Martin Seligman

Martin Seligman is an American psychologist whose research on learned helplessness and optimism helped establish positive psychology as a field.

Learned helplessness: A pattern in which exposure to uncontrollable events reduces attempts to escape or change later situations. Seligman’s early experiments helped establish this phenomenon and its psychological interpretation.
Perceived control: A person’s belief about whether their actions can influence events and outcomes. Loss of perceived control is central to Seligman’s account of learned helplessness.
Overjustification effect: A reduction in intrinsic motivation that can occur when an activity is made contingent on external rewards. Seligman’s early academic environment included research on motivation and behavior beyond helplessness.
VIA Survey of Character Strengths: A self-report questionnaire designed to identify a person’s profile of character strengths. It made the strengths classification developed by Seligman and Peterson available for research and practice.
Attributional style: A person’s habitual way of explaining the causes of events, especially setbacks and successes. Seligman linked explanations of setbacks to vulnerability to depression and to optimism.
Cognitive behavioral therapy: A psychotherapy that changes patterns of thought and behavior contributing to emotional distress. Seligman’s work on explanatory habits overlaps with methods for examining and revising pessimistic thoughts.
University of Pennsylvania: A private research university in Philadelphia where Seligman taught and conducted much of his work. Seligman spent much of his academic career at Penn and led its positive psychology initiatives.
Positive psychotherapy: A psychotherapeutic approach that builds positive emotion, engagement, meaning, and relationships alongside addressing distress. Seligman’s well-being theories informed therapies that deliberately cultivate strengths and positive experience.
Explanatory style: A framework for describing how people explain events in terms of permanence, pervasiveness, and personal responsibility. This framework turns Seligman’s account of optimism into a set of specific explanatory habits.
Learned optimism: A set of skills for challenging pessimistic explanations and developing more flexible interpretations of setbacks. Seligman presented optimism as a pattern people can practice rather than an inborn trait.

Linked from 4 pages