“Women who flashed a genuine smile in their yearbook in 1970, as opposed to a non-Duchenne or fake smile, 30 years later had fewer divorces and more marital satisfaction.”—Martin Seligman |
was a slightly depressive grump for the first 40 years of my life,” Dr. Martin Seligman is on record as telling the 
The Times of London recently. He can afford to make that confession: as a keen convert to optimism and the founder ten years ago of the positive psychology movement, he has led what amounts to a global crusade for the reinstatement of positive emotion, engagement, purpose, meaning, and sheer grit as motivational factors in human existence.
His own cup might be said to be running over, considering the success of his project. Seligman’s three-year program “Scientific Research on Purpose, Productivity, Health and Well-Being,” based in the Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania and supported by a $2 million grant, has attracted widespread international attention. It has inspired not only 32 scholarly publications, but also 160 media reports in outlets ranging from The New York Times and CBS News to The Times of India and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Seligman developed this new psychological insight by using himself as a guinea pig. Years ago, he recalls, whenever he walked into a cocktail party, “I found myself saying ‘I hate cocktail parties, I never have any fun here.’ ” He disputed with himself about this prejudice, and ended up going into parties with a positive attitude and meeting people whose company he enjoyed. From that small social epiphany, he went on to create a revolutionary new, contrarian approach to psychology. In brief, he focuses on what can go right, rather than on what is wrong.
His program has concentrated on five areas of endeavor. First, with Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan, his team has been investigating how purpose and meaning build life satisfaction, productivity and health. “The first big question, I think, is the mind/body problem,” says Seligman. “Much of my research, for almost 40 years, has been at the intersection of how mental states influence physical states.” He cites a survey of 999 Dutch people aged 65; after ten years the most optimistic quartile among them had suffered only one-fourth the rate of cardio-vascular deaths recorded among the rest of the population.
The other big question is the issue of free will and how it interacts with positive psychology. Formerly, Seligman points out, psychology focused on the notion of victimhood; if someone did something bad, then upbringing, childhood illnesses and other factors were seen as extenuating circumstances. But working on the positive side of life—on virtue, character and noble action—then character and the human will explain virtuous behavior. “I don’t think the notion of positive psychology is sound without a notion of will.”
“I don’t think the notion of positive psychology is sound without a notion of will.”
Led by Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, his second field of investigation is why correlation between economic indicators and national well-being is so modest. Working in Australia in 2008, Seligman points to 15 years of unbroken prosperity there, incongruously accompanied by an epidemic of depression among young people. As regards the effect of GDP on national well-being, he says: “It’s dramatically curvolinear and that means that below the safety net, if you’re looking at places like Sierra Leone, then for every increase in GDP you get an increase in well-being and life satisfaction. But once you get to the United Kingdom, or even to Mexico or Brazil, increases in GDP produce fewer and fewer increases in life satisfaction.” Seligman believes politicians must react to this.
George Vaillant of Harvard and Mike Csikszentmihailyi of Claremont led the third and fourth areas of his research which encompass the relationship of spirituality to successful lives and the concept of psychological capital—the notion that positive emotion and being “in flow” lays down psychological resources that can be drawn on later in life. The top ten percent of undergraduates at the University of Illinois tested by various measures of positive emotion are now, 15 years later, earning on average $15,000 more than their contemporaries. Even socially, he contends, “Women who flashed a genuine smile in their yearbook in 1970, as opposed to a non-Duchenne or fake smile, 30 years later had fewer divorces and more marital satisfaction.”
These scholars came together at the Medici II meetings held each year in Philadelphia. The fifth and final feature of the program, the Authentic Happiness website, has attracted registrations by more than 1,000,000 people from over 200 nations. It has been translated into Spanish and Chinese and other languages are being added.
In 2008, Seligman travelled to Australia to assist Geelong Grammar School, the prestigious institution once attended by the Prince of Wales, to create a $15 million well-being center. But he is just as proud of a more modest venture in the deprived English region of South Tyneside where children learn positive psychology in their curriculum. At Harvard, positive psychology is now the most popular course for undergraduates. Martin Seligman’s conversion to optimism has turned out to be well-founded.
