Grit in Positive Psychology

Last Updated May 27, 2026

Grit occupies an important but contested place in positive psychology. It belongs to the study of human strengths, long-term development, character, motivation, achievement, and flourishing. At its best, grit helps explain how people continue pursuing meaningful goals after difficulty, delay, boredom, failure, or discouragement would otherwise interrupt progress. It names a form of sustained agency: the capacity to keep returning to a valued aim across time.

Within positive psychology, grit is not merely toughness. It is not a slogan about refusing to quit. It is a psychological construct concerned with perseverance of effort and consistency of interest in relation to long-term goals. That makes it closely connected to purpose, self-control, hope, resilience, engagement, meaning, accomplishment, and character strengths. Yet grit must also be interpreted carefully. Positive psychology is strongest when it studies strengths without ignoring suffering, inequality, exhaustion, institutional conditions, or the possibility that persistence can become harmful when detached from judgment.

This article examines grit as a positive psychology construct: why it became influential, how it relates to flourishing, where it fits within the broader science of strengths, and why a mature account must distinguish adaptive persistence from simplistic motivational culture.

Overview

Positive psychology studies the conditions that allow individuals, communities, and institutions to flourish. Instead of focusing only on pathology, deficit, disorder, or damage, it asks how people develop strengths, meaning, resilience, engagement, purpose, relationships, and accomplishment. Grit fits naturally into this field because it concerns one of the most important questions in human development: how do people continue pursuing meaningful goals over time?

Grit became influential because it named a familiar but difficult-to-measure pattern. Some people remain committed to long-term aims despite repeated difficulty. They continue practicing, revising, learning, recovering, and returning. They tolerate slow progress. They do not require constant excitement to continue. They can remain oriented toward a purpose long enough for skill, identity, and achievement to accumulate.

Within positive psychology, this makes grit a candidate strength. It may support accomplishment, engagement, meaning, mastery, and resilience. It can help people move beyond short-term motivation toward sustained development. But grit is not automatically positive in every form. Persistence can become rigid. Passion can become obsessive. Long-term goals can become misaligned with health, justice, relationships, or reality.

A mature account of grit in positive psychology therefore requires balance. It should recognize grit as a valuable human capacity while refusing to turn it into a moral demand. It should connect persistence to flourishing rather than exhaustion. It should treat grit as one part of a larger system that includes support, opportunity, rest, feedback, purpose, and ethical judgment.

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The positive psychology context

Positive psychology emerged as a movement to study positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Its central concern is not superficial happiness, forced optimism, or denial of suffering. At its strongest, positive psychology asks how human beings build lives of meaning, strength, connection, contribution, and flourishing under real conditions.

Grit fits within this context because it is future-oriented and developmental. It is concerned with how people continue working toward goals that matter. It emphasizes long time horizons, sustained effort, and commitment beyond immediate reward. These are important features of flourishing because many meaningful lives are built not through constant pleasure, but through difficult commitments that become valuable over time.

However, positive psychology has also faced criticism when it appears to overemphasize individual attitude while underemphasizing structural conditions. Grit inherits this risk. If treated carelessly, it can become part of a shallow positivity culture that tells people to persevere without asking whether their environments are humane, just, safe, or supportive.

For that reason, grit should be interpreted as a situated strength. It is a human capacity, but it is developed and expressed within social worlds. Families, schools, workplaces, communities, economic systems, and institutions shape whether long-term effort is possible and whether it leads to flourishing or depletion.

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Why grit belongs in positive psychology

Grit belongs in positive psychology because it concerns a constructive human capacity: the ability to sustain effort and commitment toward valued long-term goals. It is not merely a defensive response to hardship. It is a developmental strength that can help people build competence, identity, contribution, and meaning.

Many positive psychology constructs involve future-oriented agency. Hope concerns pathways and motivation toward goals. Optimism concerns expectations about the future. Resilience concerns recovery and adaptation after difficulty. Purpose concerns meaningful direction. Engagement concerns deep involvement in activity. Accomplishment concerns mastery, progress, and achievement. Grit intersects with all of these because it explains how effort remains organized across time.

Grit is especially important because flourishing is rarely instantaneous. A meaningful life often includes projects that are difficult before they are rewarding: education, creative work, caregiving, scientific research, ethical leadership, community repair, spiritual discipline, professional formation, and civic responsibility. These projects require more than positive emotion. They require continuity.

At the same time, grit should not dominate positive psychology. A person can be gritty and miserable. A person can persist in ways that damage relationships, health, or moral judgment. A flourishing life requires more than relentless pursuit. It also requires wisdom, care, joy, rest, belonging, justice, and the capacity to revise one’s goals.

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Grit and flourishing

Flourishing is broader than success. It includes well-being, meaning, relationships, engagement, contribution, agency, dignity, and a life that feels worth living. Grit may support flourishing when it helps people remain committed to goals that are meaningful, ethical, developmentally appropriate, and socially supported.

A gritty person may be more likely to persist through the difficult middle of development: the phase after initial excitement but before visible mastery. This phase matters because many people abandon meaningful goals when progress becomes slow. Grit can help people remain in the process long enough for growth to occur.

But grit can also conflict with flourishing when persistence becomes obsessive, isolating, or punitive. A person may sacrifice relationships, health, sleep, joy, and moral perspective in the name of a long-term goal. In such cases, grit no longer supports flourishing. It becomes overpersistence.

The positive psychology question is therefore not simply whether a person has grit. The better question is whether grit is integrated into a flourishing life. Does the goal matter? Is the effort sustainable? Are relationships protected? Is the person growing? Is the institution ethical? Does persistence serve life, or has life been reduced to persistence?

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Grit and the PERMA model

The PERMA model organizes well-being around five broad elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Grit is most directly connected to accomplishment, but its relationship to PERMA is wider than achievement alone.

Grit can support engagement because long-term commitment often deepens involvement in a domain. A musician, researcher, teacher, athlete, parent, organizer, or craftsperson may experience deeper engagement after sustained practice makes more complex forms of participation possible. Grit can also support meaning because persistence often becomes more durable when connected to values, service, identity, or purpose.

Relationships matter because grit is not always solitary. Mentors, peers, families, teams, communities, and institutions help people persist. Encouragement, accountability, belonging, feedback, and shared purpose can all sustain long-term effort. A person’s grit may be partly relational: strengthened by people who help them continue wisely.

Positive emotion has a more complex relationship to grit. Grit does not require constant happiness. In fact, it often appears when positive emotion is low. Yet positive emotions such as pride, gratitude, hope, interest, and joy can renew effort. A healthy model recognizes that grit and positive emotion can support each other, but neither should be reduced to the other.

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Grit, character strengths, and virtue

Positive psychology often studies character strengths: stable capacities that help people live well, contribute to others, and pursue meaningful lives. Grit can be interpreted as a character-related strength because it involves commitment, effort, courage, diligence, and future orientation. It reflects the capacity to remain faithful to demanding goals that require development over time.

However, grit is not a complete virtue by itself. Classical accounts of virtue often emphasize practical wisdom: the capacity to know when, how, why, and toward what end a strength should be used. Courage without wisdom can become recklessness. Honesty without compassion can become cruelty. Grit without judgment can become stubbornness.

This is why grit should be integrated with other strengths. It works best when paired with humility, prudence, curiosity, self-regulation, fairness, love of learning, hope, gratitude, and social intelligence. These strengths help grit remain humane and adaptive. They prevent persistence from becoming rigid self-assertion.

Positive psychology practice should therefore avoid treating grit as the supreme strength. It is one strength among many. Its value depends on the quality of the goal, the method of pursuit, and the wider character system in which it operates.

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Grit and resilience

Grit and resilience are related but distinct. Resilience concerns adaptation after adversity. It asks how people recover, reorganize, and continue after disruption, trauma, failure, or stress. Grit concerns sustained commitment to long-term goals. It asks how people continue effort and interest across time.

The two constructs overlap when long-term goals encounter obstacles. A person pursuing a demanding aim will almost certainly face setbacks. Resilience helps them recover from those setbacks. Grit helps them return to the larger goal after recovery. In practice, resilience may protect the continuity that grit requires.

Still, resilience and grit should not be collapsed into one concept. A person can be resilient without remaining attached to the same goal. They may adapt by changing direction. Conversely, a person can be gritty but not resilient if setbacks create emotional rigidity, exhaustion, or inability to recover. Healthy long-term persistence requires both continuity and adaptation.

The positive psychology challenge is to understand how people bend without breaking and continue without becoming rigid. Resilience provides flexibility. Grit provides continuity. Flourishing often requires both.

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Grit, hope, and future orientation

Grit is deeply future-oriented. A gritty person continues working because the goal exists beyond the present moment. This makes grit closely related to hope. Hope gives people a sense that the future can be shaped. Grit helps sustain the effort required to shape it.

Hope is often described through agency and pathways. Agency is the motivational sense that one can move toward a goal. Pathways are the perceived routes through which the goal might be pursued. Grit adds temporal endurance: the capacity to keep investing effort and interest over time, even when the pathways are difficult or require revision.

This relationship matters because effort without hope can become despairing. Hope without effort can remain fantasy. Grit and hope become powerful when joined: hope imagines possible futures; grit continues the work required to approach them.

Yet hope and grit must both remain realistic. False hope can trap people in impossible goals. Rigid grit can keep people pursuing paths that no longer work. Future orientation becomes healthy when it includes feedback, changing strategies, and the ability to distinguish obstacles from dead ends.

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Grit and self-control

Grit and self-control are closely related in positive psychology, but they operate on different time scales. Self-control concerns the regulation of immediate impulses, temptations, distractions, and emotions. It helps people choose a future benefit over a present impulse. Grit concerns sustained commitment to long-term goals across extended periods of time.

Self-control can support grit because long-term goals are enacted through daily choices. A person who wants to complete a degree, write a book, develop as a scientist, practice a craft, or recover from injury must repeatedly manage short-term temptations and discouragements. Without self-control, long-term commitment may fail to become daily behavior.

However, grit is more than self-control repeated many times. It includes durable interest and goal hierarchy. A person may have strong self-control in the moment but lack a stable long-term direction. Another person may care deeply about a long-term goal but struggle with daily regulation. Positive psychology must understand both capacities and their interaction.

The healthiest form of grit does not depend only on heroic self-control. It uses environments, habits, relationships, routines, and meaningful structures to make persistence more sustainable. In this sense, grit is not only an internal trait. It is also a designed way of living with one’s goals.

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Grit, accomplishment, and mastery

Grit is most strongly associated with accomplishment because long-term achievement usually requires sustained effort. Mastery develops through practice, feedback, correction, and continued engagement. A person may need years of effort before skill becomes visible. Grit can support that process by helping the person remain in contact with the work long enough for improvement to accumulate.

In positive psychology, accomplishment is not only external success. It includes mastery, progress, competence, self-efficacy, and the satisfaction of completing meaningful work. Grit may support these forms of accomplishment because it keeps effort aligned with long-term development.

But accomplishment should not be confused with flourishing as a whole. A person can achieve impressive outcomes while neglecting relationships, health, meaning, or moral responsibility. A positive psychology account of grit should therefore ask whether accomplishment is integrated into a good life rather than pursued as an isolated metric.

Grit contributes most to mastery when it is paired with deliberate practice. Repetition alone is not enough. The person needs feedback, stretch, attention, correction, and refinement. Grit keeps the person returning; deliberate practice improves what they do when they return.

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Limits of grit as a positive psychology construct

Grit’s popularity created both influence and distortion. The concept became useful because it named sustained commitment. But popular culture often simplified grit into toughness, hustle, relentless work, or refusal to quit. These simplifications weaken the science and can harm people.

One limitation is construct overlap. Grit overlaps with conscientiousness, self-control, industriousness, and achievement motivation. This does not make grit meaningless, but it does require caution. Researchers should ask what grit adds beyond established traits and whether perseverance of effort and consistency of interest should be analyzed separately.

A second limitation is measurement. Grit scales are useful research tools, but self-report measures can be shaped by bias, social desirability, culture, comparison groups, and context. They should not be used as high-stakes tools for admissions, hiring, discipline, or individual judgment.

A third limitation is overpersistence. Positive psychology should not celebrate perseverance without asking whether the goal is good, the effort is sustainable, and the conditions are just. Some goals should be revised. Some systems should be left. Some forms of “grit” are actually exhaustion, fear, coercion, or sunk-cost thinking.

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Positive psychology without structural blindness

A serious account of grit in positive psychology must avoid structural blindness. It is not enough to ask whether individuals are persistent. We must also ask whether the world around them makes meaningful persistence possible.

People differ in access to safe schools, stable housing, health care, free time, mentors, supportive families, fair wages, transportation, psychological safety, and institutional trust. These conditions affect whether long-term goals can be pursued. A person may appear less gritty not because they lack character, but because their circumstances impose instability, exhaustion, or repeated barriers.

This issue is especially important in education and work. Schools should not use grit language to compensate for underfunding, overcrowding, or lack of support. Workplaces should not praise grit while normalizing burnout, poor management, or unfair compensation. Public institutions should not celebrate individual perseverance while failing to repair preventable hardship.

Positive psychology becomes more credible when it joins strengths with systems. Grit is a human capacity, but it flourishes in environments that provide support, fairness, feedback, and meaningful opportunity. The ethical question is not only “How can people become grittier?” It is also “What kinds of institutions deserve people’s sustained commitment?”

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A mathematical lens on grit and flourishing

A mathematical lens can clarify how grit might relate to flourishing without reducing the human concept to a formula. A simple model can represent grit as a combination of perseverance of effort and durable interest:

Within positive psychology, grit can then be modeled as one contributor to flourishing rather than as a substitute for flourishing:

This model shows why grit should not be interpreted as the whole of positive psychology. It may contribute to flourishing, but flourishing also depends on meaning, relationships, support, health, institutional context, and other conditions.

A dynamic version can model sustained effort over time:

The dynamic model is especially important for positive psychology because it shows that persistence is renewed or depleted by life conditions. Grit is not merely stored inside the individual. It is strengthened by meaning, belonging, support, and recovery; it is weakened by depletion, isolation, and impossible demands.

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Responsible use in positive psychology practice

Grit can be useful in positive psychology practice when it helps people reflect on meaningful goals, practice habits, setbacks, motivation, and long-term development. It becomes harmful when it is used to shame people, rank them, or tell them to endure conditions that should be changed.

For individuals, grit work should begin with values. What goal is worth sustained effort? Why does it matter? What kind of person does the goal help one become? What support is needed? What feedback would improve the process? What signs would indicate that the goal or method should change?

For educators, grit should be connected to growth-oriented learning environments. Students need feedback, revision opportunities, belonging, challenge, and support. They should not be told that grit alone can overcome structural inequality or poor instruction.

For organizations, grit should be interpreted institutionally. A healthy organization supports long-term effort through fair expectations, psychological safety, meaningful work, clear goals, recovery time, and ethical leadership. It does not demand endless resilience from people while preserving harmful systems.

For researchers and practitioners, the central rule is humility. Grit is important, but it is not everything. It should be studied and applied as one construct within a broader framework of human flourishing.

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Python workflow: modeling grit and flourishing

The following Python workflow uses synthetic data to model grit as one contributor to flourishing. It includes perseverance of effort, durable interest, meaning, relationships, social support, health resources, and depletion. The purpose is to demonstrate why grit should be interpreted within a broader positive psychology framework.

# Python workflow: grit in positive psychology
# Synthetic data for article support and research-method demonstration only.
# Do not use this workflow to evaluate, rank, hire, discipline, or assess real people.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import statsmodels.api as sm

rng = np.random.default_rng(42)
n = 800

# Grit facets
perseverance_effort = rng.normal(0, 1, n)
durable_interest = rng.normal(0, 1, n)

# Positive psychology variables
meaning = rng.normal(0, 1, n)
relationships = rng.normal(0, 1, n)
social_support = 0.50 * relationships + rng.normal(0, 0.85, n)
health_resources = rng.normal(0, 1, n)
depletion = rng.normal(0, 1, n)

# Construct a grit score
grit_score = 0.60 * perseverance_effort + 0.40 * durable_interest

# Synthetic flourishing outcome
flourishing = (
    0.18 * grit_score
    + 0.30 * meaning
    + 0.25 * relationships
    + 0.22 * social_support
    + 0.20 * health_resources
    - 0.28 * depletion
    + rng.normal(0, 1, n)
)

df = pd.DataFrame({
    "perseverance_effort": perseverance_effort,
    "durable_interest": durable_interest,
    "grit_score": grit_score,
    "meaning": meaning,
    "relationships": relationships,
    "social_support": social_support,
    "health_resources": health_resources,
    "depletion": depletion,
    "flourishing": flourishing
})

print("Correlation matrix:")
print(df.corr().round(3))

# Model 1: grit alone
model_grit_only = sm.OLS(
    df["flourishing"],
    sm.add_constant(df[["grit_score"]])
).fit()

# Model 2: grit within a positive psychology framework
model_positive_psychology = sm.OLS(
    df["flourishing"],
    sm.add_constant(df[[
        "grit_score",
        "meaning",
        "relationships",
        "social_support",
        "health_resources",
        "depletion"
    ]])
).fit()

comparison = pd.DataFrame({
    "model": ["grit_only", "grit_plus_positive_psychology_context"],
    "r_squared": [model_grit_only.rsquared, model_positive_psychology.rsquared],
    "adjusted_r_squared": [
        model_grit_only.rsquared_adj,
        model_positive_psychology.rsquared_adj
    ],
    "grit_coefficient": [
        model_grit_only.params["grit_score"],
        model_positive_psychology.params["grit_score"]
    ],
    "grit_p_value": [
        model_grit_only.pvalues["grit_score"],
        model_positive_psychology.pvalues["grit_score"]
    ]
})

print("\nModel comparison:")
print(comparison.round(4))

print("\nInterpretation:")
print(
    "If the grit coefficient becomes smaller after adding meaning, relationships, "
    "support, health resources, and depletion, grit should be interpreted as one "
    "part of flourishing rather than as a complete explanation of flourishing."
)

This workflow illustrates a key positive psychology principle: strengths matter, but they operate within systems of meaning, relationship, health, support, and recovery. Grit may support flourishing, but it should not be isolated from the rest of life.

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R workflow: grit, PERMA, and contextual supports

The following R workflow models grit alongside PERMA-like flourishing variables. It uses synthetic data to compare a grit-only model with a broader positive psychology model that includes meaning, relationships, support, health resources, and depletion.

# R workflow: grit in positive psychology
# Synthetic data for article support and research-method demonstration only.
# Do not use this workflow to evaluate, rank, hire, discipline, or assess real people.

set.seed(42)

n <- 800

# Grit facets
perseverance_effort <- rnorm(n)
durable_interest <- rnorm(n)

# Positive psychology variables
meaning <- rnorm(n)
relationships <- rnorm(n)
social_support <- 0.50 * relationships + rnorm(n, sd = 0.85)
health_resources <- rnorm(n)
depletion <- rnorm(n)

# Construct a grit score
grit_score <- 0.60 * perseverance_effort + 0.40 * durable_interest

# Synthetic flourishing outcome
flourishing <- (
  0.18 * grit_score +
  0.30 * meaning +
  0.25 * relationships +
  0.22 * social_support +
  0.20 * health_resources -
  0.28 * depletion +
  rnorm(n)
)

df <- data.frame(
  perseverance_effort,
  durable_interest,
  grit_score,
  meaning,
  relationships,
  social_support,
  health_resources,
  depletion,
  flourishing
)

# Correlation matrix
round(cor(df), 3)

# Model 1: grit alone
model_grit_only <- lm(flourishing ~ grit_score, data = df)

# Model 2: grit inside a broader positive psychology model
model_positive_psychology <- lm(
  flourishing ~ grit_score + meaning + relationships +
    social_support + health_resources + depletion,
  data = df
)

comparison <- data.frame(
  model = c("grit_only", "grit_plus_positive_psychology_context"),
  r_squared = c(summary(model_grit_only)$r.squared, summary(model_positive_psychology)$r.squared),
  adjusted_r_squared = c(summary(model_grit_only)$adj.r.squared, summary(model_positive_psychology)$adj.r.squared),
  grit_coefficient = c(coef(model_grit_only)["grit_score"], coef(model_positive_psychology)["grit_score"])
)

print(round(comparison, 4))

cat("
Interpretation:
Grit may contribute to flourishing, but positive psychology should also model
meaning, relationships, support, health resources, and depletion. A strength is
not the whole life system in which that strength operates.
")

The workflow reinforces the article’s central argument: grit is a meaningful positive psychology construct, but it belongs inside a wider model of flourishing rather than above it.

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GitHub Repository

The companion GitHub repository provides a reproducible research-code structure for the Grit knowledge series, including article-specific workflows, synthetic data examples, documentation, and multi-language modeling assets.

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Conclusion

Grit has an important place in positive psychology because it names a human strength that supports sustained development. It helps explain how people continue pursuing meaningful long-term goals through difficulty, delay, boredom, and setback. It connects naturally to accomplishment, engagement, meaning, hope, resilience, self-control, and character strengths.

But grit is not the whole of flourishing. A life organized only around persistence can become narrow, exhausted, or unjust. Positive psychology must therefore treat grit as one strength among many, not as a master virtue. It should be joined to wisdom, care, humility, relationships, health, social support, and ethical institutions.

The strongest account of grit in positive psychology is neither sentimental nor punitive. It does not reduce success to individual willpower. It does not deny suffering or structural barriers. It asks how people can sustain meaningful effort in ways that support flourishing rather than deplete it.

Grit matters most when it helps people continue what is worth continuing, revise what needs revision, and build lives of meaningful commitment without losing the wider conditions of human well-being.

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Related articles

• What Is Grit?
• Angela Duckworth and the Modern Science of Grit
• Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals
• Grit and Self-Control: Related but Not the Same
• Grit and Conscientiousness: Overlap, Distinction, and Debate
• Grit and Resilience
• Grit, Hope, and Future Orientation
• Grit, Burnout, and the Risks of Overpersistence

Further reading

• Duckworth, A.L. (2016) Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. New York: Scribner.
• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M.E.P. (2004) Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Seligman, M.E.P. (2011) Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.
• Snyder, C.R. (2002) ‘Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind’, Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), pp. 249–275. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
• National Research Council (2012) Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Available at: https://www.nationalacademies.org/publications/13398/education-for-life-and-work-developing-transferable-knowledge-and-skills-in-the-21st-century
• University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center (n.d.) PERMA™ Theory of Well-Being and PERMA™ Workshops. Available at: https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/learn-more/perma-theory-well-being-and-perma-workshops

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References

• Credé, M., Tynan, M.C. and Harms, P.D. (2017) ‘Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), pp. 492–511. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
• Duckworth, A.L. (n.d.) Research. Available at: https://angeladuckworth.com/research/
• Duckworth, A.L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D. and Kelly, D.R. (2007) ‘Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), pp. 1087–1101. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
• Duckworth, A.L. and Quinn, P.D. (2009) ‘Development and validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)’, Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(2), pp. 166–174. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890802634290
• Duckworth, A.L. and Yeager, D.S. (2015) ‘Measurement matters: Assessing personal qualities other than cognitive ability for educational purposes’, Educational Researcher, 44(4), pp. 237–251. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X15584327
• Jachimowicz, J.M., Wihler, A., Bailey, E.R. and Galinsky, A.D. (2018) ‘Why grit requires perseverance and passion to positively predict performance’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(40), pp. 9980–9985. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803561115
• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M.E.P. (2004) Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Seligman, M.E.P. (2011) Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.
• Seligman, M.E.P. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000) ‘Positive psychology: An introduction’, American Psychologist, 55(1), pp. 5–14. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5
• Snyder, C.R. (2002) ‘Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind’, Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), pp. 249–275. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
• University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center (n.d.) PERMA™ Theory of Well-Being and PERMA™ Workshops. Available at: https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/learn-more/perma-theory-well-being-and-perma-workshops

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