Font Size: 

Psychology has become a science that direct much of its attention on repairing damage within a disease model. This tendency to focus on pathology result in model of human being that neglects the fulfilled individual, improvement in quality of life and prevention of pathologies. Psychology should not just the study of weakness and pathology, it is also the study of strength. Treatment is not just directed to fix the broken, but it is also nurturing the best within individuals. From the perspective of prevention, researchers have discovered that there are human strength that acts as buffers against mental ilness (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

Flourishing is a term used to describe high levels of well-being (Hone et al., 2014).  Flourishers are those individuals with both high levels of hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being (Schotanus-Dijkstra, et al., 2016). Human flourishing rests on five pillars of Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning in life, and Accomplishments (PERMA). These elements are fundamentals to human well-being. What is the good life? The answer is that it is pleasant, engaged, meaningful, achieving, and connected (Seligman, 2011).

The eudaimonic approaches on well-being suggest that psychological health is achieved by fulfilling one’s potential, functioning at an optimal level, or realizing one’s true nature (Lent, 2004 in Cooke, Melchert, & Conno, 2016). According to Maslow (1987),  self-actualization refers to people’s desire for self-fulfillment, the tendency for them to become actualized  in what they  are potentially. This tendency might be explained as to become more what one idiosynctratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Self actualization can also be described as individuals actualized or realizing their potential, fulfilling  themselves, and becoming the best they are capable of becoming. The emergence of the need for self-actualization  usually rests upon some prior satisfaction of the physiological, safety, love, and esteem needs.

Although the concept of flourishing and self-actualization are widely used, they still need to be studied within the cultural context because people in different cultures have different construals of the self and others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).  The culture and the social system in which one has raised may affect motivation, behavior, and the need for self-actualization (Faraci & Cannistraci, 2015).  Measurement of well-being is also said as having tendency to reflect Western individualistic orientation of conceptualizing health and well-being (Cooke, Melchert, & Conno, 2016).Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine self-actualization as the predictor of flourishing in the context of Indonesian culture.

This study involved 147 undergraduate students as participants, with ages ranged from 18 to 24 years.  PERMA-Profiler (Butler & Kern, 2016) was used to measure flourishing in five PERMA domain (Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning in life, and Accomplishments). This research used The Short Index of Self-Actualization or the Self-Actualization Scale (SAS; Jones & Crandall,1986) to measure self-actualization. Simple linear regression analysis and  Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data.

Result showed that self-actualization had significant contribution toward flourishing.  The contribution of self-actualization contributed 12.9%  to flourishing (R² = 0.359, F= 21.433,  p = .000), and the rest 87.1%  was influenced by other factors. Promoting flourishing appears to depend on many factors other than self-actualization. More research is needed in the study of flourishing.

 

Key words: flourishing, self-actualization, well-being, PERMA