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Optimism about the Future 7. Happiness in the Present Part II: Strength and Virtue 8. Renewing Strength and Virtue 9. Your Signature Strengths Part III: In the Mansions of Life Work and Personal Satisfaction Love Raising Children Reprise and Summary Psychologists can now measure such once-fuzzy concepts as depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism with considerable precision. We now know a good deal about how these troubles develop across the life span, and about their genetics, their biochemistry, and their psychological causes. Best of all we have learned how to relieve these disorders. By my last count, fourteen out of the several dozen major mental illnesses could be effectively treated and two of them cured with medication and specific forms of psychotherapy.
But this progress has come at a high cost. Relieving the states that make life miserable, it seems, has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. But people want more than just to correct their weaknesses. They want lives imbued with meaning, and not just to fidget until they die. Lying awake at night, you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three and feel a little less miserable day by day. If you are such a person, you have probably found the field of psychology to be a puzzling disappointment.
Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness, just as we do for weight. New research into happiness, though, demonstrates that it can be lastingly increased. And a new movement, Positive Psychology, shows how you can come to live in the upper reaches of your set range of happiness; the first half of this book is about understanding the positive emotions and increasing yours. While the theory that happiness cannot be lastingly increased is one obstacle to scientific research on the subject, there is another, more profound obstacle: the belief that happiness and even more generally, any positive human motivation is inauthentic.
I call this pervasive view about human nature, which recurs across many cultures, the rotten-to the-core dogma. If there is any doctrine this book seeks to overthrow, it is this one. The doctrine of original sin is the oldest manifestation of the rotten-to- the-core dogma, but such thinking has not died out in our democratic, secular state. Freud dragged this doctrine into twentieth-century psychology, defining all of civilization including modern morality, science, religion, and technological progress as just an elaborate defense against basic conflicts over infantile sexuality and aggression.
The rotten-to-the-core doctrine also pervades the understanding of human nature in the arts and social sciences. Just one example of thousands is No Ordinary Time, a gripping history of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the great living political scientists. Motivations like exercising fairness or pursuing duty are ruled out as fundamental; there must be some covert, negative motivation that underpins goodness if the analysis is to be academically respectable. I cannot say this too strongly: In spite of the widespread acceptance of the rotten-to-the-core dogma in the religious and secular world, there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation.
I believe that evolution has favored both good and bad traits, and any number of adaptive roles in the world have selected for morality, cooperation, altruism, and goodness, just as any number have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism. This dual-aspect premise is the cornerstone of the second half of this book. Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play, and parenting. Positive Psychology has three pillars: First is the study of positive emotion. Third is the study of the positive institutions, such as democracy, strong families, and free inquiry, that support the virtues, which in turn support the positive emotions. The positive emotions of confidence, hope, and trust, for example, serve us best not when life is easy, but when life is difficult.
In times of trouble, understanding and shoring up the positive institutions, institutions like democracy, strong family, and free press, are of immediate importance. In times of trouble, understanding and building the strengths and virtues—among them, valor, perspective, integrity, equity, loyalty—may become more urgent than in good times. Since September 11, , I have pondered the relevance of Positive Psychology. In times of trouble, does the understanding and alleviating of suffering trump the understanding and building of happiness? I think not. People who are impoverished, depressed, or suicidal care about much more than just the relief of their suffering. These persons care—sometimes desperately—about virtue, about purpose, about integrity, and about meaning. Experiences that induce positive emotion cause negative emotion to dissipate rapidly.
The strengths and virtues, as we will see, function to buffer against misfortune and against the psychological disorders, and they may be the key to building resilience. So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose.
Big-words: just gimme happiness big orange lollipops purple balloons. See there his orange and purple bouquet. The lollipops melt. The balloons wilt. The man waits. As a novice in the School Sisters of Notre Dame, she committed the rest of her life to the teaching of young children. Asked to write a short sketch of her life on this momentous occasion, she wrote: God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value…. The past year which I spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine. In the same year, in the same city, and taking the same vows, Marguerite Donnelly wrote her autobiographical sketch: I was born on September 26, , the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys…. My candidate year was spent in the mother-house, teaching chemistry and second year Latin at Notre Dame Institute.
These two nuns, along with of their sisters, thereby became subjects in the most remarkable study of happiness and longevity ever done. Investigating how long people will live and understanding what conditions shorten and lengthen life is an enormously important but enormously knotty scientific problem. But why? Is it the clean mountain air of Utah as opposed to the exhaust fumes of Las Vegas? Is it the staid Mormon life as opposed to the more frenetic lifestyle of the average Nevadan? Is it the stereotypical diet in Nevada—junk food, late-night snacks, alcohol, coffee, and tobacco—as opposed to wholesome, farm-fresh food, and the scarcity of alcohol, coffee, and tobacco in Utah?
Too many insidious as well as healthful factors are confounded between Nevada and Utah for scientists to isolate the cause. Unlike Nevadans or even Utahans, however, nuns lead routine and sheltered lives. They all eat roughly the same bland diet. They have the same reproductive and marital histories. They are in the same economic and social class, and they have the same access to good medical care. So almost all the usual confounds are eliminated, yet there is still wide variation in how long nuns live and how healthy they are.
Cecilia is still alive at age ninety-eight and has never been sick a day in her life. In contrast, Marguerite had a stroke at age fifty-nine, and died soon thereafter. We can be sure their lifestyle, diet, and medical care were not the culprits. When the novitiate essays of all nuns were carefully read, however, a very strong and surprising difference emerged. Looking back at what Cecilia and Marguerite wrote, can you spot it? When the amount of positive feeling was quantified by raters who did not know how long the nuns lived, it was discovered that 90 percent of the most cheerful quarter was alive at age eighty-five versus only 34 percent of the least cheerful quarter. Similarly, 54 percent of the most cheerful quarter was alive at age ninety-four, as opposed to 11 percent of the least cheerful quarter.
Was it really the upbeat nature of their sketches that made the difference? Perhaps it was a difference in the degree of unhappiness expressed, or in how much they looked forward to the future, or how devout they were, or how intellectually complex the essays were. So it seems that a happy nun is a long-lived nun. Smiling on demand, it turns out, is easier said than done. Some of us break into a radiant smile of authentic good cheer, while the rest of us pose politely. There are two kinds of smiles. The first, called a Duchenne smile after its discoverer, Guillaume Duchenne , is genuine. The muscles that do this, the orbicularis oculi and the zygomaticus, are exceedingly difficult to control voluntarily. The other smile, called the Pan American smile after the flight attendants in television ads for the now-defunct airline , is inauthentic, with none of the Duchenne features.
Indeed, it is probably more related to the rictus that lower primates display when frightened than it is to happiness. When trained psychologists look through collections of photos, they can at a glance separate out the Duchenne from the non Duchenne smilers. Dacher Keltner and LeeAnne Harker of the University of California at Berkeley, for example, studied senior-class photos from the yearbook of Mills College. All but three of the women were smiling, and half of the smilers were Duchenne smilers. All the women were contacted at ages twenty-seven, forty-three, and fifty-two and asked about their marriages and their life satisfaction.
Astonishingly, Duchenne women, on average, were more likely to be married, to stay married, and to experience more personal well-being over the next thirty years. Those indicators of happiness were predicted by a mere crinkling of the eyes. Questioning their results, Harker and Keltner considered whether the Duchenne women were prettier, and their good looks rather than the genuineness of their smile predicted more life satisfaction. A genuinely smiling woman, it turned out, was simply more likely to be well-wed and happy. The first part of this book is about these momentary positive emotions: joy, flow, glee, pleasure, contentment, serenity, hope, and ecstasy. In particular, I will focus on three questions: Why has evolution endowed us with positive feeling?
What are the functions and consequences of these emotions, beyond making us feel good? Who has positive emotion in abundance, and who does not? What enables these emotions, and what disables them? How can you build more and lasting positive emotion into your life? Everyone wants answers to these questions for their own lives and it is natural to turn to the field of psychology for answers. So it may come as a surprise to you that psychology has badly neglected the positive side of life. For every one hundred journal articles on sadness, there is just one on happiness. One of my aims is to provide responsible answers, grounded in scientific research, to these three questions. Unfortunately, unlike relieving depression where research has now provided step-by-step manuals that are reliably documented to work , what we know about building happiness is spotty. On some topics I can present solid facts, but on others, the best I can do is to draw inferences from the latest research and suggest how it can guide your life.
In all cases, I will distinguish between what is known and what is my speculation. My most grandiose aim, as you will find out in the next three chapters, is to correct the imbalance by propelling the field of psychology into supplementing its hard-won knowledge about suffering and mental illness with a great deal more knowledge about positive emotion, as well as about personal strengths and virtues. How do strengths and virtues sneak in? A hedonist wants as many good moments and as few bad moments as possible in his life, and simple hedonic theory says that the quality of his life is just the quantity of good moments minus the quantity of bad moments.
This is more than an ivory-tower theory, since very many people run their lives based on exactly this goal. But it is a delusion, I believe, because the sum total of our momentary feelings turns out to be a very flawed measure of how good or how bad we judge an episode—a movie, a vacation, a marriage, or an entire life—to be. One technique he uses to test hedonic theory is the colonoscopy, in which a scope on a tube is inserted uncomfortably into the rectum and moved up and down the bowels for what seems like an eternity, but is actually only a few minutes. A stationary colonoscope provides a less uncomfortable final minute than what went before, but it does add one extra minute of discomfort. The added minute means, of course, that this group gets more total pain than the routine group.
Because their experience ends relatively well, however, their memory of the episode is much rosier and, astonishingly, they are more willing to undergo the procedure again than the routine group. In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it. This book will talk about why hedonism fails and what this might mean for you. So Positive Psychology is about the meaning of those happy and unhappy moments, the tapestry they weave, and the strengths and virtues they display that make up the quality of your life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Anglo-Viennese philosopher, was by all accounts miserable. I am a collector of Wittgensteinobilia, but I have never seen a photo of him smiling Duchenne or otherwise. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want, we want to be entitled to our positive feelings. Yet we have invented myriad shortcuts to feeling good; drugs, chocolate, loveless sex, shopping, masturbation, and television are all examples. I am not, however, going to suggest that you should drop these shortcuts altogether. The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who in the middle of great wealth are starving spiritually.
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die. The positive feeling that arises from the exercise of strengths and virtues, rather than from the shortcuts, is authentic. I found out about the value of this authenticity by giving courses in Positive Psychology for the last three years at the University of Pennsylvania. These have been much more fun than the abnormal psychology courses I taught for the twenty years prior. I tell my students about Jon Haidt, a gifted young University of Virginia professor who began his career working on disgust, giving people fried grasshoppers to eat.
Worn down by all these negative explorations, he began to look for an emotion that is the opposite of moral disgust, which he calls elevation. Haidt collects stories of the emotional reactions to experiencing the better side of humanity, to seeing another person do something extraordinarily positive. We passed an old woman shoveling her driveway. One of the guys asked the driver to let him out. I thought he was just going to take a shortcut home. But when I saw him pick up the shovel, well, I felt a lump in my throat and started to cry. I wanted to tell everyone about it. I felt romantic toward him. The students in one of my classes wondered if happiness comes from the exercise of kindness more readily than it does from having fun. After a heated dispute, we each undertook an assignment for the next class: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity, and write about both.
The results were life-changing. When our philanthropic acts were spontaneous and called upon personal strengths, the whole day went better. One junior told about her nephew phoning for help with his third-grade arithmetic. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. Time stops. One of the business students volunteered that he had come to the University of Pennsylvania to learn how to make a lot of money in order to be happy, but that he was floored to find that he liked helping other people more than spending his money shopping. To understand well-being, then, we also need to understand personal strengths and the virtues, and this is the topic of the second part of this book. When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Feelings are states, momentary occurrences that need not be recurring features of personality. Traits, in contrast to states, are either negative or positive characteristics that recur across time and different situations, and strengths and virtues are the positive characteristics that bring about good feeling and gratification. Traits are abiding dispositions whose exercise makes momentary feelings more likely. The negative trait of paranoia makes the momentary state of jealousy more likely, just as the positive trait of being humorous makes the state of laughing more likely. The trait of optimism helps explain how a single snapshot of the momentary happiness of nuns could predict how long they will live. Optimistic people tend to interpret their troubles as transient, controllable, and specific to one situation. Pessimistic people, in contrast, believe that their troubles last forever, undermine everything they do, and are uncontrollable. To see if optimism predicts longevity, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, selected consecutive patients who referred themselves for medical care forty years ago.
On admission, Mayo Clinic patients routinely take a battery of psychological as well as physical tests, and one of these is a test of the trait of optimism. Of these patients, had died by the year , and optimists had 19 percent greater longevity, in terms of their expected life span, compared to that of the pessimists. Living 19 percent longer is again comparable to the longer lives of the happy nuns. Optimism is only one of two dozen strengths that bring about greater well-being. Some men never grow up and never display these traits, while other men revel in them as they age.
Both these studies began in the late s, when the participants were in their late teens, and continue to this day, with the men now over eighty. Vaillant has uncovered the best predictors of successful aging, among them income, physical health, and joy in living. The mature defenses are robust harbingers of joy in living, high income, and a vigorous old age in both the largely white and Protestant Harvard group and the much more varied inner-city group. For the Harvard men at age 75, joy in living, marital satisfaction, and the subjective sense of physical health were predicted best by the mature defenses exercised and measured in middle age. How did Positive Psychology select just twenty-four strengths out of the enormous number of traits to choose from? The last time anyone bothered to count, in , more than eighteen thousand words in English referred to traits.
Choosing which traits to investigate is a serious question for a distinguished group of psychologists and psychiatrists who are creating a system that is intended to be the opposite of the DSM the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, which serves as a classification scheme of mental illness. Valor, kindness, originality? But what about intelligence, perfect pitch, or punctuality? Three criteria for strengths are as follows: They are valued in almost every culture They are valued in their own right, not just as a means to other ends They are malleable So intelligence and perfect pitch are out, because they are not very learnable. Punctuality is learnable, but, like perfect pitch, it is generally a means to another end like efficiency and is not valued in almost every culture. While psychology may have neglected virtue, religion and philosophy most assuredly have not, and there is astonishing convergence across the millennia and across cultures about virtue and strength.
Wisdom, for example, can be broken down into the strengths of curiosity, love of learning, judgment, originality, social intelligence, and perspective. Love includes kindness, generosity, nurturance, and the capacity to be loved as well as to love. Convergence across thousands of years and among unrelated philosophical traditions is remarkable and Positive Psychology takes this cross-cultural agreement as its guide. These strengths and virtues serve us in times of ill fortune as well as better moments. In fact, hard times are uniquely suited to the display of many strengths. Until recently I thought that Positive Psychology was a creature of good times: When nations are at war, impoverished, and in social turmoil, I assumed, their most natural concerns are with defense and damage, and the science they find most congenial is about healing broken things. In contrast, when nations are at peace, in surplus, and not in social turmoil, then they become concerned with building the best things in life.
Florence under Lorenzo de Medici decided to devote its surplus not to becoming the most awesome military power in Europe, but to creating beauty. Muscle physiology distinguishes between tonic activity the baseline of electrical activity when the muscle is idling and phasic activity the burst of electrical activity when the muscle is challenged and contracts. Most of psychology is about tonic activity; introversion, high IQ, depression, and anger, for example, are all measured in the absence of any real-world challenge, and the hope of the psychometrician is to predict what a person will actually do when confronted with a phasic challenge. How well do tonic measures fare? Does a high IQ predict a truly canny response to a customer saying no?
How well does tonic depression predict collapse when a person is fired? Psychology as usual predicts many of the cases, but there are huge numbers of high-IQ people who fail, and another huge number of low-IQ people who succeed when life challenges them to do something actually intelligent in the world. I call this imperfection in prediction the Harry Truman effect. We need a psychology of rising to the occasion, because that is the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of predicting human behavior. Their tonic characteristics—depression level, sleep patterns, waist size—probably did not count for much, except insofar as they fed the Harry Truman effect.
This means that we all contain ancient strengths inside of us that we may not know about until we are truly challenged. Not because they were made of different stuff than we are, but because they faced a time of trouble that evoked the ancient strengths within. When you read about these strengths in Chapters 8 and 9 and take the strengths survey, you will find that some of your strengths are tonic and some are phasic. Kindness, curiosity, loyalty, and spirituality, for example, tend to be tonic; you can display these several dozen times a day. Perseverance, perspective, fairness, and valor, at the other extreme, tend to be phasic; you cannot demonstrate valor while standing in a check-out line or sitting in an airplane unless terrorists hijack it. One phasic action in a lifetime may be enough to demonstrate valor. When you read about these strengths, you will also find some that are deeply characteristic of you, whereas others are not.
I call the former your signature strengths, and one of my purposes is to distinguish these from strengths that are less a part of you. I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths. For this reason, the second part of this book focuses on how to identify these strengths. Rather, the good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. This is something you can learn to do in each of the main realms of your life: work, love, and raising children.
One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day. Simplifying a complex concept for my students, or telling my eight-year-old about bidding in bridge, ignites a glow inside me. More than that, when I teach well, it invigorates me, and the well-being it brings is authentic because it comes from what I am best at. In contrast, organizing people is not one of my signature strengths. Brilliant mentors have helped me become more adequate at it, so if I must, I can chair a committee effectively. But when it is over, I feel drained, not invigorated. What satisfaction I derive from it feels less authentic than what I get from teaching, and shepherding a good committee report does not put me in better touch with myself or anything larger.
The well-being that using your signature strengths engenders is anchored in authenticity. But just as well-being needs to be anchored in strengths and virtues, these in turn must be anchored in something larger. Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life. What does Positive Psychology tell us about finding purpose in life, about leading a meaningful life beyond the good life? I am not sophomoric enough to put forward a complete theory of meaning, but I do know that it consists in attachment to something larger, and the larger the entity to which you can attach yourself, the more meaning in your life. Many people who want meaning and purpose in their lives have turned to New Age thinking or have returned to organized religions. They hunger for the miraculous, or for divine intervention. Like many of these stranded people, I also hunger for meaning in my life that will transcend the arbitrary purposes I have chosen for myself.
Positive Psychology points the way toward a secular approach to noble purpose and transcendent meaning—and, even more astonishingly, toward a God who is not supernatural. These hopes are expressed in my final chapter. As your voyage through this book begins, please take a quick happiness survey. This survey was developed by Michael W. Fordyce, and it has been taken by tens of thousands of people. You can take the test on the next page or go to the website www. The website will keep track of changes in your score as you read this book, and it will also provide you with up-to-the-moment comparisons of others who have taken the test, broken down by age, gender, and education. In thinking about such comparisons, of course, remember that happiness is not a competition. Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.
Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel? Check the one statement below that best describes your average happiness. Extremely unhappy utterly depressed, completely down Consider your emotions a moment further. On average, what percentage of the time do you feel happy? What percentage of the time do you feel unhappy? What percentage of the time do you feel neutral neither happy nor unhappy? Write down your best estimates, as well as you can, in the spaces below. Make sure the three figures add up to percent. The average score on time is happy, There is a question that may have been bothering you as you read this chapter: What is happiness, anyway? More words have been penned about defining happiness than about almost any other philosophical question.
I could fill the rest of these pages with just a fraction of the attempts to take this promiscuously overused word and make sense of it, but it is not my intention to add to the clutter. I have taken care to use my terms in consistent and well-defined ways, and the interested reader will find the definitions in the Appendix. Here are the results…Squawk. I recognize the voice as that of Dorothy Cantor, the president of the ,member American Psychological Association APA , and she is right about the tenterhooks. The voting for her successor has just ended, and I was one of the candidates. But have you ever tried to use a car phone in the Tetons? I bite my lip in frustration. Who got me into this politics stuff anyway? I was an ivory-towered and ivy- covered professor—with a laboratory whirring along, plenty of grants, devoted students, a best-selling book, and tedious but sufferable faculty meetings—and a central figure in two scholarly fields: learned helplessness and learned optimism.
Who needs it? I need it. As I wait for the phone to come to life, I drift back forty years to my roots as a psychologist. There, suddenly, are Jeannie Albright and Barbara Willis and Sally Eckert, the unattainable romantic interests of a chubby, thirteen-year-old middle-class Jewish kid suddenly thrust into a school filled only with Protestant kids whose families had been in Albany for three hundred years, very rich Jewish kids, and Catholic athletes. No one could get into a good college from the Albany public schools, so my parents, both civil servants, dug deep into their savings to come up with six hundred dollars for tuition. They were right about my getting into a good college, but had no idea of the agonies a déclassé kid would suffer through five years of being looked down at by the students of the Albany Academy for Girls and, worse, by their mothers.
What could I possibly be that would remotely interest spit- curled, ski-slope-nosed Jeannie, or Barbara, the voluptuous fount of early-puberty gossip, or most impossibly, winter-tanned Sally? Perhaps I could talk to them about their troubles. What a brilliant stroke! I tried on the role, then snuggled comfortably into my niche. Please, who won? Drifting again, morosely. I imagine what it must have been like in Washington, D. The troops have come home from Europe and the Pacific, some physically wounded, many others emotionally scared. Who will heal the American veterans who have sacrificed so much to keep us free? Starting with Kraepelin, Janet, Bleuler, and Freud, they have accrued a long, if not universally praised, history of repairing damaged psyches. But there are not nearly enough of them to go around: the training is long more than eight years of post- baccalaureate work , expensive, and very selective.
Not only that, they really charge a bundle for their services. And five days a week on a couch? Does that really work? What do they do for a living in , anyway? Right after World War II, psychology is a tiny profession. Most psychologists are academics aiming to discover the basic processes of learning and motivation usually in white rats and of perception usually in white sophomores. The first is to cure mental illness. For the most part, they do the unglamorous task of testing, rather than therapy, which is the preserve of psychiatrists. The second mission—pursued by psychologists who work in industry, in the military, and in schools—is to make the lives of ordinary people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling.
The third mission is to identify and nurture exceptionally talented youngsters by tracking children with extremely high IQs across their development. The Veterans Administration Act of , among many other things, created a cadre of psychologists to treat our troubled veterans. A legion of psychologists is funded for postgraduate training, and they begin to join the ranks of psychiatrists in dispensing therapy. Indeed, many begin to treat problems among nonveterans, setting up private practices and getting insurance companies to reimburse them for their services. Psychology becomes almost synonymous with treating mental illness. Its historic mission of making the lives of untroubled people more productive and fulfilling takes a distant back seat to healing disorders, and attempts to identify and nurture genius are all but abandoned.
Only for a brief time do the academic psychologists with their rats and sophomores remain immune to the inducements proffered for studying troubled people. For a time, basic research on psychological processes normal as well as abnormal finds some favor at NIMH. But NIMH is run by psychiatrists, and in spite of its name and its mission statement from Congress, it gradually comes to resemble a National Institute of Mental Illness—a splendid research enterprise, but exclusively about mental disorders, rather than health. Academic psychologists begin to steer their rats and sophomores in the direction of mental illness. I can already feel this inexorable pressure when I apply for my very first grant in But to me, at least, it is hardly a burden since my ambition is to alleviate suffering. Whimpering softly, they passively accepted shocks, even when these later shocks could be easily escaped.
This finding captured the attention of researchers in learning theory, because animals are not supposed to be able to learn that nothing they do matters—that there is a random relationship between their actions and what befalls them. The basic premise of the field is that learning only happens when an action like pressing a bar produces an outcome like a food pellet or when the bar press no longer produces the food pellet. Learning of randomness that nothing you do matters is cognitive, and learning theory is committed to a mechanical stimulus-response- reinforcement view, one that excludes thinking, believing, and expecting. Animals and humans, it argues, cannot appreciate complex contingencies, they cannot form expectations about the future, and they certainly cannot learn they are helpless.
Learned helplessness challenges the central axioms of my field. For this same reson, it was not the drama of the phenomenon or its strikingly pathological aspect the animals looked downright depressed that intrigued my colleagues, but the implications for theory. In contrast, I was swept away by the implications for human suffering. As I sit writing at my gray steel desk in the bowels of my laboratory, a converted farm building in the chilly countryside of upstate New York, I do not need to linger over the problem of whether to discuss the implications of learned helplessness for mental illness. My first grant request—and all those that follow over the next thirty years—places my research squarely in the framework of the search to understand and cure disease. Within a few years, it is not enough to investigate rats or dogs who might be depressed; investigators have to look at depression in humans. Then within a decade, depressed sophomores are out also.
The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association DSM-III codifies what the real disorders are, and unless you present yourself as a patient and have at least five out of nine severe symptoms, you are not really depressed. Sophomores, if they stay in school, are still functioning. As most psychological researchers go along with the new demand that research take place on certified patients, much of academic psychology finally surrenders and becomes a hand-maiden of the psychiatric-disorder enterprise. Bending research science away from basic research toward applied research that illuminates suffering is fine with me. If I have to conform to psychiatric fashions, couch my work in the latest fashion of DSM-III categories, and have official diagnoses hung onto my research subjects, these are mere inconveniences, not hypocrisy.
For patients, the payoff of the NIMH approach has been awesome. In , no mental illness was treatable. For not a single disorder did any treatment work better than no treatment at all. It was all smoke and mirrors: working through the traumas of childhood did not help schizophrenia the movie David and Lisa notwithstanding , and cutting out pieces of the frontal lobes did not relieve psychotic depression the Nobel Prize to Portuguese psychiatrist Antonio Moniz notwithstanding. Fifty years later, in contrast, medications or specific forms of psychotherapy can markedly relieve at least fourteen of the mental illnesses. Two of them, in my view, can be cured: panic disorder, and blood and injury phobia.
Not only that, but a science of mental illness had been forged. We can diagnose and measure fuzzy concepts like schizophrenia, depression, and alcoholism with rigor; we can track their development across a lifetime; we can isolate causal factors through experiments; and, best of all, we can discover the beneficial effects of drugs and therapy to relieve suffering. The payoff for me has been pretty good, too. Working within a disease model, I have been the beneficiary of more than thirty unbroken years of grants to explore helplessness in animals and then in people. Learned helplessness and depression have similar underlying brain chemistry deficits, and the same medications that relieve unipolar depression in humans also relieve helplessness in animals. At the back of my mind is real unease, however, about this exclusive emphasis on discovering deficits and repairing damage. As a therapist, I see patients for whom the disease model works, but I also see patients who change markedly for the better under a set of circumstances that fit poorly into the disease model.
I witness growth and transformation in these patients when they realize just how strong they are. When a patient who has been raped gains insight into the fact that while the past was unchangeable, the future is in her hands. When a patient has the flash of insight that while he might not be such a good accountant, his clients always cherish him for being so painstakingly considerate. When a patient brings order into her thinking by merely constructing a coherent narrative of her life from the apparent chaos of reacting to one trouble after the next. I see a variety of human strengths, labeled and then amplified in therapy, that serve as buffers against the various disorders whose names I dutifully inscribe on the forms that go to insurance companies.
This idea of building buffering strengths as a curative move in therapy simply does not fit into a framework that believes each patient has a specific disorder, with a specific underlying pathology that will then be relieved by a specific healing technique that remedies deficits. Ten years into our work on learned helplessness, I change my mind about what was going on in our experiments. It all stems from some embarrassing findings that I keep hoping will go away. Not all of the rats and dogs become helpless after inescapable shock, nor do all of the people after being presented with insolvable problems or inescapable noise. One out of three never gives up, no matter what we do. Moreover, one out of eight is helpless to begin with—it does not take any experience with uncontrollability at all to make them give up.
At first, I try to sweep this under the rug, but after a decade of consistent variability, the time arrives for taking it seriously. What is it about other people that makes them collapse at the first inkling of trouble? I park the mud-splattered Suburban and hurry into the lodge. They both had spent much of the last twenty years at APA conclaves in Washington and elsewhere. I was an outsider who was not invited to these gatherings. Both Pat and Dick have held almost every major APA-wide office, except the presidency. I have held none. Pat and Dick had each been president of a dozen groups. The last presidency I can remember, as I dial again, is of my ninth-grade class. Frustrated and immobilized, I stare blankly at the phone. I stop, take a deep breath, and scan my own reactions. I am a hideous example of my own theory. Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and frustrations. Optimists, in contrast, have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as surmountable, particular to a single problem, and resulting from temporary circumstances or other people.
Pessimists, I had found over the last two decades, are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad events happen; they do worse at school; sports, and most jobs than their talents augur; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier interpersonal relations, and they lose American Presidential elections to their more optimistic opponents. Were I an optimist, I would have assumed that the busy signal meant Dorothy was still trying to reach me to tell me I won. Even if I lost, it was because clinical practice now happens to have a larger voting bloc than academic science. I was, after all, the scientific consultant to the Consumer Reports article that reported how remarkably well psychotherapy works. So I am well positioned to bring practice and science together, and I will probably win if I run again next year.
But I am not a default optimist. I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist; I believe that only pessimists can write sober and sensible books about optimism, and I use the techniques that I wrote about in Learned Optimism every day. I take my own medicine, and it works for me. I am using one of my techniques right now—the disputing of catastrophic thoughts—as I stare at the phone that dangles off the hook. The disputing works, and as I perk up, another route occurs to me. Fowler, Dr. As I wait for Ray to come on, I drift back twelve months to a hotel suite in Washington. Ray and his wife, Sandy, and Mandy and I are opening a California Chardonnay together.
In his mid-sixties, Ray is handsome, wiry, and goateed, reminding me of Robert E. Lee and Marcus Aurelius rolled into one. A decade before, he had been elected president, moving up to Washington, D. Through no fault of his, however, within months the American Psychological Association fell apart. Meanwhile, an organized group of disgruntled academics of which I was one were threatening to march out of the organization, believing its politically astute practitioner majority had led the APA to become an organ that supported private psychotherapy and neglected science. Moving from the presidency to the real seat of power as CEO, within a decade Ray had wrought a truce in the practice- science wars, moved the APA astonishingly into the black, and increased the membership to ,, bringing it into a tie with the American Chemical Society as the largest organization of scientists in the world.
Can I possibly win? And if I do, can I accomplish anything worth three years of my life? Ray is used to considering quietly; he is an island of contemplation in the stormy ocean of psychological politics. Or that I want to see psychology challenge this pernicious system of managed care by getting behind therapy effectiveness research. Or that I want to see research funding for mental health doubled. Do you remember the image at the end of A Space Odyssey? The enormous fetus floating above the earth, not knowing what was to come? In this case, I happen to mean it. Would it be worth three years of your life? Not only did you win, you had three times as many votes as the next candidate.
Twice as many people as usual voted. You won by the largest vote in history! But what was my mission? I needed to come up with my central theme in short order and begin gathering sympathetic people to carry it out. It is my view that therapy is usually too late, and that by acting when the individual was still doing well, preventive interventions would save an ocean of tears. This is the main lesson of the last century of public health measures: Cure is uncertain, but prevention is massively effective—witness how getting midwives to wash their hands ended childbed fever, and how immunizations ended polio. Can there be psychological interventions in youth that will prevent depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse in adults? My own research for the previous decade had been an investigation of this question. I found that teaching ten-year-old children the skills of optimistic thinking and action cuts their rate of depression in half when they go through puberty my previous book, The Optimistic Child, detailed these findings.
So I thought that the virtues of prevention and the importance of promoting science and practice around it might be my theme. Six months later in Chicago, I assembled a prevention task force for a day of planning. Each of the twelve members, some of the most distinguished investigators in the field, presented ideas about where the frontiers of prevention lay for mental illness. Unfortunately, I was bored stiff. It was just the disease model warmed over and done up proactively, taking the treatments that worked and enacting them earlier for young people at risk. It all sounded reasonable, but I had two reservations that made it hard to listen with more than half an ear. First, I believe that what we know about treating disordered brains and minds tells us little about how to prevent those disorders in the first place.
What progress there is been in the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people—such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic. The exercise of these strengths then buffers against the tribulations that put people at risk for mental illness. Depression can be prevented in a young person at genetic risk by nurturing her skills of optimism and hope. An inner-city young man, at risk for substance abuse because of all the drug traffic in his neighborhood, is much less vulnerable if he is future-minded, gets flow out of sports, and has a powerful work ethic.
But building these strengths as a buffer is alien to the disease model, which is only about remedying deficits. Second, beyond the likelihood that injecting kids at risk for schizophrenia or depression with Haldol or Prozac will not work, such a scientific program would attract only yeomen. A renovated science of prevention needs the young, bright and original scientists who historically have made the real progress in any field. As I shuffled out toward the revolving doors, the most iconoclastic of the professors caught up with me. You have to put some intellectual backbone into this. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing and singing. Since she was distracting me, I yelled at her, and she walked away. From when I was three until when I was five, I was a whiner.
I whined every day. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to being grumpy, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change. More importantly, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting her shortcomings.
She could do that herself. Rather, my purpose in raising her was to nurture this precocious strength she had displayed—I call it seeing into the soul, but the jargon is social intelligence—and help her to mold her life around it. Such a strength, fully grown, would be a buffer against her weaknesses and against the storms of life that would inevitably come her way. Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest. But if social benefits come through putting people in places where they can best use their strengths, there are huge implications for psychology. Can there be a psychological science that is about the best things in life? Can there be a classification of the strengths and virtues that make life worth living?
Can parents and teachers use this science to raise strong, resilient children ready to take their place in a world in which more opportunities for fulfillment are available? Can adults teach themselves better ways to happiness and fulfillment? The vast psychological literature on suffering is not very applicable to Nikki. A better psychology for her and children everywhere will view positive motivations—loving kindness, competence, choice, and respect for life—as being just as authentic as the darker motives. It will ask how children can acquire the strengths and virtues whose exercise leads to these positive feelings. It will ask about the positive institutions strong families, democracy, a broad moral circle that promote these strengths and virtues. It will guide us all along better paths to the good life.
Nikki had found me my mission, and this book is my attempt to tell it. WHY do we feel happy? Why do we feel anything at all? Why has evolution endowed us with emotional states that are so insistent, so consuming, and so…well, so present…that we run our very lives around them? Evolution and Positive Feeling In the world that psychologists are most comfortable with, positive feelings about a person or an object get us to approach it, while negative feelings get us to avoid it. The delicious odor of brownies being baked pulls us toward the oven, and the repulsive smell of vomit pushes us to the other side of the sidewalk. But amoebae and worms also presumably approach the stuff they need and avoid pitfalls, using their basic sensory and motor faculties without any feeling. Now, Seligman sets out to provide readers with the insights and tools from the relatively new field of positive psychology. He does this with a rich mixture of anecdotes, personal revelations and research.
In addition, he provides frequent self-assessments and exercises. I think that almost anyone who takes the time to read what Seligman has to say, who takes and thinks about the self assessments, and who does the exercises, will start thinking and acting in ways that lead to lasting happiness. He is a leading research psychologist who builds on solid experimental findings. Written by the former president of the American Psychological Association, and author of over a dozen books including the popular Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, this title is one of the better selling happiness books out there. However even if you could alter all of these things, it would not do much for you as this stuff accounts for only a small part of your happiness. On to Voluntary efforts… Download Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment Audible — Abridged dged PDF.
Post a Comment. Thursday, August 18, Authentic Happiness. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment Audible — Abridged dged Author: Martin E. Seligman ID: BNA78KW. Posted by Unknown at AM Email This BlogThis!
edu uses cookies to personalize content, tailor ads and improve the user experience. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. To browse Academia. edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Ebook Authentic Happiness by Martin E. Seligman PhD Original version Wirlilik Gundoyo. Download Download PDF Full PDF Package Download Full PDF Package This Paper.
A short summary of this paper. PDF Pack. People also downloaded these PDFs. People also downloaded these free PDFs. Balamurugan J PhD. Download Free PDF Download PDF Download Free PDF View PDF. Positive psychology: an introduction by Enrique López. A Harvard Medical School Special Health Report Mindfulness: A path to well-being by Rono Leonard. by Shane Clifton. SEMEAR Project: Planting Seeds for a Better and More Virtuous World by Flora Victoria. A Balanced Psychology and a Full Life. by Acacia Parks. The Complementary Roles of Eudaimonia and Hedonia and How They Can Be Pursued in Practice by Veronika Huta. The Disease-Resistant Personality by Lee Smith. Download Download PDF. Download Full PDF Package. Designed by Karolina Harris Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seligman, Martin E. Includes bibliographical references and index. Conduct of life. Men step down and yet rise up, the hand is drawn by the hand it draws, and a woman is poised on her very own shoulders.
Without you and me this universe is simple, run with the regularity of a prison. Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs, stars collapse at the specified hour, crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule. But we, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years to fit this place, we know it failed. For we can reshape, reach an arm through the bars and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out. And while whales feeding on mackerel are confined forever in the sea, we climb the waves, look down from clouds. Positive Feeling and Positive Character 2. How Psychology Lost Its Way and I Found Mine 3. Why Bother to Be Happy? Can You Make Yourself Lastingly Happier? Satisfaction about the Past 6. Optimism about the Future 7. Happiness in the Present Part II: Strength and Virtue 8. Renewing Strength and Virtue 9. Your Signature Strengths Part III: In the Mansions of Life Work and Personal Satisfaction Love Raising Children Reprise and Summary Psychologists can now measure such once-fuzzy concepts as depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism with considerable precision.
We now know a good deal about how these troubles develop across the life span, and about their genetics, their biochemistry, and their psychological causes. Best of all we have learned how to relieve these disorders. By my last count, fourteen out of the several dozen major mental illnesses could be effectively treated and two of them cured with medication and specific forms of psychotherapy. But this progress has come at a high cost. Relieving the states that make life miserable, it seems, has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. But people want more than just to correct their weaknesses. They want lives imbued with meaning, and not just to fidget until they die. Lying awake at night, you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three and feel a little less miserable day by day.
If you are such a person, you have probably found the field of psychology to be a puzzling disappointment. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness, just as we do for weight. New research into happiness, though, demonstrates that it can be lastingly increased. And a new movement, Positive Psychology, shows how you can come to live in the upper reaches of your set range of happiness; the first half of this book is about understanding the positive emotions and increasing yours. While the theory that happiness cannot be lastingly increased is one obstacle to scientific research on the subject, there is another, more profound obstacle: the belief that happiness and even more generally, any positive human motivation is inauthentic.
I call this pervasive view about human nature, which recurs across many cultures, the rotten-to the-core dogma. If there is any doctrine this book seeks to overthrow, it is this one. The doctrine of original sin is the oldest manifestation of the rotten-to- the-core dogma, but such thinking has not died out in our democratic, secular state. Freud dragged this doctrine into twentieth-century psychology, defining all of civilization including modern morality, science, religion, and technological progress as just an elaborate defense against basic conflicts over infantile sexuality and aggression.
The rotten-to-the-core doctrine also pervades the understanding of human nature in the arts and social sciences. Just one example of thousands is No Ordinary Time, a gripping history of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the great living political scientists. Motivations like exercising fairness or pursuing duty are ruled out as fundamental; there must be some covert, negative motivation that underpins goodness if the analysis is to be academically respectable. I cannot say this too strongly: In spite of the widespread acceptance of the rotten-to-the-core dogma in the religious and secular world, there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation. I believe that evolution has favored both good and bad traits, and any number of adaptive roles in the world have selected for morality, cooperation, altruism, and goodness, just as any number have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism.
This dual-aspect premise is the cornerstone of the second half of this book. Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play, and parenting. Positive Psychology has three pillars: First is the study of positive emotion. Third is the study of the positive institutions, such as democracy, strong families, and free inquiry, that support the virtues, which in turn support the positive emotions. The positive emotions of confidence, hope, and trust, for example, serve us best not when life is easy, but when life is difficult. In times of trouble, understanding and shoring up the positive institutions, institutions like democracy, strong family, and free press, are of immediate importance. In times of trouble, understanding and building the strengths and virtues—among them, valor, perspective, integrity, equity, loyalty—may become more urgent than in good times.
Since September 11, , I have pondered the relevance of Positive Psychology. In times of trouble, does the understanding and alleviating of suffering trump the understanding and building of happiness? I think not. People who are impoverished, depressed, or suicidal care about much more than just the relief of their suffering. These persons care—sometimes desperately—about virtue, about purpose, about integrity, and about meaning. Experiences that induce positive emotion cause negative emotion to dissipate rapidly. The strengths and virtues, as we will see, function to buffer against misfortune and against the psychological disorders, and they may be the key to building resilience. So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out.
This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose. Big-words: just gimme happiness big orange lollipops purple balloons. See there his orange and purple bouquet. The lollipops melt. The balloons wilt. The man waits.
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So moderate ill health does not bring unhappiness in its wake, but severe illness does. But when it is over, I feel drained, not invigorated. It all stems from some embarrassing findings that I keep hoping will go away. Since she was distracting me, I yelled at her, and she walked away. In my personal life, it had always discouraged me that these delightful emotions rarely visited me, and failed to stay for a long visit when they did. But NIMH is run by psychiatrists, and in spite of its name and its mission statement from Congress, it gradually comes to resemble a National Institute of Mental Illness—a splendid research enterprise, but exclusively about mental disorders, rather than health.
One of my aims is to provide responsible answers, grounded in scientific research, to these three questions. Feelings are states, momentary occurrences that need not be recurring features of personality. If there were no treadmill, people who get more good things in life would in general be much happier than the less fortunate. Now that you and I are convinced that it is well worth it to bring more happiness into your life, authentic happiness ebook free download, the overriding question is, can the amount of positive emotion in our lives be increased? The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association DSM-III codifies what the real disorders are, and unless you present yourself as a patient and have at least five out of nine severe symptoms, you are not really depressed. Entirely blind, she crisscrossed the United States in her senior year at the University of Pennsylvania while doing her authentic happiness ebook free download thesis.
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