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Popular Culture Review
Psychology. This paucity seems clear testimony to the perceived Eurocentric
orientation of the field. The popular biography of the spiritual founder of
Buddhism is well known, presumably too well known to belabor here. As the
folk biography relates the narrative, after almost starving himself to death he
collapsed in a stream while bathing. During his search for enlightenment,
Siddhartha identified meditation as proper. Motivation for meditation in
traditional Buddhist practice is to achieve insight, not necessarily create
physiological change.
Nor, for that matter is meditation seen as a therapeutic intervention.
Meditative practice is said to deal with the 5 hindrances—agitation, aversion,
craving, doubt, and sloth. Still, Buddhism, as is perhaps typical of such social
structures, exists in an array of varietal forms, Zen being especially common in
Japan.
It may be intuitive that people anywhere searching for “happiness” would in
due course investigate Eastern philosophy. Although there is no immediately
apparent explanation for why the Zen form of Buddhism was one of the varieties
well introduced into the US, it is possible to speculate on mechanisms such as
the Arts & Craft movement, which provided such an impulse toward cultural
exchange, or the effects of the occupation of the Japanese archipelago in the late
forties and early fifties.
In keeping with the normal exploratory nature of human curiosity, much
New Age activity loosely bound to Happiness Studies is patent balderdash, with
easily enumerated suspicions and “problems” plaguing the enterprise, such as:
• One finds during a careful literature survey by topic in
Positive Psychology that much, perhaps too much, of the research
on happiness is based on self-report questionnaires. Unless this has
not been mentioned in the methods discussion, there is little or
none of the traditional test-test-retest imposed by independent
inquiry into random samples of these pools of responses.
• A good portion of Positive Psychology is uncomfortably
frequently extrapolated from correlation rather than experimental
data. Because the subject pool is comprised of human beings, it is
often difficult and on occasion illegal to construct experimental
protocols to “get around” this. Still, although this is a realistic
explanation for the lack of some purely experimental data, it does
not “raise” the desired confidence level afforded by the existing
data pack. Poor data does not become good because better data is
not available.
• Positive Psychology is at this point necessarily based on short
term rather than longitudinal research. Time will tell. Perhaps
some longitudinal evidence will enter the research flow.