Martin Seligman

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Martin Seligman bigraphy, stories - American psychologist and writer

Martin Seligman : biography

12 August 1942 –

Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman (born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists. "The most popular theoretical interpretation of the learned helplessness phenomenon to date is that of Seligman (1975) and Maier and Seligman (1976)."

According to Haggbloom et al.’s study of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, Seligman was the 13th most frequently cited psychologist in introductory psychology textbooks throughout the century, as well as the 31st most eminent overall.

Prevention and Treatment Magazine Parents

Seligman has written about positive psychology topics such as The Optimistic Child, Child’s Play, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, and Flourish.

Publications

  • (Paperback reprint edition, W.H. Freeman, 1992, ISBN 0-7167-2328-X)
  • (Paperback reprint edition, Penguin Books, 1998; reissue edition, Free Press, 1998)
  • (Paperback reprint edition, Ballantine Books, 1995, ISBN 0-449-90971-9
  • (Paperback edition, Harper Paperbacks, 1996, ISBN 0-06-097709-4
  • (Paperback edition, Free Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-2298-9)

Personal life

According to an interview for his electronic journal Prevention and Treatment Seligman said magenta was his favorite color because of the amazing calming effects of the color on the human body. He plays bridge, and finished second in one of the three major North American pair championships, the Blue Ribbon Pairs (1998), and has won over 50 regional championships. He has seven children, four grandchildren and three dogs.

Seligman was inspired by the work of the psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania in refining his own cognitive techniques and exercises.Hirtz, Rob, , The Pennsylvania Gazette, The University of Pennsylvania, January/February 1999.

Learned helplessness

Seligman’s foundational experiments and theory of "learned helplessness" began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that were opposite to the predictions of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, then a leading psychological theory.;

Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation — usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation — even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. In later years, alongside Abramson, Seligman reformulated his theory of learned helplessness to include attributional style.

According to author Jane Mayer, Seligman gave a talk at the Navy SERE school in San Diego in 2002, which he said was a three-hour talk on helping US soldiers to resist torture, based on his understanding of learned helplessness.

Positive psychology

Seligman worked with Christopher Peterson to create what they describe as a ‘positive’ counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). While the DSM focuses on what can go wrong, Character Strengths and Virtues is designed to look at what can go right. In their research they looked across cultures and across millennia to attempt to distill a manageable list of virtues that have been highly valued from ancient China and India, through Greece and Rome, to contemporary Western cultures. Their list includes six character strengths: wisdom/knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each of these has perhaps a half-dozen sub-entries; for instance, temperance includes forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation. One of their key points is that they do not believe that there is a hierarchy for the six virtues; no one is more fundamental than or a precursor to the others.