expectations of what are considered good or success as well as those of parents and teachers. As part of their developmental tasks, students compare their accomplishments with those of their peers, which might be an unfair undertaking because each of us is different. Rather than comparing with peers, how about comparing our performance with our own performance yesterday?

In a competitive society like the one we are living in, it is hard for our youngsters to have this mind-set because like it or not, they – just like most of us – are bound by societal expectations communicated through students in school and at home. However, for the sake of our personal well-being, we need to define what success means to us and try to be better each day.