Positive Psychology Course and Its Relationship to Well-Being, Depression, and Stress

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of a positive psychology course on student well-being, depressive symptoms, and stress in a repeated measure, nonequivalent control design. As hypothesized, the positive psychology students reported higher overall happiness, life satisfaction, routes to happiness, and lower depressive symptoms and stress compared to students in the control course. These findings replicate previous research on the benefits of positive psychology courses on well-being and extend previous research by showing that the benefits generalize to other reliable and multidimensional measures of happiness as well as measures of depression and stress. Our results indicate that a positive psychology course may be one way to improve students’ mental health.