Positive Leisure Science: From Subjective Experience to Social Contexts

This book extends positive psychology by embedding leisure into the positive science field, following a new paradigm and aggregating various domains and fields. Positive science can be applied to the field of leisure and, in turn, leisure can serve as an arena to study some of the most important optimal functioning variables. The book presents knowledge on a diverse range of topics about optimizing socio-cognitive processes and behaviors, places and contexts, societies and cultures through leisure. These topics are unified by an underlying continuum that extends from individuals and subjective experiences to social worlds. The contributions highlight components of everyday life, showing that subjective experience and life trajectories are structured and social goals and life purposes are defined and achieved within interactions between individuals and their lived contexts and environments in daily life. .

About the Author

Teresa Freire (PhD) is assistant professor at the School of Psychology in the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, and Director of the Psychological Counselling Service (ServPsi) of the School of Psychology.

She teaches in graduation, master and doctoral Psychology courses and supervises several master and PhD research projects, leading the research group for the study of optimal functioning (Grupo de Investigação para o Funcionamento Óptimo – GIFOp) aimed at studying the quality of subjective experience in daily life through the lens of positive psychology, in clinical and social psychological domains.

Based on her research findings, she has developed and supervised individual and group intervention programs, with children and adolescents. Leisure experience, and its implications to positive development of adolescents, has been one of her major research topics.

Teresa Freire also collaborates in international research teams and is author of national and international publications (peer-reviewed journals and books). She belongs to the European Network for Positive Psychology (ENPP), being member of the Management Board Committee and country representative for Portugal. She is the president of the Portuguese Society of Positive Psychology (Sociedade Portuguesa de Psicologia Positiva – SPPP).