What Does The Laboratory Do? And How is Happiness Studied?
The head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation Dmitry Leontiev gave an interview.
Dmitry Alekseevich, tell us how and under what circumstances the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation was created and how was the team made?
Our laboratory was formed in several stages, and at the beginning of its existence it represented a much simpler structure, far from international. It all started with the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University, where I worked for over 30 years. For a long time there was a steady tendency: it was not possible to find for the graduates of the faculty, even the best of them, any positions or places at the faculty. Therefore, in the 2000s, several of my very strong graduates went to work at the Higher School of Economics. After some time, they had the idea to create some kind of formal subdivision on the basis of the university and invite me there. If before that we existed in the form of an “invisible college”, an invisible collective not tied to any place, now there is an opportunity to institutionalize our structure on the basis of the HSE Department of Psychology. So in 2011, our small scientific and educational laboratory, dedicated to positive psychology and the quality of life, was founded, which I also headed. We began to actively work within the framework of this problem and after a few years decided to take part in the competition for the creation of international laboratories. Since we have always had good international contacts, it was not difficult for us to find a worthy person for the post of scientific director of the future laboratory. It was a little more difficult to persuade him, but we successfully coped with this, and now he certainly does not regret contacting us. It's about Professor Kennon Sheldon from the University of Missouri. As a result, in 2014, our small team was transformed into the International Laboratory for Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation. And this, in turn, became the main argument for me to go to work at the Higher School of Economics full-time.
What is studied by positive psychology?
Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies the conditions, prerequisites and factors of a good life. But what does a good life mean? In the past, positive psychology mainly promoted itself through the idea of happiness as the most understandable, lying on the surface and selling well. Now it has expanded and moved from the concept of happiness to other aspects of a positive and good life. And the impetus for this was the very transformation of the concept of a good life, which is explained by changes in the historical context. After World War II, the focus of positive psychology was mainly on violations, dislocations, problems and ways to solve and correct them. Over time, life began to improve, and these topics were gradually replaced. The focus is on a life worth living, a decent, high-quality life. The question arose about how to live when there is no need to survive. As the character of the famous Soviet comedy used to say, "to live well, but to live well is even better." Then it turned out that the usual patterns of how to survive and solve problems do not help to understand how to live well. American psychologist Martin Seligman, the founder and leader of the direction of positive psychology, noted: "We know very well how to come from point -7 to point -2, but we do not know at all how from point +1 to point +4." There was a need for some new research, the search for new patterns. This is how the renewed subject area and agenda began to form, while the approaches used remained traditional for psychology.
Today, the problem-subject area of positive psychology includes many different topics: first of all, these are positive emotions - happiness, joy, optimism, satisfaction and involvement, as well as the meaning of positive interpersonal and work relationships; resistance to stress and counteraction to them (what in modern literature is denoted by the concept of "resilience"). The idea of positive psychology is now that we need not so much to solve problems after they arise, but to cultivate certain inner strengths in people so that these problems do not arise at all. Basically, we are moving from fixing problems and violations to preventing them. This is especially true in the Russian context, because the value of life in our culture has always been quite low. We do not value our own and other people's lives, and hence the disdain for health and a healthy lifestyle, for safety rules. This carries with it high rates of violent crime, accidents and suicide. The well-known phrase "take care of yourself" is much less common and natural in our country than in Western culture. We are not used to taking care of ourselves. That is why positive psychology is very relevant and significant, because it helps to increase the value of life, one's own and those around people.
Moving on to more specific topics, what areas of research are the laboratory staff involved in?
To some extent, we continue the work that we were doing before, before the creation of the laboratory, while introducing some new stream into the research of positive psychology. A significant part of our work is devoted to the problem of meaning. The problem of meaning in general in our culture has always been given much more attention than the problem of emotions. More than a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, during the Silver Age, many Russian philosophers criticized the idea of the supremacy of happiness in people's lives, a principle put forward earlier by British utilitarian philosophers. As an alternative, the authors proposed the idea of meaning, so it became a key domestic principle, more important and adequate for managing human behavior. Echoes of these discussions could be observed in philosophy and psychology of the 20th century, when approaches to the study of the problem of meaning were actively developed. I myself have dealt with this problem all my professional life and have written my Ph.D. and doctoral dissertations specifically on the problem of meaning. In the last decade, there has been a literal boom in the problem of meaning, which has again come to the fore in the world's positive psychology. Leading publishers continue to publish studies and books on it in huge quantities, which was difficult to imagine 15-20 years ago. Indeed, this is a much more complex and multidimensional construct than positive emotions or happiness, because the meaning cannot be simply reduced to some kind of emotions and experiences. And we have quite rich groundwork on this topic, based on the ideas of the cultural-activity tradition of Russian psychology.
Another important idea for us is the concept of personal potential. By the way, back in 2011, before the laboratory became international, a large collective monograph entitled “Personal potential. Structure and Diagnostics ”, almost all the authors of which later became part of the already international laboratory. This theory explains what in ordinary language is called the inner core of the personality. The key idea is that personal potential is the potential of the ability to self-regulate, or to respond flexibly to the challenges of the world around us, which come to us in the form of feedback from our own actions. We have been working with this rather complex structure for more than 10 years, developing various aspects of the problem of personal potential. Now these ideas have already passed into widespread practice. For example, the Sberbank Charitable Foundation a few years ago created a special program for the development of personal potential, based precisely on our developments. They use it in school education in many regions to develop the personal potential of students. All these ideas turned out to be consonant with another project that we have been implementing together with a number of other divisions of the Higher School of Economics since November last year. I mean the recently established scientific center for interdisciplinary research of human potential.
The problem of choice is another separate topic, albeit less common than the previous ones. Several employees of the laboratory did serious research on the topic and defended dissertations on it. In 2015, four of our employees published the monograph "The Psychology of Choice" - in fact, the first Russian book on this topic. So we have competitive developments that we can offer at the highest international level in a number of research areas.
The laboratory collaborates with both American and Russian regional universities. What points of scientific contact with colleagues exist and what joint projects have you managed to implement?
The University of Missouri is where Kennon Sheldon, our lab's scientific director, works. This leads to a number of studies that we conduct jointly, both international cross-cultural, and Russian and American, including using data collected at the University of Missouri. Another key American university for us - Rochester - is the headquarters of a scientific field with which we are in very close contact - the theory of self-determination. At this university, its creators and authors Richard Ryan and Edward Desi worked for a long time and partially remain. The same tradition is represented by foreign colleagues of our laboratory - Kennon Sheldon and his colleague, leading researcher Martin Lynch, who works at the University of Rochester. This is a very large and reputable school, at the conference of which hundreds of people from all over the world come every three years. The approach is in many ways close to us, so we easily find a common language and intersecting topics with Kennon Sheldon, brought up in a completely different tradition. Martin Lynch has visited our country several times, speaks excellent Russian, knows Russian psychology well and is an important link between our and American psychology.
We also involve various regional research centers in our research and projects, so people interested in our approaches, theories and methods are located in various parts of Russia. Perhaps the strongest and most diverse ties we have with Tomsk State University, with which I have been friends for over 20 years. We conduct seminars, schools and other scientific and educational events. Some of them are organized by our colleagues on their own and invite us, and some of them we do, and then we hold in Tomsk. All these events always arouse great interest and attract people from all over Siberia. We also brought our American colleagues to some seminars, which is especially remembered by the participants, because not so many foreign scientists can travel so far. In 2018, colleagues from Tomsk University organized a very interesting school on the quality of life in Altai, which they are going to repeat after the epidemiological situation improves. We have also implemented interesting joint projects with Kamchatka State University and other research centers. What unites our foreign and domestic Russian cooperation is people. Relationships between people are always at the center, followed by connections between organizations. Everything goes through people.
Share the most interesting research results of the laboratory that have been realized during its existence.
Together with our American colleagues, we have conducted interesting research on the relationship between freedom and responsibility. Based on empirical data from the two countries, we found that freedom and responsibility are closely related to each other. That is, we were able to find confirmation of this well-known philosophical idea at the psychological level and prove that these two phenomena do not contradict each other at all. The results of this work have been published in one of the leading journals.
Interesting results have been obtained in the study of loneliness. Our methodology is devoted to the correlation of different aspects of the experience of loneliness, both positive and negative. After all, loneliness combines very complex experiences that go beyond the traditional approach to it as an extremely unfavorable symptom. There is a whole class of people who value and love loneliness very much, finding serious resources in it. As a rule, these are people who are somehow connected with mental work, it is for them that loneliness is a positive thing. To study this topic, the laboratory staff developed a unique questionnaire, which was later even translated into English and adapted in the United States. The situation is different from the more familiar scenario when we translate into Russian and adapt the methods of foreign colleagues. We began to study this technique with my colleague Yevgeny Osin even before the foundation of the international laboratory. Among the projects that aroused particular interest at international conferences is a cross-cultural study on attitudes towards loneliness, the characteristics of its experience, motivations and emotions in such a situation, using the example of three countries: Russia, the United States and South Korea. We are now preparing these results for publication.
Last year, against the backdrop of the coronavirus epidemic, we made a large cycle of research on pandemic consciousness and even managed to summarize our results on this topic in the format of a symposium organized on the basis of the World-class Scientific Center “Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Human Potential”. We responded very quickly to the new phenomenon and suspended all our current projects at that time in order to collect as much empirical material as possible. Now we are in the process of describing it and preparing to publish the results. Some of this research has focused on personality traits that enable us to reduce the negative emotions, stresses and worries associated with a pandemic. Another interesting study concerns the attitude to this situation as a situation of uncertainty and, again, the prevention of the negative emotions associated with this. In addition, we analyzed restraint and self-isolation as a forced mode of loneliness. Another work was devoted to the role of optimism and inner support. Positive psychology focuses primarily on internal buffers that allow us to survive and survive in this difficult situation and not succumb to its negative influence. Among them - reliance on and taking responsibility for decisions on oneself, as opposed to expecting this responsibility from the authorities or medical institutions. We have found that people who take responsibility for making decisions are more resilient to the psychological effects of a pandemic. This is also associated with optimism, but not thoughtless, but responsible. Responsible optimism helps to get rid of negative emotions, but thoughtless optimism, paradoxically, does not bring any benefit.
Is the laboratory progressing towards a goal? What tasks do you see as priorities in the coming years?
Last year we had an important event - a master's program "Positive Psychology", created by the laboratory staff, was opened. The applicants showed great interest in it, and the competition for the places was very high. And this is not surprising, because our master's program is the only program in Russia implemented by people who are directly involved in the production of knowledge in this area. Moreover, our colleagues are familiar with almost all leading scientists in the field of positive psychology and actively involve them in conducting lectures and seminars for students. First-hand knowledge, as they say. Now our main task is to gain a foothold in this new field, into which we have already successfully entered. In addition, new books are being prepared, new dissertations are being defended on the problem of loneliness, uncertainty and personal change. But still, now our efforts are more focused on endurance and preservation of stability. I would like not only to go through the current situation of uncertainty of the pandemic without losses, but also to extract something useful from it.