Psicología positiva y psicología popular de la autoayuda: un romance histórico, psicológico y cultural.

In this paper, the psychological discourse about the subject pro-vided both by positive psychology and by self-help literature is compared. To specify the object of analysis we define a set of psychological categories and subcategories, to which we have dubbed as "positive" individualism and which cultural and historical back-ground has been analyzed in previ-ous works. Besides these categories, we analyze other aspects such as the kind of vocabulary and the type of rhetoric deployed by both kind of litera-ture to defend their arguments. To carry out these analyses we used a mixed methodology, combining the word-count technique, the ANOVA, the correspondences analysis, and key-words in context. We added a critic discussion of the texts to the data obtained. The hypothesis set out here postulate that both positive psychology and self-help literature share com-mon psychological roots: they defend the same idea of happiness in a simi-lar way psychological concepts in order to describe and explain the individ-ual, and develop analogous psychological practices and techniques aiming to help the individual to search his own well-being. We also postulate that this commonality is not shared by other psychological models, although they have a comparable interventional and practical vein, such as cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, which we also analyze in this paper. The results obtained are congruent with the set of hypothesis here suggested. Key words: positive psychology; self-help; word-count; "positive" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]