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Positive Interventions: Past, Present and Future As positive intervention researchers, we are often approached by proponents of ACT, and the ensuing conversation is freuqently the same. The questioner says,“I have always wondered what the difference is between a positive intervention and ACT.” Obscured within this polite statement are the questions they really want to ask: is there anything new about positive interventions, or are we “selling old wine in a new bottle”? What do positive interventions bring to the table that other interventions do not? These are, we think, reasonable questions, and ones that researchers in our field too rarely take the time to answer. Equally pressing is a concern that we hear more rarely, but are fairly certain lurks in the back of our questioners’ minds with some regularity: Isn’t it irresponsible to ignore a person’s problems? Isn’t there a risk that such an approach can do harm to clients?

One central goal of this chapter is to explore the ways in which positive intervention research has and has not been thoughtful about exactly these issues. First, we address the question of what, exactly, a positive intervention is. We follow with a review of the different areas of positive intervention, including descriptions of prototypical activities, evidence of their effectiveness, and important considerations for their application. Lastly, we discuss several future directions for positive intervention research; most notable of these is investigation of the possibility that positive interventions, in certain contexts, may be ineffective, or even cause harm. Each of these sections constitutes a step towards our final goal of discussing what distinguishes …