Seligman's interventions aimed to boost all three of what he calls the basic types of happiness: pleasure, which includes sensory enjoyments like good food and sex; flow, the sensation of being fully absorbed in a task; and meaning, using your highest strengths in service to something larger than yourself. To test the interventions, Seligman created authentichappiness.org, which currently has more than 500,000 registrants. Seligman, Steen, and Peterson tracked 577 of those who had completed baseline happiness-level questionnaires, did a randomly assigned one-week intervention or a control, and took five follow-up happiness-level assessments. "It's a random-assignment, placebo-controlled study, the best kind of study there is," Seligman says. He believes that the study, the results of which were published last year in the journal American Psychologist, was the first to rigorously test happiness-creating interventions.
He found that three of them were particularly effective. The "gratitude visit," in which the participant wrote down and recited an essay of gratitude to a "kind" person in his or her life, caused an immediate spike in happiness, but after a month the effect was gone. Two others had more lasting impact. The "three good things" intervention—in which the participant wrote down three things that went well and their causes each day for a week—lifted happiness for a full six months, as did the "using signature strengths" intervention, in which the participant took a test to identify his or her personal strengths, like creativity or forgiveness, and used a "top strength" in a new, different way daily for a week.
All five of the experimental interventions worked better than the control, in which the participant simply wrote down a different early childhood memory each night for a week.
To Seligman, there is little mystery about why they worked: "Emotions are often a consequence of thinking. You can change what you think and get some conscious control over your emotional life."
Really?
No. At least, not always, says Julie K. Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College and the author of The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. (It's worth noting that most of the major players in this debate have written at least one mass-market book.) "It's not impossible to change, but it's much more difficult than Seligman describes," she says. "Stability in traits is considerable. . . . I am generally skeptical of recipes for happiness."
What about the positive results so far? The tricky bit, skeptics say, is that they're all self-reported. To judge an intervention's effectiveness, the respondent is asked—over and over in various ways—how happy he feels. "Some people are repressors," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside. "They might really be unhappy but claim they are happy. There is no thermometer for happiness."
Still, the interventions do appear to work for some people; it seems unlikely that everyone who reports improved happiness is a repressor. But do they work for nearly everyone, as the proponents of positive psychology assert? There seems to be little doubt that interventions aimed at replacing selfishness with caring are probably worth trying for most people. Seligman believes much modern unhappiness springs from what he calls "the society of the maximal self," which encourages an obsessive focus on the individual rather than the group. Numerous studies show that the happiest people are those who devote their lives to caring for others rather than focusing on themselves, and many of Seligman's suggested exercises—talking with homeless people, doing volunteer work, or spending three hours a week writing fan letters to heroic people—aim to foster selflessness in daily life. Other psychologists say such interventions make sense. "The more selfish you are, the more unhappy you are," says Nancy Etcoff, a Harvard University psychologist who is writing her own popular book on happiness. "If you look at suicide notes, they are filled with 'I,' 'me,' and 'my.' " The same seems to hold true for the work of suicidal poets (see page 65).
More controversial are interventions that try to increase optimism with techniques like actively disputing negative thoughts. "What my research shows is that there's a kind of pessimism that works for anxious people where optimism does not," Norem says. "What I call defensive pessimism is where you set low expectations and imagine all of the things that could go wrong. Anxious people become very effective planners by turning their anxiety into a motivating force." Optimism-building interventions, she says, could make such people even more anxious than they were before, as they struggle and fail to vanquish worrisome thoughts.
Barbara Held agrees. "If optimism works for you, great. But I think people need to hear that life is hard, and it's OK if you are not happy all the time. There are some negative ways of coping that can be done successfully." The problem with interventions that train attention on the positive, she says, is that "there may be something to be gained by feeling bad and paying attention to it. Maybe you can do something to change the cause of feeling bad in the first place."
On the largest scale, critics say, rampant optimism might be a recipe for global disaster. "Cruelty, murder, slavery, genocide, prejudice and discrimination, and worst of all perhaps, indifference to human suffering, abound, both today and in previous centuries," wrote the late Richard Lazarus, then a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, in the journal Psychological Inquiry in 2003. Against such tyranny, Lazarus argues, optimism is worthless: "Pessimists, or realists as many would prefer to think of themselves, mobilize valuable outrage against human depravity and its banality."
For their part, some leaders of the positive psychology movement are forthcoming about its limitations. "My task is to act as more of a brake than an engine," says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California and the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. "Developing a premature orthodoxy is not good."
Seligman, too, takes pains to point out that pessimism has its place. "In some situations—the cockpit of an airliner, for example—what's needed is not an upbeat view but a mercilessly realistic one," he wrote in Learned Optimism. The best approach is one he calls flexible optimism, in which a person learns to dispute unproductive, catastrophic thoughts but to listen to pessimistic ones and heed them when warranted.
Which is no doubt a good idea, if it can indeed be done. While Ballentine, the now-happier court mediator, proclaims, "I have a different life now," it's important to note that she said so while in the middle of an intensive course on the subject. Evolutionary psychologists such as Etcoff like to point out that happiness, by its very nature, tends to be short-lived. "You would not survive if you were happy all the time," she says. "You would not be reaching for resources, and you would not be protecting yourself."
It may turn out that short-term change is easy, while long-term improvement is not. For a movement that burst on the scene just eight years ago, it is probably too soon to say whether the happiness it seeks to create can endure. For that matter, it is too soon to say whether positive psychology itself will endure. "As of now, the movement is, in my view, in danger of being just another one of the many fads that come and go" in psychology, Lazarus wrote.
"The bottom line is, this stuff is all new," Etcoff says. "It has certainly met with a receptive audience, and people do seem to get better. It's less clear that they will stay better."
Martin Seligman's books include Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfllment and Learned Optimism : How to Change Your Mind and Your Life.
Happiness is a pie-chart, according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon and David Schkade. For an overview of their work see "Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change," in Review of General Psychology 2005, Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 111-131. (Click here to download the .pdf.)
For an antidote to saccharine self-help books, try Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching: A 5-Step Guide to Creative Complaining by Barbara Held.
The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath provides a critical overview of Plath's poetry, prose, letters and journals and their place in 20th century culture.
The Bell Jar, A Novel is Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical account of her first suicide attempt.
The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov were published in 2002.
