offered a podium presentation (variation) 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

How WEIRD Are Positive Psychology Interventions? (#126)

Tom Hendriks 1
  1. Anton de Kom University of Suriname, Paramaribo, Suriname

The aim of this presentation is to present findings of a recently published bibliometric analysis of positive psychology intervention, that quantifies the extent to which rigorous research on PPIs that employ randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reach beyond Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) populations. In addition, we will discuss findings from two meta-analyses on the efficacy of PPIs in Western and Non-western countries. We found that RCTs on the efficacy of PPIs are still predominately conducted in western countries which accounted for 78.2% of the studies. However, there is a strong and steady increase in publications from non-western countries since 2012, indicating a trend towards globalization of positive psychology research. In regard to the meta-analyses, we found that PPIs from Western countries have small effects on wellbeing and illbeing, whereas PPIs from non-Western countries report moderate to large effects. We will discuss possible explanations for our findings, focusing on the difference in study quality, the influence of biases and discuss the possibility that PPIs could even be more effective in non-western countries due to a better cultural fit.