The Psych Student

In the above clip is Professor Martin Seligman, renowned on the subjects of depression and abnormal psychology, who has become since around the 90’s a proponent of Positive Psychology.

This video is a TED talk he gave on July 21, 2008, in which he delves into what Positive Psychology is; moving the science beyond just treating those people suffering from something to helping people achieve actual happiness and meaningful lives. Being that it’s TED, he ties it back to technology, science and design at the end, but it’s essentially a very similar talk to the one I heard him give last Tuesday on the subject of “Positive Psychology and Positive Education” as part of the British Psychological Society Lecture Series.

There’s a lot to be said for what Seligman is evangelizing, and a number of areas worth exploring, but what interested me quite a bit was the notion of flow. Flow is just one part within one of the four modes of what Seligman defines as the necessary ingredients for the “Happy Life,” or what I think would be better described as the Complete Life. Complete meaning you have all the parts needed for basic survival, and on top of that you have what humans essentially crave for a satisfying life as well.

We live in an age where being satisfied is the eighth sin. It’s bad for the economy. It’s not trendy. It runs counter to every political or marketing campaign in existence. Seligman touched on this fact on Tuesday in a speech that almost mirrored (though without the punchlines) the now web phenom Youtube clip of comedian Louis C.K. banging on about how “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”

Seligman ’s four identifiable modes of happiness are positive emotion, engagement, meaning and positive relationships. Any one of these could be an entire area of study in and of themselves. The human need for meaning reaches back thousands of years and with what we have since the 20sth century, essentially the death of the god that either took you to heaven or sent you to hell, meaning has been a subject of constant redefinition.

But that’s not where flow is. Flow is in engagement, Seligman says, and no matter if we’ve found meaning or not, most people at some point has found flow. What’s interesting is in how he descirbies it, as a sense of nothingness. When you’re completely involved in something that the rest of the world melts away. Someone asks you what you’re thinking and you answer “nothing.” Having worked in writing and in web code, I know this one. Meaning is a little esoteric. We’re often questioning if what we do has meaning. But when I’ve been involved in a six-hour stint of CSS editing just to make some fonts look a certain way and didn’t even notice 9 a.m. segue into 3 p.m. or lunch fly by, that’s flow.

“Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

And it does have a satisfying feeling. So long as the computer doesn’t crash before you save something.

Seligman says that psychology has a larger role to play. Making people not sick has been the process for most its existence. “I suggest that psychology in the coming decade will supplement its venerable task of treating mental illness with a new focus on positive education,” he says.

There are different methods he suggests for people to self-train. One method is a slight difference on a topic I’ve posted on here before, that of positive self-talk. In the manner of “positive self-statements,” I’m still not a fan. It’s an unnatural, counter intuitive thing to do, and most proponents of it suggest it as a way to start the day, meaning that once you big yourself up in front of the mirror, it can only go downhill from there out in the real world full of people with no special interest in how your esteem is doing. Seligman suggests something different, and has studies to show its success. At the end of each day, he suggest people keep a journal or at least take a mental note of three things that day that they succeeded at. Tangible things to think about before going to sleep. After some weeks of doing this, practitioners have reported starting the following day with more enthusiasm.

In his 2002 study on Positive Psychology Progress, the Empirical Validation of Interventions, this practice, when combined with another one on identifying signature strengths, “increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for six months.”

“Another exercise, the gratitude visit, caused large positive changes for one month. The two other exercises and the placebo control created positive but transient effects on happiness and depressive symptoms. Not surprisingly, the degree to which participants actively continued their assigned exercise on their own and beyond the prescribed one-week period mediated the long-term benefits.” — Seligman

As a form of treatment, this moves psychology into a new area. When some folks talk about doing this sort of thing within the field of medical practice, people get squeamish.

Should we strive to do away with depression all together? Seligman doesn’t go that far, but we can see that it is treated as a disorder and that this treatement seeks to surplant it by replacing those tendencies of Learned Helplessness with a lifelong practice of positive habits. In terms of Tuesday’s talk, he advocated that these habits be taught in school alongside math and history.

But Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. write in Scientific American that treating depression as an ailment might be the wrong track all together: “In most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.”

Andrews and Thomson assert that “Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.”

I bookmarked their study some time ago and am planning to write a post on it at some greater length later on. there’s something scary in too much happiness, though. Something a little spooky. Our range of feelings have evolved over time and each one has survived millions of years of testing. Should we strive to amputate them in a single generation?

Let’s consider in light of this post that depression could be an illness. What of the idea of improving people beyond the norm of simply not being sick? Is better than well an ideal target? Or, another way of looking at it would be that our standards have been off the mark all this time, and now they’re being recalibrated.

CITED:

Seligman, M., Steen, T., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, 60 (5), 410-421 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.5.410

ALSO: As a side note, it’s neat to see in this age of pay-to-read research that Seligman is seizing on the open access movement, as he writes in his  study:

“After one pays for Web site development and maintenance, there are virtually no additional costs to data collection for adequately powered studies, and we have offered the use of our Web site to interested researchers.”

Kudos from this web developer on that.