Flourish Martin Seligman Review

[Sean Vaidhyanathan]

Ifound the overall arc of the book from learned helplessness to learned hope particularly fascinating. Marty and his original collaborator on the learned helplessness experiments, Steve Maier (who turned his attention to neuroscience after graduate school) realized that their original theory of learned helplessness was actually backwards (see "Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience"). The passivity and the feeling of lack of control experienced in their learned helplessness experiments was actually the default response, an automatic, unlearned reaction to prolonged adversity, and what must actually be learned is hope-- the perception that one can control and harness the unpredictability in one's environment. I found Marty's optimism about the possibility of these insights informing the treatment of depression really inspiring.

You can read about Marty's many other contributions throughout this book, including his work on learned optimism, positive psychology, resiliency training for the military, the cataloguing and measurement of character strengths, and the various offshoots of positive psychology: positive education, positive health, and positive psychotherapy.

Have no doubt, Marty has been busy! Of course, he didn't do this work alone, and he gives ample and flowery descriptions of those who have helped him throughout his long career, including (but by no means exclusively): Lyn Abrahmson, Alejandro Adler, Lauren Alloy, Roy Baumeister, Aaron Beck, General Rhonda Cornum, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Ed Diener, Angela Duckworth, Johannes Eichstaedt, Barbara Fredrickson, Geelong Grammar School, Jim Hovey, Suzanne Johnson, Darwin LaBarthe, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Acacia Parks, James Pawelski, Chris Peterson, Richard Pine, Jack Rachman, Peter Railton, Tayyab Rashid, Karen Reivich, Judith Rodin, Paul Rozin, Carl Sagan, Stephen Schueller, Peter Schulman, Andrew Schwartz, Arthur Schwartz, Barry Schwartz, Carly Seligman, Daryl Seligman, Jenny Seligman, Mandy Seligman, Nikki Seligman, Chandra Sripada, Sir John Templeton, Jack Templeton, Lyle Ungar, George Vaillant, Joe Wolpe, and David Yaden.

One particular turning point in his career occurred around the age of 30 when he was a newly tenured professor at Penn, and still doing work on animal experimental psychology. Aaron Beck (father of cognitive behavioral therapy), who had served as a mentor to Marty, helping him receive a professorship at Penn, warned Marty that if he continued on this research path and didn't do more applied work, he would "waste [his] life". Then, a dream a few nights later helped cement his decision to change trajectory in his career:

It's clear that Marty received a lot of support throughout his journey. In this regard, and on many other levels, Marty is a phenomenon. I have worked with multiple giants in my career, but I have never seen anything like what I saw working with Marty. He had a constant stream of people wanting to be in his orbit, and people wanting to give him money for his research. It was truly fascinating to behold, and this phenomenon is very evident in his autobiography.

Unfortunately, I fear that he tends to show much less admiration for those who are not within his orbit. This is evident in the book-- not only through what he does discuss, but more through what he omits. Reading Marty's recounting of the history of psychology, it sometimes reads as though the field of psychology consisted of two main phases: everything that came before Marty and everything that came after Marty. Of course he can't be faulted for not including everything in an autobiography, but there are certainly places where he could have given a more comprehensive review.

One thing that is fascinating to read about is his transition from a smiling happy child before the age of three to a pessimistic and unsmiling teenager, to a depressive junior faculty member, to the most prominent researcher on optimism and happiness.

Another aspect of his ambition relates to his desire to be part of the upper "social strata". Throughout his childhood, we see statements such as: "I was still very much lower caste, although I didn't know exactly which variety of low", and here is his description of his high school graduation party:

This rift is unfortunate and unnecessary, and there is a real opportunity for a happy marriage between humanistic psychology and positive psychology. There are so many rich testable theories coming from the founders of humanistic psychology, including Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, that can once and for all be tested using modern rigorous methods of analysis that were not available in their day. I, for one, am trying to take a lot of the ideas from the humanistic psychologists and test them empirically, and I know others in the field such as Kennon Sheldon, Richard Ryan, and Edward Deci, are also attempting to do the same.

Indeed, this is why Maslow included physical safety and security as basic needs that allow one to flourish, and why the focus of the founding humanistic psychologists was pointedly not on happiness or well-being, but being and becoming a whole person. There needs to be a real, healthy integration of the negative and positive. We've seen what happens when we look at well-being divorced from the negative, as in the case of happy, well-adjusted people who are content because they reached their personal goal of happiness but ignore the real plight of those around them who are not as fortunate. In my view, this is a real criticism that Marty dismisses too quickly in his book. See Ruth Whippman's excellent article "Where were we while the Pyramid was Collapsing? At a Yoga Class" for a critique that I believe we need to be discussing openly and honestly as a field if we want to have a science of well-being that helps all people flourish.

Trying to make sense of how he ended up where he is today, reflecting on the dreams and other experiences he had along the way that made him feel like he was being called, he notes that on his good days, he attributes his successes to being a "natural":

Marty indeed was a natural card player. But it's also clear from his autobiography that he was constantly dealt a very lucky hand. Perhaps Marty's greatest talent of them all was his extraordinary ability to capitalize on the myriad opportunities that came his way. Whatever the precise mix of factors, there's little doubt that this synergy ended up producing one the most complex, ambitious, productive, impactful, and definitely not boring, psychologists of all time.

In the sections below, we have compiled evidence-based activities and "interventions" that have been shown to promote well-being. We have specifically selected those that are most closely related to our research on various aspects of human flourishing including happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships, as well as activities related to our research on pathways to human flourishing such as religious community, family, work, and education.

The interventions and activities here are focused on those that individuals can implement themselves. There is of course a much broader research literature on interventions requiring special resources, trained therapists or health care providers, or which may require significant expense.

The interventions described here constitute activities or easy-to-access books or resources that evidence suggests contribute to various aspects of human flourishing. We have organized these into 4 major groupings below (with references): cognitive exercises, behavioral exercises, institutional and relational commitments, and workbooks to address psychological distress. As is discussed in each section, each of these activities or commitments described below also constitutes an important orientation to the good.

Simple easy-to-use interventions have been developed to increase gratitude in life. There are numerous variations on these simple activities but the original intervention (Emmons and McCullough, 2003) consisted of taking time once per week to reflect upon five things in life that one was grateful for and writing these down, and then repeating this for ten consecutive weeks. In a randomized trial, those who were assigned to participate in this gratitude intervention as compared to writing about life events or hassles or having no instructions, were found to have higher levels of gratitude as well as better feelings about life as a whole, fewer physical symptom complaints, and more and better sleep (Emmons and McCullough, 2003). Another variation of this gratitude exercise had participants write down three things that went well each day; they were also to write about their causes, and to do this every night, for one week. Those who were assigned to do this, versus simply writing about memories, had higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depressive symptoms, even six months later (Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson, 2005). There are of course numerous other variations on this exercise of expressing gratitude. A recent meta-analysis synthesizing the evidence from the various interventions that have been developed suggested that, although there is some variation across interventions, these types of gratitude exercises do tend to increase measures of gratitude and also feelings of psychological well-being more generally (Davis et al., 2016). A simple approach such as writing about, or sharing out loud with a spouse or a friend, three things that one is grateful for, once a week or three times a week, might help develop a habit of gratitude.

Described below are various behavioral activities or interventions that can enhance well-being. These three activities are the use of character strengths, acts of kindness towards others, and volunteering in the community. These three activites in some sense can be viewed as actions oriented towards what is good in oneself (character/virtue), what is good for others (acts of kindness), and what is good for the community (volunteering).

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