Beyond the Clinic: A Review of PERMA-Based Interventions in Non-Healthcare Populations

Much of the early intervention work built on Seligman’s PERMA model (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment) grew out of healthcare settings, where it was used with clinical groups such as cancer patients and people managing chronic illness. The model has much more implications than simply being applicable to clinical contexts. This paper reviews how PERMA-based interventions have been adapted for populations outside the clinic, organising the literature around five settings: schools and universities, workplaces, military personnel and veterans, sport, and older adults living in the community. The evidence clearly shows a significant gap in executing standardized PERMA protocols in interventions across various settings. Schools and aging populations have produced the most genuinely experimental work, including randomised and quasi-experimental designs, whereas much of what is described as a PERMA intervention in workplace and military contexts turns out to be correlational or psychometric rather than a tested programme. Across all five settings the model is repeatedly extended (PERMA+4, PERMA-H), which speaks to its flexibility but also to a degree of conceptual under-specification. Measurement is inconsistent and many studies enlist PERMA-Profiler as a holistic measure of wellbeing and doesn’t consider further useful domain-level variation. Furthermore, the PERMA framework has been solely modeled on a Western population and fitting the model without cultural attunement raises questions on intervention protocol. The review draws on freely accessible databases; funding constraints meant that several major subscription databases could not be searched, which is acknowledged as a limitation. Taken together, the literature supports PERMA’s usefulness beyond the clinic while pointing clearly to the need for stronger designs, standardised measurement, and culturally grounded adaptation.