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Recreate or Create? Leisure as an Arena for Recovery and Change

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Positive Psychology as Social Change

Abstract

While passive leisure is experienced as pleasant and serves as an important route to recovery, active leisure has a distinct phenomenology and a different function. Active leisure is first and foremost a motivator for creating changes and developing potentials. The chapter investigates links between leisure and well-being, and is particularly concerned with the issue of whether development of skills and recreational specialization really is experienced as pleasant. In conclusion, positive psychology is considered to still be a field of conceptual confusion, but with an important promise: That of establishing a scientific understanding of how the balance between work and leisure may provide opportunities satisfaction and flourishing completion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I treat life satisfaction and overall happiness as synonyms in this chapter because they both reflect a general evaluation of the degree to which life as a whole is favorable. I do, however, stress the distinction between satisfaction and happiness as an overall evaluation versus satisfaction and happiness as feeling states experienced in concrete situations. At the level of state experiences, I also consider satisfaction to be a feeling.

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  1. University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway

    Joar Vittersø

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    Robert Biswas-Diener

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Vittersø, J. (2011). Recreate or Create? Leisure as an Arena for Recovery and Change. In: Biswas-Diener, R. (eds) Positive Psychology as Social Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9938-9_16

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