The Ted conference by Martin Seligman is untitled “11threason to be optimistic”.
When we have asked Martin Seligman few years ago about the statement ofpsychology he answered “ Not good enough”.
Duringyears, psychology was the science of diseases. Psychologists andresearchers wanted to find what was wrong about people to diagnosis ( ex: depression, alcoholism…). It was a science to measure“fuzzy*”concepts.
At the end, the goal was to make people less miserable, and, for M. Seligman, it was scarring.
For him, consequences were that psychologists became victimologists, theyforgot about improving life of normal people and they never developedpositive intervention.
These are the reasons why Martin Seligman interested himself to positivepsychology.
For this psychologist, human science should be as concerned with strengths*as with weaknesses. It has to be as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst. Moreover, it has to improve life of normal people. They are the bases of positive psychology.
This discipline has to focus more on positive emotion. He compared that to make the opposite of what we do with the DSM, the manual of mental illness diagnosis.
He decided to ask about extremely happy people to discover what makes people happy. He founds that they are more in romantic relationship and they have more friends that unhappy people.
He described three categories of people who felt happy. The first one is “The pleasant life”, in this way, people have many pleasures as they can and they have learning skills.
The second is “The good life” where people are engaged in relation(romantic or friend) and they have goal.
The final one is “The meaningful*life”, the most important point of this one is knowing yours strengths and use them.
With other researchers he did an experimentation about what make people feel positive emotions.
They found that going to visit someone who did something important for you and thanks him, makes people happier one week after. They called it“Gratitude visit” .They also found that, in general, philanthropy i.e helping another person make people happier.
To resume, what is contributing to life satisfaction is when the time is stopping for the person. The pursuit of pleasure has not much impactin happiness. What is the most correlated with happiness is thepursuit of meaning and engagement in romantic relationship andfriendship.
In my opinion, for psychologist, it is really interesting to understand what make people happier and the impact of positive emotions. Infact, our goal is not to help people to go to the “zero level”where they don’t feel any negative emotion and they don’t feelemotion at all but according to our deontology code it is to improvethe well-being of our patient.
I also think that people of full of resources and psychologist have to help people to know their strengths to use them to improve theirlife.
Laëtitia Barré
_______________
Key words: Positive psychology, emotion, well-being
________________
Vocabulary :
Fuzzy = flou
Strengths and weaknesses = Forces et faiblesses
Meaningful = significatif/ signifiant
________________
Resource : Ted conference : The new era of positive psychology by Martin Seligman (2008)
To see it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBxfd7DL3E