Piers Worth

Introduction

Piers Worth is a British psychologist, Visiting Professor in Psychology at Buckinghamshire New University, a Chartered Psychologist and an Accredited Psychotherapist. He wrote and leads the university's MSc in Applied Positive Psychology, and has served as head of the academic department of psychology there. His research concerns self-transcendence, lifespan development, and what has come to be called second wave positive psychology, the movement that argues the field must engage with difficulty, suffering, and mortality rather than with positive states alone.

His doctoral research set the shape of much of his later work: how creativity changes as people age, and whether it can support positive ageing. That combination of lifespan thinking with a willingness to work on uncomfortable material distinguishes him from the first generation of positive psychology, whose public reputation rested on happiness and character strengths.

Early Life and Education

Worth trained and qualified as a psychologist and as a psychotherapist in the United Kingdom, and took his doctorate with a study of creativity across the lifespan and its relationship to ageing well. He has described his research and writing as focused on subjects and applications that might broaden the base of positive psychology, a framing that places him at the edges of the field rather than at its centre.

He is based at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe, where he is attached to the Centre for Positive Psychology and to the Department of Psychology, and where he built the MSc in Applied Positive Psychology that he continues to lead.

Academic and Professional Career

Worth's career has combined academic administration, programme design, and research. As head of the psychology department at Buckinghamshire New University he shaped the institution's teaching in positive psychology, and the masters programme he wrote has trained many of the practitioners now working in applied positive psychology in the United Kingdom.

His research output has been collaborative and unusually wide-ranging. A long partnership with Matthew D. Smith has produced a series of papers on self-transcendence, on narrative identity, on happiness, and on what positive psychology might contribute in and after the pandemic. He has also worked with Lee Newitt, Andrew Machon, Diane Herbert, and Lesley Lyle on lifespan and existential themes, and with Anna Hatchard on a qualitative study of laughter yoga.

In 2021 he published with Smith, in Frontiers in Psychology, a critical review of the self-transcendence literature that has become his best-known paper. He has also edited a substantial volume, Positive Psychology Across the Lifespan: An Existential Perspective, with a foreword by Paul T. P. Wong (Routledge, 2024).

Major Contributions to Psychology

Self-transcendence

Worth and Smith's central argument is that self-transcendence, the capacity to orient beyond one's own immediate concerns, may help people find relief and support in conditions of uncertainty, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Their distinctive contribution is diagnostic as much as theoretical. Reviewing the historical foundations of the concept and the main theoretical approaches to it, they argue that existing definitions lean towards the complex, the obscure, and the imprecisely spiritual, with the consequence that the possibility of supporting self-transcendence in a wider population becomes excluding. Their aim is clarity, so that the construct can function as an inclusive and democratised resource for wellbeing and resilience.

Second wave positive psychology

Worth is one of four authors of Second Wave Positive Psychology: Embracing the Dark Side of Life, with Itai Ivtzan, Tim Lomas, and Kate Hefferon. The book's premise is that positive psychology is widely misunderstood as the study of pleasant states, when in fact it investigates some of the most difficult human experiences. It treats meaning, resilience, mortality, suffering, and spirituality from a constructive angle, arguing that the path of development often runs through experiences that are painful but transformatory.

Existential positive psychology across the lifespan

His edited volume situates positive psychology within lifespan developmental and existential frameworks, drawing on Erikson's stages, Frankl's account of meaning, and the tradition Paul Wong named existential positive psychology. Wong's foreword credits the book with addressing the divide between humanistic and positive psychology and showing that the two can be integrated.

Reworking Erikson, narrative identity, and shame

Worth has proposed a reconceptualisation of Erikson's life cycle organised around the experience of shame, arguing that the developmental polarity between autonomy and constraint, and the strength of will that emerges from navigating it, deserves more attention than it receives. With Newitt and Smith he has written on narrative identity, on the question of how people construct a story of themselves from the inside.

Major Publications

Second Wave Positive Psychology: Embracing the Dark Side of Life (with Itai Ivtzan, Tim Lomas, and Kate Hefferon, Routledge) — the textbook of the second wave position, arguing that positive psychology must engage the difficult as well as the pleasant.
Positive Psychology Across the Lifespan: An Existential Perspective (Routledge), as editor and contributor — a lifespan-developmental and existential reframing of the field, with a foreword by Paul T. P. Wong.
"Clearing the Pathways to Self-Transcendence" (with Matthew D. Smith, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021) — a critical review of the self-transcendence literature and the case for a clearer, more inclusive definition.
"Positive Psychology Post-Pandemic" (with Matthew D. Smith, 2022) — on what the field might contribute to recovery from the effects of the pandemic.
"Narrative Identity: From the Inside Out" (with Lee Newitt and Matthew D. Smith, 2023) — on self-narrative as a developmental resource.
"Happiness: Perspectives from Positive Psychology" (with Matthew D. Smith, 2023) — a compact survey from Aristotle to contemporary theorists.
"A Re-conceptualisation of Erikson's Life Cycle" (2021, with a German version in 2024) — a developmental account organised around shame and the emergence of will.
"No Laughing Matter: Qualitative Study of the Impact of Laughter Yoga Suggests Stress Inoculation" (with Anna Hatchard, 2021) — an empirical study of a laughter-based intervention.

Impact and Legacy

Worth's influence runs through teaching and synthesis rather than through a single large research programme. The masters programme he designed has trained a substantial share of the United Kingdom's applied positive psychology practitioners, and his books are used as course texts. His advocacy of second wave positive psychology, which insists that the field address suffering, mortality, and the darker range of experience, is now broadly accepted within the discipline even where his specific formulations are not adopted. The 2021 self-transcendence paper has been one of the more widely read statements of why the construct needs to be made usable.

The criticisms are of two kinds. The first is that the constructs he works with are, by his own admission, not settled. Worth and Smith's central complaint is that self-transcendence has been defined in ways that are complex, obscure, and imprecisely spiritual; that is a diagnosis rather than a solution, and the field still lacks a consensual definition or a well-validated measure. Critics would say that a construct whose definition is this unstable cannot yet bear the weight of intervention design, and that the "democratised" version risks thinning the concept into something closer to generic wellbeing.

The second is that second wave positive psychology is better at critique than at evidence. The position has succeeded as an argument within the field, and the claim that positive psychology should study difficulty is now uncontroversial. What is less clear is whether second wave work has produced a distinctive, well-supported body of findings rather than a redescription of existing humanistic and existential psychology in new vocabulary. The empirical studies associated with the group, including the small qualitative laughter yoga study, are modest in scale and design.

There are also two structural objections that apply to the wider enterprise he helps lead. The positive ageing paradigm has been criticised in gerontology for moralising later life and for locating responsibility for ageing well in the individual, thereby under-weighting material, health, and structural conditions that shape outcomes far more than outlook does. And the rapid growth of taught master's programmes in applied positive psychology, of which his is a prominent British example, has raised questions about credentialising interventions whose effects are on average small and highly variable across populations. Worth's own writing is notably more cautious than the field's popular reputation, and his work consistently acknowledges limits rather than promising transformation.

Learn More

Viktor Frankl — whose account of meaning through self-transcendence anchors the existential tradition Worth builds on.
Abraham Maslow — who placed self-transcendence above self-actualisation in his later work.
Carl Rogers — the humanistic tradition that Worth's lifespan volume argues should be integrated with positive psychology.
Itai Ivtzan — his co-author on Second Wave Positive Psychology, and a researcher on meaning and mindfulness.

References

Ivtzan, I., Lomas, T., Hefferon, K., & Worth, P. (2016). Second wave positive psychology: Embracing the dark side of life. Routledge.
Worth, P. (Ed.). (2024). Positive psychology across the lifespan: An existential perspective. Routledge.
Worth, P., & Smith, M. D. (2021). Clearing the pathways to self-transcendence. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
Worth, P., & Smith, M. D. (2023). Happiness: Perspectives from positive psychology. In S. Chetri, T. Dutta, & M. K. Mandal (Eds.), Understanding happiness: An explorative view. Springer.
Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.
Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.
Wong, P. T. P. (2011). Positive psychology 2.0: Towards a balanced interactive model of the good life. Canadian Psychology, 52(2), 69-81.