TED Talks Dr. Seligman

Dr. Seligman opens his TED Talk with a story about an interview he was asked to do with CNN. He had to prepare a sound bite that first was composed of just one word in regard to the state of psychology. He simply said "good." Then he was not to use two words and he said "not good." Finally he was asked to use three words and he said "not good enough." Before he gets into why psychology is not good enough however, he first speaks of the disease model and all the advancements that psychology has made along these lines.

In the history of psychology, most of the work has been directed at helping people with disease. Dr. Seligman states that there are roughly sixteen psychological diseases that people can have that impact their mental health. Psychology can help with almost all of them and completely cure two of them according to Seligman. However, the focus on only disease has left psychology somewhat limited in its scope to do to help normal people; "psychology was all about finding out what's wrong with you, spotting the looney…"

Seligman states that now psychology can help make miserable people less miserable and he is proud of that accomplishment. However, there were also were costs to this model. One cost was to ignore the possibility to help normal people. However, from this position, psychology has slowly begun to broaden its perspective. There is now something that is called positive psychology that has more of a focus on the psychologically...

One is that we can now identify the precursors of positive states of human emotions.
There have also been many interventions proposed; over one hundred twenty from the Buddha to Anthony Robbins as the speaker mentions. Seligman further defines three different aspects of a happy life. These include the pleasant life, a life of engagement, and the meaningful life. The first part of happiness, the pleasant life, is mostly inheritable. This is the ability to meet the pleasures of life can be due to inheritable traits; pleasure has raw feel.

However, is not the only part of a happy life and there are other components. There are tests that can find your highest strengths. These strengths can be applied to work, love, and play through what is referred to as flow. There are many positive interventions that can be applied to such as savoring. Another is gratitude. Seligman conducts an example of gratitude interventions in which a person writes a three hundred word thank testimonial to that person. This…