Martin Seligman

American Psychologist, Martin Seligman, dubbed the “Father of Psychology” for his extensive contributions to the field of psychology, was born in Albany, New York in 1942. In 1964 he earned a bachelor of philosophy from Princeton and in 1967 a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania where he currently works and is director of the clinical training program. He is responsible for researching the Theory of Learned Helplessness, which led him to a series of significant advances in the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of depression. His research on the matter would later contribute to new ideas about optimism and ways to further the new found psychological category of Positive Psychology (FamousPsych). Martin has related a story…

Majority of the people in today’s society would consider that positive psychology and happiness now is vastly different than it was in the past. This change was sparked by understanding that feelings are not forever, and that your emotions are not the endpoints in your life. Modern science has provided humanity with classifications of mental illnesses and ways to interpret the human brain and its functionalities during certain stages in one’s lifetime. This way of thinking focuses on humans…

depressed they are (Evans et al., 2005). To provide evidence for errors in logic, female subjects were asked to read and interpret oaragraphs about women in difficult situations. Depressed woman made more errors in logic (arbitrary inferences) , in their interpretation than non-depressed women. (Hammen&Krantz. 1976) Cognitive triad- depressed recall more negative events than positive ones, select pessimistic statements, rate their behaviour in labs as poor (Ridout et al., 2003). On the other…

are Theory Y. However, I do work with someone who would be considered a Theory X employee. This person stands out to the rest of us and is labeled as having an attitude while going against leadership, and at times it feels as if they are going against the team making it difficult to work alongside them. I have found, as a new employee, I will ask a Theory Y employee rather than approaching a Theory X employee. Assuming they do not want to do any extra work. Theory Y employees thrive on…

While most researchers equate it with a high level of pessimism, the learned helplessness experiment by Seligman helps to explain it better detail. There are two parts of the experiment- one for humans and one for animals, or in this case, a dog. For the dog, the scientists strapped its paws to the floor and exposed it to non-lethal electric shocks, which we will refer to as the uncontrollable aversive stimuli. At first, the animal tries to escape, but it fails, and it soon learns that the…

Learned Optimism (Martin Seligman) Martin Seligman is a common reference books Punset and José Antonio Marina. Eminent psychologist, has focused his career not in the study of those diseases or conditions that destroy the minds of many individuals, but in the study of the mind of those who, despite having a healthy mental state, can improve their lives, pursue a greater happiness, better understanding of themselves or feel fully realized. It all started when after finishing his studies, he…

Martin Seligman started with a brief history of psychology. The last half century, psychology worked inside the disease model. Some successes include: making fourteen of the disorders treatable and two are curable. In addition, the science of mental illness concepts developed and psychologists invented drug treatments to solve certain mental disorders. Unfortunately, psychology made three critical mistakes: psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologist forgetting people had freewill;…

Martin Seligman shares how people can become happier by discussing three different life styles in which individuals are happy. After sharing how happy people differ from the average person, — they are more social— he goes on to describe the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. In the pleasant life, individuals seek what makes them happy and surround their life around those items. The good life consists of individuals finding what their strengths are and integrating those…

In “The new era of positive psychology”- TED talk by Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology and the author Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism, looks at ways healthy people can lead happier, more engaged and what is the truly path of happy life. Psychology is in the path of growth and improve. Due to the advantage and disadvantage, previous psychology improve itself lacking of moral and they also forgot that people make their choice, rushing in helping people get out of trouble…

Martin E. P. Seligman explores what truly is the effectiveness of osmotherapy in is article, Effectiveness of Psychotherapy. Seligman starts his article by summarizing how the efficacy study and the effectiveness study is used to determine the effectiveness of psychotherapy. When using efficacy method a control and treatment groups are randomly assigned and placebos are used in efforts to gain more insight. There are many components to efficacy study which is why when used its results are taken…