Can Movies Enhance Happiness?

Abstract

Reviews the book, "Positive psychology at the movies: Using films to build virtues and character strengths" by Ryan M. Niemiec and Danny Wedding (see record 2008-09883-000). The central idea of the book is that psychology may have restricted itself too much in searching for ways to foster well-being. Niemiec and Wedding ignore all the work that is done on the therapeutic value of fiction and narratives, and start with a clean slate. They describe three different factors that could contribute to the happiness of onlookers. They do not trust the idea that movies alone can help viewers to reach the clean spot by themselves. Therefore, they educate the readers, i.e. potential movie viewers, about the work of Peterson and Seligman about character strengths and virtues. The main strength of the book is that it offers an alternative idea of how to spread the ideas of positive psychology, because the positive psychologists often resort to the toolkit of negative psychology. There are also some less fortunate points of this book. The authors totally neglect the existing literature on the appreciation of art and fiction and do not present any data on the system used to classify the strengths that are depicted in movies. The reviewer provides careful critiques of the many movie examples of the (questionable) theory the authors use to describe the mechanism of imitation and inspiration, which allows viewers to profit from watching a positive psychology movie. This book is suggested for the general public. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)