Nort sent Matt into the pool to swim the meter fly. Biondi swam it in Rest up for twenty minutes and swim it again. He is in the top 25 percent of optimism among professional athletes. Optimistic athletes get faster after defeat, while pes- simistic athletes get slower Seligman et al.
I will summarize one study on cardiovascular death and optimism. Take sixty-five-year-old Dutch men and women and monitor them for a decade. Can you predict who is going to die, given all the tradi- tional risk factors like cholesterol, blood pressure, body mass index, and the like? These risk factors are not very predictive. But if you take the optimism and pessimism, holding constant the risk factors, the upper quartile in optimism has less than half the risk of cardiovascular death than the rest of the population Giltay et al.
There are about fif- teen such studies in the literature. What I have done so far is define the field of positive psychology. Positive psychology is about the concept of well-being. The elements of well-being are PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. I have given some samples of the science that has been done on these five elements.
Can these elements be built in people? Positive Interventions Before describing how many positive interventions begin, I should say that I am a pessimist and a depressive. I take my own medicine. For example, when one of my undergraduates suggested to me ten years ago that making a gratitude visit might increase positive emotion, I first tried it on myself.
I have always taken whatever my subjects have taken. When I did shock in animals, I would take the shock first. And I would eat the Purina chow, which was worse than the shock! So I first did these interventions on myself. If it works on me, I give it to my wife and my seven children. If it works on us, then my graduate students get it, and then we are ready to do laboratory studies on it.
If it works in laboratory studies, we begin to do clinical studies. There is a gold-standard method for testing interventions on the negative side of life—random-assignment, placebo-controlled studies. From the Buddha to modern pop psychology, there have been about two hundred suggestions about what makes people lastingly happy.
What we do in my laboratory is take these different suggestions, manualize them, and put them on the World Wide Web. I have a website, www. Some 1. Seligman would like to find out which exercises make people lastingly happier and less depressed, and which are placebos. If you are willing to do this, you are going to get an exercise but will not know whether it is a placebo or a real exercise.
Then we are going to follow you for the next six months, asking you about your depression and well-being. Using this procedure, we have found what works lastingly well and what does not. Positive interventions, unlike negative ones, tend to be addictive. One of the dirty little secrets of psychotherapy research is that the way we measure its effectiveness is how long the effects last after the end of the treatment—before they melt to zero.
Sad to say, by and large in psycho- therapy, as in dieting, you get benefits for a few months, and then they melt to zero. Interestingly, one characteristic of many of the positive exer- cises is that they are self-sustaining.
By and large, people keep doing the exercise after the week is up. The exercises thus tend to be self-maintaining. Here is another exercise. Marital therapy is the most difficult form of therapy to do, and it has the worst outcome statistics. Basically, in marital therapy, what we teach people is how to fight better, how not to have the same fight over and over. What you try to do, essentially, is change insuf- ferable marriages into barely tolerable marriages. That is not what posi- tive psychology is interested in.
So about seven years ago, led by Shelly Gable, marital researchers at UCLA began to ask the question not of how couples fight together, but of how they celebrate together.
Imagine that your spouse has just been promoted at work. What do you say to her? Well deserved. Exactly what did he say? Why did you really think you had been promoted? You know, I have been reading your financial reports for the past few months, and that last report you wrote on the pension plan is simply the best financial document I have read in my twenty-five years in business.
Would you relive the whole episode with me? It turns out that practicing active-constructive responding predicts increases in love and affection and decreases in divorce. So active-constructive responding is a second exercise that is quite well documented now. A third exercise came out of the work that Chris Peterson and I did. Given that you have found your signature strengths, think of a way of doing that task using your highest strength. One woman I worked with was a wait- ress.
She hated waitressing, with the heavy trays and customers patron- izing her. Her task was to redefine waitressing using her highest strength: social intelligence. Notice that she is going to fail almost all the time.
She is, however, continually putting on offer what she is best at. In her case, the trays got lighter and the tips got bigger. In the case of random-assignment, placebo-controlled research, six months later you are less depressed and happier Seligman et al. We went to classrooms and taught individual classes techniques of the sort that I have described above. Since the teaching in these studies was done by graduate students, we then asked the question, could we teach teachers to do this?
So we devel- oped a ten-day course for teachers and then followed the students of these teachers for the next two years. We found that their students showed sig- nificantly less depression, less anxiety, and, perhaps, better conduct for the next two years Seligman et al. Could this work for a whole school? The Geelong Grammar School in Australia a traditional British boarding school allowed us to try this.
Twenty of my faculty went to Australia, and we taught one hundred faculty from Geelong Grammar, which has around twelve hundred students. The faculty took ten days to learn these techniques. The whole school has now been imbued with positive education. Indeed, there are now nineteen replications of these procedures in schools across the world Seligman et al. Here is the story of the inflection point in positive education.
Two years ago I was called to the Pentagon. On the far left hand are people who fall apart under extreme adversity. In the great middle are most people, by definition.
These are people who are resilient, in the sense that although they have a very hard time after the awful event, within a month or two, by our psychological and physical measures, they are back where they were. And then a large number of people on the right-hand side of the distribution show post-traumatic growth.
That is, they often go through post-traumatic stress disorder, but a year later, by physical and psychological measures, they are stronger than they were before the adversity occurred. My suggestion to the chief of staff was that he move the entire distri- bution of the army in the direction of post-traumatic growth by teach- ing them the skills of positive psychology.
General Casey then actually ordered that, from that day forward, resilience and positive psychology would be taught and measured throughout the entire United States Army. That is, we like the notion that you teach teachers these skills and then have the teachers teach the students. That is the army way. So the job, Dr. Seligman, will be to train all the drill sergeants in the army in positive psychology. The usual army tests are about weaknesses and risk factors. But Chris Peterson, with Carl Castro, developed a test of fitness, a item test of psychological fitness, social fitness, family fitness, and spiritual fitness.
So we have measures of these positive variables on 1. Sec- ond, the army has developed online courses that you can take for college credit in each of these areas. They then go out and teach the troops.
So the U. Army is in the middle of a cultural transformation. George Casey is a visionary. He realizes that the wars that we have been involved in lately are human wars, not mechanical wars, and if you want to create an army that can do its job and not have an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder, you need a psychologically fit army. While the DSM focuses on what can go wrong, Character Strengths and Virtues is designed to look at what can go right.
In their research they looked across cultures and across millennia to attempt to distill a manageable list of virtues that have been highly valued from ancient China and India, through Greece and Rome, to contemporary Western cultures. Each of these has three to five sub-entries; for instance, temperance includes forgiveness , humility , prudence , and self-regulation. In his book Flourish , , Seligman wrote on 'Well-Being Theory', [13] and said, with respect to how he measures well-being; ' Each element of well-being must itself have three properties to count as an element:.
He concluded that there are five elements to 'well-being', which fall under the mnemonic PERMA: [13]. In July , Seligman encouraged the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to look into well-being as well as financial wealth in ways of assessing the prosperity of a nation. On July 6, , Seligman appeared on Newsnight and was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman about his ideas and his interest in the concept of well-being.
Seligman plays bridge and finished second in the installment of one of the three major North American pair championships, the Blue Ribbon Pairs, as well as having won over 50 regional championships. Seligman has seven children, four grandchildren, and two dogs. He and his second wife, Mandy, live in a house that was once occupied by Eugene Ormandy.
We published his book, "What. Exploring the connection between families and inequality, Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships argues that the legal regulation of families stands fundamentally at odds with the needs of families. Strong, stable, positive relationships are essential for both individuals and society to flourish, but from transportation policy to the.
Offers advice on long-distance relationships, discussing open communication, realistic expectations, and emotional and physical intimacy. Psychologist Maureen Gaffney believes that in an increasingly uncertain world it is not only possible for us to flourish but essential that we.
Choosing to Flourish is a decision everyone must make! Once that decision is made a true transformation begins. This book will guide you through a Flourishing journey of realizing your dreams, hopes, and aspirations.
You will so happy you read this easy to read, captivating book that meets you where. A year-long mentoring journey that will help establish strong relationships between mentors and mentees as they dig into understanding God's Word together.
Home Flourish. Flourish by Martin E. Flourish by Jacqueline Turner. The Fight to Flourish by Jennie Lusko.
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