Are You Living the Pleasant Life, the Good Life, or the Meaningful Life?
Posted May 22 2009 11:55pm
The video below from TED is a talk given by Dr. Martin Seligmann about positive psychology.
Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology in 2000, and has devoted his career since then to furthering the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. It's a fascinating field of study that had few empirical, scientific measures -- traditional clinical psychology focusing more on the repair of unhappy states than the propagation and nurturing of happy ones. In his pioneering work, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, developing clinical tools and training the next generation of positive psychologists.
His earlier work focused on perhaps the opposite state: learned helplessness, in which a person feels he or she is powerless to change a situation that is, in fact, changeable. Seligman is an often-cited authority in this field as well -- in fact, his is the 13th most likely name to pop up in a general psych textbook. He was the leading consultant on a Consumer Reports study on long-term psychotherapy, and has developed several common pre-employment tests, including the Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ).
Here is the gist of the talk, but the video (23 minutes) is well worth watching.
The Pleasant Life
having as many pleasures as possible
amplying these pleasures with your skills
50% of this is heritable and not very modifiable
positive emotion habituates
The Good Life
the three great avenues of life: work, play, love
pleasure is raw, something you feel
flow (as opposed to pleasure): you are one with the activity
The video below from TED is a talk given by Dr. Martin Seligmann about positive psychology.
Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology in 2000, and has devoted his career since then to furthering the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. It's a fascinating field of study that had few empirical, scientific measures -- traditional clinical psychology focusing more on the repair of unhappy states than the propagation and nurturing of happy ones. In his pioneering work, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, developing clinical tools and training the next generation of positive psychologists.
His earlier work focused on perhaps the opposite state: learned helplessness, in which a person feels he or she is powerless to change a situation that is, in fact, changeable. Seligman is an often-cited authority in this field as well -- in fact, his is the 13th most likely name to pop up in a general psych textbook. He was the leading consultant on a Consumer Reports study on long-term psychotherapy, and has developed several common pre-employment tests, including the Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ).
Here is the gist of the talk, but the video (23 minutes) is well worth watching.
The Pleasant Life
The Good Life
The Meaningful Life
Should you have any difficulty viewing the video here on the blog, click here to see it at TED