![]() Sometimes they would provide a mechanism for the subjects to make the irritant stop in other cases, there was no way for the subject to change their situation. Seligman and other researchers examined this phenomenon through a series of experiments, such as exposing lab animals or human subjects to adverse conditions like a mild shock or an irritating noise. In other words - the opposite of optimism.ĭr. Seligman distinguished himself for his work on the phenomenon of learned helplessness: the idea, internalized to varying degrees by some of us, that nothing we do matters and so there is no point in trying. ![]() Seligman would have seemed an unlikely character to become a future founder of the field known as positive psychology.īut he found his place and his people at Princeton University, he writes, and later settled into graduate research in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman had been denied promotions and prizes, despite being at the top of his high-school class - slights that, years later, a former faculty member confirmed were manifestations of anti-Semitism.Īt 18, Dr. On scholarship at a private military academy where he didn’t fit in easily with his affluent classmates, Dr. His father, after a series of strokes, had become paralyzed and depressed, never recovering either physically or emotionally. Seligman wrote in his autobiography, “The Hope Circuit.” “I was morbidly introspective and through freshman year kept a handwritten journal of dark thoughts.”ĭr. ![]() “I toyed with writing about death and dying, and I wore black much of the time,” Dr. Martin Seligman was a young man on the verge of adulthood, at the dawn of the 1960s, he was a committed pessimist. ![]()
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