Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Martin Seligman on Happiness

Speaker: Martin Seligman
The first BOSS Club speaker this year was Dr Martin E.P. Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His work on positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism is world renown. His bibliography includes twenty books and 200 articles on motivation and personality.

Transcript

This is an edited transcript of the AFR BOSS Club presentation by Dr Martin Seligman in Sydney on Wednesday 15 February 2006.

When I was President of the American Psychological Association they media-trained me and I had an encounter with CNN, which is emblematic of what I am going to talk about tonight. They came to me and said they wanted my opinion on the state of psychology today. I said, "Great", and they said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite". "Well, how many words do I get?" They said, "Well, one". Cameras rolled and she said, "Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Good". "No, cut, cut, cut. Well, I can see you're really not very comfortable, we'd better give you a longer sound bite". So I said, "Well, how many words do I get this time?" "Well, you can have two". "Dr Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good". "Cut. Look, we can see you're really quite uncomfortable with all of this. We'll give you a long sound bite. You can have three words this time. Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good enough".

That's really what I am going to talk about. In fact I could have substituted the words "performance management" or "education" for "psychology" here because I think systematically what you learned as undergraduates in these fields has not been good enough in a very specific way. In fact it has not been good enough because it's been only about what is wrong with people: Victims, trauma, depression. What disables life. What it has not been about is what enables life, about growth and positive emotion and meaning and engagement, so that is what my half-hour is going to be about tonight.

I am going to suggest that, if we supplement education or psychology or the social sciences or performance management with what makes people at their best and notions of growth, these fields might become good enough.

So that's what I'll be after in the next half-hour. Here's the outline of what I am going to do. I am going to start by saying - how many of you are corporate people? Okay, so I'll start by saying why this might matter to you as business people, and then I heard you were very sharp questioners, so what I thought I would do is to have my own question period here and to ask the very hardest questions I know about why you shouldn't pay any attention to all of this and then what I think the answers are. Then I'll give you just a few teasers about the science of positive psychology. This started about nine years ago and it's been my mission. I've raised about $40 million for it. There are probably 500 to 1,000 scientists working in it now and there is a great deal of scientific information about the positive side of life that we didn't know a decade ago and I will give you a couple of teasers from it.

As some of you may know, I've spent a good part of my life with psychotherapies and drugs, asking what really works and what is placebo, so I actually do rigorous intervention studies, random assignment placebo controlled studies of psychotherapy and drugs.

About seven years ago when I started to get interested in happiness I began to ask the question in a tough way, that is, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins there have been about 200 suggestions about what makes people lastingly happier. Most of these are sheer boosterism, they're placebos, and I've spent a great deal of my time asking: Are there interventions that actually work? I'll give you a tiny flavour of that as well.

Because this is Australia and there has been so much in the news lately about your suicides, you're about ten years behind the epidemic of depression in the United States - and there's another bloody Yank come over to tell Australians how to live their lives. We are about ten years ahead of you in this mess, and so I'm going to try to tell you something about what I think is going on and maybe what can be done about it. In that regard I'll conclude by talking about the notion of a full life, and that I think is not a sentimental notion, rather I think it consists of three different kinds of lives: A life of positive emotion, a life of engagement and a life of meaning. I'll tell you a little bit about what is known about who the happiest people on earth are and what combination of these three lives they have, and then we'll do Q and A for as long as you can stand it.

Let's start with the general framework. I think the notion of happiness is useless, it's just the name of a field, it means so many different things to so many people and when I started working on this about a decade ago it was clear to me I couldn't do science on the word "happiness", but I think it actually dissolves into three different and quite workable notions, and they're very different. They're measured in different ways and they're built in different ways. The first is what you ordinarily associate with happiness, the smiley face. I'm not against the smiley face and indeed I think part of positive psychology is the question of feeling good, smiling, being ebullient, but it is very interesting to know that 50 percent of the world's population - 3 billion people - don't feel good most of the time, they're not in a good mood, they don't giggle a lot and they don't smile. It's like your waistline actually. There's a set range and the best that positive psychology can do on the giggling side of life is to move you into the upper part of your set range, but you don't make gigglers out of curmudgeons.

So the first part of this is indeed the pleasant life and it consists of having as much pleasure as you can, as many of the positive emotions, and learning some of the dozen or so techniques that actually work for increasing the duration and intensity of your pleasures. There are shortcuts to the pleasures. You can go shopping; you can masturbate; you can watch television; you can take drugs.

But the second form of life I'm going to talk about is the engaged life, being one with the music, being totally wrapped up in the people you love or what you're hearing. Looking around I see that about 60 percent of you are one with what I'm saying. (By the way, the other 40 percent of you are having sexual fantasies. We measure this sort of thing. )

There are no shortcuts to the engaged life. The engaged life can only be had by first knowing what your highest strengths are, your signature strengths, and re-crafting your life to use them at work, in love, in leisure, in parenting and in friendship. It is the engaged life, by the way, that Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson were talking about when they were talking about happiness, not the Goldie Hawn smiley-face life.

That's two of the three forms of happiness and the third, the one with actually the best intellectual provenance, is the meaningful life. That consists of again knowing what your highest strengths and talents are and using them in the service of something that you believe is bigger than you are.

Now each of these turns out to be measurable and the measurement of these is free. I'm not a vendor, by the way, I try to give as much of this stuff away as I can. I have a website called authentichappiness.org. It has on it all the major tests of the positive side of life and their psychometrics and if you want to take them and find out where on gratitude you stand relative to the 10,000 Australians who have taken it, you can find what percentile you are in. You can give them to your clients and the like.

Importantly, each of these three forms of life is buildable. There are interventions that change them, and that is mostly what I work on these days.

I want to say something right now, which I'll conclude with later. I am quite interested in who has the most life satisfaction, as I said, who are the happiest people on earth, and I ask: To what extent is a function of pursuing positive emotion, pursuing engagement or pursuing meaning? We have done 15 replications of this with several thousand people across cultures and the results are very surprising. Hugh Heffner was wrong. The pursuit of pleasure makes almost no contribution at all to a satisfying life.

It is the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of engagement that matter and the reason that this is relevant to a corporate audience is - and I'll talk about this at great length tomorrow - there are all sorts of fascinating hints that productivity at work, that growth in general, that physical health and how long you live in fact follow very much the same regularities of life satisfaction, and indeed the major studies I am involved in now with corporations, hospitals, the military, teachers, is to ask the question: To what extent is productivity at work a function of how much meaning there is at work; how engaged you are on the job and how much positive emotion you have at work, and then the great question: If you use our interventions, the ones that actually work that build these things, do you increase productivity at work?

So that is the general framework and let me now turn to my own question period, which is why you shouldn't pay any attention to what I'm about to say.

Let me give you about five different reasons that you might think this stuff is nonsense. The first is happiness, that's about feeling. You know, we're corporate people, we're tough-minded. What we care about is what you do. Indeed, that's my view as well. It turns out one of the important surprises of positive psychology is that these three forms of life do a great deal more than make you feel good and in fact most of the studies that are done on this hold constant, say, success, then they vary the amount of happiness or the amount of engagement or the amount of meaning you have and it turns out that these are drivers. These are things that contribute to how much money you make, they contribute to how well you do in the sports field. Optimistic people, holding everything else constant, are one-half to one-eighth the likelihood of getting depressed and optimistic people, holding the physical variables constant, seem to live between eight and nine years longer than pessimistic people. So this is about doing, not just about feeling.

The second thing - you might think you shouldn't pay attention to any of this - is you know about Rwanda and famine and suffering people in the world. Why should we allocate resources to finding out about happiness? There are essentially two reasons: The first is that I work in Rwanda and I work with suicidal people and if you have the impression that all they care about is the next machete chop or ending their suffering, you just don't know suicide and Rwanda. People in dire straits care enormously about integrity, about justice, about the future of their nation and about their family. So that is one reason that one should be interested in the positive side of life, even one who cares about suffering.

The second, which I'm not going to have much time to talk about today, is that it turns out oddly enough psychotherapy for 100 years has been where you go to talk about your troubles. That is an oddly untested premise. I've developed something called positive psychotherapy in which you don't talk about your troubles, rather you talk about what is best inside you, and we find this works at least as well as anti-depression drugs and the great forms of cognitive and interpersonal therapy that work on depression. So this is worth paying attention to, even if all you care about is really suffering.

The third… is that life satisfaction is not a function of pleasure, it is a function of engagement and meaning. Longevity and morbidity is surprisingly a function of the positive variables as opposed to the negative variables.

Another is the effect of wealth on happiness. Most of you probably think the wealthier you are the happier you will be. Well, it turns out there is a good study of the Forbes 150, who are the 150 richest people in North America. They have the same levels of happiness and depression that you do and if you quantify once you're above the safe - below the safety net, more money makes you more happy. Where you are, however, and there are people who quantify this, just looking around - here's my guess - if you are thinking about giving up three weekends next year to earn an extra $10,000, my suggestion is don't do it. Quantitatively, it turns out that spending those three weekends with your friends and your family will bring you more life satisfaction than another $10,000.

I'm an inveterate measurer, I work in the immune system and, without boring you about this, notions like gratitude, flow, meaning are now measured with about the same precision as natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes.

The final thing that might interest you is you have been raised in a performance management, psychotherapy century which says that the way you do well is to correct errors. If you're interested in correcting errors, you should have a lot of negative emotion since negative emotion seems to have evolved to be the error corrector, but if your company is at a point or your life is at a point at which you want to grow, if you are involved not in a zero sum game but a positive sum game, then it seems to be the positive emotions - meaning, engagement, flow - that are the evolutionary mediators of growth. The positive emotions seem to be a neon sign that psychology capital can now be built that you can draw on later in life.

Let me now turn to a little bit of the science of positive psychology. I've got all sorts of devilish ways of taking you to my laboratory and making you sad or happy. The reason I do that is I want to know the way you think when I change your mood. So, for example, if I take a deck of cards and I ask you to read them aloud with expression and the first one says, "Today is a day like any other day", and the second one says, "Things are not going very well today", and the tenth one says, "Everything I touch turns to shit", it turns out I can radically change your mood and I have the reverse cards for making you happier.

Once I do that I ask the question, "What is your mentation (mental activity) like", so if I put you in front of a machine and say, "Press this button as quickly as you can when I say a vehicle", when I say "aeroplane" it takes about 8/10ths of a second, when I say "car" it takes about 8/10ths of a second, when I say "elevator" it takes about 4 seconds to do it. If I put you in a good mood by one of my techniques it takes you about one second to see that "elevator" is a vehicle. And if you take physicians and you give them a difficult liver diagnosis to make and you make them happier first, they are faster and more accurate to make the diagnosis.

The generalisation of this is that positive emotion jolts the brain into a different way of thinking. It is very good at making you better at synthetic, top-down, lateral, creative thinking, so if you are planning a marketing campaign it is a very good idea to do that in a state of positive emotion. If you are doing your income tax, on the other hand, or you're deciding who to fire, it's a very good idea to be in a negative mood because negative moods seem to make you better at bottom-up, analytic, what's wrong with this kind of thinking. That is the generalisation of about 50 articles.

( Now to the ) building of psychological capital by positive emotion. In 1970 a couple of hundred 19-year-old girls from Mills College posed. The photographer asked them to smile and they posed for it. There are two kinds of smiles. There is a genuine smile, it is called a Duchenne smile, and you can tell, not from the mouth but where the crows' feet are, they involve a set of muscles under the orbit of the eye, and then there is the stewardess smile, the people who have to smile for a living. I could teach you how to look at pictures and identify that in about five minutes. A Berkeley group trained researchers to look at which women were Duchenne smiling and which were stewardess smiling and then they phoned these women up 30 years later and they asked about divorce rate, marital satisfaction rate and life's - you've got it. The women who were flashing the stewardess smile had more divorces, less marital satisfaction and less life satisfaction.

If you do a similar thing with wages, you take the upper quartile of happy undergraduates back in the late 1980s and you test this in rigorous ways by the questionnaires on my web site and you co-vary out how much their family earns and the like. Fifteen years later they are earning on an average $10,000 to $15,000 more.

So that is another kind of science that goes on here. This is about optimism in sales. There is very large literature on optimism. Optimistic people generally do better in three kinds of things: They resist depression, they do better than they are supposed to at work, in sports, they get better grades and they are physically healthier.

This is just a sample of a MetLife study we did. (Shows slide) MetLife hires people by - there is this SAT of life insurance that asks you do you like to go to parties, how many relatives do you have, and things like that. If you have over a given number of relatives they hire you basically, but the problem is that 50 percent of life insurance salesmen quit in the first year and 80 percent of them quit in the United States by the end of the third year. Very expensive.

So we created with MetLife a group of people who failed the career profile, but were Frankenstein-ian optimists. By the way, I do mean Frankenstein-ian here. We have looked at 30 different professions and for each profession there is actually an optimal level of optimism for the profession. In every profession except one, optimistic people do better than they are supposed to. There is one in which they do worse. At any rate, when I say pessimistic life insurance salesmen, a pessimistic life insurance salesman is more optimistic than almost anyone in this room. At any rate, this Frankenstein-ian optimist outsold the whole force and lasted longer.

(The exception to the optimism rule is lawyers) .We took the entire entering class at Virginia Law School in 1991 and we measured their optimism and pessimism and to our enormous surprise it is the pessimists who got higher grades, who made the Law Review and who got the best paying jobs. If you think about that for a moment, it is what law calls "prudence". Lawyers are wonderful at recognising every possible catastrophe that can occur and protect you against it, but the problem is that they are now the highest paid profession in the United States and the big New York firms are spending more on retention than recruitment and that is because the same kind of pessimism that lets you see every potential catastrophe that might occur tonight you take home with you -and you think your spouse is having an affair, you're sure you are not going to make partner and at any rate the economy is going under anyway. So it seems to be that pessimism is good for this, but it unfortunately has … a great personal cost.

Let me switch very briefly to the kinds of things that I spend most of my time doing. I generate exercises for doing these things and I ask to what extent does it build engagement, meaning and positive emotion at work with the people you love and in life. I will just give you one tiny sample of this work. When people come to my website they take the signature strengths test. 400,000 people have taken it. It tells you what your highest strengths are. By the way, positive psychology is enormous fun. I have taught everything in psychology except statistics and I've never had so much fun and it's basically because when I teach abnormal psychology I can't assign you to go out and get drunk for a week to see what alcoholism is like, but I can assign you to take the signature strengths test and then re-craft some tedious job at work.

The key to the engaged life is to find out what your highest strengths are and use them more. One woman I worked with was a waitress. She hated waitressing, heavy trays, patronising customers. She took the signature strengths test. Her highest strength was social intelligence. So her job was to re-craft waitressing to use social intelligence more. She decided she would make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's evening. Now obviously she failed at that most of the time, but by putting what she was very best at on offer continually she changed it from being a heavy job to a job in which she was in flow. That is just one example of about three-dozen exercises that seem to lastingly build engagement, lastingly build positive emotion and lastingly build meaning.

The last thing I want to talk about today, because this is Australia and I know many of you are concerned with depression and high-functioning people, is to tell you something about the epidemic of depression that you are well into already. Basically the evidence is very good that there is ten times as much depression now as there was fifty years ago in every single wealthy country on the globe. It is quite a paradox because fifty years ago the average American home was 1200 square feet, there was one car per family and one out of five kids went to college. Today in the United States the average home is 2500 square feet, there are more cars than licensed drivers and one out of two kids goes to college. If you had told my parents that, they would have said this is paradise, but it is not paradise. In fact happiness has been entirely flat in Australia and in the United States for fifty years. It hasn’t budged an inch. And depression is ten times more common. So the question is: How could it be, with all this wonderful material stuff going on - and it's not just material, by the way. There is less pollution, more women's rights, less discrimination, less crime and the like. So with everything we care about objectively going north, why is morale going south?

Pretty much everything I have said up to now is pretty solid. I am about to speculate for three minutes. It is not biological and it is not ecological, we know it is not, so your genes, chromosomes and hormones, contrary to what drug companies tell you, are not responsible for the epidemic of depression, they haven't changed in fifty years, and it is not ecological, it's not additives or the water you are drinking. The Amish down the road from me, 30 miles down the road, are the best control for this. They drink our water, breathe our air and they put the additives in our food and they have 1/10th the rate of depression that we do in Philadelphia. They live in the 18th century. Something about modernity.

Here are the few things it might be. We've been measuring individualism for many years and both your country and mine are individualist nations, but they are now rampantly individualistic. There is a big, big "I", and our grandparents, when they failed, had very comfortable spiritual furniture to sit in. They believed in God, they believed in the nation, they had big extended families, they believed in community. All of these things have eroded in the last 50 years and so the spiritual furniture that our children have to sit in when they fail is now threadbare. So that is one thing that is probably going on.

A second is that in the United States we have something called the Self-Esteem Movement. It says that the duty of every parent is to make kids feel good. The duty of every teacher is to make kids feel good. The duty of therapists is to make their charges feel good. I don't believe that for a moment. That is, I think the duty of teachers and parents and therapists is to help their charges get the skills of good commerce with the world, good commerce with the people they love, good commerce on the sports field, good commerce at school. When you teach kids that it's their right to feel happy no matter what they're doing and these kids who do feel happy confront failure, they're very fragile because they haven't learned the skills of good commerce with the world.

The third thing that I think is going on is victimology. There is very good evidence that when people fail now they blame other people, the establishment, their parents, more than ever in the past. Victimology is very good if you want to feel good, it raises self-esteem when you take the heat off yourself, but it is often wrong and your troubles actually are due to things you did, bad character, bad decisions, things you're responsible for, but even more importantly, victimology is learned helplessness. It is the belief that nothing you do matters and that is what I worked on for the first 15 years of my life and it is a recipe for being depressed.

The final thing is wealth seems to ineluctably bring shortcuts in life, that we buy things that are shortcuts to life satisfaction.

I will close with a story about a lizard. When I was an undergraduate I worked with a man called Julian James, who was an animal behaviourist. We were given a South American lizard as a laboratory pet and the problem about the lizard is that it was starving to death. We couldn't figure out what it ate. We gave it flies; it wasn't interested. We blended mango and papaya; it wouldn't go for them. Chinese take-out, the lizard had no interest. One day Julian came in, the lizard was in torpor, sort of just lying there, and Julian came in and offered the lizard his lunch, which was ham on rye. The lizard just lay there. Then Julian read the New York Times and he put the first section of the New York Times down on top of the ham sandwich. From across the room the lizard saw this, got up, stalked across the room, jumped on the table, shredded the New York Times and ate the ham sandwich.

Why am I telling you about this? It's because there are no shortcuts to pleasure or eating or copulation in that lizard. It has to engage in stalking and hunting and shredding and killing before it will eat, and we're just like that except it is not stalking and hunting and shredding and killing that evolution has given human beings, it has given us a repertoire of behaviours to go through to bring gratification and if we take shortcuts - and I am not against shortcuts, I am not remotely puritan enough to be against shortcuts, but the problem about living with shortcuts is you don't develop the skills, the lizardly skills necessary to buffer you against depression.

This is a commercial message actually: I have a website - this one cost $10 - called reflectivehappiness.com and I put up one exercise a month. This started about a year ago when Time magazine did its thing and I decided, in light of the epidemic of depression, to look at the first fifty severely depressed people to come to the website. The number there of 33.9 - you probably don't know anyone that depressed. You are in bed basically and you crawl out of bed and go to the computer every so often. So fifty of these people came to the computer, they did the one exercise, which was very simple: For the next week write down three things that went well today and why they went well. That's all. Re-educating attention to the positive side of life when normally you lie in bed and ruminate about all the awful things that happened to you today. So they did this one exercise and they came back on average two weeks later and they took it again. They had gone down to the mild-moderate range of depression. I have spent my life working with psychotherapy and drugs. They don't do this. They don't operate as quickly or as big as that.

Now I mention this because in an epidemic of depression, there are several things I want to say: We don't have the drugs or therapeutic - and it's too late to curb the epidemic by doing those. But acting preventatively by building positive emotion, by building meaning, by building engagement - and if you just look at this: The average treatment of depression in the United States costs $3,000 a year. This is virtually free. It suggests that preventative means, and preventative means on the positive side of life, may be one of our best weapons against depression. Don't throw away your pills, I'm not suggesting we give up psychotherapy, I was once the president of the largest labour union of mental health workers in the world. I am all for therapy, but this is an important supplement and this one may actually do something about the epidemic.

In conclusion, what I have said in the last half-hour is that psychology as usual, management as usual, education as usual has been all about remediation, correcting errors, finding out what is wrong. I have suggested to you that a science has now arisen, a science of positive emotion, a science of meaning, a science of engagement, and that by measuring and then building meaning, engagement and positive emotion we may be able to produce not only more life satisfaction, more work satisfaction and prevent the episode of depression, but it might be just what we want to do to produce growth in corporations.

Thank you. I am happy to answer questions for as long as you want.

Q. Thank you very much for your talk, Professor Seligman. My question is actually about signature strengths and what I wanted to know is: Is there any questionnaire or study regarding the trajectory of signature strengths? What I mean by this is you can start with certain signature strengths and/or throughout life by growth and all sorts of other factors. Signature strengths can be changed?

Yes, there is a well-validated questionnaire that 400,000 people around the world have taken on strengths. It is called the VIA Signature Strengths test and it is on authentichappiness.org. It's free. What you want to do with it, it will tell you what your five highest strengths are compared to Australian women over 30 and then the idea is, when you find out that kindness is your highest strength, the idea is to re-craft your life to use kindness more at work and parenting, at leisure and the like. So there is now not only a questionnaire, but when we first worked in this area the way psychopathology got started was with the DSM and ICD, the manual of the insanities, so we thought we had to write an un-DSM, which is the manual of the sanities, so there is now an 800-page single-spaced Oxford book called the Classification of Strengths and Virtues. It basically tells you for each of the 24 apparently universal - we send researchers up to northern Greenland and to the Maasai we've done a 70-nation study on the universality of strengths, so this manual tells you how each of them are measured, what the sex ratio is, what the genetics is, what the disabling conditions are for them, what the normal developmental courses and what interventions seem to work on them.

Q. Sorry, that wasn't my question. The question is the trajectory. In other words, I'm one of those 10,000 Australians actually, I took it several times because I was curious, over a period of approximately 18 months. Actually I wasn't interested in initially if they changed, but they did, because I did work on the signature strengths, I did actually put them into action. My question is: Is there any longitudinal study to mark if there is a trajectory of change in the signature strength?

The signature strengths test has only been around for about four years, so we don't have very good longitudinal data on it, but one thing we do have on it about change is 400 new people take the test every day, so I am able to map when there is some big event in the world, whether or not there is a change in the distribution of strengths. So interestingly on 9/11, that was a big event and what we did was to track the distribution of strengths in America and other nations and suddenly the theological strengths - faith, hope and love - went way up in America, forgiveness went way down, and it happened no place else in the world, so these do change with major events, but we don't really know what the normal life course, for example, is of the strengths.

Q. Just in terms of parenting with children, is there a resource on any of the websites that you have listed that enables one to help educate one's children?

Yes, about half my work is with children and indeed there is a children's strengths test. Much of the work - is about teaching 10-12 year olds, for example, optimism and then looking at the probability of depression as they go through puberty, so basically teaching a child to be a good disputer of catastrophic thoughts, which is the key skill in optimism, halves the rate of depression as kids go through puberty.

I just came from the Geelong Grammar School and to my astonishment - I just found out about it - they have raised $15 million to create a positive psychology curriculum to give to Geelong kids and then to spread it through Australia, and what they are doing is taking off from a rather large amount of data which suggests that by teaching kids early, before puberty, the skills of positive emotion, the skills of engagement, the skills of optimism, the skills of meaning, you probably cut down the rate of depression, probably the answer to the epidemic.

But I should say that I don't think positive psychology needs the excuse of preventing illness or preventing depression. Rather I think the positive side of life is everyone's birth right and I would still be saying the same thing even if it didn't prevent depression and I think what Geelong has in mind for their students and for Australian young people generally is that this may be a way to complement education about talent and discipline, which is our usual education, with education about life satisfaction and that may increase the tonnage of happiness and, if we're right about productivity, productivity in Australia as time goes on.

Q. You've talked about the engaged life. I am sure you have thought about whether one should actively disengage in some things, because if one reads the media and engages in Rwanda, Iraq and the Australian Wheat Board, it's deeply depressing, and I'm sure you've also read Voltaire and heard Candide's solution, which was to retreat and cultivate one's garden, so is part of the solution to actively disengage in some things and retreat and cultivate one's garden?

I have so much to say about that. Let's see where to start. First, I think engagement is an unadulterated good thing and I think evolution has been very strongly about being one with the music and engagement. But it's got some bad consequences as a result and that is - well, it is important not to confuse mentation with engagement. I have to back up a bit. The difference between the pleasant life and the engaged life, the pleasant life is defined by raw fields, that is, you look inside and you see pleasure, you have thoughts. When you're one with the music and when you're engaged, 80 percent of the time if I interrupt you in the middle of engagement and ask you what you're thinking and feeling, the answer is "Nothing". That is probably not a coincidence.

We believe that the (attention) resources necessary to be completely engaged in what someone else is saying or in love are so great as to use up all the resources you use for thinking and feeling.

So part of your question - but I do want to talk about that lightweight Voltaire in just a second, and I'm serious about that - I think is about depression, anxiety and mentation, so if you think about media, if you were a farmer in Western Australia 100 years ago, well, you knew about the conditions of farming in Western Australia, but if the Titanic sunk you didn't know about it or you might hear a month later, but now you can turn on CNN and you hear all this terrible stuff all the time and it feeds the Pleistocene brain and in fact depression and anxiety are directly related to how grim the mentations going on are. So that part of your question was right I think, but it wasn't about engagement.

The final thing I want to say is something about Voltaire: I think Voltaire is both a lightweight and a really insidious figure. I think the French enlightenment is lightweight. There is a really interesting enlightenment, it is the Scottish enlightenment - I don't know how many of you know this - it takes place about fifty years earlier. Francis Hutcheson, who leads it in 1710 and I think is really the first positive psychologist - the background is the Kirk and the Kirk tells you, you know, you have to beat people into being good. What Hutcheson says, and this is what leads to Adam Smith, is: Isn't it interesting that people are at their happiest helping another person? It's an astonishing insight; it's probably true. The Scottish enlightenment in turn leads to the French enlightenment. The French enlightenment gets crushed by Candide, gets crushed by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, in which Voltaire says: Oh, optimism, what a terrible thing to have. Look at this horrible world around us. Well, it is interesting that in this epidemic of depression that we have, we have kids looking at this horrible world around us and part of this horrible world around us is partly the CNN phenomenon of being confronted with the Titanic sinking daily, but also the pessimism comes I think from what we teach kids, and so if you have looked at the canon lately for literature in your high schools or in history, the literature in our schools are The Scarlet Letter, Death of a Salesman, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet - the tragic view of life. Now if you are a 14-year old and all you're taught is that heroism, virtue, nobility are not to - they end in death and hubris, so it's no good doing those things.

Then if you think about history, I don't know how history in Australia is taught, but history in the United States is taught as one awful thing after another. First we killed the Indians, then we enslaved the blacks and now we're killing people in Iraq, and it somehow omits the notion of human progress, which I think is the real story of civilisation. It omits the notion that in the 20th century together we defeated Fascism and communism and created universal medical care. Somehow kids aren't taught this, so indeed we're setting kids up I think for the grimmest view of life, it feeds right into a brain that evolved in the Pleistocene era, which is looking for the ice that is coming down the street, the brain that says, "Nice day in Sydney today, it'll be a nice day tomorrow", that got crushed by ice. So we're feeding right into the depressive brain by what we teach and by the pessimism, which is so fashionable in literature and in history.

Sorry, the word "Voltaire" always sets me off. I don't know how it's survived.

Q. Dr Seligman, in your book Learned Optimism you explained about an experiment where you had these dogs in these boxes. The dogs were pessimistic dogs and they were given electric shocks and they wouldn't do anything, they would just sit there and whimper. Now you explained in that experiment the solution to the dogs was to grab them by the scruff of the neck and manhandle them over the barrier until they got the idea that their actions could get them out of the mess that they were in and after that the cure was long-lasting, it was permanent.

Correct.

The cure that you have put forward in your book is this idea of disputation and it seems to me that this idea that you used on the dogs, it worked for the dogs, but it worked for people too, so have you got any suggestions on other ways of learning to be more optimistic, apart from disputation?

When we teach optimism to kids and adults, one of the strategies is disputation. Another strategy is teaching a whole repertoire of social skills, decision-making, negotiation, assertiveness, all of which are the equivalent of showing the dogs that there are things they do that matter, so in general the panoply of skill-building I think is anti-pessimistic, so in that sense I think I am both a behavioural and a cognitive therapist.

Disputation is a very important one and it has a property of self-maintenance that is very useful, so most psychotherapy is like dieting in that it lasts for a while and then it melts and that is because it is no fun to keep turning down chocolate mousse, but disputation is something that feels good and is self-maintaining and that is an important property, so actually I'm a pessimist and a depressive and I think only a pessimist can do serious science on optimism, so I use this stuff all the time and it has to pass the Marty Seligman test before it goes into random assignment placebo tests, and I actually used it when I was doing your Voltaire thing. When I said "Voltaire, lightweight", and looked around, you know, "Who is this arrogant person?" And so I looked around and said, oh, that was really a mistake and this question period is going to go down the toilet. That is a routine catastrophic thought that a pessimist had, but then about 30 seconds later when I repeated the stuff about Candide and many of you laughed and I think a couple of you even applauded, then I started to dispute it. I said, no, you know, at least a large number of people are really with it, and I felt better right away and it energised me for your question. So the skill of disputation is, unlike most things in psychotherapy, self-maintaining and maybe the single most important of the 10 or 12 tricks I have about teaching optimism.

Q. Thank you. Jerry is the name, my wife is a lawyer but that is not my question. I have noticed that your books are often in what would be described as the self-help section and I am just wondering - you're obviously a huge scholar of the field - are there any other writers or thinkers who you think have got it right, kindred spirits if you like, because there's many out there.

Yes, good. First, I should say something about self-help. I'm serious about self-help. I am a psychotherapist and I believe sometimes therapy and drugs are necessary, but there's an important relationship. When I do psychotherapy on someone who is suicidal or a drug abuser or whatever, then I think what I'm doing is an intervention in which I'm imposing it on them and they kind of catch on. The nice thing about the positive side of life, and Aristotle told us this when he said that virtue isn't virtue unless you choose it: No one can impose the positive side of life on you. That is another way of putting what I mean about self-help: From the first day I took up skiing until five years later when I gave it up, I was always fighting the mountain, and that's what doing psychotherapy feels like - there are quite a number of psychotherapists in the audience - because what you're trying to do is correct weaknesses. But when you have people take a strengths test and they find out that kindness is their highest strength, they run with it, that is, they adopt it themselves without a therapist and they just keep doing it more and more. It's downhill skiing. So I think actually there is serious self-help here, unlike what the self-help shelves are filled with.

Now there are a fair number of science-based self-help books that are worth looking at, although they often don't make it to the self-help shelf. Mike Csikszentmihalyi's books on flow - His books on flow are scientifically valid. They don't have a lot of advice in them, though.

My favourite person for this group actually is George Vaillant on ageing. George Vaillant has a book called Aging Well. By the way, he is now an Australian resource. He's the leading psychoanalyst in the world, but he lives six months a year south of Melbourne now and the reason I mention Aging Well to a group whose mean age looks like about 40 or 45, it's about the last quarter of life, it's about who collapses in the last quarter of life and who keeps going and leads a full life, but the problem is it has to be read in the first half of life.

Q. Could you talk a little about the gender differences in terms of depression and optimism?

The sex differences?

Sex differences, because the results in Australia are terrible for young men.

Yes, I can talk for quite a long time about the sex differences, they're very interesting. It's a 2 to 1 ratio. Women have twice the incidence of depression in every wealthy nation as men. In every poor nation the ratio is 1 to 1. Very interesting. It doesn't occur until puberty, so before puberty boys and girls are about equally depressed. When puberty hits, suddenly the 2 to 1 ratio appears and stays there until about age 60 when men catch up with the women again.

One other thing to mention is women are not only sadder than men, they are happier than men. Not in the same moment, but the capacity for joy and positive emotion is much higher in women on average. Men are stony soil, but one might think that the same thing that gives women the ability to have highs also gives women the ability to have lows. Now no one really knows why. There are a lot of theories about why this is. One good theory is that women think and men act, so when something bad happens, women ask this question of why did it happen and they talk about it and they think about it and men go out and beat someone up. The thing about thinking is that it feeds right into depression, so ruminating about your problems is part of the causal maintenance of depression. ...

That is, every wealthy nation has a 2 to 1 ratio of depression in women than men. It also has eating disorders, which are 90 percent women, bulimia and anorexia. Every poor nation does not have a thin ideal for women. It has a 1 to 1 male-female ratio and does not have eating disorders.

Now if you think about the enormous scam of dieting - and we now know that - the reason I call it a scam is that everyone here can lose 10 pounds in a month, but the problem is you will regain all that weight or more, 80 to 95 percent of people, over the next three to five years. The problem about dieting is (1) it doesn't work in the long run, so regaining the weight is very depressing. Notice, by the way, the onset of puberty for girls. Girls become voluptuous, but they think they're becoming fat, and that may explain part of it, whereas boys, when they go through puberty, they're becoming more like the male ideal.

If you're in the 80 or 95 percent of the people who fail to keep the weight off, then putting the weight back on is one barrier after another every day and if you're in the 10 percent who succeed it turns out you're malnourished and that is you'd basically be a 125 pound woman whose body is trying to say you're really 140 pounds and a routine side-effect of malnutrition is depression. So those are the kind of speculations about the sex difference.

Q. Why do the men commit suicide?

Women are considerably more likely to be depressed than men, but men are three times - the last time I looked - three times as likely to succeed at committing suicide. Suicide attempts seem to be just as common in women as in men, but women cut and take pills, which are not lethal, and men jump and shoot, which is lethal.

Q. I have a question about the increase in depression that you talked about. Do you have the literature as to whether there is an increase in depression in Asian countries, thinking about that big "I", small "we", and that is usually reversed in Asian countries.

Right. Taiwan has the same increase in depression that your country and my country does. There is ten times as much depression in Taiwan. Japan has a ten-fold increase in depression roughly. It's very hard to know about the undeveloped Asian countries, it's very hard to know about mainland China. There is some reason to think that as China is becoming richer what they're getting is what we've got, so I think maybe behind your question is collectivism and it is not clear to me that collectivism prevents depression.

Q. Professor Seligman, Edward Spence from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. My interest in your work is mainly philosophical, I read your book Authentic Happiness recently and I found it very stimulating from a philosophical point of view, but reading through your book I couldn't help thinking there are striking similarities between your work, positive psychology, and that of the ancient Hellenistic philosophers, the Epicureans and the Stoics. You refer a lot to Aristotle, but there is hardly a reference to the Stoics and the Epicureans. Is there any particular reason for that?

I'm trying to think of how to say it without boring the rest of the audience with what really interests you and me. I'll just say a little bit about what I think the lineage is of what positive psychology comes from. I think the lineage is Hellenic rather than Judaeo-Christian and I think you are alluding to some of the milestones along the way. It is very interesting that positive psychology depends - it can't get away from the notion of free will. That is, you have to choose the stuff. Psychology, as usual, doesn't - you can be a victim, it doesn't really need choice, but positive psychology does. So the question is where notions that human beings could actually choose things come from? You can certainly find that in the traditions that you're talking about, the Greco-Roman tradition, and in fact its intersection with Christian theology is very interesting.

I wanted to write something about free will a few years ago, so I thought there would be a book some place that would tell me about the history of free will, but the only place I could find anything like it was in the theological disputes about grace, about whether or not you participate in your own grace, and that's very interesting and you're the inheritors of some pretty nasty stuff, but you don't know it, I don't think.

In the 4th century the Pelagean heresy - you probably know this was committed - Pelagius argues that people could choose to avoid sin and Augustine burns his books and condemns it as the Pelagean heresy. Basically that sort of Catholic theology 'til about 1500 when Erasmus comes along and says, no, people actually can choose the good and choose not to do evil, and the Renaissance is greatly tied up with the notion of choice.

Then the reformation comes around and Calvin and Luther basically say there is no such thing as choice, that is what predestination is about.

There is this wonderful debate you may know between Erasmus in 1523 - he writes an article called On the Freedom of the Will - and Luther in 1524 writes an article called On the Bondage of the Will. What we inherited was mostly the Reformation, which basically says we can't choose good or evil. The big break in that is Methodism …(and the idea that ) human beings can participate in their own grace and I think Australia and the United States have actually had these great awakenings in which human freedom and the notion of choice becomes operative in our politics and in our industry.

Q. It seems to me that when we're unhappy we can do one of two things: We can try and change something in ourselves, and you've talked a lot about how we can reframe things and accentuate the positive, but the other thing we can do is try to act on the environment. You haven't said a lot about how we decide whether the problems out there are really out there rather than in here and we should try and leave the bad relationship or change the toxic work environment or lobby to change government policies that are having negative social outcomes. Could you just say a little bit about that other side of the coin?

Yes, it is a very good question. Now it's got two different kinds of answers. One is that engagement in the world is probably a better idea than engagement with yourself and the metaphor is that a lot of depression is carried by engagement with the self, so not only is narcissism not a very good thing, but in general if I ask you what was the worst thing that happened yesterday you'll give me about 250 words on average in answer. If I ask you what was the best thing that happened yesterday you'll give me about 100 words in answer, which is to say that mentation, self-awareness, engagement with the self is often built around the negatives.

Another way of putting this: C S Peirce about 150 years ago argued that the function of thinking was to allay doubt. What he meant by that is we only think when things go wrong, so the whole movement of self-awareness, insight, introspection I actually think feeds depression. I'm not a great fan of insight, engaging the self, examining one's motives, on and on. I think there are things to be said against the examined life, in other words. I'm sorry if I'm offending you about that one.

But the other thing to be said in a more naked way: We do know something about the relative contribution of external circumstances to internal circumstances, so if you take married versus non-married, rich versus poor, good weather versus bad weather, the number of diseases you have and all the externals and sum them all together and ask what the relationship to happiness is, they only account for 15 percent of the variance. So most of the variance in happiness is accounted for by the things you do as opposed to the environment you're in, so in that sense there is a great deal to be said about happiness originating in the person and not the environment, so to the extent that our politicians want to make us happier by throwing money at a better environment, that is probably not going to work very much. Rather, happiness is a property of the individual, I believe the choices they make and their engagement with the world.

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