Image of words Positive Psychology

What is Positive Psychology?

Positive Psychology is an emerging field of study that focuses on the science of happiness. Pioneered by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman in 1998, the purpose of Positive Psychology is to find out the virtues that lead to a meaningful life and the effects on that will have on an individual, as well as the community as a whole.Instead of just treating mental illness and relieving suffering, positive psychologists also focus on the strengths that make life worth living and restoring a healthy balance to well-being.Martin andMihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor from Claremont Graduate University, describe the new science in the following way: "We believe that a psychology of positive human functioning will arise that achieves a scientific understanding and effective interventions to build thriving in individuals, families, and communities."Studies have shown that happiness can have a dramatic effect on an individual’s well-being, contributing to every aspect of their life, including health, relationships, employment and longevity. According to the United Nations World Happiness Report 2013, positive emotions help the cardiovascular, immune and endocrine systems; lower the risk of heart disease and strokes; and even speed up the recovery process. Happy workers are more likely to receive positive ratings from management, as well as see an increase in wages. Employee satisfaction can have a positive effect on productivity and performance, increasing revenue, sales and ultimately profit.Positive psychologists believe that figuring out the puzzle and pursuit of happiness can lead to answers to some of our biggest problems individually, nationally and even globally.
Read More
Icons of happiness.

Positive Psychology Timeline

This timeline shows the progression of the unlikely and amazing story of positive psychology. You can read the full story in our article The Happiness Revolution. 1984 Ed Dienercoins the termsubjective well-being. 1985 Ed Dienerpublishes his Satisfaction with Life scale. 1997 Martin Seligmanand MihalyCsikszentmihalyimeet on a Hawaiian beach and begin mapping out a plan for launching positive psychology. 1998 Martin Seligman delivers his "Manhattan Project for the Social Sciences" inaugural presidential address at the American Psychological Association convention. Barbara Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory of the value of positive emotions is published. 1999 The first positive psychology conference is heldin Akumal, Mexico. The first annual Positive Psychology Summit is held in Lincoln, Neb. The first university programs in positive psychology are available at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. 2000 Special millennial issue ofAmerican Psychologistdevoted to positive psychology. First Templeton Prize to Barbara Fredrickson. 2001 "Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study" published, linking happiness and positive outlook to longevity. U.S. News & World Reportpublishes "Happiness Explained" cover story. 2002 First International Positive Psychology Summit in Washington, D.C. U.S. Department of Education grants $2.8 million for Martin Seligman to explore positive psychology in a Philadelphia high school. Martin Seligman publishesAuthentic Happiness. 2003 Marcial Losada and Barbara Fredrickson publish their 3:1 positivity ratio, showing that those who flourish exhibit a ratio of at least 3:1 positivity-to-negativity in their behavior and expression. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough publish "Counting Blessings Versus Burdens" showing that a consistent practice of gratitude increases wellbeing. 2004 $1 million National Institute of Mental Health grant to Sonja Lyubormirskyand Kennon Sheldon to explore practical "intervention" pathways to permanent increases in happiness. Martin Seligman and Chris PetersonpublishCharacter Strengths and Virtues, the definitive text and positive psychology's what-goes-right answer to psychology's classic what-goes-wrong reference textDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). 2005 Timepublishes its cover story, "The Science of Happiness." First master's program in positive psychology at U Penn. "Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change" study shows as much as 40 percent of personal happiness is dictated by personal effort. "Does happiness lead to success?" study shows broad range of benefits, from physiological health to financial and career success and greater social engagement. 2006 Gallup World Poll launched, with sampling that represents 95 percent of the world's population. Tal Ben-Shahar's "Positive Psychology" becomes Harvard's most popular course. 2007 Sonja Lyubormirsky publishesThe How of Happiness. First doctoral program in positive psychology at Claremont Graduate University. 2008 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index launched in the United States. The Pentagom approaches Martin Seligman to develop a positive psychology program for the U.S. Army. 2009 First World Congress on Positive Psychology held in Philadelphia. Barbara Fredrickson publishes her 3:1 positivity ratio finding inPositivity. 2010 Tony Hsieh'sDelivering Happinesshits No. 1 onNew York Timesbestseller list and stays on the list for 27 consecutive weeks. Gretchen Rubin'sThe Happiness Projecthits No. 1 onNew York Timesbestseller list and has stayed on the list continuously for more than two years. 2011 British government begins national happiness survey. Somerville, Mass., becomes the first U.S. city to track its population's happiness. 2012 Harvard Business Reviewpublishes issue on "The Value of Happiness."
Read More
Illustration of the word PERMA

What is PERMA?

PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement) is an acronym that stands for the five elements developed by Martin Seligman that account for what makes up the “good life” – an authentic and sustained happiness and well-being. No one element defines well-being, but each contribute, either subjectively or objectively.Positive Emotion is one of the cornerstones to well-being. Kindness, gratitude, hope, contentment are all positive emotions that contribute to the “pleasant life.”Engagement, much like positive emotion, is a subjective element to well-being. Engagement is about being totally absorbed (in the flow) by a present task where time and self- consciousness seem to cease.Relationships are an important part of well-being. People who maintain strong positive relationships are generally happier in life. We are “social beings” who need to connect with one another.Meaning in life comes from serving something that is bigger than self. To have a sense of well-being, finding a purpose in life is essential. Altruism and philanthropy are good methods to establishing a meaningful life.Achievement is a sense of accomplishment. Having goals and meeting those goals, improves your well-being and allows you to flourish.
Read More
Taktsang Palphug Monastery (The Tiger's Nest), Bhutan

What is Gross National Happiness?

Forty years ago Robert F. Kennedy delivered a speech challenging GNP as a measure of progress and growth for a nation. In his speech he stated, “Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”It is clear that tracking growth using a single statistic, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is limiting our understanding of the relative health of a society to a simple measure of economic prosperity. But measuring subjective factors like happiness, courage and joy is a difficult challenge and the possible solutions to these challenges are still being debated. However, many nations are already moving forward with attempts to more accurately measure the well-being of their citizens by looking beyond hard economic statistics to other areas that impact daily life.Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an indicator originally developed in Bhutan in the early 1970s. His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the Fourth King of Bhutan, believed that the existing development paradigm—GDP—did not consider the ultimate goal of every human being: HAPPINESS. GNH was based on the premise that the calculation of “wealth” should consider other aspects besides economic development: the preservation of the environment and the quality of life of the people. His Majesty believed the goal of a society should be the integration of material development with psychological, cultural and spiritual aspects.[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zqdqa4YNvI&feature=related width:595 height:394 autoplay:0]What is “Gross National Happiness”? Inspired by GNHFund.com – created by MortenSondergaard.com and developed by Simpleshow.Over the last 10 years nations have begun to expand the types of indicators they use to measure national prosperity in an effort to obtain a better understanding of the well-being of their citizens. The implementation of different surveys and indices has been spreading around the world.The Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations has been used since the early 1990s. Published every year, the HDI is a score that amalgamates three indicators: lifespan, educational attainment and adjusted real income. In 2010 an update was made to account for inequality standards.In 2003 Europe conducts the first European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) to be repeated every four years. The survey examines a range of issues, such as employment, income, education, housing, family, health, work-life balance, life satisfaction and perceived quality of society.The Canadian Index of Well-Being (CIW) released their first report in 2009. The CIW identifies a set of key indicators that will track Canada’s progress in eight interconnected domains of well-being: community vitality, democratic engagement, education, environment, healthy populations, leisure & culture, living standards and time use.In 2011 the UK began to measure the National Well-being of its citizens with the specific goal of looking beyond GDP. It includes headline indicators in areas such as health, relationships, job satisfaction, economic security, education, environmental conditions and other measures of personal well-being using individual self-assessment.The Washington Post reported on an in-depth story last year about new government measurements. The article stated, “Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a panel of experts in psychology and economics, including Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, began convening in December to try to define reliable measures of ‘subjective well-being.’ If successful, these could become official statistics.” The commission’s findings are due this fall.It will be very interesting to see what indicators will be used by our government in order to measure our national “happiness and well-being.” Despite some commonalities, the organizations and governments creating these indices are using different approaches for measuring these subjective factors. This creates difficulty in measuring across borders, a key advantage to GDP, and makes them vulnerable to challenges of accuracy and manipulation for political purposes. However, they are providing a wealth of new knowledge that could be employed to help nations address deep-rooted issues.
Read More
Martin Seligman leans on podium

The President’s Address by Martin Seligman

When I was elected president of our Association, I was both humbled and challenged by what I saw as an opportunity to enlarge the scope of our discipline's work. For I believed then, and do still hold, that there are two areas in which psychology of the late 20th century has not played a large enough role in making the lives of people better. One area that cries out for psychology's attention is the 20th century's shameful legacy of ethnic conflict. (Even as I write this piece, the world community is struggling with the plight of some half-million refugees from Kosovo.) The second area cries out for what I call "positive psychology," that is, a reoriented science that emphasizes the understanding and building of the most positive qualities of an individual: optimism, courage, work ethic, future-mindedness, interpersonal skill, the capacity for pleasure and insight, and social responsibility. It's my belief that since the end of World War II, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness. With these two areas of need in mind—relieving ethnic conflict and making life more fulfilling—I created two presidential initiatives during my time in office, as described below. Ethnopolitical Conflict Certainly the goal of a more peaceful 21st century is as complex and as urgent as ever. To help psychology build an infrastructure that would allow future psychologists to play a role in preventing ethnic conflict and violence, I teamed with Canadian Psychological Association President Peter Suedfeld and created a joint APA/CPA Task Force on Ethnopolitical Warfare. Dr. Suedfeld and I believe that with the death of fascism and the winding down of communism, the warfare the world faces in the next century will be ethnic in its roots and hatreds. In contemporary ethnopolitical conflicts, as in Kosovo right now, civilian populations are the primary targets of terror. The destruction of whole communities and the ongoing problems of refugees and human rights abuse amplify the problems. What can psychology do? I submit to you that we can train today's young psychologists who have the courage and the humanity for such work to better understand, predict, and even prevent such tragedies. When the worst does occur, we can train psychologists to help pick up the pieces by helping people and communities heal and learn to live and trust together again. The first step in creating a scholarly understanding of ethnic conflict was taken at an APA/CPA conference on the subject at the University of Ulster in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in June. The meeting, chaired by Dan Chirot of the University of Washington, brought together 30 of the world's most distinguished specialists not just from psychology but from many disciplines, for example, from the fields of history, ethnic conflicts, human rights, and conflict resolution. Among the questions discussed were the following: What do we know about the roots of ethnopolitical violence? Why do some potentially violent situations result in violence while others do not? How does a society resolve group conflict relatively peacefully, as in the case of a South Africa, while others are solved with mass murder or forced migration? Clearly, these are difficult questions, and the answers need to come from many disciplines. But to set the stage, three universities are taking the lead in creating a pioneering postdoctoral fellowship program combining both scholarship and field work in the scientist-practitioner model to study ethnopolitical conflict. The first entering class is that of June 1999. Classes will take place on three campuses—​at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. The Mellon Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and private donors have already pledged over $2 million to this initiative. A NewScience ofHumanStrengths Entering a new millennium, we face a historical choice.Standing alone on the pinnacle of economic and political leadership, the United States can continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of our people and of the people on the rest of the planet. Such a course is likely to lead to increasing selfishness, alienation between the more and the less fortunate, and eventually to chaos and despair. At this juncture, psychology can play an enormously important role. We can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound and, at the same time, understandableand attractive. We can show the world what actions lead to well-being, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities, and to a just society. Ideally, psychology should be able to help document what kind of families result in the healthiest children, what work environments support the greatest satisfaction among workers, and what policies result in the strongest civic commitment. Yet we have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living. For although psychology has come to understand quite a bit about how people survive and endure under conditions of adversity, we know very little about how normal people flourish under more benign conditions. This is because since World War II, psychology has become a science largely about healing. It concentrates on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning. Such almost exclusive attention to pathology neglects the flourishing individual and the thrivingcommunity. True, our emphasis on assessing and healingdamage has been important and had its important victories. By my count, we now understand and can effectively treat at least 14 mental disorders that we could not treat 50 years ago. But these victories have come at a considerable cost. When we became solely a healing profession, we forgot our larger mission: that of making the lives of all people better.In this time of unprecedented prosperity, our children can look forward to more buying power, more education, more technology, and more choices than ever before. If it were indeed true that depression is caused by bad events, then Americans today, especially young Americans, should be a very happy group. But the reality is that a sea change has taken place in the mental health of young Americans over the last 40 years. The most recent data show that there is more than 10 times as much serious depression now as 4 decades ago. Worse, depression is now a disorder of the early teenage years rather than a disorder that starts in middle age, a situation that comprises the single largest change in the modern demographics of mental illness. And that, I believe, is the major paradox of the late 20th century. Why? In searching for the answer, I look not toward the lessons of remedial psychology with its emphasis on repairing damage. Instead, I look to a new social and behavioral science that seeks to understand and nurture those human strengths that can prevent the tragedy of mental illness. For it is my belief that no medication or technique of therapy holds as much promise for serving as a buffer against mental illness as does human strength. But psychology's focus on the negative has left us knowing too little about the many instances of growth, mastery, drive, and character building that can develop out of painful life events. So my second presidential initiative is intended to begin building an infrastructure within the discipline and funding it from outside to encourage and foster the growth of the new science and profession of positive psychology. Our mission is to utilize quality scientific research and scholarship to reorient our science and practice toward human strength. In this way, we can learn to identify and understand the traits and underpinnings of preventive psychological health and, most importantly, learn how to foster such traits in young people.Supporting the research and vision of tomorrow’s positive psychology leaders will be an important part of building the foundation of this new science. Toward this end, a number of projects are under way. With generous support from the John Templeton Foundation, APA has created the Templeton Positive Psychology Prize. Awarded annually, it will recognize and encourage the work of mid-career researchers working in the realm of positive psychology. When it is bestowed for the first time in February 2000, the Templeton Prize will become the largest monetary award ever given in psychology. In addition, a "junior scientists" network of 18 early and mid-career researchers all working in issue areas related to positive psychology has also been created. The network grew out of 6 days of conversation and brainstorming led by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Don Clifton, Raymond Fowler, and myself. This meeting was an unparalleled success. The typical evaluation was "the best intellectual experience of my career." Now these 18 young scientists will continue to collaborate both electronically and face to face. My expectation is that they will be the leaders of our reoriented science in decades to come. In 1998, two groups of more senior scholars also met and began work on the taxonomy of the roots of a positive life. One group is asking, "What are the characteristics of a positive life, and how can they be measured and taught? What are the relationships among subjective well-being, positive individual traits, and positive community?" The other group seeks to transform the study of genius and extraordinary accomplishments. They commend to our science the idea that human greatness occurs not only in the realm of achievement, but that genius can also come into play in mastering human relationships, assuming moral responsibility, engaging in spirituality, and viewing life as a work of art. This Truly Extraordinary People group intends to pioneer such studies. The creation of a new science of positive psychology can be the "Manhattan Project" for the social sciences. It will require substantial resources but it does hold unprecedented promise. The medical model often talks about medical cost offset; and, indeed, cost offset is important. But I suggest there's another cost offset to consider: one for the individual and for the community. Positive psychology should not only have as a useful side effect the prevention of serious mental illness, but it also holds the potential to create, as a direct effect, an understanding and a scientifically informed practice of the pursuit of the best things in life and of family and civic virtue. I have often been asked what was my reason, deep down, for running for president of APA. I will tell you now. It was because I thought I had a mission but did not know what it was.I thought that in serving as president, I would discover my mission. And I did. That mission is to partake in launching a science and a profession whose aim is the building of what makes life most worth living. This opportunity was your gift to me, and my fondest hope is that the two initiatives I have discussed above and gone on to launch will repay your trust. In closing, I now want to make explicit the underlying theme of my presidency: Psychology is not merely a branch of the health care system. It is not just an extension of medicine. And it is surely more than a tenant farmer on the plantation of profit-motivated health schemes. Our mission is much larger. We have misplaced our original and greater mandate to make life better for all people, not just the mentally ill. I therefore call on our profession and our science to take up this mandate once again as we enter the next millennium.
Read More
Profile-Chris-Peterson.jpg

Profile: Christopher Peterson

The late Christopher Peterson, Ph.D., was a renowned professor, philosopher, textbook author—and blogger. His blog for Psychology Todaywas called “The Good Life: Positive psychology and what makes life worth living,” and who wouldn’t want to learn about that?“Other people matter,” Chris said, and it became his signature phrase. When he died unexpectedly at 62 in October 2012, there was an outpouring of grief from former students and friends—a Facebook tribute page was established, Psychology Today created a tribute page from his friends and colleagues and The International Positive Psychology Association’s Third World Congress on Positive Psychology devoted an entire session to celebrating his life and legacy.Academically, he was known as one of the pioneers in the positive psychology field. He officially held the Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1986 until his death. But he cherished most the Golden Apple Award—given annually to a professor who “treats each lecture as if it were his last”—he received from the student body in 2010.His groundbreakingstudy of optimists and pessimists found that optimists are more likely to outlast pessimists. But perhaps his most important professional achievement was as research director of the Values In Action (VIA) project, which produced assessment tools—a set of surveys—he devised along with Martin Seligman, Ph.D.The VIA Institute on Character is a nonprofit formed to advance the science and practice of character. Their aim is to fill the world with greater virtue—i.e. more wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. And they do this by offering the VIA Surveyfree of charge, across the globe. Understanding and using your strengths contributes to increased happiness and better relationships, among other benefits, according to the website.Chris wroteA Primer in Positive Psychology, an accessible introduction to the scientific study of what goes right in people’s lives—instead of psychology’s traditional investigation of what’s wrong. HisPursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychologygathers and updates his blog posts. The book’s format—in short, annotated chunks of two or three pages—lends itself to delightful browsing.“There must be an ancient Buddhist aphorism that makes my point profoundly,” he wrote in late 2009, “but I’ll just say it bluntly, in plain 21st century Americanese: Don’t sweat the small stuff; and most of it is small stuff. Days are long. Life is short. Live it well.”
Read More
Profile image of Martin Seligman

Profile: Martin Seligman

Martin Seligman tells how his daughter Nikki told him she’d been a whiner—until her fifth birthday, when she decided to stop. “If I can stop whining,” she added, “you can stop being a grouch.”Marty has since become a champion of the positive in an extraordinary range of applications, including:Education. In 2002 the Department of Education gave Marty $2.8 million to study implementing positive psychology in a Pennsylvania school system. And in 2008 he and colleagues presented a program integrating positive psychology into the curriculum of an Australian school. He has run the first master’s program in positive psychology since 2005. (This October, the British government is sponsoring a worldwide meeting in positive education.)Health. At the Third World Summit on Positive Psychology in June 2013, Marty astonished his audience with two findings. The first showed the incidence of atherosclerotic disease throughout the northeastern United States. The second showed demographic clusters of people who had used words and phrases on Twitter that expressed anger, hostility and aggression, as well as disengagement and lack of social support. The maps were virtually identical. Marty and his colleagues are working now to assess positive psychology’s impact on physiological health.Military. In 2008, Marty was approached to create a positive psychology program for the U.S. Army. The program has measurably reduced anxiety, depression, PTSD and substance abuse. Marty’s next frontier is prospection—how humans use creativity, free will and imagination to navigate the future instead of being bound by the past.Nikki’s scolding has borne positive fruit.
Read More
Profile image of Sonja Lyubomirsky

Profile: Sonja Lyubomirsky

When Sonja Lyubomirsky left Russia in the 1970s and immigrated with her parents to the United States, there was a lot about her new life that was different. To her, the most striking was how happy Americans seemed.That curiosity bloomed into a brilliant career in psychology, and when Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiand Raymond Fowler chose 18 of the best and brightest to join them at Akumal, Sonja was included.Sonja’s researchhas been awarded a Templeton Psychology Prize, a Science of Generosity grant, a John Templeton Foundation grant, and a million-dollar grant (with Ken Sheldon) from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness.Sonja was drawn to the desire to publish some of these finds as a popular book.It was not an easy decision. There were colleagues who said publishing “how to” happiness material was premature. Sonja herself says she resisted the idea, concerned about the “seeming hokeyness” of some of these simple interventions.Philanthropic impulse eventually won out. In 2007 she published The How of Happiness, the first book by a highly credentialed positive psychologist (Harvard summa cum laude, Stanford doctorate, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside) to present the latest research in a how-to format. And in 2013 she published The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, But Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, But Does.That young girl who was so curious about happiness has helped a lot of people have more of it.
Read More
Profile image of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi

Profile: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-high), called simply Mike by his friends and colleagues, had dedicated his career to the study of what he called flow, the state of being fully engaged in the activity of the moment that is shared by great artists engrossed in their work, teenagers absorbed in a complex videogame sequence, or new lovers in each other’s company.Son of a Hungarian ambassador to Rome, Mike had spent his fairly idyllic childhood in Rome in the 1930s, but the tranquility of those years was soon shattered by the miseries of World War II. He was surprised to see how successful, self-confident adults suddenly became helpless and dispirited as their social supports were shorn away by war and its aftermath. “Without jobs, money or status,” he recalls, “they were reduced to empty shells. Yet there were a few who kept their integrity and purpose despite the surrounding chaos. Their serenity was a beacon that kept others from losing hope.”These observations sparked the young man’s curiosity. What was it that made some people so resilient while others gave in to despondency?When the war ended in 1945, Mihaly was just 10 years old. In the years that followed, he devoured books on philosophy, history and religion, seeking answers to the puzzle of human nature. He became interested in psychology after hearing a lecture by Carl Jung, who he says viewed the human predicament “with an unflinching yet hopeful gaze,” and immigrated to the United States at the age of 22 to pursue his studies.Mike would eventually find a kindred curious spirit in Martin Seligmanand the two of them would spearhead a movementto a more positive psychology.Now, for more than 35 years Mike has been involved in research on topics related to flow. He is the author of Flow, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, The Evolving Self and Creativity, and is co-author of The Creative Vision, The Meaning of Things and Being Adolescent. He is the C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., and director of the Quality of Life Research Center (QLRS), which he founded in 1999. The QLRC is a non-profit research institute which conducts research on a wide range of cutting edge issues in positive psychology, and provides a forum for scholars from all across the globe to extend their research and studies in positive psychology.
Read More
Happiness Revolution Illustration

Happiness Revolution

A young psychology student at Cal State, Ed Diener had grown up on a San Joaquin Valley farm and had been around farm workers all his life, and he thought it would be interesting to study happiness in migrant farm workers. “Mr. Diener,” his professor sniffed, “you are not doing that research project—for two reasons. First, farm workers are not happy. And second, there is no way to measure happiness.” Ed knew from firsthand experience that his professor was wrong on his first point. But just how do you scientifically measure the level of a person’s happiness? Ed was convinced this was worth looking into. He abandoned the project and did his paper on the topic of conformity. (History does not record whether the professor appreciated the irony.) When Happiness Was Out of Style That was the mid-1960s. By the early 1980s, now a tenured psychology professor, Ed threw himself into research on happiness. In 1984 he published his Satisfaction with Life Scale, a scientific index that so reliably measures “subjective well-being”— happiness—that it is still widely used today. Into the ’90s, he accumulated evidence and published papers on subjective well-being. His students and colleagues dubbed him Dr. Happiness. Still, the subject got little respect in scientific circles, and even as a tenured professor Ed was passed over for promotion by older professors, here calls, “because they thought what I was doing was so flaky.” He describes giving talks to economists in the early ’90s. “They just hated it,” he says, recalling times when he would barely get out a few sentences before being rudely cut off. “They were very aggressive in their colloquium,” is how the ever-affable Ed puts it. Dr. Happiness was still swimming against a massive tide—but a sea change was coming. A Chance Encounter In the winter of 1997 a man was hiking the beaches of Hawaii with his family, when his daughter said she heard a yell for help. “Sure enough,” he recalls, “down in the surf was a snowy-haired man, being pounded against the lava walls, razor-sharp with barnacles, and then being tossed back out into the turbulence.” He waded in and pulled the big man to safety, not realizing that he had just triggered a revolution. The man he had rescued was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-high), a Hungarian-born psychologist. Mihaly, called Mike by friends and colleagues, had dedicated his career to the study of that state of total engagement he called flow. Growing up in war-torn Europe had given Mike a profound experience of human suffering and human resilience—and that second side of the human coin intrigued him. What brings out our best and noblest traits? He wondered. Mike’s rescuer was Martin Seligman, one of the most eminent psychologists on the planet. A self-confessed grouch, Marty might have seemed the least likely happiness revolutionary. He had built his career on the study of what he called learned helplessness. (His first book bore the cheery title Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death.) Marty had long held little regard for the science-worthiness of something as “soft” as happiness, and he wasn’t personally all that big on it, either: “The feelings of happiness, good cheer, ebullience, self-esteem and joy,” he later wrote, “all remained frothy for me.” Power of Positive Emotion But Marty also possessed an indefatigable curiosity along with an idealistic streak. He genuinely wanted to help make the world a better place. As Mike observed, “Marty sometimes wishes he had been a rabbi when he grew up.” The two men clicked immediately and soon realized they shared a burning interest. Both felt that psychology had lost sight of its central reason for being, to better understand and foster “life worth living,” as Mike put it, “including such qualities as courage, generosity, creativity, joy and gratitude.” Up to then psychology had focused on the study and treatment of human suffering, which Marty felt was “a vexation to the soul.” He agreed with Abraham Maslow, who a half-century earlier had written, “The study of crippled, stunted, immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” Marty and Mike wanted to forge an approach focused on what goes right in human nature. A positive psychology. Birth of a Revolution Marty had a specific platform in mind. He had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association, which at 160,000 members was the largest scientific organization in the world. William James, the 19th century “father of modern psychology,” had held that chair, as did Carol Rogers, Abraham Maslow and other giants. Every incoming APA president was expected to set the membership’s agenda for the coming year, and Marty wanted to do something big. Talking deep into the Hawaiian night, the two men hatched a plan. Rather than trying to persuade their establishment colleagues to join them, they would focus on the classic tactic of revolutionaries: draw passionately committed new recruits from the ranks of the young. Over the following year they assembled a field of 50 candidates from among the most talented, promising students who were philosophically attuned to what they were up to and psychology’s most brilliant rising stars. From that 50 they winnowed a list of 18, whom they invited to a first-ever conference on positive psychology in Akumal, Mexico. All immediately accepted. Seldom (if ever) has a branch of science been planned so deliberately and precisely. Over the coming decade, these 18 would emerge as pioneers and prime movers in an explosive new field of psychology. Announcing a Manhattan Project Meanwhile Marty began preparing his inaugural address for the APA’s annual convention that summer, an event that would bring together thousands of top psychologists from around the nation. It wasn’t hard to imagine reactions ranging from polite skepticism to rejection to outright hostility. After all, hadn’t Marty himself viewed the whole idea of happiness as “frothy”? In August, as Marty took the podium, a hush fell over the crowd. Word had gotten around that something big was coming. “Entering a new millennium,” he said, “we face a historical choice. We can continue to increase our material wealth while ignoring the human needs of people on the rest of the planet. Or we can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound, and show the world what actions lead to well-being, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities and to a just society.” The creation of a new science of positive psychology, he added, could serve as a “Manhattan Project” for the social sciences: requiring substantial resources but holding unprecedented promise. I have often been asked what was my reason, deep down, for running for president of APA. I will tell you now. I thought that in serving as president, I would discover my mission. And I did. That mission is to partake in launching a science and a profession whose aim is the building of what makes life most worth living." The “Manhattan Project” analogy may have been a little over the top, but it served its purpose. The auditorium rang with applause as the staid psychologists stood. “People came up to me afterward with tears in their eyes,” recalls Marty, “and said, ‘This is why I became a psychologist!’" Positive psychology was off and running. Funding a Revolution It takes cash to stage a revolution—especially in science. Happily, Marty also has gifts in this area, and in those early years his fund-raising skills brought in millions of research money from private foundations. Billionaire Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies helped establish the Positive Psychology Network, and billionaire physician turned-investor John Templeton funded the annual Templeton prizes, which at $100,000 a pop was the largest cash award ever given in psychology. The young movement had also built a strategic advantage: the Akumal Eighteen and its elder statesmen—Marty and Mike, along with Marty’s mentor and APA CEO Ray Fowler, Gallup organization CEO Don Clifton and Ed—held positions as editors of key journals in their field. “In 1981, when I started,” says Ed, “there were something like 100 published articles a year that even referred to well-being. In 1999 that number started to skyrocket.” Today it’s about 12,000 per year. In January 2000 the APA devoted a special issue of its flagship journal, American Psychologist, to positive psychology, with Marty and Mike as guest editors. It was the movement’s birth announcement to the profession. By late the following year the U.S. News & World Report published a cover story, “Happiness Explained.” For most of the 20th century, happiness was largely viewed as denial or delusion. Psychologists were busy healing sick minds, not bettering healthy ones. Today, however, a growing body of psychologists is taking the mystery out of happiness and the search for the good life. Three years ago, psychologist Martin Seligman … rallied colleagues to what he dubbed “positive psychology.” The movement focuses on humanity’s strengths, rather than its weaknesses, and seeks to help people move up in the continuum of happiness and fulfillment. Now, with millions of dollars in funding and over sixty scientists involved, the movement is showing real results." The American Psychologist special issue reached 160,000 psychologists. The U.S. News & World Report story went out to more than 2 million households. If the timing had been different, it might have been positive psychology’s shot heard round the world. But the impact was short-lived. The date on that issue’s cover? Sept. 3, 2001. What Good Is Happiness? Barbara Lee Fredrickson was making her way to a family funeral when she heard the news from lower Manhattan. “In a heartbeat,” she later reported, “my entire world no longer felt safe.” A psychologist at University of Michigan and the first recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize, Barbara was one of the leading lights of positive psychology. Yet the events of 9/11 threw her into an emotional tailspin that she had a hard time shaking at first. “I was plagued by doubt,” she wrote of those dark days. “I wondered, Who will care? I honestly felt that the science of positivity was no longer relevant in this new era of terrorism. For the first time, I questioned the relevance of my life’s work.” Marty’s reflections were similar. “Since Sept. 11, 2001,” he wrote a few months later. “In times of trouble, does the understanding and alleviating of suffering trump the understanding and building of happiness?” The U.S. News & World Report story was quickly forgotten, and it would be years before the media would show any significant interest in the movement. At the moment, nobody was interested in reading about subjective well-being. In the long run, 9/11 and its aftermath had hardly any impact on the surge of new positive psychology research. But the questions highlighted one of the challenges: Can we justify pouring precious resources into studying what makes people feel good when there are so many pressing problems? To put it bluntly: What good is happiness? How to Positively Thrive One of the earliest scientific answers came from Barbara. Her “broaden and build” theory (published in 1998) proposed that while negative emotions serve the evolutionary purpose of helping humans survive, positive emotions help us thrive. While feelings of fear, shock and anger tend to focus our thoughts and actions, positive emotions—such as joy, interest, contentment or love—have the opposite effect. They open the mind’s focal lens wider (broaden), leading to greater discovery, learning, growth and development, allowing us to become more mentally resourceful, creative and socially integrated (build). In essence, being happier makes you smarter. According to a 2001 landmark study, it makes you live longer, too. Nearly 700 nuns, ranging in age from 75 to 102 and hailing from seven congregations across the U.S., had been followed for about 15 years, when researchers discovered that an archive had preserved a set of brief autobiographical sketches the women had written back in the 1930s, when they took their original vows. The scientists studied the sisters’ language, charting linguistic evidence of their enthusiasm, optimism and joy (or lack of them) and then cross-referenced the results with the women’s life histories. The results: At age 85, 90 percent of the most positive group were still alive, compared to only 34 percent of the least positive group. And by age 95 those numbers were 54 percent versus 11 percent. Knowing which nuns had written more positively about their lives in their twenties—some 70 years earlier—predicted which would live significantly longer. Happy Means Healthy Scores of studies soon followed, linking happiness to a wide range of tangible benefits, including less incidence of stroke, better resistance to colds and increased immune function, greater resilience to adversity and stronger intuition, less physical pain, lower cortisol levels and less stress and inflammation. In 2005, Ed and two of his Akumal Eighteen colleagues—Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside and Laura King, a professor of psychology of the University of Missouri, Columbia—made an extensive survey of the literature, reviewing some 300 studies involving more than a quarter million people. In their published metastudy, “The benefits of positive affect: Does happiness lead to success?” they reported compelling evidence that happier people are more likely to have: • better health and longer life • more fulfilling marriages and relationships • higher incomes and more financial success • better work performance and more professional success • more altruism and social and community involvement What’s more, they found happiness didn’t just correlate with these conditions, it preceded and predicted them consistently. Can You Really Increase Your Happiness? The growing evidence was unmistakable: increasing happiness is worth the effort. But the young movement faced a second, even bigger scientific hurdle: According to established scientific fact, happiness levels were pretty much established by our genes, and there wasn’t much we could do to change them. The idea of a genetically determined “happiness set point” came from studies based on the Minnesota Twin Registry, a major body of psychological and demographic data yielded by studying dozens of sets of twins. One landmark 1966 paper, for example, captured its depressing conclusion in its title: “Happiness is a stochastic [i.e., random] phenomenon.” Every individual has a distinct personality tendency, said the study’s authors, including a mood profile, and that profile is largely inherited. Plainly put: happiness is a roll of the genetic dice. Moreover, studies of lottery winners and paraplegic accident victims seemed to show that even when people experience extreme, unexpected fortune—good or bad—the resulting leap in happiness or despair tends to flatten out over time. In other words, we get used to it. If the change is bad (even awful), we learn to cope. If it’s good, no matter how good, we soon start taking it for granted. This behavior pattern, called “hedonic adaptation,” had been accepted scientific canon for decades. The authors of the “happiness is stochastic” study summed up this position in a wry note that became famous in scientific circles: “It may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller.” Now it was up to the positive psychologists to challenge that notion. Akumal Members Tackle the Dogma For Sonja Lyubomirsky, the happiness question piqued her interest at an early age. Upon emigrating from Russia, she immediately realized that people in America seemed happier. From then on, she became intrigued with the question of what makes some people happier than others. In January 2001, Sonja suspected that people could increase their own happiness levels and empirical evidence could surely be discovered. So, just as she had done previously with Ed to the “Does happiness lead to success?” study, she along with two Akumal alums combed through data from existing studies as well as recent work and found a critical flaw in the happiness set point theory. It didn’t fit all the data. It fit about half. In their paper, “Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change,” the three researchers described three prime factors that influence our individual level of happiness: • our genetic makeup • our external circumstances, such as location, surroundings, level of income and job • our own behaviors Genetics, they found, dictate about 50 percent of our happiness level (set point), and circumstances change that very little, or up to 10 percent (adaptation). The remaining 40 percent is determined by what we say, do and think. About 40 percent of our own level of happiness is entirely within our own control. Sonja and her colleagues cited experiments, called “happiness interventions,” that showed simple daily activities could measurably increase positive well-being—and that those increases stayed in place even long after the experiments ended. One such study showed that students who kept a daily tab of minor positive events in their lives for 10 weeks showed less illness, a more positive outlook and greater happiness than the groups who noted daily hassles or emotion-neutral events. Another study had a trial group perform five “acts of kindness” every week for six weeks and found the same general impact. A flood of similar studies showed similar results. In an interview a few years before his death, David Lykken, the researcher who made the “as futile as trying to be taller” statement, said he regretted the remark. He added, “It’s clear that we can change our happiness levels widely—up or down.” The Revolution Hits the Streets In January 2005, Time magazine ran a cover story, “The Science of Happiness,” including the articles “Why Optimists Live Longer” and “Is Joy in Your Genes?” to “Does God Want Us to Be Happy?” A constant flow of coverage followed, from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to CNN and the BBC. Popular books followed, from Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (2006) to The How of Happiness (2007) by Sonja to Barbara’s Positivity (2009). In 2011, a New York author, Gretchen Rubin, published an instructional memoir about her project to take on a different strategy for greater happiness each month for a year. The Happiness Project shot to the top of the New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list and stayed for weeks. Not long after the Time piece ran, the press picked up a story on a course in positive psychology offered at Harvard by a young associate professor named Tal Ben-Shahar. When he first offered the seminar in 2002, eight had signed up. Two years later, offered as a lecture course, 380 students enrolled. A few years later he offered it again—and this time 855 students made it Harvard’s largest course. Be Happy in Your Work The business community caught wind of the revolution. In 2010 The Business of Happiness, by billionaire serial entrepreneur Ted Leonsis, Happiness at Work, by influential Long Island University business professor Srikumar Rao, and The Happiness Advantage, by Harvard assistant psychology professor turned- business consultant Shawn Achor appeared. That year, when Zappos founder Tony Hsieh published his business memoir, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, it debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list and stayed for 27 consecutive weeks. In 2012 the Harvard Business Review, the gold standard of academic business journalism, dedicated its January/February issue to a cover story, “The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits.” Its lead editorial explained their decision: “Happiness can have an impact at both the company and the country level. We’ve learned a lot about how to make people happy. We’d be stupid not to use that knowledge.” Toward Gross National Happiness With the help of Ed and Nobel Prizewinner Daniel Kahneman, Don Clifton’s Gallup organization developed increasingly powerful survey tools providing exhaustively comprehensive data. And in the past few years local and national governments around the world have been floating and in some cases implementing proposals to measure subjective well-being, along with economic measures like GNP and GDP, as yardsticks of their state of health. Marty says, “I just reviewed a proposal for the National Academy of Science, in which a dozen of the most prestigious economists and psychologists in America propose to the government that they create the equivalent of a Bureau of Labor Statistics for well-being.” Ed explains, “People pay attention to what is measured. In my mind, this is the biggest story in positive psychology.” The movement is not without critics. “There are clinical psychologists who still regard me as the Darth Vader of psychology,” muses Marty. “I get hate letters every so often.” And there are those who deride positive psychology as a careless “happiology” campaign led by zealots and simplistic thinking. But these are in the minority. Psychology Gets With the Program “I Google positive psychology every day,” says Marty, “and I’d say the ratio these days is about 5:1, positive comments to negative. I recently saw a Google Ngram search [a search of words and phrases in Google’s library of digitized books] that showed references to the phrase positive psychology now outnumber references to cognitive neuroscience. Right now it’s probably the most popular movement in psychology.” This new level of respect, he adds, offers a wide-open field for young researchers who aren’t likely to face the skepticism he did half a century ago. Thankfully, Marty, Mike, Ed, Barbara, Sonja and many other positive psychologists did weather early trials and challenges. Their work has sparked conversations and initiatives around the world on happiness. People everywhere are benefiting from positive psychology—even if they don’t know about its amazing and unlikely beginning.
Read More