viernes, 12 de marzo de 2010
"I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize."
Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology in 2000, and has devoted his career since then to furthering the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. It's a fascinating field of study that had few empirical, scientific measures -- traditional clinical psychology focusing more on the repair of unhappy states than the propagation and nurturing of happy ones. In his pioneering work, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, developing clinical tools and training the next generation of positive psychologists.
His earlier work focused on perhaps the opposite state: learned helplessness, in which a person feels he or she is powerless to change a situation that is, in fact, changeable. Seligman is an often-cited authority in this field as well -- in fact, his is the 13th most likely name to pop up in a general psych textbook. He was the leading consultant on a Consumer Reports study on long-term psychotherapy, and has developed several common pre-employment tests, including the Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ).
Seligman Theory influenced on psychologist research of depression in the 1970s. he accidentally discovered helplessness when he was studying the effects of inescapable shock in dogs. he restrained dogs in a Pavlovian harness and administered several shocks paired with conditioned stimulus just like classical conditioning. Later they were placed in a shuttle-box where they could avoid shock by jumping over a barrier. This was also used in the operant conditioning learning. The experiment have problems because most of the dogs failed to learned how to avoid the shocks they were receiving.