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      Beyond the “Third Wave of Positive Psychology”: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research

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          Abstract

          The positive psychology (PP) landscape is changing, and its initial identity is being challenged. Moving beyond the “third wave of PP,” two roads for future research and practice in well-being studies are discerned: The first is the state of the art PP trajectory that will (for the near future) continue as a scientific (sub)discipline in/next to psychology (because of its popular brand name). The second trajectory (main focus of this manuscript) links to pointers described as part of the so-called third wave of PP, which will be argued as actually being the beginning of a new domain of inter- or transdisciplinary well-being studies in its own right. It has a broader scope than the state of the art in PP, but is more delineated than in planetary well-being studies. It is in particular suitable to understand the complex nature of bio-psycho-social-ecological well-being, and to promote health and wellness in times of enormous challenges and changes. A unique cohering focus for this post-disciplinary well-being research domain is proposed. In both trajectories, future research will have to increase cognizance of metatheoretical assumptions, develop more encompassing theories to bridge the conceptual fragmentation in the field, and implement methodological reforms, while keeping context and the interwovenness of the various levels of the scientific text in mind. Opportunities are indicated to contribute to the discourse on the identity and development of scientific knowledge in mainstream positive psychology and the evolving post-disciplinary domain of well-being studies.

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          Most cited references185

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          The weirdest people in the world?

          Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
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            Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being.

            Carol Ryff (1989)
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              Subjective well-being.

              Ed Diener (1984)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                14 January 2022
                2021
                : 12
                : 795067
                Affiliations
                Africa Unit for Transdisciplinary Health Research, Faculty of Health Sciences, North-West University , Potchefstroom, South Africa
                Author notes

                Edited by: Jana Uher, University of Greenwich, United Kingdom

                Reviewed by: James Pawelski, University of Pennsylvania, United States; Gisele Dias, King’s College London, United Kingdom

                *Correspondence: Marié P. Wissing, Marie.Wissing@ 123456nwu.ac.za

                This article was submitted to Positive Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2021.795067
                8795509
                35095679
                d1d40c37-bbdd-4395-8eaa-fa4954411dfa
                Copyright © 2022 Wissing.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 14 October 2021
                : 14 December 2021
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 187, Pages: 20, Words: 19846
                Categories
                Psychology
                Perspective

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                positive psychology,beyond “the third wave”,post-disciplinarity,complex phenomena,metatheoretical assumptions,theory,methodological reform,harmony

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