The purpose of this paper was to introduce positive psychology, to the fields of SLA and English education in Korea. Positive psychology investigates how people flourish and seeks the virtues and strengths of humans. It focuses on the factors enabling people and their communities to thrive, instead of focusing on psychological disorders and abnormalities, longstanding issues of general psychology. Its three main research topics include positive emotions, traits, and institutions, all of which have relevance to SLA and L2 education. This paper examined how these topics have been approached in SLA. Much attention has focused on positive emotions, particularly, enjoyment, which has gained momentum in recent years with publications. Empirical studies of the impacts of positive emotions on L2 learning were reviewed with discussion of enjoyment. The paper concludes by discussing directions for future research, applying positive psychology to Korean EFL contexts.

Brand communities have been increasingly used by marketers to build brands. A brand community can be defined as a “…group of consumers with a shared enthusiasm for the brand and a well-developed social identity, whose members engage jointly in group actions to accomplish collective goals and/or express mutual sentiments and commitments” (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006, p. 45). Recent research on brand communities has begun to identify the importance of consumers’ psychological processes in regard to developing successful brand communities. Based on the flow theory from positive psychology, we propose that flow could be generated by brand community characteristics and plays an important role in influencing brand community members’ attitudes toward the brand. Specifically, we propose a model that identifies brand community characteristics (i.e., community cohesiveness and information quality) that produce flow experience and how the flow experience impacts brand identification and brand loyalty. Members from 31 automobile brand communities participated in this survey study, and 580 validated questionnaires were returned. Structural Equation Model was used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that community cohesiveness and information quality positively directly influence brand identification and also indirectly influence brand identification via flow. Flow also positively influences members’ brand identification and, subsequently, impacts brand loyalty. The results from our research contribute to the branding, brand community, and flow theory literature.