Positive Psychology

Today at the university forum Dr. Martin Seligman from Penn State University spoke about the field of positive psychology. He is more or less the founder of the movement. While serving as President of the American Psychological Association he noticed the strict emphasis on diagnosing weakness and the treatment of human pathology, but little to no attention on strength and increasing well-being with that strict intent in mind. There was a lot of emphasis on mental illness, but not mental health. So out of those thoughts came his desire to develop this field of positive psychology.

Some interesting things he noted:

• Depression has seen a ten-fold increase in the last century in spite of greater economic prosperity than the world has ever seen. I wonder how much of that is due to actual increasing incidence rates or just the diagnosis of it.
  
• With the sharp increase in depression, happiness has plateaued.
  
• Our country has seen greater military and economic success in this last century than in all of the rest of its history, but people seem less satisfied with their lives.
• If you have some time to kill, visit his Authentic Happiness website and take some of the tests that he has there. It also has a bunch of other resources, TONS of questionnaires on different things.
  

One study that he cited traced two groups of students from 9th-12th grades. One group served as the control, while the other had 20 weeks with one 80 minute lesson a week on kindness, with instruction to perform at least three kind acts within the week. By the end of their high school careers, the treatment group were rated higher in social skills by their teachers (who were blind to which students were receiving the treatment), higher in GPA, and more cooperative by their parents.

This was just kind of a sidenote, but he talked briefly about couples. One thing he said that I thought was funny was that he stated that the main goal of couples therapy is to teach couples how to fight with each other, of course, in a constructive manner. One area which seems pretty simple to target is how each person within a couple reacts to the success of the partner. For example, when responding to a promotion, an aggressive-critical response would be to say something like, "well, great. Do you know high a tax bracket that is going to put us?" and the passive-critical response would be to say, "what's for dinner?" Couples who flourish focus on what he called the active-constructive response and say things like, "that's great! Let's relive the moment...what did your boss say? how did that make you feel?" etc. Invariably, happy couples are ones who celebrate with each other their successes.

I guess what I liked most about the forum was how he talked about the concept of flow, as espoused by Cziksentmihaly. I actually got to take a class from him while at Claremont Graduate University which is cool because he's actually kind of a big deal in the field of positive psychology. Having said that, let me also add that he is a terrible lecturer. Great thinker, bad speaker. Anyway, the concept of flow revolves around not just being content, but applying your greatest strengths to derive the greatest rewards for yourself, and to experience engagement in the process that helps you develop meaning in your life. This can be a variety of things for people, but m0re simply put, it's when you do what you love, and time has no meaning while you're involved with the process, and it helps you find meaning in your life. This can be a number of things - spending time with loved ones, participating in meaningful activities (as simple as sports, or the creation of art), serving others, etc.

I find this all the more interesting because lately I've been reading Freakonomics. It's a very compelling read, but also kind of turns upside down a lot of things that I think are important. I'm interested in finishing it, having some time to think it over, and then read the conservative response found in Freedomnomics. Anyway, a point that Dr. Seligman brought up was that so many economists insist that the point of the economic system is the creation of wealth, that that is its sole purpose. But what's the point if in the creation of more wealth when we're still lacking in finding our own personal peace and well-being? The creation of wealth is a very important goal, but should not be the end in itself. And this was Dr. Seligman's final point - it should be in finding additional security and contributing to the lives of others, to help them attain and find those things that add value to their own lives. In that process we find meaning in our own.

I just really liked this message because it runs counter to so much of the sentiment that is out there right now when you watch the news or read the paper. Money is important, and in its absence a person is very hard pressed to reach a satisfied state. A prominent figure in psychology is Abraham Maslow who constructed a pyramid that he refers to as the hierarchy of needs, with basic physiological needs at the bottom that must be met, and culminates in the highest-order need which is self-actualization. Out of self-actualization creativity, morality, acceptance, and other things are born. The part that we seem to be getting wrong is confusing the difference between wants and needs. Whatever difficulties we may be having, we still have plenty of reasons to be happy and to feel optimistic. As Louis CK attests...