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Five-year-old calls out her dad
The father was Martin Seligman, a psychologist who studies optimism, and the daughter was Nikki. She had been dancing, singing, and throwing weeds in the air while he grimly pulled them out. Her question was whether he remembered that, before her fifth birthday, she had whined all the time.
He did, and he told her she had been pretty horrible. She pointed out that her birthday was two weeks ago and that she had not whined once since. On that birthday she had decided to stop, it was the hardest thing she had ever done, and if she could stop whining, he could stop being such a grouch.
In that moment he saw that he was a grouch, and a proud one. A grouch sees everything wrong with what's going on, criticizes it, and corrects it. It occurred to him for the first time that any success he had had in life came in spite of being a grouch. He resolved to change, and by his own measurements he is a completely different person than he was thirty years ago.
Why does negative information stick so hard?
In 2001, Roy Baumeister and colleagues published a review titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good. It surveyed research on events, emotions, relationships, and feedback. Across those areas, bad events had a larger and longer lasting effect than good events of similar size. The authors linked the pattern to survival, since missing a threat costs more than missing a reward.
Is a critical eye ever an advantage?
In his book Learned Optimism, Seligman pointed to law as a field where pessimistic thinking can serve people well, since the work rewards anticipating every way a case could fail. He argued that the two styles each have uses in different settings. He called the approach flexible optimism.
Where did Seligman's optimism work lead?
In 1998, Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association. He used the position to promote positive psychology, a field that studies strengths and well-being as well as illness. He and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the field in a 2000 special issue of American Psychologist.
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