Aspects of a critique of the “positive” psychology of self efficacy

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M.A. Cohn and B.L. Fredrickson,“Positive emotions” (ref.3), whom I’ve discussed recently (A, B, C) are modest in their terms, relative to how teachers and counselors might be expected to understand their short-term opportunities. Building “personal resources” results from “increases in daily positive emotion” (18) because reliably-recurrent good feelings lead to enjoyable “broaden-and-build” (generative) processes or developmental activities, thereby (I add) self-nurturing talents, self-cultivating interest, and honing one’s own skills (but how such recursive efficacy works remains mysterious in their research summary). C&F attend to a behavioral process happening that seems magically lacking life-centered minds or individuational enactivity: desire, aspiration, purpose, and identity (though all that is easily implied by them—just not focal, which all that should be for a theory of learning, which they claim to be conceptualizing).

mindality

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I need ‘mindality’ relative to terms—mentality and mind—that don’t work for what I have in mind.

When one says that something is “mental,” likely meant is that the something is brainy content or a piece of mind. Using ‘mentality’ likely doesn’t mean the condition of something’s being mental; ‘mentality’ usually means something like a frame of mind. There’s a gestaltism, if not holism, implied by “mentality.”

a preface to exploring empirical feeling

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Thinking about feeling can be tenably understood as thinking about the holism of our embodied enactivity (our being, wholly comprehended), which is beyond my aim here.

Soon, I’m going to focus on some leading “positive” psychologists’ sense of “emotions,” which is much less than a rich comprehension of feeling (those psychologists might readily agree). The notion of “positive emotion” in empirical psychology is normalistically oriented (which is good for statistical methods), i.e., conventionalist and constrained, unlike a richness of feeling one may find in actual life.

feeling like an endless preface

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I want to briefly discuss contexts of child development that can’t be fairly discussed briefly (I fear) without obscurity. But the contexts are integral background to where I’d prefer to go (e.g., explorations of “the” [?] Literary mind), for the sake of understanding human development broadly and deeply (inasmuch as I can). That’s my bias in venturing into senses of a highly meaningful life. But any meaningful life is individual, so a bias is proper. Mine’s philosophical (or literary psychological—interdomainal [I don’t like ‘interdisciplinary’]). It’s deeply important to me that the sense of Mind (let’s say) I want to explore is not something emerging from my own life, but is about human development as such—not that I want to proffer a sense of human development generally that should tend toward what interests me. But the sense of literary-psychological philosophy I want to garden is a developmental one, dependent on its sense of development (which ultimately weaves into a sense of our evolving, but that’s the long story).

growing children as venue: packing for a conceptual adventure

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Over the next few months’ postings and pages, I will use experience and research on good parenting and child development to work with conceptual aspects of that. I’m venturing to better understand growth (individuation) that becomes easily-empathic (non-egoistic) yet highly individual (ideally, very creative)—a healthy self centrism. Advice for a practice of good parenting doesn’t directly follow from such a venture, but I’ll cite good resources.

I’m also interested in how these two keynotes of exemplary individuation (empathy and creativity) may build on each other for the sake of authentic happiness (or a sense of authentic happiness that I take from recent inquiries in “positive psychology”).