Martin seligman pdf download

Learned helplessness convinced me that the behaviorist program was dead wrong. Appreciating complex contingencies is the process of judgment, and extrapolating them to the future is the process of expectation. If one takes learned helplessness seriously, such processes cannot be explained away as epiphenomena, because they cause the behavior of giving up.

The work on learned helplessness was one of the blasts that blew down the straw house of behaviorism and led in the s to the enthroning of cognitive psychology in the fiefdoms of academic psychology. I was thoroughly convinced that negative emotions the so-called dysphorias were not epiphenomena. The evolutionary account was compelling: Sadness and depression not only signaled loss, they brought about the behaviors of disengagement, giving up, and in extreme cases suicide.

Anxiety and fear signaled the presence of danger, leading to preparations to flee, defend, or conserve. Anger signaled trespass, and it caused preparation to attack the trespasser and to redress injustice. Strangely, though, I did not apply this logic to positive emotions, either in my theory or in my own life. The feelings of happiness, good cheer, ebullience, self-esteem, and joy all remained frothy for me.

In my theory, I doubted that these emotions ever caused anything, or that they could ever be increased if you were not lucky enough to be born with an abundance of them.

I wrote in The Optimistic Child that feelings of self-esteem in particular, and happiness in general, develop as only side effects of doing well in the world. However wonderful feelings of high self-esteem might be, trying to achieve them before achieving good commerce with the world would be to confuse profoundly the means and the end.

Or so I thought. In my personal life, it had always discouraged me that these delightful emotions rarely visited me, and failed to stay for a long visit when they did. I had kept this to myself, feeling like a freak, until I read the literature on positive and negative affect.

Whether one identical twin is a giggler or a grouch, it is highly likely that her sister, with exactly the same genes, will be one as well; but if the twins are fraternal, sharing only half their genes, the odds that they will have the same affectivity are not much greater than chance.

How do you think you score on positive and negative affectivity? You can take the test here or on the website www. Read each item and then mark the appropriate answer in the space next to the word.

Indicate to what extent you feel this way right now that is, at the present moment. Use the following scale to record your answers. To score your test, merely add your ten positive affect PA scores and your ten negative affect NA scores separately. You will arrive at two scores ranging from 10 to Some people have a lot of positive affect and this stays quite fixed over a lifetime. High positive-affect people feel great a lot of the time; good things bring them pleasure and joy in abundance.

Just as many people, however, have very little of it. Most of the rest of us lie somewhere in between. I suppose psychology should have expected this all along. Constitutional differences in anger and depression have long been established. Why not in positive emotion? The upshot of this is the theory that we appear to have a genetic steersman who charts the course of our emotional life.

If the course does not run through sunny seas, this theory tells us that there is not much you can do to feel happier. I have a friend, Len, who is much lower on positive affect than even I am.

He made millions as the CEO of a securities trading company and, even more spectacularly, became a national champion bridge player several times over—all in his twenties! Handsome, articulate, bright, and a very eligible bachelor, however, he was surprised that in love he was a total flop.

As I said, Len is reserved, and virtually devoid of positive affect. I saw him at the very moment of victory in a major bridge championship; he flashed a fleeting half-smile and escaped upstairs to watch Monday night football alone. This is not to say Len is insensitive. He is not warm. He is not joyous. He is not a barrel of laughs. In fact, there is probably nothing much wrong with Len. He is just constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity.

Evolution has ensured that there will be many people down there, because natural selection has plenty of uses for the lack of emotion as well as for its presence. To be a champion bridge player, to be a successful options trader, and to be a CEO all require lots of deep cool when under fire from all sides. But Len also dated modern American women, who find ebullience very attractive. A decade ago he asked my advice about what to do, and I suggested that he move to Europe, where bubbliness and extroverted warmth are not so highly prized.

He is today happily married to a European. And this is the moral of the story: that a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion. That afternoon in the garden with Nikki convinced my heart that my theory was wrong, but it took Barbara Fredrickson, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, to convince my head that positive emotion has a profound purpose far beyond the delightful way it makes us feel.

The Templeton Positive Psychology Prize is given for the best work in Positive Psychology done by a scientist under forty years of age.

In , the inaugural year of the prize, Barbara Fredrickson won it for her theory of the function of positive emotions. Fredrickson claims that positive emotions have a grand purpose in evolution. They broaden our abiding intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can draw upon when a threat or opportunity presents itself.

When we are in a positive mood, people like us better, and friendship, love, and coalitions are more likely to cement. We are open to new ideas and new experience. For instance, suppose you have in front of you a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall in such a way that wax does not drip on the floor. The task requires a creative solution—emptying the box and tacking it to the wall, then using it as a candleholder.

The experimenter beforehand makes you feel a positive emotion: giving you a small bag of candy, letting you read amusing cartoons, or having you read a series of positive words aloud with expression.

Each of these techniques reliably creates a small blip of good feeling, and the positive emotion induced makes you more likely to be creative in fulfulling the task. Another experiment: Your job is to say as quickly as you can whether a word falls into a specific category. But if the experimenter first induces positive emotion as above, you are faster. The same intellectual boost occurs with both little children and experienced physicians. Then all the children were given a learning task about different shapes, and both did better than four-year-olds who got neutral instructions.

At the other end of the spectrum of experience, 44 internists were randomly placed in one of three groups: a group that got a small package of candy, a group that read aloud humanistic statements about medicine, and a control group. All the physicians were then presented with a hard-to-diagnose case of liver disease and asked to think out loud as they made their diagnosis. The candied group did best, considering liver disease earliest and most efficiently.

Happy But Dumb? In spite of evidence like this, it is tempting to view happy people as air- heads. The happy-but-dumb view has very respectable provenance. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, wrote in that the function of thought is to allay doubt: We do not think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong. When presented with no obstacles, we simply glide along the highway of life, and only when there is a pebble in the shoe is conscious analysis triggered.

They gave undergraduate students differing degrees of control over turning on a green light. For other students, however, the light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button. Afterward, each student was asked to judge how much control he or she had. Depressed students were very accurate, both when they had control and when they did not. The nondepressed people astonished us. They were accurate when they had control, but even when they were helpless they still judged that they had about 35 percent control.

The depressed people were sadder but wiser, in short, than the nondepressed people. More supporting evidence for depressive realism soon followed. Depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas happy people think they are much more skillful than others judge them to be. Eighty percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills; the majority of workers rate their job performance as above average; and the majority of motorists even those who have been involved in accidents rate their driving as safer than average.

Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.

Depressed people, in contrast, are evenhanded in assessing success and failure. This does indeed make happy people look empty-headed. Moreover, Lisa Aspinwall a professor at the University of Utah who won the second-prize Templeton award in gathered compelling evidence that in making important real-life decisions, happier people may be smarter than unhappy people.

She presents her subjects with scary, pertinent health-risk information: articles about the relationship of caffeine to breast cancer for coffee drinkers, or about links between tanning and melanoma for sun worshippers. Happy people remember more of the negative information and rate it as more convincing, it turns out, than do the unhappy people. The resolution of the dispute about which type of people are smarter may be the following: In the normal course of events, happy people rely on their tried and true positive past experiences, whereas less happy people are more skeptical.

Even if a light has seemed uncontrollable for the last ten minutes, happy people assume from their past experience that things will eventually work out, and at some point they will have some control. Hence the 35 percent response discussed earlier, even when the green light was actually uncontrollable. There is an exciting possibility with rich implications that integrates all these findings: A positive mood jolts us into an entirely different way of thinking from a negative mood.

This seems to make us critics of a high order. When we gather to debate which one of several superb job candidates we should hire as a professor, we often end up hiring no one, instead picking out everything that each candidate has done wrong. So a chilly, negative mood activates a battle-stations mode of thinking: the order of the day is to focus on what is wrong and then eliminate it.

A positive mood, in contrast, buoys people into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, undefensive and lateral. This way of thinking aims to detect not what is wrong, but what is right.

It does not go out of its way to detect sins of omission, but hones in on the virtues of commission. It probably even occurs in a different part of the brain and has a different neurochemistry from thinking under negative mood.

Choose your venue and design your mood to fit the task at hand. Here are examples of tasks that usually require critical thinking: taking the graduate record exams, doing income tax, deciding whom to fire, dealing with repeated romantic rejections, preparing for an audit, copy-editing, making crucial decisions in competitive sports, and figuring out where to go to college.

Carry these out on rainy days, in straight-backed chairs, and in silent, institutionally painted rooms. Being uptight, sad, or out of sorts will not impede you; it may even make your decisions more acute. In contrast, any number of life tasks call for creative, generous, and tolerant thinking: planning a sales campaign, finding ways to increase the amount of love in your life, pondering a new career field, deciding whether to marry someone, thinking about hobbies and noncompetitive sports, and creative writing.

Carry these out in a setting that will buoy your mood for example, in a comfortable chair, with suitable music, sun, and fresh air. If possible, surround yourself with people you trust to be unselfish and of good will.

Play among juvenile ground squirrels involves running at top speed, jumping straight up into the air, changing directions in midair, then landing and streaking off in the new direction. Young Patas monkeys at play will run headlong into saplings that are flexible enough to catapult them off into another direction.

Both of these maneuvers are used by adults of the respective species to escape predators. It is almost irresistible to view play in general as a builder of muscle and cardiovascular fitness and as the practice that perfects avoiding predators, as well as perfecting fighting, hunting, and courting.

Health and longevity are good indicators of physical reserve, and there is direct evidence that positive emotion predicts health and longevity.

In the largest study to date, 2, Mexican-Americans from the southwest United States aged sixty-five or older were given a battery of demographic and emotional tests, then tracked for two years. Positive emotion strongly predicted who lived and who died, as well as disability. After controlling for age, income, education, weight, smoking, drinking, and disease, the researchers found that happy people were half as likely to die, and half as likely to become disabled. Positive emotion also protects people against the ravages of aging.

You will recall that beginning nuns who wrote happy autobiographies when in their twenties lived longer and healthier lives than novices whose autobiographies were devoid of positive emotion, and also that optimists in the Mayo Clinic study lived significantly longer than pessimists. Happy people, furthermore, have better health habits, lower blood pressure, and feistier immune systems than less happy people.

Research suggests, however, that more happiness actually causes more productivity and higher income. One study measured the amount of positive emotion of employees, then followed their job performance over the next eighteen months. Happier people went on to get better evaluations from their supervisors and higher pay. In a large-scale study of Australian youths across fifteen years, happiness made gainful employment and higher income more likely. In attempts to define whether happiness or productivity comes first by inducing happiness experimentally and then looking at later performance , it turns out that adults and children who are put into a good mood select higher goals, perform better, and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tasks, such as solving anagrams.

When Bad Things Happen to Happy People The final edge that happy people have for building physical resources is how well they deal with untoward events. How long can you hold your hand in a bucket of ice water? The average duration before the pain gets to be too much is between sixty and ninety seconds. Rick Snyder, a professor at Kansas and one of the fathers of Positive Psychology, used this test on Good Morning America to demonstrate the effects of positive emotion on coping with adversity.

He first gave a test of positive emotion to the regular cast. By quite a margin, Charles Gibson outscored everybody. Then, before live cameras, each member of the cast put his or her hand in ice water. Everyone, except Gibson, yanked their hands out before ninety seconds had elapsed. Gibson, though, just sat there grinning not grimacing , and still had his hand in the bucket when a commercial break was finally called.

Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.

Barbara Fredrickson showed students a filmed scene from The Ledge in which a man inches along the ledge of a high-rise, hugging the building. At one point he loses his grip and dangles above the traffic; the heart rate of students watching this clip goes through the roof. Building Social Resources At the age of seven weeks my youngest child, Carly Dylan, took her first tentative steps in the dance of development.

Mandy beamed back and laughed, and Carly, cooing, broke into a bigger smile. Securely attached children grow up to outperform their peers in almost every way that has been tested, including persistence, problem solving, independence, exploration, and enthusiasm.

Feeling positive emotion and expressing it well is at the heart of not only the love between a mother and an infant, but of almost all love and friendship. It never fails to surprise me that my closest friends are not other psychologists in spite of so much shared sympathy, time together, and common background or even other intellectuals, but the people with whom I play poker, bridge, and volleyball.

The exception proves the rule here. There is a tragic facial paralysis called Moebius syndrome that leaves its victims unable to smile. Individuals born with this affliction cannot show positive emotion with their face, and so they react to the friendliest conversation with a disconcerting deadpan.

They have enormous difficulty making and keeping even casual friends. When the sequence of feeling a positive emotion, expressing it, eliciting a positive emotion in another, and then responding back goes awry, the music that supports the dance of love and friendship is interrupted.

Routine psychological studies focus on pathology; they look at the most depressed, anxious, or angry people and ask about their lifestyles and personalities. I have done such studies for two decades. We took an unselected sample of college students and measured happiness rigorously by using six different scales, then focused on the happiest 10 percent.

The very happy people spent the least time alone and the most time socializing , and they were rated highest on good relationships by themselves and by their friends. All 22 members of the very happy group, except one, reported a current romantic partner. The very happy group had a little more money, but they did not experience a different number of negative or positive events, and they did not differ on amount of sleep, TV watching, exercise, smoking, drinking alcohol, or religious activity.

Many other studies show that happy people have more casual friends and more close friends, are more likely to be married, and are more involved in group activities than unhappy people. A corollary of the enmeshment with others that happy people have is their altruism. Before I saw the data, I thought that unhappy people— identifying with the suffering that they know so well—would be more altruistic.

So I was taken aback when the findings on mood and helping others without exception revealed that happy people were more likely to demonstrate that trait. In the laboratory, children and adults who are made happy display more empathy and are willing to donate more money to others in need.

When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we like others more, and we want to share our good fortune even with strangers.

When we are down, though, we become distrustful, turn inward, and focus defensively on our own needs. Looking out for number one is more characteristic of sadness than of well-being. Developing more positive emotion in our lives will build friendship, love, better physical health, and greater achievement.

Broadening and building—that is, growth and positive development— are the essential characteristics of a win-win encounter. Ideally, reading this chapter is an example of a win-win encounter: if I have done my job well, I grew intellectually by writing it, and so did you by reading it.

Being in love, making a friend, and raising children are almost always huge win- wins. Almost every technological advance for example, the printing press or the hybrid tea rose is a win-win interaction. The printing press did not subtract an equivalent economic value from somewhere else; rather it engendered an explosion in value. Herein lies the likely reason for feelings.

By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue. Now that you and I are convinced that it is well worth it to bring more happiness into your life, the overriding question is, can the amount of positive emotion in our lives be increased? Let us now turn to that question. The Happiness Formula Although much of the research that underlies this book is based in statistics, a user-friendly book in psychology for the educated layperson can have at most one equation.

V, the single most important issue in Positive Psychology, is the subject of Chapters 5, 6, and 7. H Enduring Level of Happiness It is important to distinguish your momentary happiness from your enduring level of happiness. Momentary happiness can easily be increased by any number of uplifts, such as chocolate, a comedy film, a back rub, a compliment, flowers, or a new blouse. No one is more expert on this topic than you are.

The challenge is to raise your enduring level of happiness, and merely increasing the number of bursts of momentary positive feelings will not for reasons you will read about shortly accomplish this. The Fordyce scale you took in the last chapter was about momentary happiness, and the time has now come to measure your general level of happiness. The following scale was devised by Sonja Lyubomirsky, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside.

In general, I consider myself: 2. Some people are generally very happy. They enjoy life regardless of what is going on, getting the most out of everything. To what extent does this characterization describe you?

Some people are generally not very happy. Although they are not depressed, they never seem as happy as they might be. To score the test, total your answers for the questions and divide by 8. The mean for adult Americans is 4. Two-thirds of people score between 3. The title of this chapter may seem like a peculiar question to you. You may believe that with enough effort, every emotional state and every personality trait can be improved.

When I began studying psychology forty years ago, I also believed this, and this dogma of total human plasticity reigned over the entire field. It held that with enough personal work and with enough reshaping of the environment all of human psychology could be remade for the better. It was shattered beyond repair in the s, however, when studies of the personality of twins and of adopted children began to cascade in.

The psychology of identical twins turns out to be much more similar than that of fraternal twins, and the psychology of adopted children turns out to be much more similar to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents. All of these studies—and they now number in the hundreds—converge on a single point: roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance.

But high heritability does not determine how unchangeable a trait is. S Set Range : The Barriers to Becoming Happier Roughly half of your score on happiness tests is accounted for by the score your biological parents would have gotten had they taken the test. So, for example, if you are low in positive affectivity, you may frequently feel the impulse to avoid social contact and spend your time alone.

As you will see below, happy people are very social, and there is some reason to think that their happiness is caused by lots of fulfilling socializing. So, if you do not fight the urgings of your genetic steersman, you may remain lower in happy feelings than you would be otherwise.

She needed periodic doses of hope because her usual mood was low; if she could have afforded a therapist, her diagnosis would have been minor depression. This ongoing funk did not begin when her husband left her three years earlier for another woman, but seemed to have always been there—at least since middle school, twenty-five years ago.

Then a miracle happened: Ruth won 22 million dollars in the Illinois State lottery. She was beside herself with joy. She was even able to send her twin sons to private school. Strangely, however, as the year went by, her mood drifted downward. By the end of the year, in spite of the absence of any obvious adversity, her expensive therapist diagnosed Ruth as having a case of dysthymic disorder chronic depression.

A systematic study of 22 people who won major lotteries found that they reverted to their baseline level of happiness over time, winding up no happier than 22 matched controls. The good news, however, is that after misfortune strikes, the thermostat will strive to pull us out of our misery eventually. In fact, depression is almost always episodic, with recovery occurring within a few months of onset.

Even individuals who become paraplegic as a result of spinal cord accidents quickly begin to adapt to their greatly limited capacities, and within eight weeks they report more net positive emotion than negative emotion. Within a few years, they wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.

Of people with extreme quadriplegia, 84 percent consider their life to be average or above average. These findings fit the idea that we each have a personal set range for our level of positive and negative emotion, and this range may represent the inherited aspect of overall happiness.

As you accumulate more material possessions and accomplishments, your expectations rise. The deeds and things you worked so hard for no longer make you happy; you need to get something even better to boost your level of happiness into the upper reaches of its set range. But once you get the next possession or achievement, you adapt to it as well, and so on. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of evidence for such a treadmill. If there were no treadmill, people who get more good things in life would in general be much happier than the less fortunate.

But the less fortunate are, by and large, just as happy as the more fortunate. Good things and high accomplishments, studies have shown, have astonishingly little power to raise happiness more than transiently: In less than three months, major events such as being fired or promoted lose their impact on happiness levels.

Wealth, which surely brings more possessions in its wake, has a surprisingly low correlation with happiness level. Rich people are, on average, only slightly happier than poor people. Real income has risen dramatically in the prosperous nations over the last half century, but the level of life satisfaction has been entirely flat in the United States and most other wealthy nations. Physical attractiveness which, like wealth, brings about any number of advantages does not have much effect at all on happiness.

Objective physical health, perhaps the most valuable of all resources, is barely correlated with happiness. There are limits on adaptation, however.

There are some bad events that we never get used to, or adapt to only very slowly. The death of a child or a spouse in a car crash is one example. Four to seven years after such events, bereaved people are still much more depressed and unhappy than controls. Together, the S variables your genetic steersman, the hedonic treadmill, and your set range tend to keep your level of happiness from increasing. But there are two other powerful forces, C and V, that do raise the level of happiness.

C Circumstances The good news about circumstances is that some do change happiness for the better. The bad news is that changing these circumstances is usually impractical and expensive. What percentage of Americans becomes clinically depressed in their lifetime?

What percentage of Americans reports life satisfaction above neutral? What percentage of mental patients reports a positive emotional balance more positive feelings than negative feelings? Which of the following groups of Americans report a negative emotional balance more negative feelings than positive? American adults answering these questions believe, on average, that the lifetime prevalence of clinical depression is 49 percent it is actually between 8 and 18 percent , that only 56 percent of Americans report positive life satisfaction it is actually 83 percent , and that only 33 percent of the mentally ill report more positive than negative feelings it is actually 57 percent.

All of the four disadvantaged groups in fact report that they are mostly happy, but 83 percent of adults guess the opposite for poor African-Americans, and percent make the same guess for unemployed men.

Only 38 and 24 percent, respectively, guess that the most elderly and multiply handicapped people report a positive hedonic balance. The overall lesson is that most Americans, regardless of objective circumstances, say they are happy, and at the same time they markedly underestimate the happiness of other Americans. At the dawn of serious research on happiness in , Warner Wilson reviewed what was known then.

I will now review what has been discovered over the past thirty-five years about how external circumstances influence happiness. Some of it is astonishing. Rich is better. At the broadest level, researchers compare the average subjective well-being of people living in rich nations versus those in poor nations. Here is the question about life satisfaction that at least one thousand respondents from each of forty nations answered; please answer it yourself now: On a scale of 1 dissatisfied to 10 satisfied , how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

This cross-national survey, involving tens of thousands of adults, illustrates several points. First, Sophie Tucker was partly right: overall national purchasing power and average life satisfaction go strongly in the same general direction. So the wealthy Swiss are happier than poor Bulgarians, but it hardly matters if one is Irish, Italian, Norwegian, or American. There are also plenty of exceptions to the wealth-satisfaction association: Brazil, mainland China, and Argentina are much higher in life satisfaction than would be predicted by their wealth.

The former Soviet- bloc countries are less satisfied than their wealth would predict, as are the Japanese. The cultural values of Brazil and Argentina and the political values of China might support positive emotion, and the difficult emergence from communism with its accompanying deterioration in health and social dislocation probably lowers happiness in eastern Europe.

Cross-national comparisons are difficult to disentangle, since the wealthy nations also have higher literacy, better health, more education, and more liberty, as well as more material goods.

Comparing richer with poorer people within each nation helps to sort out the causes, and this information is closer to the comparison that is relevant to your own decision making.

In very poor nations, where poverty threatens life itself, being rich does predict greater well-being. In wealthier nations, however, where almost everyone has a basic safety net, increases in wealth have negligible effects on personal happiness. In the United States, the very poor are lower in happiness, but once a person is just barely comfortable, added money adds little or no happiness.

Even the fabulously rich—the Forbes , with an average net worth of over million dollars —are only slightly happier than the average American. How about the very poor? He interviewed and tested thirty-two prostitutes and thirty-one pavement dwellers of Calcutta about their life satisfaction. Kalpana is a thirty-five-year-old woman who has been a prostitute for twenty years. The death of her mother forced her into the profession to help support her siblings.

She maintains contact with her brother and sister and visits them once a month in their village, and she supports her eight-year-old daughter in that village. Kalpana lives alone and practices her profession in a small, rented concrete room, furnished with a bed, mirror, some dishes, and a shrine to the Hindu gods.

She falls into the official A category of sex worker, making more than two and a half dollars per customer. Astonishingly this is not so. Their overall life satisfaction is slightly negative 1.

But in many domains of life, their satisfaction is high: morality 2. Their lowest satisfaction in a specific domain is income 2.

While Kalpana fears that her old village friends would look down on her, her family members do not. Her once-a-month visits are times of joy. She is thankful that she earns enough to provide a nanny for her daughter and to keep her housed and well-fed. When Biswas-Diener compares the pavement dwellers of Calcutta to the street people of Fresno, California, however, he finds striking differences in favor of India.

Among the seventy-eight street people, average life satisfaction is extremely low 1. There are a few domains in which satisfaction is moderate, such as intelligence 2. While these data are based on only a small sample of poor people, they are surprising and not easily dismissed. But even in the face of great adversity, these poor people find much of their lives satisfying although this is much more true of slum dwellers in Calcutta than of very poor Americans.

If this is correct, there are plenty of reasons to work to reduce poverty—including lack of opportunity, high infant mortality, unhealthy housing and diet, crowding, lack of employment, or demeaning work—but low life satisfaction is not among them.

This summer Robert is off to the northern tip of Greenland, to study happiness among a group of Inuit who have not yet discovered the joys of the snowmobile.

How important money is to you, more than money itself, influences your happiness. Marriage Marriage is sometimes damned as a ball and chain, and sometimes praised as a joy forever. Neither of these characterizations is exactly on target, but on the whole the data support the latter more than the former. We now know a good deal about how these troubles develop across the life span, and about their genetics, their biochemistry, and their psychological causes.

Best of all we have learned how to relieve these disorders. By my last count, fourteen out of the several dozen major mental illnesses could be effectively treated and two of them cured with medication and specific forms of psychotherapy.

A national bestseller, Authentic Happiness launched the revolutionary new science of Positive Psychology—and sparked a coast-to-coast debate on the nature of real happiness. According to esteemed psychologist and bestselling author Martin Seligman, happiness is not the result of good genes or luck.

Accessible and proven, Authentic Happiness is the most powerful work of popular psychology in years. Martin E. Fox Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Martin Seligman has written a very practical book, guiding readers to make positive choices in life. Steven Pinker Author of The Language Instinct A highly insightful scientific and personal reflection on the nature of happiness, from one of the most creative and influential psychologists of our time.

Optimism introduces the revolutionary, scientifically based idea of "Positive Psychology". By frequently calling upon their "signature strengths". They credit good events to personal, permanent, pervasive causes. Rating 10 is best Overall Applicability Innovation Style 9 8 9 8 To purchase abstracts, personal subscriptions or corporate solutions, visit our Web site at www.

The respective copyrights of authors and publishers are acknowledged. All rights reserved. No part of this abstract may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of getAbstract Ltd Switzerland.

This summary is restricted to the personal use of Willie Erasmus willie famousbrands. Recommendation Despite equal talent and drive, it turns out that optimists will succeed where pessimists fear to tread. The good news is that you can learn optimism and lean on it to respond to adversity and inculcate greater resilience.

He offers cognitive techniques designed to tweak your natural disposition and give you the advantage of optimism. This societal beliefs and the priority emerged even though self-esteem is a product of success, not a cause. Research consequences… Pessimistic suggests that unwarranted high self-regard can lead to violent and criminal behavior. Developing a more optimistic explanatory style can energize.

Pessimists see setbacks as perpetual, pervasive and personal. Optimists expect problems to be just temporary. Pessimism derives from a deep-seated sense of helplessness. Optimism begets resilience; optimists they become succeed. By studying people who do not give up easily or who bounce back more quickly, fundamental. Like the habits of researchers are realizing that resilience comes down to the explanations people give cleanliness and themselves when things go bad.

How personally do you take failure? How permanent do than a burden. How pervasively does it affect your life? Pessimists tend to believe bad things happen to them as a result of permanent causes. Go on produce resilience. Pessimists tell themselves that bad events will undermine their whole lives. An optimist believes good things result from pervasive reasons, while setbacks are related only to short-term circumstances.

Do you internalize blame yourself or externalize blame others? An internal blaming style can lead to low self-esteem. Pessimistic explanatory styles turn moments of learned helplessness adversity, you into full-blown depression, adding importance to the issue of hope and hopelessness.

If can change you explain your failure to yourself pessimistically, you may then expect your future to your customary reaction from be full of failure based on this one experience. Both drug and cognitive therapies relieve dejection and depression, but cognitive therapy gives you new ways to view old problems and to change giving up to your explanatory style.

Cognitive therapy relieves depression more successfully and makes activity and it less likely to return. It offers inoculation against future severe depression.

In general, females are raised to be passive.