Martin E.P. Seligman

Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman is the Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center and Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology. He is also the Director of the Penn Master of Applied Positive Psychology program (MAPP). He was President of the American Psychological Association in 1998, during which one of his presidential initiatives was the promotion of Positive Psychology as a field of scientific study. He’s a leading authority in the fields of Positive Psychology, resilience, learned helplessness, depression, optimism, and pessimism, and he’s also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and build strengths and well-being. He’s written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books.

Among his better-known works are The Hope Circuit (Public Affairs, 2018), Flourish (Free Press, 2011), Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002), Learned Optimism (Knopf, 1991), What You Can Change & What You Can’t (Knopf, 1993), The Optimistic Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), Helplessness (Freeman, 1975, 1993) and Abnormal Psychology (Norton, 1982, 1988, 1995, with David Rosenhan). His newest book Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work—Now and in an Uncertain Future, co-authored with Gabriella Kellerman, is forthcoming in 2023. The book provides essential plans and actionable advice for facing the uncertain future of work. With in-depth and clear-eyed evidence, it offers key skills on everything from resilience and innovation to social connection and foresight.

His work has been featured on the front page of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Reader’s Digest, Redbook, Parents, Fortune, Family Circle, USA Today, and many other popular magazines. He has been a spokesman for the science and practice of psychology on numerous television and radio shows. He has written columns on such far-flung topics as education, violence, happiness, and therapy. He has lectured around the world to educators, industry, parents, and mental health professionals.

Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology in 2000 and has devoted his career since then to furthering the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. It’s a fascinating field of study that had few empirical, scientific measures—traditional clinical psychology focuses more on the repair of unhappy states than the propagation and nurturing of happy ones. In his pioneering work, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, developing clinical tools and training the next generation of positive psychologists.

His earlier work focused on perhaps the opposite state: learned helplessness, in which a person feels he or she is powerless to change a situation that is, in fact, changeable. Seligman is an often-cited authority in this field as well — in fact, his is the 13th most likely name to pop up in a general psych textbook. He was the leading consultant on a Consumer Reports study on long-term psychotherapy and has developed several common pre-employment tests, including the Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ).