[Music] [Music] when I was president of the American Psychological Association they tried to Media train me and they uh an encounter I had with CNN uh summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today which is the 11th reason to be optimistic the uh editor of discover told us uh 10 of them I'm going to give you the 11th so they came to me CNN and they said Professor Seligman uh would you tell us about the the state of Psychology today we'd like to interview you about that and I said great he said but this is CNN so you only get a sound bite so well how how many words do I get I said well one cameras rolled and she said um Professor Seligman what is the state of Psychology today good cut cut that won't to um uh we'd really better give you a longer sound bite well how many words do I get this time well you get two Dr Seligman what is the state of Psychology today not [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] good look Dr suan we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium uh we better uh give you a real sound bite uh this time you can have three words and Professor Seligman what is the state of Psychology today not good enough and that's what I'm going to be talking about I I want to say why Psychology was good why it was not good and how it may become in the next 10 years good enough and by parallel summary I want to say the same thing about technology about entertainment and design because I think the issues are very similar uh so why was psychology good well for more than 60 years psychology worked within the disease model uh 10 years ago when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate and told them what I did they'd move away from me uh and because quite rightly they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you spot the Looney and now when I tell people what I do uh they move toward me and what was good uh about uh psychology about the $30 billion investment and imh made about working in the disease model about what you mean by psychology is that it 60 years ago none of the disorders were treatable it was entirely smok and mirrors and now 14 of the disorders are treatable two of them actually curable and the other thing that happened is that a science developed a science of mental illness that we found out that we could take fuzzy Concepts like uh depression alcoholism and measure them with rigor that we could create a classification of the mental illnesses that we could uh understand the causality of the mental illnesses we could uh look across time at the same people people for example who are genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia and uh ask what the contribution of mothering of genetics are and we could uh isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses and best of all we were able in the last 50 years to invent uh drug treatments and psychological treatments uh and then we were able to test them rigorously in random assignment Placebo control designs throw out the things that didn't work keep the things that actively did and the conclusion of that is that psychology and Psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable and I think that's terrific I'm proud of it um but what was not good the consequences of that were three things the first was moral that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists pathologizes that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble bricks fell on you and we forgot that people made choices and decisions we forgot responsibility that was the first cost the second cost was that we forgot about you people we forgot about improving normal lives we forgot about a mission to make uh relatively untroubled people happier more fulfilled more productive and genius High Talent became a dirty word no one works on that and the third problem about the disease model is in our rush to do something about people in trouble in our rush to do something about repairing damage we never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier positive interventions so that was not good and so that's what led uh uh people like Nancy atov Dan Gilbert Mike chick sent my me myself to work in something I call positive psychology which has three aims the first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness it should should be uh just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage it should be interested in the best things in life and it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling and with genius with nurturing High Talent so uh in the last 10 years and the hope for the future we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology a science of what makes life worth living it turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness and any of you for free can go to that website and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness you can ask how do you stack up for positive emotion for meaning for flow against uh literally tens of thousands of other people we we created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio how they're defined how to diagnose them what what builds them and what gets in their way uh we found that we could discover the causation of the positive States the relationship between uh left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity as a uh uh cause of Happiness um I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people and I've asked the question how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you and starting about 6 years ago we asked about extremely happy people and how do they differ from the rest of us and it turns out there's one way very surpris they're not more religious they're not in better shape they don't have more money they're not better looking they uh don't have more good events and fewer bad events the one way in which they differ they're extremely social they don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning they uh uh they don't spend time alone each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends but watch out here this is merely correlational data not causal and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about happiness of abulance and giggling and good cheer and I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough in just a moment um we found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries from the Buddha to Tony Robbins about 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy and we find that we've uh been able to manualized many of them and we actually carry out random assignment efficacy and Effectiveness studies that is which ones actually make people lastingly happier and in a couple of minutes I'll tell you about some of those results but the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill in in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable is can psychology actually make people happier and to ask that question happy is not a word I use very much we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy and I believe there are three different and I call them different because different interventions build them it's possible to have one rather than the other three different happy lives the first happy life is the pleasant life this is a a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can and the skills to amplify it the second is a life of Engagement a life in your work your parenting your love your leisure time stops for you uh that's what Aristotle was talking about and third the meaningful life so I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them the first life is the pleasant life and it's simply as best we we can find it it's having as many of the pleasures as you can as much positive emotion as you can and learning the skills savoring mindfulness that amplify them that stretch them over time and space but the pleasant life has three drawbacks and it's why posi POS psychology is not happyology and why it doesn't end here the first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life your experience of positive emotion is heritable about 50% heritable and in fact not very modifiable so the different tricks that uh Mau and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20% tricks getting more of it second is that positive emotion uh habituates it habituates uh rapidly indeed it's all like french vanilla ice cream the first taste is 100% by the time you're down to the sixth taste it's gone and uh as I said it's not particularly malleable um and this leads to the second life and I have to tell you about my friend Len to uh talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion more than building pleasure in two of the three great Arenas of Life by the time Len was 30 Len was enormously successful the first Arena was work by the time he was 20 he's an options Trader by the time he was 25 he was a multi-millionaire in the head of an options trading company uh second in play he's a national champion bridge player and uh uh uh but in the third great Arena of life love Len is an abysmal failure and the reason he was was that Len is a cold fish uh Len is an introvert uh American women said to Len when he dated them you're no fun you don't have positive emotion get lost and uh uh Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford Park Avenue psychoanalyst who for 5 years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him but it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma it turned out that uh uh uh Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and uh watched football and uh uh played Bridge uh Len is in the bottom 5% of what we call positive affectivity so the question is is len unhappy and I want to say not contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50% of the human race and positive affectivity I think Len is one of the happiest people I know he's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness and that's because Len like most of you are is enormously capable of flow when he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning time stops for him and it stops till the closing bell when the first card is played till 10 days later the tournament is over time stops for Len and this is indeed what Mike cheek sent me high has been talking about about flow and it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way pleasure has raw feels you know it's happening there thought and feeling but what Mike told you yesterday during flow you can't feel anything you're one with the music time stops you have intense concentration and this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life and we think there's a a recipe for it and it's knowing what your highest strengths are and again there's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are and then recrating your life to use them as much as you possibly can recrating your work your love your play your friendship your parenting just one example um one person I worked with was a bagger at jardis hated the job she's working her way through college her highest strength was social intelligence so she recraft bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day now obviously she failed but what she did was to take her highest strengths and recraft work to use them as much as possible what you get out of that is not smiliness you don't look like Debbie Reynolds you don't giggle a lot what you get is more absorption so that's the second path the first path positive emotion the second path is udonia flow and the third path is meaning this is the most venerable of all the happinesses uh traditionally and meaning in this view consists of a very parallel to UD ponia it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are well I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives the pleasant life the good life the meaningful life people are now hard at work on the question are there things that lastingly change those lives and uh the answer seems to be yes and I'll just give you some samples of it uh it's being done in a rigorous manner it's being the done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works uh so we do random assignment Placebo controlled long-term studies of different interventions and just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect when we teach people about the pleasant life how to have more pleasure in your life one of your assignments is to to take the mindfulness skills the savoring skills and you're assigned to design a beautiful day next Saturday set a day aside design yourself a beautiful day and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures and we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced gratitude visit I want you all to do this with me now if you would close your eyes I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in the good direction who you never properly thanked person has to be alive okay now okay you can open your eyes I hope all of you have such a person your assignment when you're learning the Gratitude visit is to write a 300 word testimonial to that person call them on the phone in Phoenix ask if you can visit don't tell them why show up at their door uh you read the testimonial everyone weeps when this happens um and what happens is when we test people one week later a month later 3 months later they're both happier and less depressed um another example is a strength state in which we get couple to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths and we find this is a strengthener of relationships and fun versus philanthropy by it's so heartening to be in a group like this in which uh so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy well my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this so we actually have people do something altruistic uh and do something fun and to contrast it and what you find is when you do something fun it has a square wave walk set when you do something philanthropic to help another person it lasts and it lasts uh so those are examples of positive interventions uh so the next to last thing I want to say is um we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have this is really what you're about and that's our Target variable and we ask the question at as a function of the three different lives how much life satisfaction do you get so we ask and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure the pursuit of positive emotion the pleasant life the pursuit of Engagement time stopping for you and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction and our results surprised us but they were backward of what we thought it turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no country contribution to life satisfaction the pursuit of meaning is the strongest and the and this is the pursuit of Engagement is also very strong where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning then Pleasures the whipped cream and the Cherry which is to say the full life the sum is greater than than the parts if you've got all three conversely if you have none of the three the empty life the sum is less than the pars and what we're asking now is does the very same relationship physical health morbidity how long you live and productivity follow the same relationship that is in a corporation is productivity a function of positive emotion engagement and meaning is Health a function of positive engagement of pleasure and of meaning in life and there is reason to think the answer to both of those May well be yes so uh Chris said that uh the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard and said this was amazing for me I've never been in a gathering like this uh I've never seen speakers stretch Beyond themselves so much which was one of the remarkable things but I found that the problems of psychology seem to be parallel to the problems of Technology entertainment and Design in the following way we all know that technology entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes uh we also know that technology entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery and by the way the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important I thought when I first became a therapist 30 years ago that if I could make some if I was good enough to make someone not depressed not a anxious not angry that I'd make them happy and I never found that I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero that they were empty and it turns out the skills of Happiness the skills of the pleasant life the skills of Engagement the skills of meaning are different from the skills of relieving misery and so the parallel thing holds with technology entertainment and design I believe that is it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness to increase positive emotion and that's typically how they've been used but once you fractionate happiness the way I do not just positive emotion that's not nearly enough there's flow in life and there's meaning in life as Laura Lee told us design and I believe entertainment and Technology can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well so in conclusion I the 11th reason for optimism in addition to to the space elevator is that I think with technology entertainment and design we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet and ifch technology can in the next decade or two increase the pleasant life the good life and the meaningful life it will be good enough if entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion meaning udonia it will be good enough and if design can increase positive emotion udonia and flow and meaning what we're all doing together will become good enough thank [Applause] you