Six Decades Of Psychology, And An Autobiography
This is about Martin Seligman and the story of psychology in the last six decades. If you’ve read a study or an article related to positive psychology, there’s a good chance that he worked on it, or had influence in it.
In this book he recounts his professional and personal life. He opens with being elected as President of the American Psychological Association. He talked about how his parents moved to America, how he became an active student in college and graduate school, how he became a professor, got tenure, got married, and raised their own family.
In between he also talked about how his theories got started: from the Learned Helplessness Theory to the Authentic Happiness Theory, and to the Well-Being theory. He also talked about the ideas he got to study, from Behaviorism to Cognition to Neuroscience, from Helplessness to Optimism. He talked about the people he collaborated with and people he had disagreements with, including critics and other scientists.
Around the last couple chapters, he expands on how neuroscience turned their earlier theory on Learned Helplessness and that, in fact, they got it wrong. Helplessness isn’t learned. It’s the default. What is learned is mastery, control, and hope.
What’s the implication of this? You have a “Hope” circuit in your brain. While your default response to prolonged bad events is helplessness and anxiety, this circuit allows you to override and buffer against this default. This also means that therapies whose treatment merely “dwells on past trauma and present misery” will not likely work; unless there is an emphasis on planning for a better future.
Why read The Hope Circuit?
You learn about the advancement and the history of psychology from the last six decades. You learn about the life of Martin Seligman.
How can you use this information?
Think of the activities that give you mastery, and control, and hope. Do more of those activities.
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