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The optimist manifesto
The optimist manifesto
Where next?
The founder of positive psychology finds a partial convert in Michael Bond
I FIND relentless optimists a real pain, but there is no denying they are better off when it comes to health and well-being. They are, for example, less likely to get cardiovascular disease or to catch flu, and are at less risk of dying from any cause. Martin Seligman, founding father of the discipline of positive psychology, is a relentless optimist and as such should be a healthy man indeed. I expected to find him annoying in the preacherly way of many behavioural gurus, but I finished his new book, Flourish, a convert, at least to his core message that changing certain psychological attitudes can have a transformative effect on people’s lives, and that well-being amounts to more than just positive emotion: relationships, meaning and a sense of accomplishment are just as important, he says. For Seligman is a rational optimist, in the sense that his recipes for increasing well-being are founded on empirical tests. So when he asks you to set aside 10 minutes in the evening to write down three things that went well that day, you sense it might be worthwhile. While he offers plenty of advice, Flourish is not a cookbook for a better life so much as a personal witness to what psychology can achieve beyond reducing suffering. If you can get through the 52 | NewScientist | 16 April 2011
AP Photo/Gautam Singh
Flourish by Martin Seligman, Nicholas Brealey Publishing (UK), £14.99, Free Press (US), $26
somewhat pedestrian first chapter, you will find how he came to realise that focusing exclusively on pathology can be, well, depressing. “Once in a while I would help a patient get rid of all his anger and anxiety and sadness. I thought I would then get a happy patient. But I never did. I got an empty patient.” You will also learn that he nearly become a professional bridge player, has seven children and a huge regard for the US army (“the force that stood between me and the Nazi gas chambers”). None of this is directly relevant, yet it gives context to Seligman’s calling, which is less an academic or therapeutic enterprise than a gamechanging crusade. He wants well-being taught in schools as part of a “revolution in world education”. In 2005 he started teaching the first
master of applied positive psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to professionals seeking to apply the skills in their workplaces. And he has been assessing the psychological fitness of the entire US army and designing courses to improve soldiers’ mental resilience. Occasionally, Seligman’s enthusiasm gets the better of him. At one point he doesn’t seem to register the absurdity of his observation that people who have been through an awful event such as rape or torture score higher on his well-being scale than those who haven’t. He is making a point about human resilience, but this is the psychological equivalent of GDP rising after an earthquake, and it illustrates the dangers of relying on well-being scores as a tool of policy-making. n
HAPPINESS is hard enough to pin down in the real world, but in the digital realm, the stumbling blocks are more fundamental. Data is mostly created by a self-selecting group of bloggers, tweeters or social network fiends – and people may alter the extent of their online interactions depending on mood. “Are they more likely to distance themselves from Facebook when they are unhappy?” wondered Julie Kane Ahkter and Steven Soria of Stanford University, California, who analysed mood in Facebook status updates. Equally tricky is the desire for online popularity, which can lead people to fake happiness online to keep friends. But the most basic problem is correlating online sentiment with real-world emotions. Sentiment has begun to be correlated with real-world opinion – but not yet emotions. For example, Bernardo Huberman’s group at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, predicted a film’s box-office success by analysing the volume of responses and their sentiments on Twitter. Similarly, work by Noah Smith at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows an 80 per cent correlation between Twitter sentiment on politics and old-style opinion polls. But can living digitally actually increase happiness? Maybe. Feng-Yang Kuo of the National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, found that bloggers have an improved sense of “subjective well-being” (a proxy for happiness?) from the self-disclosure afforded by blogs. New life-logging technologies, which document the minutiae of daily life, can improve memory in dementia sufferers. And Anind K. Dey, also at Carnegie Mellon, has reported early findings that life-logging data provides useful clues for improving our quality of life. Who wouldn’t be happy with that? Kat Austen n
Where next?
The founder of positive psychology finds a partial convert in Michael Bond
I FIND relentless optimists a real pain, but there is no denying they are better off when it comes to health and well-being. They are, for example, less likely to get cardiovascular disease or to catch flu, and are at less risk of dying from any cause. Martin Seligman, founding father of the discipline of positive psychology, is a relentless optimist and as such should be a healthy man indeed. I expected to find him annoying in the preacherly way of many behavioural gurus, but I finished his new book, Flourish, a convert, at least to his core message that changing certain psychological attitudes can have a transformative effect on people’s lives, and that well-being amounts to more than just positive emotion: relationships, meaning and a sense of accomplishment are just as important, he says. For Seligman is a rational optimist, in the sense that his recipes for increasing well-being are founded on empirical tests. So when he asks you to set aside 10 minutes in the evening to write down three things that went well that day, you sense it might be worthwhile. While he offers plenty of advice, Flourish is not a cookbook for a better life so much as a personal witness to what psychology can achieve beyond reducing suffering. If you can get through the 52 | NewScientist | 16 April 2011
AP Photo/Gautam Singh
Flourish by Martin Seligman, Nicholas Brealey Publishing (UK), £14.99, Free Press (US), $26
somewhat pedestrian first chapter, you will find how he came to realise that focusing exclusively on pathology can be, well, depressing. “Once in a while I would help a patient get rid of all his anger and anxiety and sadness. I thought I would then get a happy patient. But I never did. I got an empty patient.” You will also learn that he nearly become a professional bridge player, has seven children and a huge regard for the US army (“the force that stood between me and the Nazi gas chambers”). None of this is directly relevant, yet it gives context to Seligman’s calling, which is less an academic or therapeutic enterprise than a gamechanging crusade. He wants well-being taught in schools as part of a “revolution in world education”. In 2005 he started teaching the first
master of applied positive psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to professionals seeking to apply the skills in their workplaces. And he has been assessing the psychological fitness of the entire US army and designing courses to improve soldiers’ mental resilience. Occasionally, Seligman’s enthusiasm gets the better of him. At one point he doesn’t seem to register the absurdity of his observation that people who have been through an awful event such as rape or torture score higher on his well-being scale than those who haven’t. He is making a point about human resilience, but this is the psychological equivalent of GDP rising after an earthquake, and it illustrates the dangers of relying on well-being scores as a tool of policy-making. n
HAPPINESS is hard enough to pin down in the real world, but in the digital realm, the stumbling blocks are more fundamental. Data is mostly created by a self-selecting group of bloggers, tweeters or social network fiends – and people may alter the extent of their online interactions depending on mood. “Are they more likely to distance themselves from Facebook when they are unhappy?” wondered Julie Kane Ahkter and Steven Soria of Stanford University, California, who analysed mood in Facebook status updates. Equally tricky is the desire for online popularity, which can lead people to fake happiness online to keep friends. But the most basic problem is correlating online sentiment with real-world emotions. Sentiment has begun to be correlated with real-world opinion – but not yet emotions. For example, Bernardo Huberman’s group at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, predicted a film’s box-office success by analysing the volume of responses and their sentiments on Twitter. Similarly, work by Noah Smith at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows an 80 per cent correlation between Twitter sentiment on politics and old-style opinion polls. But can living digitally actually increase happiness? Maybe. Feng-Yang Kuo of the National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, found that bloggers have an improved sense of “subjective well-being” (a proxy for happiness?) from the self-disclosure afforded by blogs. New life-logging technologies, which document the minutiae of daily life, can improve memory in dementia sufferers. And Anind K. Dey, also at Carnegie Mellon, has reported early findings that life-logging data provides useful clues for improving our quality of life. Who wouldn’t be happy with that? Kat Austen n