Flourishing of Positive Psychology in Education: 'Emotional Turn' and Measurement Issues

Abstract

Positive psychology (PP) has attracted considerable attention in the education context. Yet, positive emotions have largely been left in the shadows. Given the scarcity of research in the last few years on this front, there is now a greatly expanding body of literature that has offered some useful insight. Interestingly, the advent and introduction of PP, with its underlying theories, the control value theory (CVT) (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun et al., 2007) and the broaden-and-build theory of emotions (Fredrickson, 2001, 2003, 2006) to applied linguistics sparked the interest of researchers to study positive emotions (e.g., enjoyment, hope, happiness…etc.) in greater detail. As such, it marked a shift in psychology away from an emphasis just on fixing the worst aspects of life and toward creating the best aspects of existence in an attempt to produce a novel understanding of the issue. The present paper is a critical review of a great body of literature on the flourishing of PP in education. The paper also highlights the innovative work inspired by PP in respect of the various aspects of the study at hand. In addition, a brief history of the PP movement is briefly discussed. The chapter also sheds some light on the measurement of emotions as being one of the vexing issues in the science of emotions since instruments, on this front, have been largely lacking.