Froh, J. J., Kashdan, T. B., Yurkewicz, C., Fan, J., Allen, J., Glowacki, J. (2010). THe benfits of passion and absorption in activities: Engaged living in adolescents and its role in psychological well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(4), 311-332.
This article is about the development and validation of a new measure of positive stuff, termed "engaged living". I'm pretty excited about this concept - the authors define it as having a passion to help others and be completely immersed in activities, implying a developmental path characterized by Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow and some combination of active/engaged citizenship, contribution, and connection. Unfortunately, the introduction section is a soup of overlapping positive psychology terms and theories which the authors do little to disentangle, and the reader is left wondering what really distinguishes "engaged living" from all of the other measures of good juju that exist in the positive psych literature (there is a table with friendly plus signs to show associations between the concepts, but good tables don't equal good theory). While this is my main criticism of the paper (well, that and the fact that they don't measure helping others so much as Great Love and Compassion, but that's for another post), I empathize with the authors, who really are just trying to carve out their own niche, identify an individual asset that they strongly feel is important to PYD, and simultaneously pay homage to all of the theoretical and empirical evidence that came before them with regard to similar concepts. ::sigh:: I think this article really highlights the need for the field of positive psychology to replicate previous findings and establish a strong evidence base for existing concepts, so that a few of them can stick around long enough for everyone to start speaking the same language.
Rating: 7/10 Jetts. 4 Jetts for coming up with a really interesting concept, and 3 Jetts for sheer number of studies included in a paper (5!)
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