Psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman has spent his professional career studying human motivation, but his role as the founding father of the positive psychology movement only came about after 30-years spent studying negative emotions and mental weakness. After being exposed to the work of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and others who argued that positive emotion are instrumental in making human beings think better and achieve important aims, Seligman's entire professional orientation shifted. Today he is a prolific author, researcher, and indefatigable proponent for better understanding the role positive emotion, engagement, and meaning play in shaping our thinking.


Q: What is a working definition for happiness?

A: Happiness is a hopelessly unwieldy scientific notion. The scientific question is to dissolve it into workable pieces so that it can be studied as part of the scientific field of Positive Psychology. I believe happiness dissolves into three different ideas, each of which is separately buildable and measurable. The first is the i) pleasant life (having as much positive emotion and as little negative emotion as possible), ii) the engaged life (being completely absorbed by the challenges you face at work, love, play etc. iii) the meaningful life (knowing what you highest strengths are and using them to belong to and serve something that is bigger than you are.) Once we have established these three categories we can begin to measure them scientifically.


Q: Is there such a thing as the opposite of happiness?

A: When I first started out I expected to find out that sadness or anxiety would be perfectly inversely correlated to happiness. In other words if you were completely happy you couldn't be sad or vice versa. But all the measures that people have taken show that one can be both quite happy and quite sad, although not at the same moment. Happiness doesn't preclude sadness or anxiety and sadness or anxiety do not preclude happiness. They are not opposite.


Q: Is it true there is a formula for a formula for happiness?

A: Yes, the formula comes from a paper called "The Architecture of Happiness" by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade. I devote Chapter four from my book "Authentic Happiness" to this subject.

The formula is: H=S+C=V where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control.


Q: Is this formula the gold standard of the field?

A: Gold standard is too strong, but this formula is certainly a scientific advance.


Q: Do people really know how much positive emotion, or engagement or meaning they have in their lives? Isn't that difficult to measure?

A: Well if you say you're in pain, that's a privileged, unimpeachable statement. Only you can know the answer to that. No one from the outside can know more than you about the answer to that question. Likewise people know how much positive emotion they have in their lives–are they having fun, for instance–and if they are engaged.

The meaningful life, however is different: people may not know how much meaning they have in life. We might think that we're having a meaningful conversation right now. But we might be deluded. Meaning is not just a subjective state, but an objective state as well. We may be talking nonsense and if this is so, the external world can tell if you had a meaningful conversation or not. So for the pleasant life and the engaged life, we are the sole authorities. For the meaningful life, our subjective state is not privileged.


Q: Is it possible to measure happiness on anything but the individual level?

A: Yes, there's a large movement lead by Ed Diener and Danny Kahneman in the United States which attempts to measure the level of well-being of groups, nations, and corporations. That endeavor, creating national well being accounts, has gone pretty far.


Bio

Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., works on positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism. He is currently Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known in academic and clinical circles and is a best-selling author. His bibliography includes twenty books and 200 articles on motivation and personality. Among his better-known works are Learned Optimism (Knopf, 1991), What You Can Change & What You Can't (Knopf, 1993), The Optimistic Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), and Helplessness (Freeman, 1975, 1993). His most recent book is Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002). In 1996, Dr. Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association by the largest vote in modern history. Dr. Seligman received the American Psychological Society's William James Fellow Award (for contribution to basic science) and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (for the application of psychological knowledge), as well as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association.

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