Мартин Селигман: Жизнь и вклад в психологию позитивности

American psychologist and writer (born 1942)

Martin Elias Peter Seligman ('/s//ɛ//l//ɪ//g//m//ə//n/; born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of well being and positive psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Seligman as the 31st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Seligman is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Psychology. He was previously the Director of the Clinical Training Program in the department, and earlier taught at Cornell University. He is the director of the university's Positive Psychology Center. Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1998. He is the founding editor in chief of Prevention and Treatment (the APA electronic journal) and is on the board of advisers of Parents magazine. Seligman has written about positive psychology topics in books such as The Optimistic Child, Child's Play, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, and Flourish. His most recent book, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, was published in 2018.

Seligman was born in Albany, New York, to a Jewish family. He was educated at a public school and at The Albany Academy. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Princeton University in 1964, graduating summa cum laude. and a Ph. D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. In June 1989, Seligman received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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 experimental conditioning protocol they used with dogs led to behaviors which were unexpected, in that under the experimental conditions, the recently conditioned dogs did not respond to opportunities to learn to escape from an unpleasant situation. 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.

In his 2002 book Authentic Happiness, Seligman saw happiness as made up of positive emotion, engagement and meaning.

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 (2004) 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 three to five sub entries; for instance, temperance includes forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self regulation. The authors do not believe that there is a hierarchy for the six virtues; no one is more fundamental than or a precursor to the others.

Seligman plays bridge and finished second in the 1998 installment of one of the three major North American pair championships, the Blue Ribbon Pairs, as well as having won over 50 regional championships. Seligman has seven children, four grandchildren, and two dogs. He and his second wife, Mandy, live in a house that was once occupied by Eugene Ormandy. They have home schooled five of their seven children. 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.