POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY · POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY MARTIN SELIGMAN, PHD...

Instructor’s Manual

for

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

MARTIN SELIGMAN, PHDwith

RANDALL C. WYATT, PHD

by

Randall C. Wyatt, PhD&

Erika L. Seid, MA

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The Instructor’s Manual accompanies the DVD Positive Psychology and Psychotherapy (Institutional/Instructor’s Version). Video available at www.psychotherapy.net.

Copyright © 2008, Psychotherapy.net, LLC. All rights reserved.

Published by Psychotherapy.net

Mille Valley, CA Email: [email protected] Phone: (800) 577-4762 (US & Canada)

Teaching and Training: Instructors, training directors and facilitators using the Instructor’s Manual for the DVD Positive Psychology and Psychotherapy may reproduce parts of this manual in paper form for teaching and training purposes only. Otherwise, the text of this publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher, Psychotherapy.net. The DVD Positive Psychology and Psychotherapy (Institutional/Instructor’s Version) is licensed for group training and teaching purposes. Broadcasting or transmission of this video via satellite, Internet, video conferencing, streaming, distance learning courses or other means is prohibited without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Wyatt, Randall C., PhD & Seid, Erika L., MA

Instructor’s Manual for Positive Psychology and Psychotherapy

Martin Seligman, PhD with Randall C. Wyatt, PhD

Cover design by Sabine Grand

Order Information and Continuing Education Credits: For information on ordering and obtaining continuing education credits for this and other psychotherapy training videos, please visit us at www.psychotherapy.net or call 800-577-4762.

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Instructor’s Manual for


Table of ContentsTips for Making the Best Use of the DVD 7What is Positive Psychology? 9Positive Psychology Questionnaires 11Reaction Paper Guide for Classrooms and Training 13Suggestions for Further Readings, Websites and Videos 15Group Discussion Questions 17Interview Transcript 21

Talking ‘BouT a RevoluTion 21

auThenTic happiness 25

signaTuRe sTRengThs 28

leaRned opTimism 35

posiTive psych in pRacTice 38

BuffeRing suffeRing 41

gRaTiTude visiT 43

gRafTing on TheRapy skills 46

passing The maRTin seligman TesT 50

WheRe i Was meanT To Be 53

Bonus ouTTakes

couples BenefiT fRom posiTive psychology 56

acTive ingRedienTs in TheRapy 58

childRen and leaRned opTimism 58

Video Credits 61Earn Continuing Education Credits for Watching Videos 63About the Contributors 65More Psychotherapy.net Videos 67

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Tips for Making the Best Use of the DVD

1. USE THE TRANSCRIPTSMake notes in the video Transcript for future reference; the next time you show the video you will have them available. Highlight or notate key moments in the video to better facilitate discussion during the video and post-viewing.

2. GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONSPause the video at different points to elicit viewers’ observations and reactions to the concepts presented. The Discussion Questions provide ideas about key points that can stimulate rich discussions, self-reflection and learning.

3. LET IT FLOWAllow the interview to play out so viewers can appreciate the flow of the conversation. It is best to watch the full video since issues untouched in earlier parts of the interview may be covered later. Encourage viewers to voice their opinions! What do viewers connect with or have questions about regarding Seligman’s work? It is crucial for students and therapists to develop the ability to effectively critique others’ work as well as their own.

4. TAKE A POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY QUESTIONNAIREIntroduce participants to the list of Positive Psychology Questionnaires included in this manual. The questionnaires are available at www.authentichappiness.org for anyone to take for no fee. You can assign the whole group to take the same questionnaire and then come back to the group to talk about their experiences.

Or you can turn it into a role-play by having each participant take a different questionnaire and in pairs have participants practice interviewing each other about using the results to increase their own authentic happiness.

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5. SUGGEST READINGS TO ENRICH VIDEO MATERIALAssign readings from Suggestions for Further Readings and Websites prior to viewing. You can also time the video to coincide with other course or training materials on related topics.

6. ASSIGN A REACTION PAPERSee suggestions in Reaction Paper section.

7. PERSPECTIVE ON VIDEOS AND THE PERSONALITY OF THE THERAPISTEvery psychotherapy is unique, influenced as much by the personality and style of the therapist as by the use of specific techniques and theories. Thus, while we can certainly pick up ideas from master therapists and researchers like Seligman, each viewer must make the best use of relevant theory, technique and research that best fits their own personal style and the needs of their clients.

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What is Positive Psychology?

Excerpted from the website of The Positive Psychology Center at The University of Pennsylvania, www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu (June, 2008).

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institutions entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethic, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and tolerance.

Some of the goals of Positive Psychology are to build a science that supports:

1. Families and schools that allow children to flourish

2. Workplaces that foster satisfaction and high productivity

3. Communities that encourage civic engagement

4. Therapists who identify and nurture their patients’ strengths

5. The teaching of Positive Psychology

6. Dissemination of Positive Psychology interventions in organizations & communities

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Positive Psychology Questionnaires

On this and the following page is a list of some of the questionnaires you can find on Dr. Seligman’s positive psychology website, AuthenticHappiness.org. As Dr. Seligman talks about in this video interview, clients and others can develop insights into themselves and the world around them by using these scientifically tested questionnaires, surveys, and scales.

EMOTION QUESTIONNAIRES

Authentic Happiness Inventory QuestionnaireMeasures Overall Happiness

General Happiness QuestionnaireAssesses Enduring Happiness

ENGAGEMENT QUESTIONNAIRES

Brief Strengths TestMeasures 24 Character Strengths

Gratitude QuestionnaireMeasures Appreciation about the Past

Optimism TestMeasures Optimism about the Future

VIA Signature Strengths QuestionnaireMeasures 24 Character Strengths

VIA Strength Survey for ChildrenMeasures 24 Character Strengths for Children

MEANING QUESTIONNAIRES

Meaning in Life QuestionnaireMeasures Meaningfulness

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LIFE SATISFACTION QUESTIONNAIRES

Approaches to Happiness QuestionnaireMeasures Three Routes to Happiness

Satisfaction with Life ScaleMeasures Life Satisfaction

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Reaction Paper for Classes and Training

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY• Assignment: Complete this reaction paper and

return it by the date noted by the facilitator.

• SuggestionsforViewers: Take notes on these questions while viewing the video and complete the reaction paper afterwards, or use the questions as a way to approach the discussion. Respond to each question below.

• LengthandStyle: 2-4 pages double-spaced. Be brief and concise. Do NOT provide a full synopsis of the video. This is meant to be a brief reaction paper that you write soon after watching the video—we want your ideas and reactions.

What to Write: Respond to the following six questions in yourreaction paper:

1. Key points: What important points did you learn about positive psychology and psychotherapy from this video? What stands out in how Seligman works?

2. What I found most helpful: What was most beneficial to you about the issues presented? What tools or perspectives did you find helpful and might you use in your own work? What challenged you to think in a new way?

3. What does not make sense: What concepts or strategies did not make sense to you? Did anything push your buttons or bring about a sense of resistance in you, or just not fit with your own style or comfort zone? Explore these questions.

4. HowIwoulddoitdifferently: What might you do differently from what Seligman advocates in this video? Be specific in what different approaches, strategies and techniques you might apply in working with clients to increase their sense of happiness and satisfaction in the world. Are there other techniques that you use that get at these issues as well?

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5. Other Questions/Reactions: What questions or reactions did you have as you viewed the video? Other comments, thoughts or feelings?

6. Reactions to the Online Questionnaire: Take one of the online questionnaires at www.authentichappiness.org. Please be sure to indicate which one you chose in your paper. Describe your experience of answering the questionnaire. Do the results make sense to you? What did you learn or understand about yourself from this process? What strikes you as useful or not useful about the results of the questionnaire? If you take more than one, briefly note your different experiences with each one.

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Suggestions for Further Readings, Websites and Videos

BOOKSGillham, J.E. (Ed). (2000). The Science of Optimism and Hope:

Research Essays in Honor of Martin E. P. Seligman. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2007). What You Can Change and What You Can’t. New York: Vintage.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2006). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Vintage.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press/Simon and Schuster.

Seligman, M.E.P., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., and Gillham, J. (1995). The Optimistic Child. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

WEB RESOURCESSeligman’s Positive Psychology website www.authentichappiness.org

Positive Psychology Center www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu

European Network for Positive Psychology www.enpp.org

The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/

Quality of Life Research Center http://qlrc.cgu.edu

Values in Action Institute www.viastrengths.org

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RELATED VIDEOS AVAILABLE AT WWW.PSYCHOTHERAPY.NETRollo May on Existential Psychotherapy

The Gift of Therapy: A Conversation with Irvin Yalom, MD

Motivational Interviewing – William R. Miller PhD

Solution-Focused Child Therapy – John. J. Murphy, PhD

Stage of Change for Addictions – John C. Norcross, PhD

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Group Discussion Questions

Teachers and professors, counselors, therapists, training directors and facilitators may use a few or all of these discussion questions keyed to different segments of the video.

TALKING ‘BOUT A REVOLUTION1. Half-Baked: What do you make of Seligman’s idea that psychology

as it has been traditionally understood is only half-baked; that is, it focuses on reducing suffering, but does little to increase happiness? If you agree, what is significant or important to you about this notion? If you disagree, how would you better describe the basic tasks of psychology and psychotherapy?

2. Scientific Study: Seligman states that “the relationship of humanistic psychology to positive psychology is [that positive psychology] takes some but not all of the Rogerian [and] Maslovian premises and it tries to do mainstream, cumulative, testable, random assignment, placebo-controlled science on them to ask which ones work and which ones don’t.” How valuable do you think it is to study these concerns from a rigorous scientific approach vs. the more conceptual, philosophical approach? Talk about your reflections on this.

AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS3. Doing Both: What do you think about using psychotherapy to

teach people skills for becoming happier? How do you react to Seligman’s statement that such an approach is not incompatible with therapeutic interventions to decrease depression or anxiety? How does all this sit with the foundations of your thinking about therapy and how you have been trained to practice?

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SIGNATURE STRENGTHS4. Intervention: What did you notice about the way Seligman

worked with Wyatt around his number one signature strength, curiosity? Does it make sense for you? How do you think this kind of intervention could be integrated into therapy with a client? How would it impact or alter that therapy?

5. Culture: Does Seligman’s model for happiness seem particularly Western to you, or does it make sense as a cross cultural and universal orientation? What, if any differences have you noticed about what makes people happy in different cultures? What do you think about his comments on the relationships among humility, modesty and happiness from a cross-cultural lens?

POSITIVE PSYCH IN PRACTICE6. Three Domains of Happiness: What do you think about

Seligman’s three domains of positive psychology: positive emotion, engagement and meaning? How do these three domains fit into your sense of authentic happiness? What would you add or change in your own personal definition of happiness?

7. Choosing the Profession: When you first considered going into the field of psychology or becoming a therapist, did you think about getting rid of suffering and/or making people happy? Is there anything in what Seligman is saying here that gives you pause or opens up new doors to thinking about the work?

BUFFERING SUFFERING8. Beyond Depression: What do you think of Seligman’s approach

of teaching people more about “the engaged life, the pleasant life and the meaningful life” and that these things serve as a buffer against suffering like depression? How does this inform your thinking about working with clients who are depressed?

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GRATITUDE VISIT9. Assignment: How would you feel, as a client, if your therapist

suggested the Gratitude visit assignment? As you imagine this scenario, describe your responses? Would you follow through with it? Why or why not? If not, what would help you shift your position to actually completing the assignment?

GRAFTING ON THERAPY SKILLS11. Doubts: What are some of the doubts you find yourself

having about grafting positive psychology onto “therapy as usual”? How do you react to the list of common objections he mentions: “We’re already doing it. There’s nothing new here;” “Why should we work on happiness when there is so much suffering in the world?” and “Happiness is hopelessly fuzzy”?

WHERE I WAS MEANT TO BE12. Parting Thoughts: What made most sense to you from this

dialogue about positive psychotherapy? What might you make use of in working with your own clients - or with yourself?

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Complete Transcript of Positive Psychology and PsychotherapyMartin Seligman, PhD with Randall C. Wyatt, PhD

TALKING ‘BOUT A REVOLUTIONRandall Wyatt, PhD: I’m here today with Dr. Martin Seligman, professor, psychotherapist, researcher. He’s been involved in a lot of fields of study, but in particular, he’s founded the field of positive psychology, which emphasizes learned optimism and authentic happiness. Today we’re going to talk about positive psychology and its application in the psychotherapy world and the application with psychotherapy clients.

Martin, good to have you here today.

Martin Seligman, PhD: Randall, good to be here.

Wyatt: Good. Well, let’s start off with a basic question: Why do we need... Why do we need, why did we need a positive psychology? Wasn’t the psychology we had already good enough?

Seligman: Half-baked.

Wyatt: How so?

Seligman: Well, the part that was baked was the part about suffering, trauma, illness, anger, fear, but on... Often I’d have clients—And by the way, I’m under-qualified as a psychotherapist, so we’re going to do truth in advertising here. I’m really not a very good psychotherapist. Done quite a bit of it, but I’ve trained a lot of psychotherapists and I write about it and I think about it a lot. So truth in advertising.

But occasionally, I would have a client come to me and say, “I want to be happy.” Often, the first line. And I’d say, “Oh, you mean you don’t want to be depressed?” That is, sort of this old joke about, “Doctor, I hope you can cure what I have,” and Doctor says, “I hope you have what I can cure.” So I knew something about depression, and worked in depression, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea about what happiness was.

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In fact, I worked for 35 years on sadness, anger, fear...

Wyatt: Your work on learned helplessness, as well.

Seligman: Helplessness. And people would say, “Well, you know, why don’t you work on the opposite of that?” And I would say, “Happiness is just the absence of sadness, anxiety, anger.” That turns out to be wholly false.

Wyatt: Like Freud saying we’ll turn neurosis or something like that into ordinary human misery.

Seligman: Right. And of course, Freud’s view was that the best you could ever achieve—the Schopenhauer view—was the absence of misery. That was the height of… that was human happiness. That turns out to be completely wrong, and the patient who comes in and says, “I want to be happy,” is not to be ignored. They really do want something that until the last decade or so we hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to approach.

So positive psychology, I think, in its ambitious form gives us a way of responding to people who want more than just the absence of a disorder.

Wyatt: How is it different than humanistic psychology which looked at peak experiences, self actualization and the like?

Seligman: Well, humanistic psychology is one of a number of important predecessors of positive psychology. It’s got kind of a checkered history. Though I think Rogers and Maslow were really exceptional, exceptionally fine psychologists, and I think they came too early. I think one of the problems, they came at a time in which science did not take their questions seriously. Science of the 1960s and ‘50s almost didn’t take emotion seriously. And science never invited them in, and they never invited science in.

In fact, I got a letter a few years ago from Maslow’s research assistant, who said what Abe wanted more than anything when he was APA president was for Skinner to call him up and invite him over to his office, and Skinner never did. But this person said, “You’re doing what Maslow and Rogers wanted to do.” That’s kind of part one of humanistic psychology.

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Part two is after its great founders, it was taken over, I think, by people who also had a… not only a different set of basic premises about self-actualization, but they had a different epistemology. They wanted to look at phenomenology. It was Hermeneutic and the like.

So the relationship of humanistic psychology to positive psychology is it takes some but not all of the Rogerian, Maslovian premises and it tries to do mainstream, cumulative, testable, random assignment, placebo-controlled science on them to ask which ones work and which ones don’t.

Wyatt: Okay, well, we’re going to come back to the research.

Seligman: But, no, I want to qualify this, also.

Wyatt: Alright. Go ahead.

Seligman: But in many ways—I’m not a scholar, but this is an historical accident. In fact, my notions of positive psychology did not come out of humanistic psychology.

Wyatt: Alright. Then where?

Seligman: They came elsewhere. They came out of Nietzsche, Bandura, the experimental laboratory, wondering about learned helplessness and what its opposite was. So in fact, in my own life, the humanistic psychologists, while I read them at the time, were of minimal influence. But I happen to think both Maslow and Rogers were great figures.

Wyatt: We’re going to get into the research on positive psychology and the like, but let’s go… side step and talk about, if there’s positive psychology then what do you mean by negative psychology?

Seligman: Well, I’ve… The media trained me when I was APA president, so I learned off the bat it was positive psychology versus psychology as usual.

Wyatt: Or traditional.

Seligman: Not… Not… But here in some ways is the capsule of the difference, so when I was a psychology… when I was a normal clinical psychologist and I was on an airplane and I’d introduce myself to my seat mate, and they asked me what I did they’d move away from me. Yeah, it was “spot the loony,” what a psychologist does is find out what’s

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really wrong with you. And now on an airplane when I introduce myself to my seat mates, they move toward me. The question of what’s best inside you. What are your highest strengths? How can you use them more? What’s the best experience of your life? A different set of questions.

Wyatt: So in your writings—let’s make it clear, and I want to get your opinion in person on this—is you think there is some value in what you call negative, meaning focus on pathology, on depression, anxiety and disorders and treating those disorders.

Seligman: Enormous value. I was just listening to Tracy Chapman this morning.

Wyatt: Yes.

Seligman: And I’ve always liked her stuff, you know, Talking About a Revolution and “standing on a welfare line/Wasting time on an unemployment line.” There’s something I really didn’t like about it—and this is, in many ways, the metaphor for your question—that is, I think it’s exceedingly important to get rid of the disabling conditions of life, as I think it’s exceedingly important to work on disorders, but that’s half-baked. It’s only half the battle. That is, if someone—talking Tracy Chapman—if we’re interested in humanizing a world, it’s not enough to get rid of the unemployment lines and to end war and to have… It’s not enough just to say “no.” You have to build something in addition.

So the positive side of life is something over and above the absence of the negative side of life. Which is to say, I’m a rose gardener, and you don’t grow roses by clearing the underbrush and weeding. You have to plant something additional there. So negative psychology—not my term—psychology as usual has taught us a great deal about how to do something about the disorders.

I am talking about a complement and a supplement to it, not remotely a replacement for it. That if this patient had come to me and said, “I want to be happy, and I want to be less depressed,” then indeed, I want psychotherapists to have two sets of weapons. One, weapons against depression, and we’ve got plenty of those now. But secondly,

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which we didn’t have, weapons that build happiness. So I’m all for negative psychology. I do it. I’m proud of it, and our psychotherapeutic community should be proud of it, but it’s half-baked.

But going back to the rose gardening metaphor, if you want to produce happiness, it’s not enough just to get rid of the weeds and the disorders. There are a whole bunch of other skills you need to build. And the psychotherapeutic lesson was once in awhile—as I mentioned, I’m not much of a therapist—but once in awhile I do good work, and I would manage to get rid of most of her sadness and most of her anxiety, most of her anger. And I thought when I started out doing therapy, I’d get a happy person.

Wyatt: Wipe it away, and then they’ll be in the clear again.

Seligman: Yeah. You get an empty person. Empty. And that’s because the things that fill life—purpose, meaning, good relationships, positive emotion, engagement, success—are more than just the absence of miseries.

If there’s any central lesson to what I have to say today it’s that there’s a whole set of other skills, which are the answer to the “Doctor, I want to be happy” question. They’re not the same skills as, “Doctor, I don’t want to be depressed.”

AUTHENTIC HAPPINESSWyatt: Well, let’s jump right into that then. Authentic happiness, which is one of your new books, is an interesting term. We don’t usually use those together in psychology. “Happiness” is a new term in psychology as we’re talking about, and “authenticity” is about being real and sincere, and usually it’s associated with being in touch with your pain. So what is authentic happiness? What do you mean when you use that term?

Seligman: I think I mean something like sustainable, something that speaks well enough to what you are that if you keep practicing the relevant skills, which we’ll talk about, it will sustain itself and keep going.

Just, again, to talk psychology as usual, when I... From the first day

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I took up skiing until five years later when I gave it up, I was always fighting the mountain. And all my life doing psychotherapy—I did it for 20, 20, more than 20 years—I was always fighting the mountain. That is, you’re trying to get rid of these terrible, noxious, self-defeating habits. But the problem about fighting the mountain is the way we measure the outcomes of psychotherapy for sadness, anger, anxiety and the like is how long they last after you stop before they’re completely gone. That is, very few of the psychotherapy skills, the psychotherapy lessons, are self-sustaining.

I mean, the paradigm is dieting. That, you know, anybody can lose ten percent, ten percent of their body weight in a couple of months by whatever diet is on the bestseller list. I did the Watermelon Diet and lost 20 pounds. I had diarrhea for a month.

Wyatt: Oh my.

Seligman: But the problem, the problem about dieting, and in many ways, the problem of psychotherapy on, for the disorders is that it doesn’t sustain themselves. It’s no fun to keep turning down chocolate mousse, and much of what we teach in psychotherapy is hard work and to sustain it is very difficult and it melts, it requires a lot of discipline.

Authentic happiness, sustainable happiness, talks about skills that are fun to do, that you’re not fighting the mountain. You’re downhill skiing when you do them. And this is an important difference between positive psychology and psychology as usual. I’m after sustainable stuff.

Wyatt: So authentic happiness is a goal. In what way is it not Pollyanna or just denial? Because critics might say, “Oh, this happiness,” you know, the old guard might say, “This is a flight into health or a running away from suffering.” You know, a disengagement from your pain, which is superficial.

Seligman: Yeah. Yeah.

Wyatt: You’ve heard that, I’m sure.

Seligman: Not put as well, Randall, actually.

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Wyatt: Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Seligman: So you really did put it well and differently, and we’ll try to make this interview fun by having questions I haven’t heard before.

So my first reaction to that is I’m all for psychology as usual. I’m all for pain and doing pain.

Wyatt: You have nothing against pain and suffering.

Seligman: Nothing against pain and suffering, but it’s just not enough. So we’re talking about a supplement here as well. So I don’t want the people watching this tape to stop doing uncovering and insight and the like. I think we’ve gone too far about pain and suffering before I say why positive psychology is not just the denial of that.

If you look at childhood victims of trauma, I think there’s very good evidence now that we’ve been ripping the scabs off it by the therapies we do. So if you look at the intensity and duration of symptoms of kids who have been sexually abused who testify against their accuser, I think the figure is ten times worse. That is to say, some of the working through, uncovering—where testifying about it is an exaggeration of that—rips off nature’s scabs. Now you might want to think those scabs are denial. I think they’re perfectly good defensive mechanisms. So our only defenses are not things like denial. They’re things like sublimation, humor, altruism and the like.

So, now going to the moves in positive psychology. One can both acknowledge pain, suffering, trouble in life and also want more meaning in life, more engagement in life, more success in life, more gratitude in life, more positive emotion in life, more rapture. [**last sentence might be good quote for cover or website] Now to have more gratitude in life, to have more meaning in life, need not be at all an exercise in denial of pain and suffering. So this is another way of saying I think the skills of being a happy person are almost not at all related to the skills of getting rid of unhappiness. So these, these are not incompatible, and what I’m talking today is something that every therapist can graft on to the practice they do. This is a complement, a supplement. Not a replacement.

Wyatt: That was going to be my question. So you do think it’s, it is

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something that therapists can blend, integrate into their own work with clients.

Seligman: Yeah. I’m just trying to think of a... I’ll make up a metaphor. We don’t have such people, but let’s say you’re treating someone’s body and they’ve got knee pain or something and you either do surgery or whatever. Giving them a back massage in addition is not going to do any harm, and it might make their... So I want to say giving a back massage stands in relationship to surgery on the knee in some ways teaching people about how to have more happiness stands in relationship to getting rid of a phobia. Not incompatible. Supplementary practice.

SIGNATURE STRENGTHSWyatt: You talk about focusing on people’s strengths, and you used the term “signature strengths.” Can you talk about the importance of that, the centrality of that in developing skills for authentic happiness?

Seligman: Well, let me try to give a background here without giving a tedious lecture.

Wyatt: Alright.

Seligman: So I divide the subject matter of positive psychology into three domains. One is positive emotion, which is what we usually mean by the hedonics of happiness. The second is engagement and when time stops for you, when you’re in flow, when you’re completely…when you’re one with the music. And the third is meaning. So I have the pleasant life, the engaged life and the meaningful life.

Now you just asked the question about signature strengths. So the thinking on signature strengths comes out of the question of, “When are we in flow? When are we totally engaged with another person? When are we one with the music? When does time stop for us?” And I think some of that answer is when we’re using what’s best inside of us, when we’re using our highest strengths and our highest skills. And the evidence is quite good that deploying what’s best inside you to meet the highest challenges in life is when you go into flow.

So that’s what led to the question of, “Gee, how do we…what are

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peoples’ signature strengths? How do we measure that? How do we get people to use those things more?” So the importance of signature strengths in positive psychology is first getting people to identify them.

Oh, and I should say here something important for the people who are watching: part of my goal as APA president and as a cheerleader for positive psychology has been to give this stuff away for free. So there is a website called AuthenticHappiness.org, which last time I looked 810,000 people had registered at and took the test.

Wyatt: I was a recent one. I just was on there.

Seligman: Oh, you would have been 809,000...

Wyatt: Right.

Seligman: Right. And so all of what…most of what we’re going to be talking about today—meaning, purpose, positive emotion, gratitude, signature strengths—I’ve taken the leading tests in the English language for these and these are things you’re welcome for free to use with your patients.

So one conversation that we often have in counseling and therapy is at some important point when we start talking about you: “What are you best at? What are your highest strengths? Tell me an incident that you’re really proud of. Tell me a story about yourself.”

Is... We have this conversation around taking the signature strengths test, and we have it in front of them and say, “Oh, you know, Randall…”

Wyatt: Well, let’s start. Right here, I took it yesterday.

Seligman: Oh, okay. Let’s do you.

Wyatt: I took it yesterday, and I thought that I should. Because I’d taken it last year and I only finished half of it. So I went back.

Seligman: It’s long. It takes about 25 minutes.

Wyatt: It does; 240 questions but it’s worth it.

Seligman: But it’s fun, unlike usual psychological tests.

Wyatt: It is. So my first strength is curiosity and interest in the world.

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Seligman: What’s your second one?

Wyatt: Creativity and originality and then capacity to love and be loved.

Seligman: Oh, that’s good. And what’s the next one after that?

Wyatt: Judgment, critical thinking and open-mindedness.

Seligman: What’s the next one after that?

Wyatt: Oh, my god. Appreciation of beauty and excellence.

Seligman: Oh well, you’re a good mixture actually. Yours and mine are really quite similar. Just to… before we sort of do some funny things with that, we’ve asked the question, “Who are the happiest people in the world?” So we correlate life satisfaction to configurations of strengths.

Wyatt: I’m not...

Seligman: You and I...

Wyatt: We’re not among the happiest?

Seligman: Well, no, the head strengths—curiosity, critical intelligence, originality—are not correlated with it. It’s the heart strengths that are: the capacity to love and be loved, appreciation of beauty both are. So you and I have too much head strength for... That’s for life satisfaction, so if you’re interested in life satisfaction, you want people with heart strengths. You want to work on heart strengths. If you’re interested in creativity, you want to work on creativity.

Wyatt: So those are the elements you would look at, then?

Seligman: Well, they’re... That was all a detour but when people take the signature strengths test, if you’re dealing with someone who’s depressed, for example—By the way, they’re often, “Oh, I didn’t know I had any strengths.” So it’s very interesting for people to find out what their five highest strengths are.

And then, if you’re depressed, let’s take... What was your first one again?

Wyatt: Curiosity in the world.

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Seligman: Can you tell me a story about yourself, Randall, that you’re really proud of in which you used the curiosity strength?

Wyatt: That’s a fascinating question.

Seligman: No? So then this is the way we start the conversation, and you just gave the typical, the depressed reaction. You’re not depressed. It’s much worse. It takes much longer, but there are plenty of ways of... We’re talking clinical skill now and bringing it out. But let’s go...

So, tell me a story about your use of curiosity.

Wyatt: Well, what I went to right away was my grandfather and—he’s not around anymore, died at 95 years old—but even when I was a little kid and even into my 20s, I would just be very curious with him. And I always asked him questions. He was a rancher, a farmer. “What are you doing Grandpa, there with the cows and the field?” I would just kind of always want to learn about him. He’s a very strong, Italian man. Just loved to tell stories. And so, thinking back on that, whenever I remember that, it makes me feel good.

Seligman: Good. Good. Now, I’m about to do some stuff with what you said but I want… I want our viewers to notice what I’m doing. We have... When I teach pathology and I have people tell stories about the negative side of life, what we develop when we train therapists is the ability to ask the right questions, to find out what the underlying disorder really is.

Okay, positive psychology in its rhetorical aspects teaches people to ask the questions that put people more in touch with their strengths. Okay? So what we’re going to do now is to try to put you more in touch with curiosity and your use of it.

You know, this is an interesting job you have, being an interviewer. And I have to say, I’ve been interviewed by some of the world’s leading interviewers, and you strike me as more prepared, more actually interested in what I do, less... How do you use curiosity at work?

Wyatt: Well, I’m really kind of fascinated by other people, and I guess that helps me to be a therapist.

Seligman: Yeah.

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Wyatt: And I let my curiosity lead me to discover other people’s worlds, and I learn a lot from that. So in reading your stuff, I just got more and more curious and wanted to know more and then wanted to know what you had to say in person about it. And I want to both honor where the other person’s coming from and perhaps say what I question or disagree with.

Seligman: Can you tell me a story about the best interview you ever did and how curiosity made it such a good interview?

Wyatt: Probably the interview with Irvin Yalom, who I knew...

Seligman: He must be a great interview.

Wyatt: Yeah, he is, and I’d read all his books and I knew him somewhat through his son, who I’m friends with, but I never really talked to him about his works, and so I knew him more personally through his son. So to interview him about his academic work and his scholarly work and his existential and group work, I had to really sit down and say, “I’ve got to know his… get to know his mind.” And he felt comfortable and okay with me, and so he let me into his world in the interview. And so we were just in a rhythm and, I guess like you’re skiing thing, in a flow and intensity, and it felt right. I don’t know necessarily why, but it, just the feeling was it felt like the way it should have been.

Seligman: Okay, so this is just a small sample of the way that we work with people on the positive side of life, and notice this isn’t about denial. You might have all sorts of sexual, childhood, aggression issues but…that you can talk...

Wyatt: I’m sure I do.

Seligman: …that you can talk about what you’re best at, how it stood you in good stead, how you related to your grandfather with it and how it stood you in good stead in your life and how some of the best moments in your life have come out of this strength, in no way is denial, it’s a supplementary technique that then leads to this assignment, Randall. So you know, if we were doing a whole session what we’d come out...

Okay, here’s what I want you to do for next session. We found that your first highest strength is curiosity and you use it a lot. Now I’d like you

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to find a new way to use it in the next week. And then come back and tell me about it.

So if you’re going to interview me again next week. It could be…it could be in your family. It could be in your work. Could... How would you use curiosity in a way you haven’t used…? How might you expand the territory on which you use what you’re best at?

Wyatt:

And right away if I was in the next week— It’s hitting me what you’re saying how it’s not denial. Actually, I think we’re trained in culture and in psychotherapy certainly to deny some of our best strengths, to not explore them, so it’s not a Pollyanna thing. It’s more we don’t… aren’t used to talking about them.

Seligman: Yeah. We have a culture in which you’re supposed to be modest and humble, but by the way, I measure across cultures the correlation of each strength with life satisfaction, so of the 24 strengths, 22 of them correlate positively with happiness. The more of them you have, the happier you are. Two of them correlate negatively. One is humility. So even though we’re taught to be modest and humble and that’s polite and people allegedly like us for it, it’s… it undermines... So this culture we have in which we don’t talk about our strengths, we don’t talk about what’s best inside of us actually has quite a cost.

Wyatt: That strikes a chord because a friend of mine is a, his child is half American, half Japanese. Half, you know, European and then half Japanese, and he said to me recently, “Oh, in America, people will say ‘Oh, I’m a great baseball player,’ but in Japan they wouldn’t readily say that.”

So is it possible for humility and acknowledging your own strengths to go hand in hand?

Seligman: Very important cultural differences in how people handle strengths alike, and I really don’t know the answer to your question, but we do look at strengths across culture. We’ve just completed a study of 70 nations in which we ask the question of the 24 strengths. What’s the rank order? Well, this takes some explaining.

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So the... And the question I’m really asking, answering rather, is different from the one you just asked so I will pose the question to myself and then answer it. Isn’t this very Western? Isn’t this happiness, strength stuff all about, you know, America and the like?

Wyatt: In an unlimited kind of, you know, belief or, you know, or positive...

Seligman: Yeah, and just generalizing it to the world. So we’re very interested in other nations. When your viewers go to this web site, they’ll see it’s also in Chinese and in Spanish as well so one can do some cross-cultural research on it. But we’ve done a 70-nation study in which we took the 24 strengths and we asked people to describe themselves. And so the rank order in America was—83,000 Americans—is kindness is at the top, fairness is next, gratitude is next and then down at the bottom are humility, prudence and self-control. Okay.

So we asked the question, “What’s the rank order in every other nation?” And then you can do a correlation on what the rank order is. The correlation knocked our socks off. The correlation across the world is .80. I’m used to working with .30 correlations, which is to say, in China, in Uzbekistan, in Japan, in United States, almost identical rank order on self-description of these strengths. So there’s something universal about this. This is not... The stuff about strengths is not culturally peculiar.

Wyatt: And my guess is—and my question was leading probably—I think there is probably a way to be not fully aware of it from Asian culture, but there’s a way to be humble and also feel good about, strong about yourself and express it.

Seligman:

I just don’t know enough about Asian culture to endorse that. I have the feeling you’re right. But...

Wyatt: That’s where maybe some new research is due.

Seligman:

Yeah. But I also have the worry that humility, modesty over-enforced

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may cut into happiness, life satisfaction, positive emotion across the planet. So I’m not quite ready to go with, go with your, your...

Wyatt: My hypothesis.

Seligman: …your genial humanistic hypothesis.

Wyatt: Very well said.

LEARNED OPTIMISMWyatt: So let’s go into…also, let’s go into learned optimism a bit and talk. That’s another key ingredient of positive psychology.

Seligman: Yes, it’s kind of where for me it began, actually.

Wyatt: Okay. Well, let’s hear about that.

Seligman: Well, I was a student of Tim Beck’s. I was there, there at the beginning, so I was a psychiatric resident—this was before clinical psychology really existed—with Tim for a couple of years as we were thinking through what cognitive therapy might be. And I remember Tim—we still have lunch together once a month—I remember him saying that he had come out of psychoanalysis and in the ‘50s they believed or were taught that depression was anger turned inward. So the object of what you wanted to do in therapy for depression was to get people to talk about... and he said he just got people who would unravel, and he couldn’t ravel them up again. And this was the conversion experience for him into his cognitive view of depression. So that’s the heritage I came out of.

Wyatt: Tim Beck, by the way is Aaron Beck?

Seligman: Aaron Beck, yes. Temkin.

Wyatt: Just to clarify.

Seligman: His middle name is Temkin, T-E-M-K-I-N, so he’s called Tim, the most important psychiatrist, living psychiatrist. Maybe the most important one since Freud.

And what he did, by the way, remarkable move, same move that Wolpe made. He basically said, took the phenomenon of depression, got these symptoms and said, “You know, one of these symptoms

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isn’t just a symptom; it’s the cause.” So the cause, the symptom of cognitive distortions is not just a symptom; it’s the root cause. That’s a great intellectual move, you know. Think about the Edisonian... great discovery.

At any rate, that’s the heritage I came out of.

Now I was interested in helplessness at the time and had done stuff on learned helplessness in animals and the like, and I had found that when I produced helplessness in the laboratory with people by giving them unsolvable problems or inescapable noise, that… about a third of them never became helpless. I couldn’t, couldn’t make them helpless. And about a tenth of them were helpless when they walked into the lab.

So I began to wonder about 10 years after being a resident with Tim, what was it about the people who never became helpless and the people who just were automatically helpless. And it occurred to me that it may have been the way that they were thinking about the causes of what was making them helpless.

So I began to look at optimism versus pessimism, where optimism was a way of thinking about bad events in which the cause was temporary, changeable and just this one situation. So the optimist in my laboratory when they got an anagram they couldn’t solve said something temporary like, you know, “I have a hangover.” Hangovers go away in time. And they said something local, like you know, “These anagrams, the anagrams that Dr. Seligman gave me are just too hard.” Whereas the pessimist said, “I’m stupid.” Stupidity lasts in time, and stupidity hurts you all over the place.

So I began to test that, and indeed I found out that the people who never became helpless were the people who had temporary, changeable and local causes for bad events in their head as a way of thinking about tragedy in the world, in their own life. And the ones who became helpless very easily, my depressives, were the ones who when bad events struck said, “It’s going to last forever. It’s going to undermine everything I do, and it’s my fault.”

So that’s where learned optimism came out of because I then began to

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ask, “Well, how do you change peoples’ way of thinking habitually?” And that brought me back to Beck—I hadn’t thought about Beck for quite awhile at that time—and that many of the moves within cognitive therapy teaching people first to recognize the “It’s me. It’s going to last forever. It’s going to... I walk into a cocktail party and I say, ‘I hate these things,’ you know, ‘No one likes me. I always have a miserable time.’” You first learn to recognize that’s what you’re saying and then you learn to marshal evidence against them.

So in many ways what learned optimism did was to take the learned helplessness lesson to ask who becomes helpless, who doesn’t, to find out that the people who become helpless are almost identical with the people who become depressed, and then to apply Tim Beck’s kind of tools to those people and then to do it preventatively with kids and in the schools. So that’s in a nutshell, Randall, the story of learned optimism.

Wyatt: It’s really an amazing story because in undergrad and grad school we learned about learned helplessness, and nobody really talked about the other side of learned optimism. And that’s why when seeing that everybody, you know, quoted those studies and talked about it in domestic violence or other areas of study, and this came as a refreshing charge-up.

Seligman: Well, it was more than just a charge-up for me because when... Actually, the title... I remember the way the title was chosen. I went to a New York agent named Richard Pine, and I wasn’t going to write a popular book, and I told him what I worked on, that I worked on pessimism and depression. He said, “Oh, you work on optimism!” And so he got me to think about the other half.

Wyatt: Wow.

Seligman: Which... So that was really the first time I began to ask the question, maybe optimism is something more than just the absence of pessimism. And it was that that led to positive psychology because once, once it occurred to me that optimism was something over and above low [** checkj] pessimism, that it did, it was active in itself that I began to wonder about all these other things which Freud didn’t think we could have, these things called happiness, and began to wonder if

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these were more than just the absence of misery, and they are.

POSITIVE PSYCH IN PRACTICEWyatt: Well, let’s, let’s go right to the heart of what we’re talking about… is how can this work on learned optimism, authentic happiness, positive psychology be used in therapy? How can the traditional therapy as usual use this research and information in their work?

Seligman: Well, in two general ways using the same techniques. So one is where I started, which is I believe the therapist’s job is a lot more than getting rid of disorder. That is, I believe that the marriage counselor, the psychologists have gotten themselves locked into a medical model in which your job is only getting rid of disorder. Now I think the job of the psychologist and therapist is much more. The job of the marriage counselor is not just to make an intolerable marriage barely sufferable. It’s to produce a good marriage. The job of the psychologist is not to just get rid of depression, anxiety and anger. It is actually to make people happy.

Half of making people better people is getting rid of the underbrush and doing the weeding, but that’s only half the job. So I’m saying part of your birth right as therapists is to redefine your job to do two things: to get rid of disorder and to build happiness.

So given that redefinition, the answer to your question, “How does this graft onto therapy?” just falls out naturally.

Wyatt: Which is, just to pause, that’s a fairly revolutionary—to use Tracy Chapman’s term—view.

Seligman: Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution.

Wyatt: Right. You didn’t know you’d be singing today.

Seligman: No, no.

Wyatt: That’s okay.

Seligman: I don’t think of this as revolutionary, but now that you put it that way, it really is because no one ever taught me as a therapist that my job was also to make people happy. But I think what I’m saying

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today is that’s, that’s why I went into it. It wasn’t just to get rid of people—It wasn’t just to get rid of suffering. It was to help people live up to their potential, and that’s a different set of skills. So... But you know, that’s also the humanistic psychologists saying that as well, so it’s perhaps revolutionary in the same sense except what I do is tied to science and to random assignment, placebo-controlled studies.

Wyatt: And, and where it’s certainly humanistic as tools themselves, but yours has specific tools that are about dealing with conflict and stress and overcoming changing from pessimism to optimism.

Seligman: Right. So the tools that have... So once you accept the premise that half of our job is to make people happy, happier—I have a question: What in the world does that mean? And I think happiness is an unwieldy notion scientifically.

I only use it in book titles and in the name of the field.

In the same way that the word “cognitive” plays no role in cognitive psychology.

It’s just the name of the field.

Cognitive psychology works on memory, on perception, on belief and attribution.

Happiness plays nothing more than labeling in this.

So the question is, what does happiness dissolve into that’s workable, that we can measure and build? And for me, it dissolves into three very different arenas, each of which is measurable in a patient and each of which there are now validated techniques for building. So the first is positive emotion. Can you make people feel happier, feel more gratitude, feel more optimism, feel more pleasure? The second is—I call that the pleasant life.

The second is engagement, being totally absorbed. You and I are both very much into this interview. We’re probably about 85 percent into the, into flow, which is an unusually high number. How do you get more of that, the engaged life?

And the third is the meaningful life, a life in which you know what you’re best at and you use it to belong to and serve something bigger

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than you are. So I’m saying the mission of a, the mission of the therapist of the future is twofold: one is to get rid of the disorders, the second is to build happiness. Building happiness is workable and that has to do with building pleasure, building a pleasant life, building engagement in life and building meaning in life. So for me, that’s what a complete therapist of the future is about.

Wyatt: Well, let’s take one of those which is not often talked about. I’m reminded of Adler talking about engagement in the world and giving back to the world, almost a spiritual connection of some sort. How does a therapist go about engaging the client in that, in a sense?

Seligman: Okay, so that has to do with signature strengths. So if you look at the literature on flow, absorption, being one with the music, there’s a recipe for it. We go into flow when our highest strengths and talents just meet the highest challenges we face. So the job of the therapist in this regard is for us to get people to be conscious of their strengths by telling stories about themselves at their best, by taking the signature strengths test on AuthenticHappiness.org, and then giving a set of guided assignments in which you use those strengths more in parenting, at work, in leisure. So that’s...

Maybe I should tell a story to illustrate this.

Wyatt: That sounds good.

Seligman: So one woman I worked with was a waitress, and she hated being a waitress: heavy trays, being patronized by customers. She took the signature strengths test and her highest strength was social intelligence, so I assigned her to find a new way as a waitress to use social intelligence more. The aim here is to enjoy her work more, to get more flow in life. So she redefined her job as making every encounter with her, each patron’s encounter with her the social highlight of their evening.

Now, notice something about that. One is she almost surely failed 90 percent of the time, but she was putting what was very best inside of her on offer all evening long. And the result of that was she liked the job better, the trays weren’t heavier, were lighter, and she got bigger tips. So that’s what I mean by the engaged life, and there’s a recipe and

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a set of exercises and a set of tests, which any therapist can graft onto what they do, to have their clients, patients have more flow in life.

BUFFERING SUFFERINGSeligman: Yeah, I think there are two justifications for positive psychology. One is it’s perfectly legitimate to make people happier as an end in itself. But I think that happy, that happiness is one of our best buffers against suffering, and I have evidence for this.

Wyatt: Well, let’s talk. What is the evidence about that?

Seligman: So we now do something called positive psychotherapy, so we take, we do it both through web exercises, but we do it with well-diagnosed, severe depressives, and it consists of 12 to 14 manualized sessions, in which... You don’t walk in and say, you know, “Tell me about your highest strength.” You integrate it with decent therapeutic skills. But there are essentially 12 exercises you’re taking people through, in which you’re making them... Exercises like the gratitude visit that we do, active-constructive, how to savor. So we’re teaching people about the engaged life, the pleasant life, and the meaningful life. That’s...

And we don’t do cognitive therapy on them. We don’t give them anti-depressant medication, and at the end of the 12 to 14 weeks, we compare them with randomly assigned people who have therapy as usual or matched controls who have medications.

And I... It was just my hope that the people who got positive psychotherapy would do as well as medication or therapy as usual. They do significantly better. At the end of therapy, 70 percent of them are in remission compared to about 10 percent with either therapy as usual or with drugs.

So that’s solid random assignment plus controlled evidence that doing an end-run around misery—

Well, here’s the best way to—I’ve given you the data—but the best way... I’m a bridge player. The average age of bridge players in the United States now is about 70. When I go to a bridge tournament I’m dealing with people who are arthritic, they’re in pain, they’re, they’re

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suffering…they’re not in pain when they play bridge.

Wyatt: They’re in the flow.

Seligman: They’re in pain between sessions, which is to say positive psychology is justified for producing happiness in its own right, but it may be one of our best end-runs around suffering.

Wyatt: Well, I’m familiar with some of the work on pain, pain management, and when the person in a lot of pain, back pain and whatever, is kind of withdrawing from life, the pain goes higher.

Seligman: Yeah. And we take, we put people’s feet on—we have them take off their shoes and socks—and they put their feet in ice water, and we say, you know, “When pain becomes unbearable, take your foot out,” and 90 seconds is about as long as people will tolerate it. But we have people play Tetris…

Wyatt: I know Tetris.

Seligman: …the video game during it. They keep their feet in ice water for four minutes. That is to say, when we’re in flow, it crowds out pain. It’s analgesic, probably more analgesic than aspirin. So the metaphor here is that... Psychotherapy has for 100 years been where you go to talk about your troubles. Now that’s a peculiarly untested hypothesis, actually, in the sense that we haven’t asked, “Hey, would you do just as well or better talking about what’s best in your life.” Talking...

Now I’m saying that there are virtues to talking about your troubles, but there is mounting evidence that talking about your strengths, building meaning in life, having more flow in life, building positive emotion in life, may do as well or even better, but at minimum I want to say it’s a useful supplement to talking about your troubles.

Wyatt: So my grandmother and my mother may have been correct in a way: “Go and… Don’t sit here...” The whole idea, “Don’t dwell too much on your problems. Go do something.” Or, “Go help somebody.” Or, you know, when a person’s depressed or something, they’re so self-involved and oftentimes it’s not a simple thing to just go help somebody.

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Seligman: Well, the hallmark symptom of depression is self-absorption.

Wyatt: Okay. So let’s talk about depression then and optimism and engagement. How is optimism and engagement then—from the positive psychology view—how can the therapist intervene with that?

Seligman: Well, learned optimism is the entire set of cognitive therapy skills about first identifying the automatic, catastrophic thoughts you’re saying to yourself—“It’s going to last forever. It’s going to undermine everything I do”—and marshaling accurate evidence against them. Authentic happiness is an additional set of skills, which take you out of yourself—active constructive, gratitude visit, being a lot more conscious of the good things that happen to you in life—and buffers against the troubles.

GRATITUDE VISITSeligman: One thing to say about your mother and your grandmother is, one, they were right, but two, the history of their being right is fascinating. And the great... As best I can do the history of positive psychology, it’s around 1707 that the breakthrough occurs. It occurs in the Scottish Enlightenment, a man named Francis Hutchinson and just the background here is Scotland 1700 is that Kierkegaard runs it. The dominant belief is, “How in the world can you get people to be good? We have to threaten them with hell and promise them heaven.” And Hutchinson comes along as a professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow and says, “Isn’t it interesting that people are at their happiest when they’re helping another human being?”

So it’s just... And it turns out to be right, that coming out of yourself, not being self-absorbed, doing something for another person is actually when people are at their happiest. And the big... The large... The exercise we do that has the largest short-term effect is to make a gratitude visit. So I’m going to do it with you. Ready?

Wyatt: I’m ready. I’ll take it.

Seligman: Close your, close your eyes.

Wyatt: Okay. Here we go.

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Seligman: You’re getting sleepy. No, I’m sorry. Wrong, wrong one.

Wyatt: Am I supposed to close my eyes?

Seligman: Yes, close your eyes, but don’t go to sleep.

Wyatt: Alright.

Seligman: Call up the face of someone who early in your life, Randall, did something very important for you who is still alive and whom you’ve never properly thanked. Okay, open your eyes. Got someone?

Wyatt: Yeah.

Seligman: Oh, good. Okay. Here’s your assignment for tonight: I want you to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, well-written, beginning, that is what they said or did for you in concrete terms, what its impact was on you at the time, and where you are in life now as a result of it. Just 300 words. Part one.

Part two, I want you to call her up in Bakersfield, and tell her you’d like to visit her but don’t tell her why. Show up on her doorstep, read the testimonial and watch what happens.

Wyatt: Now are you a psychic? How did you know it was Bakersfield?

Seligman: Was it Bakersfield?

Wyatt: No, it wasn’t Bakersfield. It was Hollister.

Seligman: Was it a her?

Wyatt: Yes, it was a her.

Seligman: Okay, so that’s your assignment. So I want you to do that and you report back as an epilogue to this interview. The modal response is that both people weep, and both people report it as “life changing,” those are the modal words. And then we measured the people who do the gratitude a month later. They’re markedly less depressed. They’re markedly happier.

Simple, simple thing. It can be grafted right onto your therapy at the right time. Takes people out of themselves and has a huge impact on their psychology.

Wyatt: Well, I can feel it brewing already, so I’ll send you an email,

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too.

Seligman:

Where is Hollister?

Wyatt: Hollister is 30 miles outside of San Jose in the country, where my grandfather has a ranch.

Seligman: What, what was it? What did she do?

Wyatt: Well, she birthed me. She was my mother. Is that what you’re asking?

Seligman: Yeah.

Wyatt: Yeah.

Seligman: Yeah.

Wyatt: What did she do that was...?

Seligman: Was it an incident you thought of or just you’ve never properly thanked her?

Wyatt: It was overall. Let’s put it this way: my father was more the nice one, and my mother was more the enforcer and discipline, disciplinarian. And so I think my father got more of the appreciation and credit more, and my mother kind of tolerated—in some ways and enjoyed, also—three boys. And so kind of the thankfulness for running us around to all the baseball games and tolerating us and putting up with us but then the next day, forgiving us and loving us again.

Seligman: Good. So you’re going to do a 300-word testimonial, concrete, concrete things she did.

Wyatt: Okay.

Seligman: How it affects you to this very day.

Wyatt: Definitely getting the uniforms ready was very important since I played on three baseball teams at once, and she had to drive us around to all of them.

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GRAFTING ON THERAPY SKILLSWyatt: You know, Martin, I think of lot of therapists do some of this stuff naturally.

Seligman: Yes. The best therapists, I think, do.

Wyatt: You know, that’s what I think. Whether they’re psychoanalytic, existential, interpersonal, CBT.

Seligman: Absolutely.

Wyatt: They get people to have hope. They find the best in people. Therapists usually care about people.

Seligman: Yes.

Wyatt: They don’t have it in their theories.

Seligman: And they’re not trained to do it.

Wyatt: Right. You’ve trained some therapists. What is their what we might call resistance, and how do you get therapists to open up to these ideas?

Seligman: Well, first, I should say on this we haven’t trained a lot of people. So we’ve talked about it a lot, and the people in my circle do it. But this is brand new; I think the first publication was eight or nine months ago on positive psychotherapy. But the question of taking a mid-career therapist and how do you start doing this is a very good question. I could make some guesses about that.

First, these are pretty simple procedures. So you just saw the gratitude visit in action. The signature strengths, you’ve got a test on the web site and there will be a manual of positive psychotherapy coming out from Oxford in the next year or two. The manuscript has been written. But the techniques are very simple. I don’t think it takes a fantastic... Once you’ve got a skilled therapist who is already doing stuff like this, is interested in hope and well-being, I think this is easy to graft on.

Another thing to be said about this—and I’ll do it by analogy. I’ve taught everything in psychology in the last 40 years. This is far and away the most fun stuff to teach. And well, here’s an example: So I

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taught abnormal psychology for 25 years out of five, five editions of textbooks.

Wyatt: I remembered a second ago that I used your book once in teaching. I had forgotten.

Seligman: Yeah. And I enjoyed it a great, a great deal, but I couldn’t assign my students to go out and be schizophrenic for a week or go out and drink themselves into unconsciousness. But I can assign my students now to make gratitude visits, to be active-constructive for a week, to learn how to savor pleasures, to design a half day of their highest pleasures and the like.

When I do that, it... I hear the word “life changing.” I almost never heard that when I taught abnormal psychology. As people can do these and it’s enormously fun to do. So I believe that once therapists start doing this, therapy will be less of a drag to do. They can do all the traditional stuff they do and then graft this on and… particularly toward the end.

So I think this is easy stuff to incorporate.

Wyatt: When you’ve done seminars and so forth and teachings, can you recall any of the things where the psychologists or therapists kind of—not a positive psychotherapy per se but just positive psychology—did they have objections? Or are they worried about pushing the conflict underground?

Seligman: To my surprise, this has been a lot more acceptable than most of the stuff I’ve done in my life. So I’ve… there are a set of objections and skepticism and I should mention them, and let’s just see if they apply to therapy.

So, one is, “We’re already doing it. My mother and my Sunday school teacher know all this stuff. There’s nothing new here.” The second objection is, “Look, this is a world of suffering. It’s got Rwanda and AIDS. Why in the world should we work on...? Maybe in 500 years we’ll get rid of ethnic murder and get rid of AIDS. Then we’ll work on happiness.” Another objection is, “Hopelessly fuzzy. Happiness is fuzzy.”

Those are the three objections I get most of the time. So let’s go

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back and take them one at a time and ask how they apply to a psychotherapy context. So the first is, “We knew it already.” Now in the case of the science, I have a list of 20 things I didn’t know 10 years ago that I, that I now know that surprise me. Things like optimistic people live 8.5 years longer than pessimistic people or that women who at age 20 show a Duchenne smile in their yearbook have fewer divorces.

Wyatt: Now describe that for those... I just learned about that recently when I read one of your books. What is a Duchenne Smile?

Seligman: Dr. Keltner took the Mills College Class 1971 yearbook...

Wyatt: Mills College in Oakland?

Seligman: Yeah. And is it where... I don’t know where. The one right around where we are now.

Wyatt: Twenty miles away. Twenty miles away.

Seligman: And if... There are two kinds of smiles, essentially. There’s a Duchenne Smile. I’m looking at the crow’s feet. The Duchenne Smile involves muscles under the eye, and you can classify these pretty easily. So they took women who were either... When the photographer said, when they were freshman, “Smile,” they either gave a Duchenne Smile or a people-who-smile-for-a-living smile, and then they called them up 25 years later and asked them, “How many divorces have you had? What’s your marital satisfaction?” The women who had the Duchenne Smile had fewer divorces and more marital satisfaction.

But this is in the context of stuff I just didn’t know, my Sunday school teacher didn’t know, that positive psychology has told us about. From a psychotherapy point of view, did you know that having your patient make a gratitude visit would probably make him happier? Or that teaching your patient to, for a week, every night before you go to sleep write down three things that went well today and why they went well, that merely doing that people will be less depressed six months later. And then it’s happened...

Some of the exercises are common sense here. Some are just surprising. So there’s a set... There’s something new—well, I wouldn’t say completely novel—but the set of 18 or so validated exercises that

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can be grafted on to therapy for which there’s evidence that they make people happier and less depressed, some of them are new. So that’s “I knew it already.”

Number two was, “In a world of Rwanda and AIDS, you know, why work on happiness?” Let’s solve... And that’s what we talked about before, Randall, and that was one of the great end-runs around the disorders may be to make people happier, that there’s evidence that, that we could actually buffer against suffering by increasing our skills of engagement and meaning and positive emotion.

And the third is that, “It’s fuzzy, happiness.” We thought depression was fuzzy. So I’m an inveterate measurer, and on my web site, AuthenticHappiness.org, there are about 20 tests of meaning, positive emotion and engagement. These are psychometrically very respectable now, so we can measure these with about the same precision we measure depression. So the science that’s emerged here that can be applied to therapy is, is not, not fuzzy.

Wyatt: You know, as I’m thinking of therapists I know, analysts, and CBTists, so to speak, I’m thinking of analysts, and psychodynamic people would probably have the most objections: “Well, that’s good stuff. That should be in the church, or that should be in the Boy Scouts or something, but it’s not therapy.”

But I’m thinking of these same people, and they do these things in their lives.

They give to others, they engage with other people, they engage in things beyond themselves.

And so, if it’s good enough for them, how come it’s not good enough for their clients?

Seligman: I have pretty good reactions among the analysts, actually. So George Vaillant and Rick Somers and I gave a course together called Positive Psychoanalysis. So it was really the question of whether, when and where you can graft on. Of course, when to terminate, what’s the role of conflict, what is there beyond conflict. And so what we talked about before about adding the exercises on and the duty of the analyst is not just to get rid of conflict but to build strength,

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to build the skills of positive emotion and to help clients have more meaning… something that’s quite congenial, I think, with analysis.

Wyatt: Even to go back to Freud—love, work, some add play—love and work are meaningful things.

Seligman: Yes, yes.

Wyatt: Love and work cover a lot, not just overcoming neurosis. So some of it, the seeds of it are already there.

Seligman: I believe that from the word go we became therapists because we wanted to do this. We wanted not only to break up disorders... Disorder is an artificial notion, by the way, I think. It’s an artifact of DSM-III and the like. It’s a reimbursement and insurance company convenience. But we wanted not only to break up the bad things but we wanted to build what was best. That’s why we became it. So making explicit the notion that what we are custodians of as therapists is not just remedating suffering but of building pleasure, building positive emotion, building engagement and building meaning. That’s what our job really is.

PASSING THE MARTIN SELIGMAN TESTWyatt: To turn the tables for a second, if you’ll let me, in what ways as you started getting into this did you apply this to your life, your marriage or family world?

Seligman: So I’m a... Everything I’ve talked... I’m a depressive and a pessimist.

Wyatt: Congratulations. Welcome to the club.

Seligman: I think only a depressive and a pessimist can write meaningful stuff about optimism, and that everything that I’ve written about I’ve tried on myself. But I also—And so it has to pass the Martin Seligman test before it makes its way into my books or into my teaching. And I’ve measured myself across the last 10 years, so in fact, I’m a happier, less depressed person. And so, I do it differently from most people: I divide my life into about 12 different arenas and then I rate on a 1 through 10 scale how each of those arenas are going. And they’re all going better, and it’s partly a result of doing this stuff.

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Wyatt: And with the pessimism, when you scored early on, you were more pessimistic or...

Seligman: No, I’m still a pessimist, so I still have this ability to see everything that’s wrong, but I can dispute it a lot better. I can marshal evidence against it. I can put it in its place. The voices that tell me, “This interview is really not going well,” those voices are still there. They’re always going to be there. That’s the genetics of depression and pessimism, but I’m really acrobatic at arguing against them and putting them in their place. Not making them softer, but making them much more clearly the voice of someone whose mission in life is external and they’re trying to make me miserable.

Wyatt: And putting things in context.

Seligman: Yes, yes.

Wyatt: More temporary, more specific.

Seligman: Arguing against them. Putting them in context.

Wyatt: Right. And do you think your family would say the same thing, that they see you being more happier and engaged or so forth? Your kids, your wife...

Seligman: Well, my, my kids, three of them have just come into teen age, so I doubt if they’d say that. You know, I’m the oppressor now, I think, but I think up until about age 12, they would have said that. Teenagers are… teenagers are different. I think my wife would probably say that.

Wyatt: So for you, for example, before this interview, you might have had some doubts or pessimism. I met you today for the first time, and… but yet you showed up here. Did you have some pessimism or...

Seligman: No, I’ve done interviews for so, so often and for so much of my life that I’m, I’m, that’s not a domain in which pessimism arises. So, but if this were, if this were a Congressional hearing, a meeting with a CEO, stuff I’m unfamiliar… meeting with my university president, then all the voices would have been there.

Wyatt: When is pessimism valuable and still important to have?

Seligman: Oh, I think... I’m actually not an advocate of optimism. I’m

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an advocate of something I call flexible optimism, which is to use it when it’s appropriate and not use it when it’s not appropriate. In my heuristic for when to use it is to ask yourself what the consequences would be of failure here.

And here’s what I mean: If you’re at a convention and you meet an attractive person and you’re thinking about walking up to them and introducing yourself, the consequences of failure here is just, you know, one more rejection in life’s long series of rejections. So there, use optimism. Use the skills of disputing the voices. On the other hand, if you’re thinking about having a fourth drink at a cocktail party, the consequences of a fourth drink might be a fatal accident, getting your license suspended. You don’t want to—You want to use pessimism. So when... You don’t want optimistic pilots. So when a pilot is thinking about de-icing an airplane, you really don’t want him to say, “Oh, you know, it’s a beautiful day.”

Wyatt: “What’s the big deal?”

Seligman: Right. Right. And that... So when the consequences are catastrophic, use pessimism. Don’t dispute. When the consequences are trivial—making another cold call if you’re a salesman. You think, “Gee, I just can’t bring myself to make another call. People always reject me.” There disputing it, consequences of failure here, just another cold call hanging up on you. So that’s the heuristic I use for when to use pessimism, when the consequences might be disastrous.

Wyatt: What’s—personally for you since we’re talking about this and just to get a sense how people talk about these things—what is meaningful in your life?

Seligman: Well, this is. I mean, this is, this is my work. This is my meaning. I believe, unlike Tracy Chapman, that I am creating a revolution, but it’s a revolution that’s not just about psychotherapy. It’s about increasing the tonnage of happiness in the world, and it’s about, “What is government for?” So I’ve come to believe that government is not about wealth; it’s not about power. It’s about increasing the well-being of the citizenry. That if we measure well-being in addition to money, in addition to warfare, if we have that policy about well being—how we’re teaching it in schools—allocating funds for

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increasing engagement and meaning will come about. So for me, I’m on a mission. This mission is my meaning. I believe it’s working. I believe in my optimistic moments that if we don’t revert to being Bosnia that what the 21st century and government will be about will be government as, as a, government, therapy, parenting, teaching are institutions designed to increase well-being.

Wyatt: Also, I note that you’re here in San Francisco, and you’ve brought your family along, quite a few kids.

Seligman: Yeah, five.

Wyatt: Five kids?

Seligman: On this trip, yeah.

Wyatt: On this trip. And that in your past, kind of retreat to build positive psychology, you included kids in it.

Seligman: Yeah. Yeah.

Wyatt: Which seems like the mix of life engaged with psychology, which you don’t hear a lot about.

Seligman: Well, when I ran for APA president 10 years ago, Mandy insisted that we buy a truck and that wherever I went I truck the entire family along. So the family is bigger now and it’s often airplanes, but it’s been very expensive, but we’ve pretty much always take the family along.

Wyatt: It’s like we could film you and do like a Chevy Chase film, family vacation.

WHERE I WAS MEANT TO BEWyatt: How long ago was your learned helplessness studies?

Seligman: The first one was published in 1967, so it’s the fortieth anniversary.

Wyatt: Back then, did you have any concept that you’d be here with learned optimism and positive psychology.

Seligman: Yes.

Wyatt: Were, are there any inklings?

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Seligman: Yes, I saw it all at once.

Wyatt: Really? That’s...

Seligman: Yes. In, you know, not in any detail, but the first time I looked at a helpless dog, you know, the whole thing in some sense flashed before me. It took, with helplessness, it took a decade to flesh out what it was, but I think the seeds were there and even though it looks very different from the outside, I think I’ve been trying to get to the place I am in now through this route.

I wasn’t made to be a clinical psychologist. I wasn’t made to work on suffering. What I was made to work on is what we’re talking about now, but the only route that existed to work on human well being and happiness that were scientifically acceptable to me 40 years ago was this route through suffering and clinical psychology. But I think I’ve gotten to where I want to be, and where I was meant to be.

Wyatt: Are you surprised by the enormous amount of studies that seem to support this. I mean, I know you had hunches and so forth, but it’s fairly overwhelming the data on being able to predict presidents who are more optimistic, or politicians, sports teams doing better when they’re more optimistic.

Seligman: So basically my science is every year I throw 10 balls up in the air and eight of them crash to the ground and never see the light of day. One of them is in the middle and one really works, and the way publications work is you publish the one that really works.

Wyatt: Are there any questions that people ask you that, that are—you say you’re interviewed a lot—that really get to the heart of positive psychology that I haven’t, we haven’t talked about today.

Seligman: You’ve done a very good job of covering it. I’m trying to think of something my clinical, my therapist friends have said to me more than once.

Wyatt: Yeah.

Seligman: And it’s not a criticism; it’s an affirmation. So, something that comes up: “This is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is what I was meant to do, but I didn’t—and I do it—but I’d never been taught

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to do it before, but this is my birthright,” is something that more than one therapist has said to me.

Wyatt: You know, a lot of these things are saying they have kind of a… not just a common sense but a good sense. I’m thinking of a friend who was into drugs and when a person’s, you know, become a drug addict, their whole life becomes embarrassing to them, often. I just read a book about Bill Moyer’s son who was a drug addict, crack and so forth, and now he’s turned his life around and is a spokesman, so to speak, and he talks about the shame involved and everything and so much despair and, you know, pessimism and embarrassment. And trying to connect to these folks—I’m thinking of my friend—on positive things about themselves. You can’t just lift them out and say, “Your life sucks and it’s awful,” and so forth, but you’ve got to find the good things about them still or else they don’t even hear you. So it seems to have wide applicability there.

Seligman: I think the same clinical skill which enables us to create rapport, to get people in touch with underlying problems, that same kind of skill can be turned on its head and used to put people in touch with what makes life worth living.

Wyatt: Alright, well, thank you very much, Martin.

Seligman: Thank you, Randall.

Wyatt: For talking with us today.

Seligman: I really enjoyed it. Yeah.

Wyatt: And it was a pleasure.

Seligman: Yeah, for me, too.

Wyatt: And I’ll write you that...

Seligman: About your mom.

Wyatt: The 300-word memo.

Seligman: For Hollister, okay. Good.

Wyatt: All right.

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BONUS OUTTAKE 1: COUPLES BENEFIT FROM POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGYWyatt: That’s something that’d be hard to argue with. You know, the couple’s research is very much in sync with what you’re saying—Gottman’s work and others like him—about a couple thinking about good times in their life, about how to have more fun, about how to have more pleasure. It’s not surprising this is applicable to...

Seligman: Yes, and I think the... well, Gottman, but I think, you know, when I’ve done a little bit of couples of stuff and I’ve read the major marriage manuals, and they really are dismal. I mean, it’s getting people to fight a little better. Whereas, the new work on relationships, Shelly Gable’s work—very important for a therapist to know about, they don’t really know about it yet—is... Gottman and Gable began to find that it wasn’t how you fought that predicted the breakup of a marriage or loving commitment but it was how you celebrated together, that is, how you talked about the good things in life.

So if you imagine a 2x2 table. Your spouse comes home. She’s just been promoted at work. Imagine there are four different ways you can respond to her: active, passive, constructive, destructive. Active, passive, constructive, destructive. We don’t have a blackboard, so I’m asking you to imagine this. So let’s take active-destructive: “Oh, you’ve just been promoted. Do you know what tax bracket that’s going to put us into? You know, as it is, the kids don’t think they have a mother because you spend two nights working… at work. Are you going to spend three nights now?” That’s active-destructive.

Passive-constructive: “That’s nice, dear. Congratulations.”

Passive-destructive: “What’s for dinner?”

Wyatt: I’m waiting for the positive part here so I can up my mood.

Seligman: Okay, well now, the message of this: there’s only one quadrant that predicts love and commitment and does it more accurately than how you fight or how you [** check INAUDIBLE], and that’s active-constructive: “You know, I’ve been reading your reports for the last six months to the company on the pension plan, and those

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are the... you know, I’ve been in corporate life for 30 years. Those are the best reports that I’ve seen on pensions in my life. What exactly did your boss say to you when he promoted you? Where were you? What did you think? Was it… were you surprised?”

So there’s a whole script that we don’t naturally engage in which actively and constructively responds to victory. Now the reason...

Wyatt: To what? To what?

Seligman: To victory.

Wyatt: To victory.

Seligman: To good events. So what we’re talking about here as a marriage counselor is not how to make bad things a little more tolerable. It’s how to have more fun, more engagement, a better relationship. And I think there’s a movement in marriage counseling now, which asks the question not of making insufferable marriages tolerable but in making good marriages much better. And again, from my point of view of the job of the therapist, you’ve got at least two jobs. One is to deal with misery, and the other is take what’s okay or good and make it much better.

Wyatt: Well, what’s striking me as we talk is traditional psychology and therapy looks at understanding pain and suffering and connecting and empathy, and to combine that with an appreciation of what’s best in a person is pretty powerful. If you just appreciate a person for their best that’s Pollyanna and you don’t take in their, you know, acknowledge their truth of their difficult times, but to do both has a synergistic effect. You know, with a couple, it’s so obvious. Everybody knows that. But with an individual too...

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BONUS OUTTAKE 2: ACTIVE INGREDIENTS IN THERAPYWyatt: To step back a little bit into traditional therapy, how do you see what everybody’s talking about these days—and they have been for years but more so now—is evidence-based therapy and the importance of the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic alliance? How does that play into teaching or learning positive psychology at least?

Seligman: So I’m very interested in active ingredients, the things that, what you can add over and above the relationship.

Wyatt: Okay.

Seligman: So most, all of the exercise we talked about this afternoon I’ve done the following with: I’ve put them... I have a web site that 800,000 people—500 people a day go to new people—and every so often I put up a link that says “Exercises,” and you go to that link; it says, “Dr. Seligman wants to find out what single exercises actually make people less depressed or happier.” And then give one exercise like the gratitude visit. No human hands. No relationship. So the exercise is like active-constructive, three blessings, gratitude visit that I described to you work with a machine [** check] given to you. So for me, what I want to do is create active ingredients, which when put in skilled therapeutic hands, multiply the effects. So I’m talking about stuff over and above. You need the relationship. I’m all for that. I teach that when I teach psychotherapy. I select for that. But what I want is active ingredients that people haven’t discovered before, which will add over and above your skills and relationships.

BONUS OUTTAKE 3: CHILDREN AND LEARNED OPTIMISMWyatt: Earlier on, particularly in California, the last 30 years or so, self-esteem was the ultimate goal. What do you see about the relationship between self-esteem and happiness and life satisfaction?

Seligman: Yeah, I don’t like self-esteem. I think self esteem is an epiphenomenon, that it’s like the speedometer on your car, that the

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speedometer... I believe that self-esteem is a meter that reads out how your commerce with the world is going: how you’re doing with the people you love, how you’re doing in school, how you’re doing at work. And in general, what it’s for is when it’s low, says those things aren’t... When it’s high, that’s good.

The people who tell us to increase self-esteem are people who are telling us to increase the meter without changing the motor. So I think self-esteem is not a very active variable. And that I distinguish between warranted self-esteem and footless self esteem. So I think the notion of teaching kids to feel good because of their race or because they know how to play or whatever is next to useless, but teaching kids skills that bring about warranted self esteem—how to get along with the people you love, how to do well in sports—that that’s the necessary underpinning.

Wyatt: You mention children. What kind of work... I know you’ve done some work, and you talk about that briefly about using methods with children, these positive methods with children.

Seligman: Most of my work is with children these days, so almost all the techniques that I’ve talked about, there are children’s versions. And we typically in our studies take 10-year-old to 12-year-old children and we teach them the skills of learned optimism—I have a book called The Optimistic Child—and then we find that as these kids go through puberty, this roughly halves the rate of depression as they go through it.

In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten very interested in teaching positive psychology in the schools, not just learned optimism and resilience. In fact, I just got back from training 90 UK middle school teachers for two weeks in the techniques of learned optimism and positive psychology. And next January, I’m taking, going on sabbatical, taking the whole family and 20 of the world’s leading positive psychologists to Jilong Grammar School in Australia, in which we want to transform education there for K-12 into positive psychology education.

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Video CreditsMartin Seligman, PhD

with Randall C. Wyatt, PhD

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY Victor Yalom, PhD

and Randall C. Wyatt, PhD

VIDEO PRODUCTION Ludlow Media

CAMERAS Ludlow Media

AUDIO Ludlow Media

EDITING Ludlow Media

POST-PRODUCTION Ludlow Media

MUSIC Reuben Maness

MENU & COVER GRAPHICS Sabine Grand

Filmed in San Francisco, CA USA A Psychotherapy.net Production © Copyright 2008, Psychotherapy.net, LLC

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Notes…

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About the Contributors

VIDEO PARTICIPANTSMartin E.P. Seligman, PhD, is Chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center and founder of Positive Psychology. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works on learned helplessness, depression, optimism and pessimism, and positive psychology. He is the network director of the Positive Psychology Network and Scientific Director of the Values-in-Action Project of the Mayerson Foundation, and is scientific director of Foresight, Inc, a testing company, which predicts success in various walks of life.

Dr. Seligman’s bibliography includes more than 20 books and 170 academic and popular articles on motivation and personality. Among his better-known works are Learned Optimism (Knopf, 1991), What You Can Change & What You Can’t (Knopf, 1993), The Optimistic Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), Learned Helplessness (Freeman, 1975, 1993) and Abnormal Psychology (Norton, 1982, 1988, 1995, with David Rosenhan). His books have been translated into more than sixteen languages and have been best sellers both in America and abroad. He has been a spokesman for the science and practice of psychology on numerous television and radio shows.

Previously, he was the Director of the Clinical Training Program of the Psychology Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He is past-president of the American Psychological Association, as well as of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association.

Since 2000 his main mission has been the promotion of the field of Positive Psychology. This discipline includes the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. As the science behind these becomes more firmly grounded, Dr. Seligman is now turning his attention to training Positive Psychologists, individuals whose practice will make the world a happier place, in a way that parallels clinical psychologists having made the world a less unhappy place.

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Randall C. Wyatt, PhD, Featured Interviewer, is Editor-in-Chief of Psychotherapy.net. He is the Director of Professional Training at the California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco at Alliant International University and a practicing psychologist in Oakland , California.

MANUAL AUTHORSRandall C. Wyatt, PhD, see above.

ErikaL.Seid,MA,LMFT, Educational Programs Manager at Psychotherapy.net, practices psychotherapy in the San Francisco area, specializing in cultural issues and sexual offender treatment.

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BRIEF THERAPY FOR ADDICTIONS SERIESBruceS.Liese Cognitive Therapy for AddictionsG.AlanMarlatt Harm Reduction Therapy for AddictionsBarbara S. McCrady Couples Therapy for AddictionsWilliam R. Miller Motivational InterviewingJohn C. Norcross Stages of Change for AddictionsRobert E. Wubbolding Reality Therapy for AddictionsJoanEllenZweben Integrating Therapy with 12-Step Programs

CHILD THERAPY WITH THE EXPERTS SERIESJon Carlson Adlerian Parent ConsultationJanet Sasson Edgette Adolescent Family TherapyGerald Koocher Psychotherapy with Medically Ill ChildrenTerry Kottman Adlerian Play TherapyStephen Madigan Narrative Therapy with ChildrenBruce Masek Cognitive-Behavioral Child Therapy

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John J. Murphy Solution-Focused Child TherapyVioletOaklander Gestalt Therapy with ChildrenDavid Scharff Object Relations Child TherapyAninUtigaard Person-Centered Child TherapyRobert E. Wubbolding Reality Therapy with Children

PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH THE EXPERTS SERIESInsoo Kim Berg Solution Focused TherapyJames Bugental Existential-Humanistic PsychotherapyJon Carlson Adlerian TherapyMary Goulding Transactional AnalysisKennethV.Hardy Family Systems TherapyAllenIvey Integrative TherapyJeffrey Kottler Integrative CounselingJohnKrumboltz Cognitive-Behavioral TherapyArnoldLazarus Multimodal TherapyDonald Meichenbaum Cognitive-Behavioral TherapyNatalie Rogers Person-Centered Expressive Arts TherapyErnest Rossi Mind-Body TherapyJill Savege Scharff Object Relations TherapyLenoreWalker Feminist TherapyRobert E. Wubbolding Reality Therapy

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POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY · POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY MARTIN SELIGMAN, PHD...

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