I am a clinical psychologist, and I have taken a great interest in the trend towards "positive psychology," also known as the study of happiness, which has become increasingly dominant in my field of late.  Several fellow psychologists have published fascinating and compelling looks at this topic; in the past two years, I eagerly devoured both Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness and The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky.  So, it goes without saying that when I discovered the release of a new title on happiness, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, I was greatly excited by the prospect of reading another book in this area.

This book is written by a father-son team, Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener.  Both have done extensive research in the happiness field, with latter collecting data–often in a fairly unconventional manner–from around the world.  They chose to focus their book on the concept of psychological wealth, which includes not only happiness but also additional factors such as one's attitude towards life, social support, material resources, and other influences.  The authors lay out their book in several parts.  Part I simply expands on the concept of psychological wealth and the principles that define it.  Parts II and III form the core of the book:  in Part II, the authors make the case that happy people function better, particularly in the areas of health, social relationships, and work, and in Part III, they examine the specific causes of happiness.  Final, the last section of the book, Part IV, involves putting everything together, including summarizing the previous concepts and proving various measures of psychological wealth. 

The authors write in a style that is clear and accessible to a general audience; furthermore, they frequently infuse humor into their work.  But less than halfway through the book, I found myself to be surprisingly bored.  One of the main ways in which the authors lost me is that they tend to overstate their case to the readers; often I found myself having a reaction along the lines of "yes, yes, I get it already!"  In fact, in Chapter 13, "Living Happily Ever After," the authors offer short summaries of each of the key chapters from Parts II and III of the book, and I found these brief synopses sufficient to convenient the most salient and necessary points to their audience. 

Another issue I had is that I'm not sure who, exactly, is the appropriate audience for this book.  For the mental health professional, the authors do offer a few new insights into the factors which contribute to psychological wealth, but as mentioned above, they are quite slow to make their points.  For the more general audience, the authors provide little in the way of practical applications of their research, with the exception of their AIM theory, or how one chooses to direct one's attention.  Unfortunately, the AIM model does not seem significantly different from the concept of Learned Optimism introduced by the founder of positive psychology, psychologist Martin Seligman, over 15 years ago.

I certainly respect Diener and Biswas-Diener as well as admire the amount effort they have each put into their life's work.  Unfortunately, however, I think that this book fails to truly convey the importance and excitement of that work to the reader. 

© 2008 Beth Cholette

Beth Cholette, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who provides psychotherapy to college students at SUNY Geneseo. She is also a Top 100 Reviewer at Amazon.com and the official yoga media reviewer for iHanuman.com.

Keywords: happiness