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The Psychology of Everyday Life: Motivation and the Search For Happiness

Positive Psychology

What are the virtues?

Assuming that happiness has three components (listed above as the pleasant, engaged, and meaningful lives), Seligman and his colleagues believed it was important to identify personality traits that promote these positive modes of living. Consequently, they identified six overarching virtues which they claim to be culturally universal. These are: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity (which involves compassion and concern for others), justice, temperance (the capacity for self control), and transcendence (the ability to find connections with a larger universe).



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