New Positive Psychology [ Scientific view for happiness and the meaning of life] Seligman Martin E P

Instant test for positive and negative effectiveness (panas)

The test is a scale of various states and emotions. Read each of the following definitions and rate how well your situation fits with it. at the moment on a five-point scale ( 1 - slightly or not at all, 2 - A little, 3 - moderately, 4 - enough, 5 - strongly). Place your rating next to each of these properties.

Positive Affects:

1. Interest (PA);

2. Vivacity (PA);

3. Passion(PA);

4. Inspiration (PA);

5. Equanimity (PA);

6. Determination (PA);

7. Attention (PA);

8. Enthusiasm (PA);

9. Activity (PA);

10. Pride (PA).

Negative Affects:

1. Irritation (NA);

2. Chagrin (NA);

3. Shame (NA);

4. Anxiety (NA);

5. Anxiety (NA);

6. Feelings of guilt (HA);

7. Fright (NA);

8. Hostility (HA);

9. Nervousness (NA);

10. Fear (NA).

To find out the test results, sum up your ratings of ten positive (PA) and separately - ten negative (NA) affects. You will get two total numbers, each with a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 50 points.

Some people are endowed with a large reserve of positive efficiency and do not lose it throughout their lives. They are almost always in a great mood, life gives them pleasure and joy. For others, all this is inaccessible - day after day they pass in despondency. And even if success comes, these people are not happy.

Most of us are in the middle between two extremes. Differences in the manifestations of anger and depression in people of different constitutions have long been established, but for some reason no one has yet undertaken a similar classification of positive emotions.

I have come to believe that the course of our emotional lives is determined by our genetic helmsman. If our route does not lie through sunny seas, it is unlikely that we will be able to change anything in an attempt to become happier. All we can do - and this is what I do - is to embrace the cold climate and stay firmly on the path to positive effectiveness, for it can give us many wonderful experiences.

I have a friend Len - a person even less cheerful than me. However, he was successful. Being the general manager of a company trading securities, Len earned a million-dollar fortune and, even more amazingly, repeatedly became the American bridge champion, and he was not yet thirty at that time! A handsome man, a bright personality and an enviable groom, Len suffered one fiasco after another in his personal life. As I said, he is an introverted person and almost devoid of positive affect. I saw Len win a major bridge tournament: he just smiled slightly and ran upstairs to watch the football match by himself. At the same time, Len is not at all an insensitive egoist. He reacts surprisingly sensitively to the emotions and requests of others, he is always responsive - it is no coincidence that everyone says that he is “good” - he just doesn’t give in to emotions too much.

The women Len courted didn't like it. There was no warmth coming from him! No cheerfulness, he rarely even laughs. “There’s something wrong with you, Len,” the women kept repeating. Sensitive to such reproaches, he studied with a psychoanalyst in New York for five years. “There’s something wrong with you, Len,” the psychoanalyst echoed to the women and tried her best, hoping to determine what childhood trauma was suppressing the positive feelings of her patient. But psychoanalysis did not help: Len had no trauma.

Actually everything was fine. Simply by virtue of his constitution, Len belongs to the group of people with reduced positive efficiency. And there are quite a lot of people like him, because for natural selection the absence of emotions is no less useful than their excess. In some cases, Len's calmness gave him considerable advantages. To win a bridge championship or successfully trade securities, you must have rare composure. However, modern American women like an ebullient joie de vivre. Ten years ago, Len came to me for advice on what to do, and I said that it made sense to move to Europe, where the demand for wild fun and other external manifestations of emotions was not yet too high. Now Len is happily married. The moral is clear: a person can be happy even if he is not very emotional.

Development of intelligence

I, like Lena, was surprised that I experienced few positive feelings. That day, when Nikki and I were weeding the beds in the garden, I already realized that my ideas about their role were erroneous, but Barbara Fredrickson, a teacher at the University of Michigan, managed to formulate it all precisely and prove: positive feelings, in addition to creating good mood, there is another and very important purpose.

The Templeton Prize is awarded to young scientists (under forty years of age) for better job in Positive Psychology. This is the largest award available to a psychological scientist ($100,000), and I was supposed to chair the selection committee. Then, in 2000, we awarded Barbara Fredrickson for creating the theory of positive emotions. The first time I read her work, I rushed headlong to the second floor and excitedly announced to my wife: “Mandi, this is a revolution in science!” At least for a pessimist like me.

Fredrickson argues that positive emotions play a critical role in the evolutionary process. They enhance our intellectual, physical and social capabilities and create reserves that are always available in case of threat or need. When you have a positive attitude, others are more sympathetic and it is easier to establish friendships, love, or other relationships with them. Negative emotions act as limiters. And under the influence of positivity, on the contrary, we become freer, more tolerant, approach any problem creatively, and are open to new ideas and impressions.

A few simple but compelling examples show that Barbara Fredrickson's groundbreaking theory is scientifically sound. Let's say you have a box of thumbtacks, a candle, and a pack of cardboard matches. You need to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip onto the floor. Here you need to be creative: pour out the buttons, attach an empty box to the wall with them and put a candle in it, like in a candlestick. Imagine that before you receive a task, they will try to evoke positive emotions in you - they will treat you with candy, let you look through funny comics, or ask you to read something pleasant out loud with an expression. Each of these techniques is likely to generate at least some positive reactions, and they will help you approach the problem creatively.

Here’s another experiment: determine as quickly as possible whether a particular word belongs to a given category, for example, “means of transportation.” When respondents hear the word “car” or “plane,” they instantly give an answer. But in the case of “elevator”, difficulties arise; most people think before answering. However, if, as in the previous experiment, a person has previously been tuned into a positive mood, his thoughts work faster. In the same way, the subject easily copes with the task of finding a definition common to several concepts. For example, for the concepts “sparrow” and “case”, one of the answer options will be “shot”: shot sparrow, shot case.

Under the influence of positive emotions, intellectual breakthroughs occur in both young children and experienced therapists. Four-year-olds were asked to think in thirty seconds about something so pleasant that they “wanted to jump up” or “sit up and smile.” (States of high-energy and low-energy cheerfulness.) Then all the children were given a test to determine the shapes of objects, and both groups (high-energy and low-energy) did better than those children who did not smile. Participants in the second part of the experiment - 44 doctors - were randomly divided into three groups. In one group, everyone was given a bag of sweets, in another they were asked to read aloud humanistic statements about medicine, and the third group served as a control group. Then the experiment participants were asked to diagnose a patient suffering from a difficult-to-recognize liver disease. At the same time, doctors were asked to think out loud. Those who ate candy had the best results: they recognized the disease faster and made the diagnosis most accurately. At the same time, no one showed the frivolity supposedly characteristic of merry fellows.

Cheerful and stupid?

The results of the above-mentioned experiment are, of course, impressive, but it’s not for nothing that cheerful people are traditionally considered frivolous? Jokes about dumb blondes have long been a source of solace for smarter but less popular dark-haired women. In class, I was considered a “boring nerd,” but later I smiled more than once in my mind, noting that my especially “life-loving” classmates did not fly very high after college. The idea that optimists are frivolous comes from an authoritative source.

The founder of pragmatism, C. S. Peirce, wrote in 1878 that the task of thought is to dispel doubts. We don't think about it and are barely aware of what's going on around us until something happens. A person walks cheerfully along the road of life as long as there are no obstacles on the way, and only when a pebble hits his sandal does he begin to think and analyze.

Exactly one hundred years later, Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson (both then young promising students) experimentally confirmed what Pierce had said. The experiment went like this: A group of students were given varying degrees of control over a green light. Some of them gained complete control: when these people pressed the button, the light flashed, and if they did not touch the button, then the light did not come on. For other students, the light turned on and off regardless of whether they pressed the button or not. All students were then asked how much their actions influenced turning on the lights. Those who suffered from depression answered very accurately, being able to determine when they pressed the button in vain and when they did not. The students, who were in a good mood, surprised the experimenters. They also correctly listed those moments when they turned on the light themselves, but in 35% of cases when turning on the light did not depend on them, they still believed that it turned on at their command. In a word, people prone to depression turned out to be sadder and wiser than cheerful people.

Scientists soon found new evidence that depressed people view life more realistically. They judge their capabilities more objectively, while cheerful and happy people usually overestimate themselves. 80% of Americans believe they have above average social communication skills. Most workers believe that the results of their work are also above average, and most drivers - even those who have been involved in accidents - again consider themselves aces.

Cheerful people usually remember more pleasant events than actually happened, and forget bad episodes faster. Sad people, on the other hand, accurately record both. Cheerful people perceive successes and failures rather one-sidedly: they attribute success to themselves, believing that the bright streak will never end and now they can do everything - but any failure is attributed to those around them, and even then as an annoying trifle. Melancholic people usually evaluate both their successes and the lack thereof quite objectively.

Thus, in a different situation, an optimist may indeed seem “empty-headed.” But it's not that simple. The theory of “depressive objectivity” is currently hotly contested. Too many cases from life practice contradict it. Lisa Aspinwall (a teacher at the University of Utah, awarded the second-class Templeton Prize in 2000) has collected a lot of evidence that when making life-changing decisions, cheerful people do act smarter than melancholic people. The experiment was as follows. Dr. Aspinwall introduced her subjects to unpleasant information about factors that potentially threaten their health: coffee lovers with articles on the effect of caffeine on the development of breast cancer, sunbathing enthusiasts with statistics on the harmful effects of sunlight and their role in the formation of melanoma. At the same time, the researcher divided the respondents into cheerful and sad - using special tests for optimism and additional stimulation of positive feelings. Then Aspinwall asked each subject to read the articles and, after a week, asked what he remembered from what he read. It turned out that optimists remembered much more alarming information and found it more convincing than sad people and melancholic people.

The results of the discussion about who is smarter can be formulated as follows. Under normal circumstances, optimists rely on their previous positive experiences, while pessimists are more skeptical. Even if the light has not turned on for ten minutes, no matter how much you press the button, the optimist believes that in the end things will go smoothly and the electricity will be restored. However, when the course of events becomes threatening (“three cups of coffee a day increases the risk of breast cancer”), optimists immediately change tactics, adopting a skeptical and analytical attitude towards life.

From all the experiments mentioned, one significant conclusion can be drawn: a positive attitude sets a completely special way of thinking. Over thirty years of work at the psychology department, I have noticed that discussions held in dull gray classrooms among constantly grumbling and dissatisfied employees, as a rule, give zero results. In fact: if you need to decide which of several worthy candidates can be accepted into the team, no one will be accepted, since a lot of shortcomings will be found in each of the applicants. So, over thirty years, we have rejected dozens of candidates for young teachers, who later became excellent, talented psychologists, and even world celebrities.

So, a cold negative attitude activates a critical mindset: a person tries to understand what is wrong and then fix the problem. A positive attitude, in turn, encourages a constructive, creative and tolerant approach, when it is not the disadvantages that catch the eye, but the advantages. It is possible that positive thoughts generally arise in another part of the brain as a result of completely different, special neurochemical processes.

I advise the reader and himself to tune in to the appropriate mood, depending on the goal. For example, when you have to take an exam, fill out a tax return, weigh the decision to quit your job, analyze love failures, prepare for an audit, edit text for printing, or choose an educational institution - without critical thinking there's no way around it. This kind of mental work is best done on a rainy day, sitting on a straight-backed chair in a quiet and modestly furnished room. This is exactly the case when a serious or sad mood not only won’t hurt, but will also help you make the best decision.

However, there are many things that require a creative approach. These include planning a sales campaign, love (at its highest levels), starting a new career, deciding to get married, writing a book, and everything related to hobbies and non-competitive sports. In this case, an environment that can raise your tone will help: a comfortable chair, the sounds of pleasant music, sunny weather, fresh air. And try to be surrounded by those whom you consider the most reliable, friendly and unselfish people.

Optimism and physical resources

High-energy, positive emotions such as joy put people in a playful mood, and play helps them develop physically. Young chipmunks, playing, run on top speed, jump up, change direction in the air and, having landed, run in the other direction. Young monkeys, having fun, jump on young trees, which bend under the weight of the animals and catapult them wherever necessary. Growing up, chipmunks and monkeys use the same techniques to escape predators. Apparently, the game helps develop the muscles and cardiovascular system to successfully hunt, quickly escape from danger, fight enemies and fight for the mate.

Health and longevity are also indicators of the body’s physical resources. It has been proven that both depend on positive emotions. In one of the largest-scale studies, 2,282 Mexican Americans completed demographic and emotional testing and were followed by researchers for two years. The level of positive emotions recorded by the tests allowed a good probability to predict the possible disability or death of the survey participant. Taking into account age, income, education, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption and illness of the subjects, psychologists concluded that cheerful people were half as likely to die or be disabled. Other studies have found that positive emotions protect against the detrimental effects of aging. Let us remember that the nuns, whose autobiographies were written in bright and joyful tones, lived longer and happy life and that the Mayo Clinic optimists lived much longer than the pessimists. And also the fact that cheerful people have lower blood pressure and stronger immunity. Add to this Aspinwall's findings on the perception of health-relevant information, and we can see that optimism undoubtedly prolongs life and improves health.

Performance

One of the most important components of health and longevity is performance. It is difficult to say what comes first in this case: either satisfaction from work makes human happiness more complete, or natural cheerfulness allows you to more fully enjoy your work. However, the fact remains that positively minded people are much more likely to be satisfied with their jobs than others.

Research shows that a good mood improves performance, and this, in turn, affects financial well-being. In one experiment, 272 employees took tests of positive emotions, and then the scientists looked at their performance over the past eighteen months. Cheerful people received more praise from their superiors, and their earnings increased. According to the results of a serious study among Australian fifteen-year-olds, optimism significantly increases the likelihood of getting good job and succeed.

What is more important - cheerfulness or efficiency? Trying to answer this question in a special study, artificially creating a good mood and tracking the results, scientists found that in good mood Both adults and children set themselves more high goals, work better and are able to work longer on solving any laboratory problems (for example, deciphering anagrams).

Cheerful people in difficult circumstances

Optimists show greater resilience during unpleasant trials. How long ago could you keep your hand in a bucket of ice water? On average, a person can endure from 60 to 90 seconds. Rick Snyder, a Kansas educator and one of the founders of positive psychology, in the program " Good morning, America" ​​conducted an experiment in live. To begin with, he tested the program staff for positive emotions. One of them - Charles Gibson - noticeably surpassed all the others with his optimism. Then, live on air, each employee dipped his hand into the ice water. Everyone except Gibson retreated after 90 seconds. He sat and smiled, putting his hand in the water, until they finally announced a commercial break.

Cheerful people not only tolerate pain more easily and take better care of their health and safety - positive emotions help neutralize negativity. Barbara Fredrickson showed the students an excerpt from the film “The Cornice”, where a man, holding onto a wall, walks along the cornice of a skyscraper, at some point he trips and hangs at a great height. All spectators' pulses increased sharply from excitement. After this, students were asked to watch one of four videos: the calming story of “Waves,” the funny story of “Puppy,” the neutral story of “Sticks,” and the sad story of “Crying.” “Puppy” and “Waves” normalized the audience’s heartbeat, and “Crying” made the pulse become even faster.

Development of social skills

My youngest daughter, Carly Dylan, took her first memorable steps in development at the age of seven weeks. Lying in her mother's arms, she looked up from her chest, looked into her eyes and smiled. My wife Mandi beamed and smiled back, and the little one's smile grew even wider. This exchange of smiles bonds mother and child for life, creating the basis of a warm relationship. Growing up, a happy child surpasses his peers in almost everything, including perseverance, independence, inquisitiveness, enthusiasm and resourcefulness. The ability to feel and clearly express positive emotions is the foundation of any relationship based on love and friendship. I have always been surprised that my closest friends are not my work colleagues (although we like each other and spend a lot of time together), not some wise intellectuals, but poker, bridge and volleyball partners.

Exception proves the rule. People born with Moebius syndrome - paralysis of the facial muscles - are deprived of the ability to express emotions: during the most intimate conversation, their face remains cold and motionless, like a mask. It is not surprising that such people have difficulty making friends. As soon as the natural chain is broken: positive emotions - their expression - reciprocal positive emotions, the music of love leaves our relationship.

Typically, psychologists are interested in pathology: they look for the most gloomy or angry people and ask them to talk about themselves. I also conducted similar research for a good twenty years. And not so long ago, Ed Diener and I decided to deviate from the stereotype - to evaluate the personal characteristics and lifestyle of the most optimistic representatives of the human race. We randomly selected 222 students and assessed their level of cheerfulness based on six parameters. Thus, we selected the 22 most positively-minded people and began to work with them.

The “most cheerful” students differed from the ordinary and depressed ones mainly in that they led a surprisingly full and rich social life. They spent less time alone and much more time in society, and received excellent characteristics from friends and acquaintances. All twenty-two respondents admitted that they had a girlfriend or boyfriend. Each on average earned a little more than ordinary students, but otherwise the “most cheerful” were not particularly different from their classmates: approximately the same number of sad and joyful events happened in their lives, they spent approximately the same amount of time sleeping, watching TV, sports, smoking , drinking or going to church. Researchers have only been able to prove that cheerful people have more acquaintances and close friends, they get married more often and are more actively involved in social activities.

Happiness and the game without losing: reconsidering the achievements of evolution

Barbara Fredrickson's theory and other research convinced me to try to bring more positive feelings into my life. Once upon a time, I, like many, believed that mood was not so important, the main thing was to maintain normal relationships with others. However, positive feelings not only lift our tone - they help us get along with people, make friends and loved ones, improve our health and achieve success. Fredrickson's theory answers the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter: why positive emotions feel so good and why we feel anything at all.

Spiritual growth and positive development are the main characteristics of what positive psychology calls a win-win situation. By the way, both writing and reading this book is also a game without losing: by putting all my strength into writing it, I grew noticeably intellectually - much the same will happen to you if you manage to hold out to the end. Love, friendship, raising children - all these are games without losing. Almost all technological achievements - the printing press and the tea rose hybrid - belong to this category.

Negative feelings signal that we are about to win or lose. Positive - attracts to a game in which it is impossible to lose. By encouraging people to be creative and tolerant, positive emotions increase social, intellectual and physical potential.

Now that I hope everyone understands how necessary it is to develop cheerfulness, the next question arises: how to increase the level of positive feelings in your life?

Negative criticism should be ignored. For the most part outstanding people They ignore unconstructive criticism, and in addition, they never allow ill-wishers to weaken their resolve. The ability to ignore the opinions of those who seek to belittle you is an important