A review of the Journal of Positive Psychology

After reading the Journal of Positive Psychology for several weeks, I feel capable of doing a review of the journal as a whole. It is interesting now to read articles on the same topic but from other publications for my psychology class, as I often find myself wishing that the article was written differently. To do a review of this journal, I will employ Linton et al.'s framework to guide my discussion.

Structure: The structure of this journal takes that of a lab report. Most of the articles I choose to read were primary research which has a very formal structure. One thing I really enjoyed about the articles was that they were effective in communicating points without taking 30 pages to do so. The articles were generally fairly short, which made them readable, but more importantly, publish-able.

Reference: The literature review section of the articles were chalk-full of references. They were written in a way that took a very scientific approach rather than the approach of the humanities. I could read a 30 page article, write one sentence about the article (which may have not even been their main point) and then at the end of the sentence cite them as a source (Carroll 2010). This is very different than the approach taken in the humanities which really investigates each sentence at a individual level when citing it in another document. This is very similar to the building block illustration used in class, especially because positive psychology is a relatively new field with limited research.

Language: Often the same group of 5 articles is cited and then the current article will tangent from there. This is very different than other research which has been fully explored and several hundred documents have been written, for example on the effects of PTSD. This is one of the reasons I found reading the Journal of Positive Psychology interesting, because I haven't been exposed to the information before. Disagreements between psychologists are definitely real, and there are papers written solely to dispute one another, however in this journal the articles didn't do much counter-talk of other theories or researchers. This is likely due to the the age of the field. In time, this counter-talk will continue but the goal will be to keep it method/idea/theory based rather than researcher based.