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Martin Elias Peter Seligman (/ ˈ s ɛ l ɪ ɡ m ə n /; born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of well-being and positive psychology. [1] His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical ...
It was created by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, researchers in the field of positive psychology, in order to operationalize their handbook Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV). [1] The CSV is the positive psychology counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM ) used in traditional psychology.
Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused by the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness, by way of their discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented.
Positive psychology began as a new domain of psychology in 1998 when Martin Seligman chose it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] It is a reaction against past practices that tended to focus on mental illness and emphasized maladaptive behavior and negative thinking.
According to Martin Seligman, anyone can learn optimism. Whether currently an optimist or a pessimist, benefits can be gained from exposure to the process of learned optimism to improve response to both big and small adversities. A learned optimism test (developed by Seligman) is used to determine an individual's base level of optimism.
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Seligman confronted dogs with a situation accompanied by a total lack of perceived control, which ultimately lead the dogs to give into the situation. They learned passiveness, helplessness. Seligman transferred his experiments to humans, speculating that perceived control is related to the development of, for instance, depression.
In Flourish (2011) Seligman argued that "meaningful life" can be considered as five different categories. The resulting acronym is PERMA: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and purpose, and Accomplishments. It is a mnemonic for the five elements of Martin Seligman's well-being theory: [82] [83]