Mark Wieczorek

I’m in the middle of reading Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman’s (former president of the American Psychological Association) book on Positive Psychology. Seligman stumbled on the idea of learned helplessness as a grad student - when dogs who were trained to associate a buzzer with an electrical shock didn’t try to escape, from the shock even when they could, he explained it by saying that they’d simply given up trying. This was contrary to the behaviorists at the time, who believed that animals could only do what they’d been taught to do through conditioning - this kind of abstraction (inescapable pain in one situation to pain in all situations), they believed, required human level thinking.

Seligman persisted, however, and further research bore him out - people can be trained to give up. The theory of learned helplessness eventually became attatched to an area of cognitive psychology known as “attributional style” in which people explain good or bad events as in terms of three dimensions - permenance, universality, and control. That is, will this bad event have a lasting effect (permenance) that affects multiple areas of your life (universality) and do you have the ability to change it (control). Your measure in these three dimensions predicts (according to Seligman’s book) how quickly you’ll recover from setbacks.

I’m not yet up to the part where tells us how to train ourselves to be optimistic, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the mean time, here’s a roundup of my links on happiness & positive psychology.

Read: Are We Happy Yet? (Survey on happiness in America & how it correlates to things like income, age and political affiliation)
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: The recipe for success: get happy and get ahead in life
Read: The Sweet Smell of … Happiness?
Read: Secret to a long life - get even more often (leave it to the Germans to figure out that surliness will help you live longer)
Read: Just the expectation of a mirthful laughter experience boosts endorphins 27 percent, HGH 87 percent
Read: The Beguiling Truth About Beauty (You’re hotter than you think)
Read: The Hidden Side of Happiness Pleasure only gets you so far. A rich, rewarding life often requires a messy battle with adversity.
Read: The New Science of Happiness What makes the human heart sing? Researchers are taking a close look. What they’ve found may surprise you
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: Smile for Success: New research shows happiness leads to success, not the other way around
Read: The Science of Happiness - Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) (via MindHacks)
Read: Happiness 101 (via MindHacks)

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