I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to being grumpy, but in spite of it.
In that moment, I resolved to change. More importantly, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting her shortcomings. She could do that herself. Rather, my purpose in raising her was to nurture this precocious strength she had displayed—I call it seeing into the soul, but the jargon is social intelligence—and help her to mold her life around it. Such a strength, fully grown, would be a buffer against her weaknesses and against the storms of life that would inevitably come her way.
Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest. But if social benefits come through putting people in places where they can best use their strengths, there are huge implications for psychology.
Can there be a psychological science that is about the best things in life? Can there be a classification of the strengths and virtues that make life worth living? Can parents and teachers use this science to raise strong, resilient children ready to take their place in a world in which more opportunities for fulfillment are available? Can adults teach themselves better ways to happiness and fulfillment? The vast psychological literature on suffering is not very applicable to Nikki.
A better psychology for her and children everywhere will view positive motivations—loving kindness, competence, choice, and respect for life—as being just as authentic as the darker motives. It will ask how children can acquire the strengths and virtues whose exercise leads to these positive feelings. It will ask about the positive institutions strong families, democracy, a broad moral circle that promote these strengths and virtues. It will guide us all along better paths to the good life.
Nikki had found me my mission, and this book is my attempt to tell it. WHY do we feel happy? Why do we feel anything at all? Why has evolution endowed us with emotional states that are so insistent, so consuming, and so…well, so present…that we run our very lives around them? Evolution and Positive Feeling In the world that psychologists are most comfortable with, positive feelings about a person or an object get us to approach it, while negative feelings get us to avoid it. The delicious odor of brownies being baked pulls us toward the oven, and the repulsive smell of vomit pushes us to the other side of the sidewalk.
But amoebae and worms also presumably approach the stuff they need and avoid pitfalls, using their basic sensory and motor faculties without any feeling.
Somewhere during evolution, though, more complicated animals acquired the wet overlay of an emotional life. The first huge clue to unraveling this knotty issue comes from comparing negative emotion to positive emotion. Negative emotions—fear, sadness, and anger—are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations.
Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us. In evolution, danger, loss, and trespass are all threats to survival itself. More than that, these external threats are all win-loss or zero-sum games, where whatever one person wins is exactly balanced by a loss for the other person. The net result is zero. Negative emotions play a dominant role in win-loss games, and the more serious the outcome, the more intense and desperate are these emotions.
A fight to the death is the quintessential win-loss game in evolution, and as such it arouses the panoply of negative emotions in their most extreme forms. Natural selection has likely favored the growth of negative emotions for this reason. Those of our ancestors who felt negative emotions strongly when life and limb were the issue likely fought and fled the best, and they passed on the relevant genes.
All emotions have a feeling component, a sensory component, a thinking component, and an action component. The feeling component of all the negative emotions is aversion—disgust, fear, repulsion, hatred, and the like.
These feelings, like sights, sounds, and smells, intrude on consciousness and override whatever else is going on. The type of thinking such emotions ineluctably engender is focused and intolerant, narrowing our attention to the weapon and not the hairstyle of our assailant.
All of this culminates in quick and decisive action: fight, flight, or conserve. This is so uncontroversial except perhaps for the sensory part as to be boring, and it has formed the backbone of evolutionary thinking about negative emotions since Darwin. It is strange, therefore, that there has been no accepted thinking about why we have positive emotion. Scientists distinguish between phenomena and epiphenomena.
Pushing the accelerator in your car is a phenomenon because it starts a chain of events that cause your car to speed up. Behaviorists like B. Skinner argued for half a century that all of mental life was mere epiphenomena, the milky froth on the cappuccino of behavior.
When you flee from a bear, this argument goes, your fear merely reflects the fact that you are running away, with the subjective state frequently occurring after the behavior. In short, fear is not the engine of running away; it is just the speedometer. I was an anti-behaviorist from the very beginning, even though I worked in a behavioral laboratory.
Learned helplessness convinced me that the behaviorist program was dead wrong. Appreciating complex contingencies is the process of judgment, and extrapolating them to the future is the process of expectation.
If one takes learned helplessness seriously, such processes cannot be explained away as epiphenomena, because they cause the behavior of giving up. The work on learned helplessness was one of the blasts that blew down the straw house of behaviorism and led in the s to the enthroning of cognitive psychology in the fiefdoms of academic psychology. I was thoroughly convinced that negative emotions the so-called dysphorias were not epiphenomena. The evolutionary account was compelling: Sadness and depression not only signaled loss, they brought about the behaviors of disengagement, giving up, and in extreme cases suicide.
Anxiety and fear signaled the presence of danger, leading to preparations to flee, defend, or conserve. Anger signaled trespass, and it caused preparation to attack the trespasser and to redress injustice.
Strangely, though, I did not apply this logic to positive emotions, either in my theory or in my own life. The feelings of happiness, good cheer, ebullience, self-esteem, and joy all remained frothy for me. In my theory, I doubted that these emotions ever caused anything, or that they could ever be increased if you were not lucky enough to be born with an abundance of them. I wrote in The Optimistic Child that feelings of self-esteem in particular, and happiness in general, develop as only side effects of doing well in the world.
However wonderful feelings of high self-esteem might be, trying to achieve them before achieving good commerce with the world would be to confuse profoundly the means and the end. Or so I thought. In my personal life, it had always discouraged me that these delightful emotions rarely visited me, and failed to stay for a long visit when they did. I had kept this to myself, feeling like a freak, until I read the literature on positive and negative affect.
Whether one identical twin is a giggler or a grouch, it is highly likely that her sister, with exactly the same genes, will be one as well; but if the twins are fraternal, sharing only half their genes, the odds that they will have the same affectivity are not much greater than chance.
How do you think you score on positive and negative affectivity? You can take the test here or on the website www. Read each item and then mark the appropriate answer in the space next to the word. Indicate to what extent you feel this way right now that is, at the present moment.
Use the following scale to record your answers. To score your test, merely add your ten positive affect PA scores and your ten negative affect NA scores separately. You will arrive at two scores ranging from 10 to Some people have a lot of positive affect and this stays quite fixed over a lifetime.
High positive-affect people feel great a lot of the time; good things bring them pleasure and joy in abundance.
Just as many people, however, have very little of it. Most of the rest of us lie somewhere in between. I suppose psychology should have expected this all along. Constitutional differences in anger and depression have long been established.
Why not in positive emotion? The upshot of this is the theory that we appear to have a genetic steersman who charts the course of our emotional life. If the course does not run through sunny seas, this theory tells us that there is not much you can do to feel happier.
I have a friend, Len, who is much lower on positive affect than even I am. He made millions as the CEO of a securities trading company and, even more spectacularly, became a national champion bridge player several times over—all in his twenties! Handsome, articulate, bright, and a very eligible bachelor, however, he was surprised that in love he was a total flop. As I said, Len is reserved, and virtually devoid of positive affect.
I saw him at the very moment of victory in a major bridge championship; he flashed a fleeting half-smile and escaped upstairs to watch Monday night football alone. This is not to say Len is insensitive. He is not warm. He is not joyous. He is not a barrel of laughs. In fact, there is probably nothing much wrong with Len.
He is just constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity. Evolution has ensured that there will be many people down there, because natural selection has plenty of uses for the lack of emotion as well as for its presence.
To be a champion bridge player, to be a successful options trader, and to be a CEO all require lots of deep cool when under fire from all sides. But Len also dated modern American women, who find ebullience very attractive. A decade ago he asked my advice about what to do, and I suggested that he move to Europe, where bubbliness and extroverted warmth are not so highly prized. He is today happily married to a European. And this is the moral of the story: that a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion.
That afternoon in the garden with Nikki convinced my heart that my theory was wrong, but it took Barbara Fredrickson, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, to convince my head that positive emotion has a profound purpose far beyond the delightful way it makes us feel. The Templeton Positive Psychology Prize is given for the best work in Positive Psychology done by a scientist under forty years of age. In , the inaugural year of the prize, Barbara Fredrickson won it for her theory of the function of positive emotions.
Fredrickson claims that positive emotions have a grand purpose in evolution. They broaden our abiding intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can draw upon when a threat or opportunity presents itself. When we are in a positive mood, people like us better, and friendship, love, and coalitions are more likely to cement. We are open to new ideas and new experience.
For instance, suppose you have in front of you a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall in such a way that wax does not drip on the floor. The task requires a creative solution—emptying the box and tacking it to the wall, then using it as a candleholder. The experimenter beforehand makes you feel a positive emotion: giving you a small bag of candy, letting you read amusing cartoons, or having you read a series of positive words aloud with expression.
Each of these techniques reliably creates a small blip of good feeling, and the positive emotion induced makes you more likely to be creative in fulfulling the task. Another experiment: Your job is to say as quickly as you can whether a word falls into a specific category.
But if the experimenter first induces positive emotion as above, you are faster. The same intellectual boost occurs with both little children and experienced physicians. Then all the children were given a learning task about different shapes, and both did better than four-year-olds who got neutral instructions. At the other end of the spectrum of experience, 44 internists were randomly placed in one of three groups: a group that got a small package of candy, a group that read aloud humanistic statements about medicine, and a control group.
All the physicians were then presented with a hard-to-diagnose case of liver disease and asked to think out loud as they made their diagnosis. The candied group did best, considering liver disease earliest and most efficiently. Happy But Dumb? In spite of evidence like this, it is tempting to view happy people as air- heads. The happy-but-dumb view has very respectable provenance.
Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, wrote in that the function of thought is to allay doubt: We do not think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong. When presented with no obstacles, we simply glide along the highway of life, and only when there is a pebble in the shoe is conscious analysis triggered. They gave undergraduate students differing degrees of control over turning on a green light.
For other students, however, the light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button. Afterward, each student was asked to judge how much control he or she had. Depressed students were very accurate, both when they had control and when they did not. The nondepressed people astonished us. They were accurate when they had control, but even when they were helpless they still judged that they had about 35 percent control. The depressed people were sadder but wiser, in short, than the nondepressed people.
More supporting evidence for depressive realism soon followed. Depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas happy people think they are much more skillful than others judge them to be.
Eighty percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills; the majority of workers rate their job performance as above average; and the majority of motorists even those who have been involved in accidents rate their driving as safer than average.
Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both. Depressed people, in contrast, are evenhanded in assessing success and failure. This does indeed make happy people look empty-headed.
Moreover, Lisa Aspinwall a professor at the University of Utah who won the second-prize Templeton award in gathered compelling evidence that in making important real-life decisions, happier people may be smarter than unhappy people.
She presents her subjects with scary, pertinent health-risk information: articles about the relationship of caffeine to breast cancer for coffee drinkers, or about links between tanning and melanoma for sun worshippers.
Happy people remember more of the negative information and rate it as more convincing, it turns out, than do the unhappy people. The resolution of the dispute about which type of people are smarter may be the following: In the normal course of events, happy people rely on their tried and true positive past experiences, whereas less happy people are more skeptical.
Even if a light has seemed uncontrollable for the last ten minutes, happy people assume from their past experience that things will eventually work out, and at some point they will have some control. Hence the 35 percent response discussed earlier, even when the green light was actually uncontrollable. There is an exciting possibility with rich implications that integrates all these findings: A positive mood jolts us into an entirely different way of thinking from a negative mood.
This seems to make us critics of a high order. When we gather to debate which one of several superb job candidates we should hire as a professor, we often end up hiring no one, instead picking out everything that each candidate has done wrong. So a chilly, negative mood activates a battle-stations mode of thinking: the order of the day is to focus on what is wrong and then eliminate it.
A positive mood, in contrast, buoys people into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, undefensive and lateral. This way of thinking aims to detect not what is wrong, but what is right. It does not go out of its way to detect sins of omission, but hones in on the virtues of commission.
It probably even occurs in a different part of the brain and has a different neurochemistry from thinking under negative mood. Choose your venue and design your mood to fit the task at hand. Here are examples of tasks that usually require critical thinking: taking the graduate record exams, doing income tax, deciding whom to fire, dealing with repeated romantic rejections, preparing for an audit, copy-editing, making crucial decisions in competitive sports, and figuring out where to go to college.
Carry these out on rainy days, in straight-backed chairs, and in silent, institutionally painted rooms. Being uptight, sad, or out of sorts will not impede you; it may even make your decisions more acute. In contrast, any number of life tasks call for creative, generous, and tolerant thinking: planning a sales campaign, finding ways to increase the amount of love in your life, pondering a new career field, deciding whether to marry someone, thinking about hobbies and noncompetitive sports, and creative writing.
Carry these out in a setting that will buoy your mood for example, in a comfortable chair, with suitable music, sun, and fresh air.
If possible, surround yourself with people you trust to be unselfish and of good will. Play among juvenile ground squirrels involves running at top speed, jumping straight up into the air, changing directions in midair, then landing and streaking off in the new direction.
Young Patas monkeys at play will run headlong into saplings that are flexible enough to catapult them off into another direction.
Both of these maneuvers are used by adults of the respective species to escape predators. It is almost irresistible to view play in general as a builder of muscle and cardiovascular fitness and as the practice that perfects avoiding predators, as well as perfecting fighting, hunting, and courting. Health and longevity are good indicators of physical reserve, and there is direct evidence that positive emotion predicts health and longevity.
In the largest study to date, 2, Mexican-Americans from the southwest United States aged sixty-five or older were given a battery of demographic and emotional tests, then tracked for two years.
Positive emotion strongly predicted who lived and who died, as well as disability. After controlling for age, income, education, weight, smoking, drinking, and disease, the researchers found that happy people were half as likely to die, and half as likely to become disabled. Positive emotion also protects people against the ravages of aging.
You will recall that beginning nuns who wrote happy autobiographies when in their twenties lived longer and healthier lives than novices whose autobiographies were devoid of positive emotion, and also that optimists in the Mayo Clinic study lived significantly longer than pessimists. Happy people, furthermore, have better health habits, lower blood pressure, and feistier immune systems than less happy people. Research suggests, however, that more happiness actually causes more productivity and higher income.
One study measured the amount of positive emotion of employees, then followed their job performance over the next eighteen months. Happier people went on to get better evaluations from their supervisors and higher pay. In a large-scale study of Australian youths across fifteen years, happiness made gainful employment and higher income more likely. In attempts to define whether happiness or productivity comes first by inducing happiness experimentally and then looking at later performance , it turns out that adults and children who are put into a good mood select higher goals, perform better, and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tasks, such as solving anagrams.
When Bad Things Happen to Happy People The final edge that happy people have for building physical resources is how well they deal with untoward events. How long can you hold your hand in a bucket of ice water? The average duration before the pain gets to be too much is between sixty and ninety seconds. Rick Snyder, a professor at Kansas and one of the fathers of Positive Psychology, used this test on Good Morning America to demonstrate the effects of positive emotion on coping with adversity.
He first gave a test of positive emotion to the regular cast. By quite a margin, Charles Gibson outscored everybody. Then, before live cameras, each member of the cast put his or her hand in ice water. Everyone, except Gibson, yanked their hands out before ninety seconds had elapsed. Gibson, though, just sat there grinning not grimacing , and still had his hand in the bucket when a commercial break was finally called.
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions. Barbara Fredrickson showed students a filmed scene from The Ledge in which a man inches along the ledge of a high-rise, hugging the building. At one point he loses his grip and dangles above the traffic; the heart rate of students watching this clip goes through the roof.
Building Social Resources At the age of seven weeks my youngest child, Carly Dylan, took her first tentative steps in the dance of development. Mandy beamed back and laughed, and Carly, cooing, broke into a bigger smile.
Securely attached children grow up to outperform their peers in almost every way that has been tested, including persistence, problem solving, independence, exploration, and enthusiasm. Feeling positive emotion and expressing it well is at the heart of not only the love between a mother and an infant, but of almost all love and friendship. It never fails to surprise me that my closest friends are not other psychologists in spite of so much shared sympathy, time together, and common background or even other intellectuals, but the people with whom I play poker, bridge, and volleyball.
The exception proves the rule here. There is a tragic facial paralysis called Moebius syndrome that leaves its victims unable to smile. Individuals born with this affliction cannot show positive emotion with their face, and so they react to the friendliest conversation with a disconcerting deadpan.
They have enormous difficulty making and keeping even casual friends. When the sequence of feeling a positive emotion, expressing it, eliciting a positive emotion in another, and then responding back goes awry, the music that supports the dance of love and friendship is interrupted.
Routine psychological studies focus on pathology; they look at the most depressed, anxious, or angry people and ask about their lifestyles and personalities. I have done such studies for two decades. We took an unselected sample of college students and measured happiness rigorously by using six different scales, then focused on the happiest 10 percent. The very happy people spent the least time alone and the most time socializing , and they were rated highest on good relationships by themselves and by their friends.
All 22 members of the very happy group, except one, reported a current romantic partner. The very happy group had a little more money, but they did not experience a different number of negative or positive events, and they did not differ on amount of sleep, TV watching, exercise, smoking, drinking alcohol, or religious activity.
Many other studies show that happy people have more casual friends and more close friends, are more likely to be married, and are more involved in group activities than unhappy people. A corollary of the enmeshment with others that happy people have is their altruism. Before I saw the data, I thought that unhappy people— identifying with the suffering that they know so well—would be more altruistic.
So I was taken aback when the findings on mood and helping others without exception revealed that happy people were more likely to demonstrate that trait. In the laboratory, children and adults who are made happy display more empathy and are willing to donate more money to others in need.
When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we like others more, and we want to share our good fortune even with strangers. When we are down, though, we become distrustful, turn inward, and focus defensively on our own needs. Looking out for number one is more characteristic of sadness than of well-being.
Developing more positive emotion in our lives will build friendship, love, better physical health, and greater achievement. Broadening and building—that is, growth and positive development— are the essential characteristics of a win-win encounter. Ideally, reading this chapter is an example of a win-win encounter: if I have done my job well, I grew intellectually by writing it, and so did you by reading it. Being in love, making a friend, and raising children are almost always huge win- wins.
Almost every technological advance for example, the printing press or the hybrid tea rose is a win-win interaction. The printing press did not subtract an equivalent economic value from somewhere else; rather it engendered an explosion in value. Herein lies the likely reason for feelings.
By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
Now that you and I are convinced that it is well worth it to bring more happiness into your life, the overriding question is, can the amount of positive emotion in our lives be increased? Let us now turn to that question. The Happiness Formula Although much of the research that underlies this book is based in statistics, a user-friendly book in psychology for the educated layperson can have at most one equation. V, the single most important issue in Positive Psychology, is the subject of Chapters 5, 6, and 7.
H Enduring Level of Happiness It is important to distinguish your momentary happiness from your enduring level of happiness. Momentary happiness can easily be increased by any number of uplifts, such as chocolate, a comedy film, a back rub, a compliment, flowers, or a new blouse. No one is more expert on this topic than you are. The challenge is to raise your enduring level of happiness, and merely increasing the number of bursts of momentary positive feelings will not for reasons you will read about shortly accomplish this.
The Fordyce scale you took in the last chapter was about momentary happiness, and the time has now come to measure your general level of happiness. The following scale was devised by Sonja Lyubomirsky, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside.
In general, I consider myself: 2. Some people are generally very happy. They enjoy life regardless of what is going on, getting the most out of everything. To what extent does this characterization describe you? Some people are generally not very happy. Although they are not depressed, they never seem as happy as they might be. To score the test, total your answers for the questions and divide by 8. The mean for adult Americans is 4.
Two-thirds of people score between 3. The title of this chapter may seem like a peculiar question to you. You may believe that with enough effort, every emotional state and every personality trait can be improved. When I began studying psychology forty years ago, I also believed this, and this dogma of total human plasticity reigned over the entire field.
It held that with enough personal work and with enough reshaping of the environment all of human psychology could be remade for the better. It was shattered beyond repair in the s, however, when studies of the personality of twins and of adopted children began to cascade in.
The psychology of identical twins turns out to be much more similar than that of fraternal twins, and the psychology of adopted children turns out to be much more similar to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents.
All of these studies—and they now number in the hundreds—converge on a single point: roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance. But high heritability does not determine how unchangeable a trait is. S Set Range : The Barriers to Becoming Happier Roughly half of your score on happiness tests is accounted for by the score your biological parents would have gotten had they taken the test.
So, for example, if you are low in positive affectivity, you may frequently feel the impulse to avoid social contact and spend your time alone. As you will see below, happy people are very social, and there is some reason to think that their happiness is caused by lots of fulfilling socializing. So, if you do not fight the urgings of your genetic steersman, you may remain lower in happy feelings than you would be otherwise. She needed periodic doses of hope because her usual mood was low; if she could have afforded a therapist, her diagnosis would have been minor depression.
This ongoing funk did not begin when her husband left her three years earlier for another woman, but seemed to have always been there—at least since middle school, twenty-five years ago.
Then a miracle happened: Ruth won 22 million dollars in the Illinois State lottery. She was beside herself with joy. She was even able to send her twin sons to private school. Strangely, however, as the year went by, her mood drifted downward. By the end of the year, in spite of the absence of any obvious adversity, her expensive therapist diagnosed Ruth as having a case of dysthymic disorder chronic depression.
A systematic study of 22 people who won major lotteries found that they reverted to their baseline level of happiness over time, winding up no happier than 22 matched controls.
The good news, however, is that after misfortune strikes, the thermostat will strive to pull us out of our misery eventually. In fact, depression is almost always episodic, with recovery occurring within a few months of onset. Even individuals who become paraplegic as a result of spinal cord accidents quickly begin to adapt to their greatly limited capacities, and within eight weeks they report more net positive emotion than negative emotion.
Within a few years, they wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed. Of people with extreme quadriplegia, 84 percent consider their life to be average or above average. These findings fit the idea that we each have a personal set range for our level of positive and negative emotion, and this range may represent the inherited aspect of overall happiness. As you accumulate more material possessions and accomplishments, your expectations rise.
The deeds and things you worked so hard for no longer make you happy; you need to get something even better to boost your level of happiness into the upper reaches of its set range.
But once you get the next possession or achievement, you adapt to it as well, and so on. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of evidence for such a treadmill. If there were no treadmill, people who get more good things in life would in general be much happier than the less fortunate.
But the less fortunate are, by and large, just as happy as the more fortunate. Good things and high accomplishments, studies have shown, have astonishingly little power to raise happiness more than transiently: In less than three months, major events such as being fired or promoted lose their impact on happiness levels. Wealth, which surely brings more possessions in its wake, has a surprisingly low correlation with happiness level.
Rich people are, on average, only slightly happier than poor people. Real income has risen dramatically in the prosperous nations over the last half century, but the level of life satisfaction has been entirely flat in the United States and most other wealthy nations.
Physical attractiveness which, like wealth, brings about any number of advantages does not have much effect at all on happiness.
Objective physical health, perhaps the most valuable of all resources, is barely correlated with happiness. There are limits on adaptation, however. There are some bad events that we never get used to, or adapt to only very slowly.
The death of a child or a spouse in a car crash is one example. Four to seven years after such events, bereaved people are still much more depressed and unhappy than controls. Together, the S variables your genetic steersman, the hedonic treadmill, and your set range tend to keep your level of happiness from increasing.
But there are two other powerful forces, C and V, that do raise the level of happiness. As an advice to prospective listeners: you are much better off downloading Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits" or a more recent Seligman release. Take the questionnaire online and the book will help you understand each domain. The author provides good instruction on how to challenge your pessimistic mindsets.
One of the main complaints mentioned by reviewer is that the test--mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the audiobook--isn't included. If you return to the book on Audible, though, you'll find the booklet available for download. So far, I'm finding the book insightful with plenty of examples AND scientific data for the skeptical. The author narrates this audio in a comfortable and gentle style. Seligman has condensed the insight of many years of study and experience into a short presentation.
He stays on topic and does not resort to jargon or obscure scientific theorizing. If you will use the test available free using the link on this page and listen with an open heart and mind to his message, Dr. Seligman can help you develop a more hope filled optimistic lifestyle. This book was probably pretty good with the self-diagnostic survey, but without it, the first 30 minutes--of a 1. I'm not even sure I should bother to listen to the rest.
It was a waste of my book credit. What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you? Include a whole book. I have a hard copy at home that I am reading, however I decided to buy an audiobook to be able to listen is on the go. I was shocked when I have discovered that lot of chapters are missing without reasoning. I believe it is a scam, cause you do not mention that you have cut parts out. What was most disappointing about Martin E. He is fine.
You are disappointing. Would you be willing to try another one of Martin E. Give me my money back. This is an excellent snapshot of how your explanatory style leads to positive or negative thinking. Comes complete with self-test booklet and with suggestions for overcoming negative thinking patterns by disputation and diversion tactics. Deserves to be in the top one. I was put off by shortness of download but it packs a lot in. I can't see why the full version is not available.
Seligman IS the father of positive psychology, learned helplessness etc. There is a test required about 15 mins into the audiobook, designed to test your own levels of optimism. One reviewer claimed this was missing from the download, but it can be found as a PDF as part of your 'My Library' after purchasing the audiobook.
Not happy. As therr is no card supplied with the digital format this book is pretty useless on its own. You could summarise the entire 2 something hour book by saying 'when you have bad thoughts, challenge them'. This title is complely unsuitable for an audio book.
Most people are doing something else e. I would have prefered Prof. Seligman to give a summary rather than wading through piles of primary data. I couldn't stick with this book, it refers to a series of questions and diagrams in offline material. Would you consider the audio edition of Learned Optimism to be better than the print version? I struggled with the print version of this book first time around, and was encouraged to go back to it because of the accessibility of the audio version.
It is one of only a few books I have listened back to frequently. What other book might you compare Learned Optimism to, and why? Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for its pragmatic examples of how to adopt a positive, pro-active attitude.
Littered with examples throughout. Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry? One of warm encouragement. A great, two hour refresher, even for those familiar with Seligman's work in positive psychology, of the mental toolkit available to help us live our best lives.
This audio book has 2 chapters. The original book has 15 chapters. Very disappointed. Wasted a credit on that.
Links to the quiz and written components could be provided. Or a disclaimer that there are important parts missing and this is only an abridged version more prominently displayed might help avoid disappointment for customers. Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not? Rather pointless if you don't have the extra papers they refer to.
Audible, please put in the description of this book that it is an abridged version. Simple, easy to understand principles and explanations. Google search the 48 questions for the test. I really needed the full version of this audiobook, and there was nothing anywhere that said it was a heavily abridged, dramatised version. I found out the hard way after I bought it. I'd heard some of it before but this guy invented mamy of the ideas he taljs about. This is an abridged version which is not made clear at purchase.
The purchase price is the same price as a full book. Very disappointing. This brief book gives one strategy: analyzing negative beliefs into less negative beliefs. Good narrators. Narrated by: Martin E.
Add to Cart failed. Please try again later. Add to Wish List failed. Remove from wishlist failed. Adding to library failed. Please try again. Follow podcast failed. Unfollow podcast failed. Stream or download thousands of included titles. Learned Optimism By: Martin E. No default payment method selected. Add payment method. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy.
To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Learned optimism Rajeev Valunjkar. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. They credit good events to personal, permanent, pervasive causes. Rating 10 is best Overall Applicability Innovation Style 9 8 9 8 To purchase abstracts, personal subscriptions or corporate solutions, visit our Web site at www.
The respective copyrights of authors and publishers are acknowledged. All rights reserved. No part of this abstract may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of getAbstract Ltd Switzerland. This summary is restricted to the personal use of Willie Erasmus willie famousbrands. Recommendation Despite equal talent and drive, it turns out that optimists will succeed where pessimists fear to tread.
The good news is that you can learn optimism and lean on it to respond to adversity and inculcate greater resilience. He offers cognitive techniques designed to tweak your natural disposition and give you the advantage of optimism. This societal beliefs and the priority emerged even though self-esteem is a product of success, not a cause.
Research consequences… Pessimistic suggests that unwarranted high self-regard can lead to violent and criminal behavior. Developing a more optimistic explanatory style can energize. Pessimists see setbacks as perpetual, pervasive and personal. Optimists expect problems to be just temporary. Pessimism derives from a deep-seated sense of helplessness.
Optimism begets resilience; optimists they become succeed. By studying people who do not give up easily or who bounce back more quickly, fundamental. Like the habits of researchers are realizing that resilience comes down to the explanations people give cleanliness and themselves when things go bad.
How personally do you take failure? How permanent do than a burden.
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