Happy days are here again, as American psychology shifts its focus from what is wrong with humans to what is right. How can "Positive Psychology" improve your life starting today?
Five-year-old Nikki—overcome by wet, mushy earth—began throwing weeds in the air, dancing, laughing and shrieking while her father, Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D, former president of the American Psychological Association, was trying to garden. Seligman yelled at her to be quiet. She walked away, head down—only to return heroically a moment later: "Daddy, I want to talk to you," she said. "You may not have noticed, but I used to be a whiner. I whined every day from the time I was 3 until the time I was 5. And, you know, Daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I've ever done, and I haven't whined since. And if I can stop whining, Daddy, you can stop being so grumpy."
It was for good reason that Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, related this innocent exchange to hundreds of colleagues from a podium in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1999.
"Nikki was right," he said. "For 50 years of my life, I've walked around being grouchy and grumpy." His daughter's preciousness had inspired an epiphany: "Witnessing Nikki's potential to see into the soul," he said, showed him that something was dreadfully wrong with psychology. Why do we only focus on negative behavior patterns, rather than learning to nurture our children's—and our own—untold strengths? "There is a misguided emphasis in psychology on finding the problem and correcting it." Seligman mesmerized a professional audience, even bringing tears to some eyes, as he put forth a new school of psychology that seeks to understand and build human strengths.
The overall goal of "positive psychology" is to enhance our experiences of love, work and play. It is a psychologist's "birthright," says Seligman, to explore optimism, love, perseverance, originality, responsibility, good parenting, altruism, civility, moderation and tolerance. "This is a revelation for a group that has focused on dysfunction, illness, healing and coping strategies," which are just a small corner of the mental health field.
It is no surprise that in the psychological literature over the last 30 years, there have been 54,040 abstracts containing the keyword "depression," 41,416 naming "anxiety," but only 415 mentioning "joy."
Furthermore, Seligman believes that only a small number of the 18 million people diagnosed with depression actually suffer from biologically based depression, which, he says, means our conception of depression is all wrong. It is not something created by rejection or childhood traumas that make us feel bad or say negative things, he says. It's much less complex than that. Maybe, "what looks like a symptom of depression—negative thinking—is itself the disease," Seligman says. This thought has driven him to devote a large part of his life's work to learning how to change patterns of negative thinking.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., is Seligman's partner in the positive psychology movement. As a young boy in Hungary, he witnessed firsthand the devastation of World War II, leaving him, ironically, with a sense of awe: How do we explain those people who remain strong during war, those who are able to withstand tragedy, who are able to live a happy life even when everything else is falling apart? he wondered. Young Csikszentmihalyi's fascination drew him decades later to positive psychology research.
Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, co-authored with Seligman the introduction to the American Psychologist's January 2000 special issue on happiness, excellence and optimal human functioning. Csikszentmihalyi explains that therapy rarely helps us because its goal is to bring us to a normal state, but that "for most people, normal life is not so hot." In his eyes, traditional psychology has failed at one of its central missions, "the optimization of life."
Although positive psychology is still in its infancy, Seligman projects that the movement's research will yield methods of making exercise less tedious, work more rewarding, relationships more enjoyable—in short, making what is good in life even better. Consider marriage, for example. A good marriage therapist might teach partners how to fight constructively, says Seligman, how to change a bad marriage into a workable one. But, the question is, how do you make a workable marriage sublime? Or take adolescent psychology. Rather than focusing on how to make bad apples less bad, positive psychology asks: How can we build morally exemplary kids?
Seligman says that America is entering a world-historic moment similar to that of Athens in the fifth century B.C., Florence in the 15th century or Victorian England in that it is defined by prosperity, freedom and overall well-being. We now have the luxury to "expand the study of the human mind to include not only illness, but virtues as well," he says, adding that we must do so in order to stay relevant.
Seligman is currently working on a supplement to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the leading authority on mental disorders. "The DSM is the 'knowology' of what's wrong with you. Our book is the 'knowology' of virtues," Seligman said. "Positive psychology literature will [use this knowledge of virtues to] teach 'learned optimism'—how to maximize joy and good—which will help prevent depression."
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