Coaching psychology and positive psychology

John Rowan

On reading the article by Alex Linley and Susan Harrington (2005), I was struck by the way in which the authors seemed to be swallowing positive psychology hook, line and sinker. However, there is a downside to positive psychology which is not mentioned in their piece. It is a terrifying devotion to empiricist methods. We all know that empiricist methods are of very little use in telling us anything worth knowing about human beings. This is because they reduce people to variables, which can then be measured. But people are not variables, and they don’t even react well to being given questionnaires or other tests devised by academic psychologists, for the simple reason that such questionnaires are not written in their own language.

If we look at a typical product of positive psychology, such as the Handbook of Postitive Psychology, what do we find? At first this looks like just the sort of thing that would be of huge interest to people involved with coaching psychology or indeed humanistic psychology. It has chapters on authenticity, creativity, empathy, flow, happiness, love, mindfulness, optimism, resilience, selfesteem, wisdom, and so forth. What could be better?

But when we start actually reading the book, a different impression comes up and hits us in the face. The chapter on Authenticity does not mention Heidegger, Becker, Bugental, May, or any of the usual existential or humanistic suspects. It majors on the work of Susan Harter, who wrote the chapter, and who has done quantitative work on concepts of authenticity among adolescents, ‘operationalising the constructs’ in the classic empricist way. She also conducted a newspaper survey of 2500 people.

Creativity also brings forth a host of empirical findings. Even a chapter entitled Emotional creativity: Toward ‘spiritualising the passions’ turns out to be mostly about the Emotional Creativity Inventory, a psychometric scale.

The chapter on Forgiveness, in like manner, reaches its climax in a 12-point psychometric scale entitled the Transgression- Related Interpersonal Motivations Scale, otherwise known as TRIM-12. Two factors emerge from this: Avoidance Motivations and Revenge Motivations. More about the refusal to forgive really. There is not much about any individual people in this chapter.

The chapter on Empathy shows fairly complete ignorance about the clinical work on empathy, which has increased so much in recent years, and spends most of its space discussing the question as to whether there is really such a thing as altruism.

The chapter on Love again comes to its final climax with a psychometric scale, a 24-item ‘Love Attitudes Scale’ which distinguishes between six forms of love. There is no poetry in this chapter.

The chapter on Hope ends up with no less than three psychometric scales, the Trait Hope Scale, the State Hope Scale and the Children’s Hope Scale. Similarly with the chapter on the Need for Uniqueness - three psychometric scales constitute the climax of the piece.

The chapter on Gratitude is relatively civilised, and shows a good historical sense of how important various philosophers and other writers have found gratitude to be very important in mental health. But even this chapter is guilty (like so many of the others) of relying on what Wilber calls a Flatland approach, which takes no cognisance of the way in which people at different levels of consciousness experience the various concepts. The gratitude of someone who has been given a favour is different from the gratitude of someone who experiences a breakthrough in therapy, which is different from the gratitude of someone who loves Nature even when it is unpleasant, which is different from the gratitude of someone who thanks ultimate reality no matter what happens.

It would be tedious to go through every one of the 55 chapters in this big, heavy book. But enough has been said to indicate that the present authors mostly avoid the challenge which is offered by a positive approach to psychology. In particular, they avoid the challenge so well expressed in another Handbook, the one on Action Research edited by Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury. There we find statements like this: ‘Research is usually thought of as something done by people in universities and research institutes. There is a researcher who has all the ideas, and who then studies other people by observing them, asking them questions, or by designing experiments. The trouble with this kind of way of doing research is that there is often very little connection between the researcher’ s thinking and the concerns and experiences of the people who are actually involved’ (Heron & Reason, 2001, p.179).

This is precisely what it wrong with the volume here discussed. In chapter after chapter it reduces a genuinely interesting topic to scales and measures designed and interpreted by the researcher, without much regard for the people on the ground who are supposed to be the source of the answers. This seems to me a sad betrayal of the promise of Positive Psychology: it is not OK to try to study important topics like these by reducing people to the scores on a psychometric scale.

Coaching psychology need to do better than this, and to adopt a more humanistic way of doing research. There are plenty of good arguments for this, and if we read a very middle-of-the-road research text like that of Donna Mertens (1998), we find many warnings against too great a reliance on empiritist methods, and a great respect for qualitative approaches, such as those dealt with in excellent texts like Denzin and Lincoln (2000).

Address for correspondence
John Rowan
70 King’s Road Hill, North Chingford,
London E4 7LY.
E-mail: johnrowan@aol.com

Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Heron, J. & Reason, P. (2001). The practice of cooperative inquiry: Research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.),

Linley, P.A. & Harrington, S. (2005). Positive psychology and coaching psychology: Perspectives on integration. The Coaching Psychologist, 1(1), 13-15.

Mertens, D.M. (1998). Research methods in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative and qualitative approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Snyder, C.R. & Lopez, S.J. (Eds.)(2002). Handbook of positive psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.