Tim Lomas

Introduction

Tim Lomas is a British psychologist whose work sits at the intersection of positive psychology, cross-cultural linguistics and the study of meditation. He is best known for two things: the "positive lexicography," a long-running attempt to catalogue words from the world's languages that describe wellbeing but have no single-word English equivalent, and his role in articulating "second wave" positive psychology, which argues that the field must engage with difficulty, suffering and ambivalent emotion rather than with positive states alone.

Lomas's public profile is unusual for a researcher of his seniority. The lexicography has been covered by The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Atlantic, TIME, The Sunday Times and the BBC, and it has made him one of the most quotable figures in contemporary wellbeing research. It is also the part of his work that has attracted the most methodological scrutiny. Since the early 2020s he has been based at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is a psychology research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and a member of the Human Flourishing Program.

Early Life and Education

Lomas is British and was raised in London. Details of his family background and schooling are not documented in reliable public sources, and he has not published a personal memoir; biographical sketches jump straight to his doctoral work.

He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Westminster in 2012, funded by that university's Institute of Health and Wellbeing. His thesis examined the impact of meditation on men's wellbeing using a mixed-methods design that combined narrative interviews, cognitive testing and electroencephalography. The combination mattered for his later career: it gave him both a quantitative and a qualitative footing, and it oriented him toward questions about masculinity, contemplative practice and how people describe experiences that standard measures struggle to capture.

That last concern — the gap between what people feel and the vocabulary available to them for saying so — became the organising question of his subsequent research.

Academic and Professional Career

In April 2013 Lomas joined the University of East London as a lecturer on the MSc in Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP), one of the earliest and best-known taught postgraduate programmes in the field in Europe. He subsequently became associate programme leader, and later programme leader, for the MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology, and he taught on the programme for roughly a decade. During this period he received grant funding to develop mindfulness-based interventions for at-risk young people and for older adults.

He has since moved to Harvard University, where he is a psychology research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an affiliate of the Human Flourishing Program. His stated research focus there is cross-cultural perspectives on wellbeing, particularly concepts and practices characterised as "non-Western." Publisher biographies accompanying the second edition of Applied Positive Psychology (2024) list him in that Harvard role while describing his UEL post in the past tense, so the transition appears to have occurred in the early 2020s; he has also continued to publish with UEL colleagues.

Lomas has been prolific. By his publishers' count he had produced more than 100 papers and a dozen books since 2013, spanning linguistics, gender, Buddhism, systems theory and social theory as well as psychology, and he has written for general audiences in The Guardian and The Conversation.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The positive lexicography

Lomas's best-known project began with a 2016 paper in The Journal of Positive Psychology, "Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 'untranslatable' words pertaining to well-being." He assembled 216 terms — hygge, tarab, dadirri, desenrascanço, charmolypi and many others — and subjected them to a grounded-theory analysis, organising them into three overarching categories: feelings (positive and complex), relationships (intimacy and prosociality) and character (personal resources and spirituality).

The project has two stated aims. The descriptive aim is to provide a window onto cultural variation in how wellbeing is constructed, countering the field's dependence on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) samples. The more ambitious aim is therapeutic: Lomas speculates that importing these words into English could enlarge speakers' emotional vocabulary and thereby enrich their experience of wellbeing. He later extended the theoretical framing in "Experiential cartography and the significance of 'untranslatable' words" (Theory & Psychology, 2018). The lexicography is maintained online at drtimlomas.com/lexicography and is explicitly open to correction and addition.

Second wave positive psychology

With Itai Ivtzan, Kate Hefferon and Piers Worth, Lomas co-authored Second Wave Positive Psychology: Embracing the Dark Side of Life (2016). The book argues that positive psychology had been widely misread as the study of cheerfulness, and that a mature science of flourishing must address mortality, suffering, adversity, spirituality and ambivalent emotional states. Lomas has written separately on "complex" or co-valenced feelings — emotions that are simultaneously pleasant and painful — arguing that they are central rather than marginal to a good life. This work places him among the field's internal reformers rather than its defenders.

Critical positive psychology

Lomas co-edited The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Positive Psychology (2022) with Nicholas J. L. Brown and Francisco José Eiroa-Orosa. Brown is one of the field's sharpest critics, best known for the 2013 American Psychologist paper with Alan Sokal and Harris Friedman that dismantled the "positivity ratio" claim of Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada. That a leading positive psychologist should co-edit a volume dedicated to critical appraisal of his own field is a notable feature of Lomas's career.

Meditation, masculinity and measurement

His doctoral and early postdoctoral work produced a series of papers on the experiential difficulties of meditation practice and on men's emotional development, including "A qualitative summary of experiential challenges associated with meditation practice" (Mindfulness, 2015). He has also worked on applying wellbeing concepts to large survey datasets, including new perspectives on wellbeing in the Gallup World Poll.

Major Publications

Second Wave Positive Psychology: Embracing the Dark Side of Life (2016, with Itai Ivtzan, Kate Hefferon and Piers Worth)
Mindfulness in Positive Psychology: The Science of Meditation and Wellbeing (2016, edited with Itai Ivtzan)
The Positive Power of Negative Emotions (2016)
Applied Positive Psychology: Integrated Positive Practice (with Kate Hefferon, Itai Ivtzan and Kirsty Gardiner; 2nd edition 2024)
Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Wellbeing (MIT Press, 2018)
The Happiness Dictionary: Words from Around the World to Help Us Lead a Richer Life (2018)
Happiness: Found in Translation (2022)
The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Positive Psychology (2022, edited with Nicholas J. L. Brown and Francisco José Eiroa-Orosa)
Happiness (MIT Press, 2023)

Impact and Legacy

Lomas has been one of the more effective popularisers of wellbeing research in the English-speaking world, and the lexicography in particular has given journalists, coaches and therapists a vocabulary for talking about cultural variation in emotion. Within academia, his influence runs along two lines: he helped legitimate the study of ambivalent and painful emotional states inside positive psychology, and he helped create an institutional home — through the Routledge handbook and the "critical positive psychology" label — for systematic criticism of the field.

Criticism of the lexicography

The methodological objections are substantial. First, the corpus was assembled largely through web searching and from secondary definitions rather than through systematic elicitation from native speakers, and Lomas has openly invited readers to submit additional words. Critics of the wider "untranslatable words" genre — of which Adam Jacot de Boinod's dictionaries are the commercial exemplar — have shown that such lists routinely contain errors, folk etymologies and meanings that speakers of the source language do not recognise; the genre has a documented problem with accuracy.

Second, "untranslatable" is strictly a misnomer, and Lomas himself places it in scare quotes. Every word on his list can be rendered in an English phrase; what is meant is that English lacks a single lexeme, which is a weaker and more common phenomenon than the word "untranslatable" implies. Third, the project leans on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whose strong determinist form — Whorf's claim that the Hopi lacked a linear concept of time — was discredited decades ago, notably in Steven Pinker's critique. Only the milder relativist version, that language shapes rather than determines experience, retains scholarly support, and that version does not carry the therapeutic conclusion Lomas hopes for.

Fourth, there is a sampling problem: the lexicography collects words pertaining to wellbeing, so the conclusion that other cultures encode rich positive concepts is partly built into the selection rule. And fifth, critics of cross-cultural psychology more generally warn that extracting single words from their linguistic systems and cultural contexts risks a soft exoticism, in which unfamiliar languages are mined for picturesque wisdom. Lomas himself names the first of these problems as the central insight of structuralism.

The untested therapeutic claim

The strongest criticism is that the payoff claim is speculative. Writing in The Psychologist, Lomas conceded that the idea the lexicon could enrich inner experience "will require a programme of empirical inquiry to substantiate it." More than a decade after the first paper, there is little direct evidence that learning foreign emotion words produces measurable gains in wellbeing, and the nearest supporting literature — on emotional granularity, associated with Lisa Feldman Barrett — concerns discriminating among emotions one already has, not acquiring new lexemes.

Lomas's responses

Lomas has been unusually candid about these limits. He states in print that the definitions are "neither complete nor final and canonical," that words are polysemous, that a term is hard to understand in isolation from its linguistic system and context of use, and that his own interpretations are "inevitably subjective and partial," particularly as he comes from a WEIRD society himself. He set up a public webpage so that scholars worldwide could refine entries. His 2018 Theory & Psychology paper engages directly with the hermeneutic and relativist objections, drawing on Anna Wierzbicka's argument that culture-specific concepts can be decomposed into simpler, universally understandable elements. And by co-editing a critical handbook with one of positive psychology's most effective debunkers, he has given the critics a platform rather than a rebuttal.

Whether this constitutes an adequate answer is contested. Conceding that a dataset is provisional does not make its individual entries accurate, and acknowledging that a hypothesis is untested does not license the confident claims that appear in the popular books derived from it.

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References

Lomas, T. (2016). The Positive Power of Negative Emotions. Piatkus.