Martin Seligman

Martin Seligman
Born	(1942-08-12) August 12, 1942 Albany, New York
Nationality	American
Education	Ph.D. in Psychology at University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater	Princeton University
Occupation	Psychologist, educator, and author
Employer	University of Pennsylvania
Organization	Department of Psychology
Title	Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology

Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman (born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists.

According to Haggbloom et al.'s study of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, Seligman was the 13th most frequently cited psychologist in introductory psychology textbooks throughout the century, as well as the 31st most eminent overall.

Seligman is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Psychology. He was previously the Director of the Clinical Training Program in the department. He is the director of the university's Positive Psychology Center. Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association for 1998. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Prevention and Treatment Magazine (the APA electronic journal) and is on the board of advisers of Parents magazine.

Seligman has written about positive psychology topics such as The Optimistic Child, Child's Play, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, and Flourish.

Early life and education

Seligman was born in Albany, New York. He earned a bachelors degree at Princeton University in 1964, graduating Summa Cum Laude (Philosophy). He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1967.

Learned helplessness

Main article: Learned helplessness

Seligman's foundational experiments and theory of "learned helplessness" began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that were opposite to the predictions of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, then a leading psychological theory.

Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation — usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation — even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. In later years, alongside Abramson, Seligman reformulated his theory of learned helplessness to include attributional style.

According to author Jane Mayer, Seligman gave a talk at the Navy SERE school in San Diego in 2002, which he said was a three-hour talk on helping US soldiers to resist torture, based on his understanding of learned helplessness.

Positive psychology

Seligman worked with Christopher Peterson to create what they describe as a 'positive' counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). While the DSM focuses on what can go wrong, Character Strengths and Virtues is designed to look at what can go right. In their research they looked across cultures and across millennia to attempt to distill a manageable list of virtues that have been highly valued from ancient China and India, through Greece and Rome, to contemporary Western cultures. Their list includes six character strengths: wisdom/knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each of these has perhaps a half-dozen sub-entries; for instance, temperance includes forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation. One of their key points is that they do not believe that there is a hierarchy for the six virtues; no one is more fundamental than or a precursor to the others.

In July 2011, Martin Seligman encouraged David Cameron to look into well-being as well as financial wealth in ways of assessing the prosperity of a nation. On July 6, 2011, he appeared on Newsnight and was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman about his ideas and his interest in the concept of well-being.

While presenting "Flourish" to the Royal Society of Arts, Seligman articulated an account of the good life, which consisted of five elements under the acronym PERMA:

• Positive emotion — tunable by writing down, every day at bed time, three things that went well, and why
• Engagement — tunable by preferentially using one's highest strengths to perform the tasks which one would perform anyway
• Relationships — tunable, but not in a way that can be explained briefly; listen to timestamp 15:12 and following of the audio
• Meaning — belonging to and serving something bigger than one's self
• Achievement — determination is known to count for more than IQ

MAPP program

The Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania was established under the leadership of Seligman as the first educational initiative of the Positive Psychology Center in 2003.

On "conversion/reparative" therapy for changing homosexuality

In 1966, Martin E.P. Seligman reported that, while using aversion therapy to try to change gay men's sexual orientation to heterosexual was controversial, in some instances, the process "worked surprisingly well", with up to 50% of men subjected to such therapy not acting on their homosexual urges. These results produced what Seligman described as "a great burst of enthusiasm about changing homosexuality that swept over the therapeutic community" after the results were reported in 1966. However, Seligman notes that the findings were later demonstrated to be flawed: most of the men treated with aversion therapy who did in fact stop homosexual behavior were actually bisexual. Among men with an exclusive or near-exclusive homosexual orientation, aversion therapy was far less successful.

Personal life

According to an interview for his electronic journal Prevention and Treatment Seligman said magenta was his favorite color because of the amazing calming effects of the color on the human body. He plays bridge, and finished second in one of the three major North American pair championships, the Blue Ribbon Pairs (1998), and has won over 50 regional championships He has seven children, four grandchildren and three dogs.

Seligman was inspired by the work of the psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania in refining his own cognitive techniques and exercises.

Publications

• — (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0752-7.  (Paperback reprint edition, W.H. Freeman, 1992, ISBN 0-7167-2328-X)
• — (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-671-01911-2. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=qreACUdDAc0C.  (Paperback reprint edition, Penguin Books, 1998; reissue edition, Free Press, 1998)
• — (1993). What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-41024-4.  (Paperback reprint edition, Ballantine Books, 1995, ISBN 0-449-90971-9
• — (1996). The Optimistic Child: Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0091831199. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=GoMABgcQzs4C.  (Paperback edition, Harper Paperbacks, 1996, ISBN 0-06-097709-4
• — (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-2297-0. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=3L0BCCoFMRgC.  (Paperback edition, Free Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-2298-9)
• — (Spring 2004). "Can Happiness be Taught?". Daedalus 133 (2): 80–87. doi:10.1162/001152604323049424. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/001152604323049424. 
• Peterson, Christopher; Seligman, Martin E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195167015. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=QqPiF1C7cy4C. 
• — (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-1-4391-9075-3. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=mQ4_UwcCojUC. 

References

University of Pennsylvania. (2012). Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Program. Retrieved April 8, 2012, from sas.upenn.edu: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/lps/graduate/mapp

External links

• Authentic Happiness, Seligman's homepage at University of Pennsylvania
• "Eudaemonia, the Good Life: A Talk with Martin Seligman", an article wherein Seligman speaks extensively on the topic of eudaemonia
• "The Positive Psychology Center", a website devoted to positive psychology. Martin Seligman is director of the Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
• Program description for Master of Applied Positive Psychology degree established by Seligman
• Martin E. P. Seligman's curriculum vitae at the University of Pennsylvania
• TED Talk: Why is psychology good?
• University of Pennsylvania's page on MAPP program