In “A Balanced Psychology and a Full Life”, Martin.E.P. Seligman, Acacia C. Parks, and Tracy Steen explain the difference between balanced and positive psychology and their relationship with the pursuit of happiness. Seligman et al. divides their piece in three sections, “A balanced psychology, what is happiness? And interventions to nurture happiness” to make their explanation thorough. They describe the three routes of happiness in this excerpt. They also give their own definition of happiness, “We believe happiness’ is a condition over and above the absence of unhappiness”(418). In the first section of this piece, Seligman et al. gives historical background with some statistical data and the rise of psychology. According to the Seligman …show more content…
They believe that there are three routes to happiness. The first route to happiness is to increase positive emotions inside someone about his/her past, present and future. According to the authors, positive emotion is not the only thing to create happiness but the main goal is to provide a way to perceive happiness. Second route includes the “pursuit of gratification”, which is satisfaction of desires. This can be fulfilled by participating in your desired activities, eating your favorite food etc. Seligman et al. claim that there are no shortcuts to gratification. According to the authors, “the pursuit of gratifications requires us to drawn on character strengths such as creativity, social intelligence, sense of humor, perservance and appreciation of beauty and excellence”(419). Gratification only needs our involvement to get it. Third route to happiness requires our strengths or something greater than just our involvement e.g. skills talent etc. Seligman et al. concludes the definition of happiness by a quote from (Peterson et al. 2005), “ A person who uses all three routes to happiness leads the ‘full life’, and recent empirical evidence suggests that those who lead the full life have much the greater life