I spent a very, very long time teaching and conducting research in psychology. I am familiar with a number of subfields outside of my specific research focus. When one conducts scholarly research it is absolutely crucial to have corralled and deeply read all the previous research on the narrow topic or question under study. By previous research I specifically mean research published in peer reviewed journals. One of the reasons we impose this sort of boundary is that we otherwise encounter all manner of made up poop that violates the requirements for proper conceptualization, rigorous and relatively fault free experimental design and adequate statistical analysis.
On the other hand many folks believe that, because they are people, they know human psychology just naturally! It’s very fun to engage in this sort of lay psychology discourse because folks feel expert and knowledgable. If one sticks with an au courant topic others generally appear to offer approval.
Now to the point. I just searched very broadly the relevant databases and found not one scholarly research articles on so-called toxic positivity. Moreover, the etiology of this word use is really kind of wack. It derives from a misunderstanding of a research movement in my subfield known as positive psychology. Positive psychology describes a focus on the good rather than the bad. I was good friends with one of the founding five, Chris Peterson, starting when we were in graduate school together. Most of my research focused on reducing white racism which is the opposite of positive psychology. If I had instead studied non-racist white folks it would have fallen within the boundaries of the positive psychology rubric.
It should be clear now that positive psychology has absolutely nothing to do with positive outlooks among people. The first article that comes up to in a google search is somebody’s thesis. In this case it was a high school thesis. It is simply not associated with scientific psychology. No — those on the scientific side of scholarly psychology do not credit observations that derive from the observations of one person — even if they have a PhD in psychology.
Please stop with all the wild talk of toxic positivity. Here is a frequently cited article that in my opinion straddles the boundary well between studying positive vs negative behaviors and is cited 212 times as of today!.