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Positive Psychotherapy

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research

Synonyms

PPT

Definition

Positive psychotherapy is a therapy intervention aimed at bolstering pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Components of the therapy include using strengths adaptively to deal with stressors, expressing gratitude, and fostering positive relationships and meaning (Rashid and Seligman 2018).

Description

Positive psychotherapy (PPT) is a therapeutic endeavor within positive psychology to broaden the scope of traditional psychotherapy. Its central premise is to address positive resources of clients such as positive emotions, character strengths, and meaning – in addition to treating symptoms – in treating psychopathology. Accentuating positive resources may serve clients best not when life is easy, but when life is difficult. Because the human brain is hardwired to attend and respond more strongly to negatives than to positives. Psychopathology exacerbates this propensity systematically. Therefore, accentuation of strengths, along with amelioration of symptoms, is a...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Health & Wellness Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), Toronto, ON, Canada

    Tayyab Rashid

Authors
  1. Tayyab Rashid
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Correspondence to Tayyab Rashid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche, Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma, Italy

    Filomena Maggino

Section Editor information

  1. PPRC, St Peter Port, Guernsey, UK

    Carmel Proctor

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Rashid, T. (2020). Positive Psychotherapy. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_3378-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_3378-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69909-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69909-7

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