2. Contextualisation
2a. Positive Psychology
What makes life beautiful?". This is the central question posed by Positive Psychology, and the research carried out on the flow has provided an answer: a good life is one that is characterized by "complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura e
Csikszentmihalyi, 2002: 89).
In the last two decades, the two great psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, have increasingly emphasized a psychology focused on the positivity of subjective experience by developing the concept of individual and social growth.
Starting from this investigation, Positive Psychology has developed two different perspectives of well-being: the hedonic and the eudaimonic (Muzio, Riva e Argenton, 2012). The hedonic dimension takes its name from the Greek word hedonè, which means pleasure (Ryan e Deci, 2001). One of the first studies published on the hedonic approach focuses on "what makes the experience pleasant or unpleasant" and therefore combines the concepts of happiness and well-being with those of pleasure, comfort and fulfilment. According to the hedonic perspective, happiness is achieved with the satisfaction of all one's desires, understood as an expression of being and not of having. Therefore, it is no longer a matter of objective well-being, measurable through economic-social indicators, but rather a subjective well-being that is expressed on two levels identified by Diener as cognitive and affective. On the cognitive level, the personal judgment on one's own life is fundamental, understood in a global sense and determined by the satisfaction for specific domains of existence, such as family or work. On an emotional level, subjective well-being is a consequence of lasting positive moods and absence of negative experiences (Muzio, Riva e Argenton, 2012).
Understanding and enhancing the strategies used by people to prolong positive experiences over time, to increase their intensity or change their nature, then become fundamental (Muzio, Riva, Argenton, 2012: 24-25). On the other hand, we have the eudaimonic perspective that considers well-being no longer as the simple achievement of pleasure, but as the result of the development of a personal daimon, a virtue hidden in each of us, whose realization leads to happiness understood as the maximum expression of one's potential (Muzio, Riva, Argenton, 2012, 26). Waterman (Ryan e Deci, 2001) suggested that eudaimonic theory occurs when people's life activities are more congruent or intertwined with deeply held values and are holistic or fully engaged. In such circumstances, people would feel intensely alive and authentic, being who they really are, a state Waterman labelled personal expressiveness (PE). PE was more associated with challenge and effort, while hedonistic pleasure was more related to being relaxed, away from problems, and happy (Ryan e Deci, 2001). In this case, happiness no longer coincides with subjective well-being, but with psychological well-being, based on the ability to maximize the expression of internal potential, implementing one's talents and individual predispositions in a process of constructing meanings and sharing goals (Muzio, Riva, Argenton, 2012, 27). Four conceptual dynamics emerge at the basis of eudaimonic reflection and its operational effects, including the concept of empowerment, the processes linked to the attribution of meaning, the concept of agency and, finally, the concept of Optimal Experience (Muzio, Riva, Argenton, 2012), which will be analysed in the next page.
