80 Dædalus Spring 2004

Since World War II, the ½eld of psy-chology has largely focused on suffering.Psychologists now measure such former-ly fuzzy concepts as depression, schizo-phrenia, and anger with respectable precision. We have discovered a fairamount about how these disorders de-velop across life, about their genetics,their neurochemistry, and their psycho-logical underpinnings. Best of all, we canrelieve some of the disorders. By my lastcount fourteen of the several dozen ma-jor mental illnesses could be effectivelytreated–and two of them cured–withmedications or speci½c psychothera-pies.1

Unfortunately, for many years interestin relieving the states that make life mis-erable has overshadowed efforts to en-hance the states that make life worth liv-ing. This disciplinary bias has not pre-empted the public’s concern with whatis best in life, however. Most peoplewant more positive emotion in their

lives. Most people want to build theirstrengths, not just to minimize theirweaknesses. Most people want lives im-bued with meaning.

What I have called Positive Psychologyconcerns the scienti½c study of the threedifferent happy lives that correspond tothese three desires: the Pleasant Life, theGood Life, and the Meaningful Life. ThePleasant Life is about positive emotions.The Good Life is about positive traits–foremost among them the strengths andthe virtues, but also the talents, such asintelligence and athleticism. The Mean-ingful Life is about positive institutions,such as democracy, strong families, andfree inquiry. Positive institutions sup-port the virtues, which in turn supportthe positive emotions.2 In its scope,then, Positive Psychology divergesmarkedly from the traditional subjectmatter of psychology: mental disorders,developmental stunting, troubled lives,violence, criminality, prejudice, trauma,anger, depression, and therapy.

But can a science of Positive Psycholo-gy lead us to happiness? Five years ago,in an effort to answer that question, I

Martin E. P. Seligman

Can happiness be taught?

Martin E. P. Seligman is Fox Leadership Profes-sor of Psychology and director of the Center forPositive Psychology at the University of Pennsyl-vania. Former president of the American Psycho-logical Association, he is the author of “Helpless-ness” (1975), “Learned Optimism” (1990), and“Authentic Happiness” (2002).

1 Martin E. P. Seligman, What You Can Change& What You Can’t (New York: Knopf, 1993).

2 Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness(New York: Free Press, 2002).

© 2004 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

started to teach an annual seminar toundergraduates at the University ofPennsylvania.

This seminar is similar to the othercourses I have taught for the last fortyyears: we read and discuss the primaryscienti½c literature in the ½eld. It differs,however, in an important way: there is areal-world homework exercise to do andwrite up every week. When one teachesa traditional seminar on helplessness oron depression, there is no experientialhomework to assign; students can’t verywell be told to be depressed or to be al-coholic for the week. But in Positive Psychology, students can be assigned to make a Gratitude Visit, or to trans-form a boring task by using a signaturestrength, or to give the gift of time tosomeone they care for. The workload isheavy: two essays per week, one on theextensive readings and the other on thehomework exercises.

The course begins with personal in-troductions that are not perfunctory. Iintroduce myself by narrating an inci-dent in which my then ½ve-year-olddaughter, Nikki, told me that she hadgiven up whining and if she could dothat (“It was the hardest thing I’ve everdone, Daddy”), I could “stop being sucha grouch.” I then ask all of the studentsto tell stories about themselves at theirbest, stories that display their highestvirtues. The listening skills taught in traditional clinical psychology centeraround detecting hidden, underlyingtroubles, but here I encourage the oppo-site: listening for underlying positivemotivations, strengths, and virtues. Theintroductions are moving and rapportbuilding, and they easily ½ll the entirethree hours.

The course then spends four meetingson what is scienti½cally documentedabout positive emotion: about the past(contentment, satisfaction, serenity),

about the future (optimism, hope, trust,faith), and about the present (joy, ebul-lience, comfort, ecstasy, mirth, plea-sure). We read and discuss the literatureon depressive realism (happy peoplemay be less accurate than miserable peo-ple 3), on set ranges for weight and forpositive emotion (lottery winners andparaplegics revert to their average preex-isting level of happiness or misery with-in a year, because the capacity for plea-sure, ‘positive affectivity,’ is about 50percent heritable and therefore quiteresistant to change4), on wealth and lifesatisfaction (the one hundred ½fty rich-est Americans are no happier than theaverage American5), on education, cli-mate, and life satisfaction (there is noimpact6), on optimism and presidentialelections (80 percent of the electionshave been won by the more optimisticcandidate–partialing out standing inthe polls, vigor of the campaign, andfunding7), on longevity and positiveemotion (novitiates who at age twentyincluded positive-emotion words intheir brief biographies live about adecade longer than more deadpan

Can happiness be taught?

3 Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, “Judg-ment of Contingency in Depressed and Nonde-pressed Students: Sadder but Wiser,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108 (1979):441–485.

4 Phil Brickman, D. Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Vic-tims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Person-ality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 917–927.

5 Ed Diener, Jeff Horwitz, and Robert Em-mons, “Happiness of the Very Wealthy,” SocialIndicators 16 (1985): 263–274.

6 Chapter 4 of my book Authentic Happinessreviews these data.

7 Harold Zullow and Martin E. P. Seligman,“Pessimistic Rumination Predicts Defeat ofPresidential Candidates: 1900–1984,” Psycho-logical Inquiry 1 (1990): 52–61.

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nuns8), and on the brain and positiveemotion (positive emotion correlateswell with activity in left-frontal regionsof the cortex 9).

The scienti½c literature bears on inter-ventions. In parallel to the techniquesthat therapists have developed for reduc-ing misery, there exist empirically vali-dated techniques that we have developedfor enhancing the positive emotions. Inour discussion of the positive emotionsabout the future, we focus on optimismand how it lowers vulnerability to de-pression and how it enhances productiv-ity, physical health, and immune activity.We practice the skill of disputing unreal-istic catastrophic thoughts, the maintool for increasing optimism.10 One stu-dent wrote a long letter to her future selffrom her graduating-senior self, outlin-ing her advice about optimism and stick-ing to her values.

Gratitude, meanwhile, is a skill, too lit-tle practiced, that ampli½es satisfactionabout the past. Gratitude Night is a high-light of the course.

An evening is set aside, and classmembers invite guests–mothers, closefriends, roommates, fathers, teachers,and even younger sisters–who havecontributed importantly to their well-being, but whom they have never prop-erly thanked. The exact purpose of the

gathering is a surprise to the guests, whoare honored with testimonials of grati-tude from their hosts. For instance, Pattyto her mom:

How do we value a person? Can we mea-sure her worth like a piece of gold, with the purest 24-karat nugget shining morebrightly than the rest? If a person’s inner-worth were this apparent to everyone, Iwould not need to make this speech. As itis not, I would like to describe the purestsoul I know: my mom . . . You are, however,the most genuine and pure-of-heart per-son I have ever met . . . .

When complete strangers will call you totalk about the loss of their dearest pet, Iam truly taken aback. Each time you speakwith a bereaved person, you begin cryingyourself, just as if your own pet had died.You provide comfort in a time of great lossfor these people. As a child, this confusedme, but I realize now that it is simply yourgenuine heart, reaching out in a time ofneed . . . .

There is nothing but joy in my heart as Italk about the most wonderful person Iknow. I can only dream of becoming thepure piece of gold I believe stands beforeme. It is with the utmost humility that youtravel through life, never once asking forthanks, simply hoping along the way peo-ple have enjoyed their time with you.

There was not a dry eye in the room asPatty read her testimonial and then hermom choked out, “You will always bemy Peppermint Patty.” In their evalua-tions of the course at the end of the se-mester, “Friday, October 27 was one ofthe greatest nights of my life” was notuntypical. Crying in any class is extraor-dinary, and when everyone is crying,something has happened that touchesthe great rhizome underneath us all.

We then turn to the knotty subject ofhappiness in the present. The pleasureshave clear sensory and feeling compo-

8 Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, andWallace V. Friesen, “Positive Emotions in EarlyLife and Longevity: Findings from the NunStudy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psycholo-gy 80 (5) (2001): 804–813.

9 Richard Davidson, “Biological Basis of Per-sonality,” in Valerian J. Derlega, Warren H.Jones, and Barbara A. Winstead, eds., Personali-ty: Contemporary Theory and Research (Chicago:Nelson-Hall, 1999).

10 Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism(New York: Knopf, 1990).

nents; they are evanescent and they in-volve little if any thinking. To enhancethe pleasures, we practice in homeworkthe skills of savoring (sharing experi-ences with others, taking mental photo-graphs, collecting physical mementos)and of mindfulness (looking at experi-ences afresh from new angles, slowingdown, and taking another’s perspec-tive).11 One of the homework assign-ments is to design and carry out a Plea-surable Day. Experiencing many of thesepleasures and having the skills of savor-ing that amplify them constitute what I call the Pleasant Life.

In ordinary English we fail to distin-guish the grati½cations from the plea-sures. This is a costly confusion because it muddles together two different classesof the best things in life, and it deceivesus into thinking they can each be had inthe same way. We casually say that welike caviar, that we like a back rub, andthat we like the sound of rain on a tinroof–all pleasures–as well as say thatwe like playing volleyball, that we likereading Andrea Barrett, and that we likehelping the homeless–all grati½cations.

Like is the operative confusion. Like’sprimary meaning in all these cases isthat we choose to do these things; we prefer them to many other possibilities.Because we use the same verb to charac-terize what pleases and what grati½es us,we are inclined to expect, erroneously,that the liking comes from the samesource. And so we slip into saying, “Cav-iar gives me pleasure” and “Andrea Bar-rett gives me pleasure”–as if the samepositive feeling exists underneath bothsentiments and that commensurability is the basis of our choosing one or theother.

When I press people about the positiveemotion underlying their experience of

pleasure, they tend to describe a felt,conscious, positive feeling. Great food, a back rub, perfume, a hot shower–allproduce what Gilbert Ryle in The Conceptof Mind calls “raw feels”: salient, felt,articulable emotion. In contrast, when I press people about the positive emo-tion they feel when serving coffee to the homeless, reading Nozick, playingbridge, or rock climbing, they tend todescribe a feeling that is elusive–onethey cannot succinctly characterize as adiscrete emotion. Total immersion usu-ally blocks consciousness, so thinkingand feeling are completely absent ex-cept in retrospect (“Wow. That wasfun!”). Indeed, it is the total absorption,the suspension of self-consciousness,the blocking of thought and feeling, andthe flow that the grati½cations pro-duce–not the presence of any felt sensa-tion–that de½ne liking these activities.In short, pleasure is de½ned by the pres-ence of raw feels, grati½cation by theirabsence.

I suggest that the difference betweenthe Good Life and the Pleasant Life re-sides in this distinction. The great bene-½t of distinguishing pleasure from grati-½cation is that even the bottom half ofthe Gaussian distribution of the capacityfor positive affect (three billion non-ebullient people) is not consigned bypsychology to the purgatory of unhap-piness. Not remotely. Rather, these peo-ple’s happiness lies in pursuing the GoodLife–in the abundant grati½cations thatcan totally absorb them.

While we moderns have lost the dis-tinction between the pleasures and thegrati½cations, the ancient Greeks andthe Romans of Hellenistic bent werekeen on it. For Aristotle, happiness (eu-daimonia), distinct from the bodily plea-sures, is akin to grace in dancing. Graceis not a separable entity that accompa-nies the dance or that comes at the end

11 Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, Savoring(Hillside, N.J.: in press).

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of the dance; it is part and parcel of adance well done. To talk about the hap-piness of contemplation, then, is only tosay that contemplation absorbs us and isdone for its own sake; it is not intendedto refer to any emotion that accompa-nies contemplation. Eudaimonia, what Icall grati½cation, is part and parcel ofright action.12 For Seneca, pleasure andvirtue are wholly separate; the happy lifeis lived in harmony with its nature, andwhile it may or may not contain plea-sure, it must contain virtue.13 Unlikepleasure, which can be had by drugs,shopping, masturbation, and television,grati½cation cannot be had by shortcuts.Grati½cation can only be had by theexercise of strength and virtue.

“Flow”14 is the way that Positive Psy-chology measures grati½cation empiri-cally. It is the state we enter when ourhighest strengths meet our highest chal-lenges. The loss of consciousness char-acterizes such complete immersion:time stops for us, we concentrate, wefeel completely at home. The Good Life,in contrast to the Pleasant Life, is aboutidentifying one’s strengths and virtuesand using them as frequently as possibleto obtain grati½cation.

One of my teachers, Julian Jaynes, wasgiven an exotic Amazonian lizard as a

pet for his laboratory. In the ½rst fewweeks after getting the lizard, Juliancould not get it to eat. Julian tried every-thing. It was starving right before hiseyes. He offered it lettuce and then man-go and then ground pork from the super-market. He swatted flies and offeredthem to the lizard. He tried live insectsand Chinese takeout. He blended fruitjuices. The lizard refused everything andwas slipping into torpor.

One day Julian brought in a ham sand-wich and proffered it. The lizard showedno interest. Going about his daily rou-tine, Julian picked up The New York Timesand began to read. When he ½nished the½rst section, he tossed it down and itlanded inadvertently on top of the hamsandwich. The lizard took one look atthis con½guration, crept across the floor,leapt onto the newspaper, shredded it,and then gobbled up the sandwich. Thelizard needed to stalk and shred before itwould eat. So essential was the exerciseof this strength to the life of this kind of lizard that its appetite could not beawakened until it had engaged it.

Human beings are much more com-plex than Amazonian lizards, but all ourcomplexity sits on top of a lizardly brainthat has been shaped for hundreds ofmillions of years by natural selection.Our pleasures, and the appetites theyserve, are tied by evolution to a reper-toire of action. This repertoire is vastlymore elaborate and flexible than stalk-ing, pouncing, and shredding, but it canbe ignored only at considerable cost.The belief that we can rely on shortcutsto grati½cation and bypass the exerciseof the strengths and the virtues is folly. It leads to legions of humanity who aredepressed in the middle of great wealth,who are starving to death spiritually.

This leads to my formulation of theGood Life: identifying one’s signature

12 Aristotle, book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics.Especially useful is J. O. Urmson, Aristotle’sEthics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988): “But for Aristotle the enjoyment of an activity is not the result of it but something barely dis-tinguishable from the activity itself; for him,doing a thing for the sheer pleasure of doing itis doing it for its own sake.” Ibid., 105. For thedistinction between the grati½cations and thepleasures, see Richard Ryan and Ed Deci, “OnHappiness and Human Potential,” Annual Re-view of Psychology 51 (2001): 141–166.

13 Seneca, Moral Essays De Vita Beata, x–xi.

14 Mihalyi Csikszentmihaly, Flow (New York:Harper and Row, 1990).

strengths and virtues and using them inwork, love, play, and parenting to pro-duce abundant and authentic grati½ca-tion.

To identify their signature strengths,the students take the via (Values-In-Action Institute of the Mayerson Foun-dation) questionnaire of strengths andvirtues.15 This instrument picks out the½ve highest self-rated strengths for eachstudent from a classi½cation (Psycholo-gy’s undsm-1)16 of twenty-four that in-cludes love of learning, valor, perspec-tive, kindness, optimism, capacity tolove and be loved, humor, perseverance,spirituality, fairness, and the like.

The ½rst time I taught my undergradu-ate seminar on the Good Life, I asked thestudents after they had identi½ed their½ve highest strengths if they got to de-ploy at least one of these strengths everyday at college. They all said no.

My class’s homework assignments followed from this dismal statistic. Weeach chose an unavoidable task that wefound tedious and invented a way to per-form the task using one of our signaturestrengths. One student transformed dataentry into flow. Using his strengths ofcuriosity and love of learning, he beganto look for patterns in the mound ofdemographic data he had been enteringfor months as a research assistant. He

discovered a pattern: the higher the fam-ily income, the more likely the parentsremain married. Another student trans-formed his lonely midnight walk fromthe library to his apartment using hisstrength of playfulness by rollerbladinghome and trying to set a new Olympicrecord on each run. Another studentused her strength of social intelligenceto turn waitressing into grati½cationby setting the goal of making each cus-tomer’s interaction with her the socialhighlight of his or her evening.

An assignment that contrasts fun withaltruism makes the distinction betweenpleasure and grati½cation clearer to mystudents. We each select an activity thatgives us pleasure, and we contrast thiswith doing something philanthropic thatcalls upon one of our strengths. There isquite a uniform emotional experiencethat ensues. The pleasurable activities–hanging out with friends, getting a scalpmassage, going to the movies–have asquare wave offset. When they are over,they leave almost no trace. The grati-½cation of the altruistic activities, bycontrast, lingers. One junior who spon-taneously tutored her third-grade neph-ew in arithmetic on the phone for twohours wrote, “After that, the whole daywent better, I could really listen and peo-ple liked me more. I was mellow all day.”One Wharton student said, “I came toWharton to make money because Ithought money would bring me happi-ness. I was stunned to ½nd out that I amhappier helping another person than Iam shopping.”

This assignment is the transition to the½nal part of the course–the study of thethird happy life, the Meaningful Life.From the perspective of Positive Psy-chology, meaning consists in attachmentto something larger. So on this account,the Meaningful Life is similar to the

15 The via questionnaire is available at <www.authentichappiness.org>. This website containsall of the leading tests of positive emotion. Asof this writing, two hundred thousand peoplehave taken the via on this website. We havefound the web collection of psychometric datavastly cheaper and faster than paper question-naires, and the samples are more representativeof our target populations than are college soph-omores.

16 Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Selig-man, Classi½cation of Strengths and Virtues (NewYork: Oxford University Press; Washington,D.C.: American Psychological AssociationPress, 2004).

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Good Life, but with one further ingredi-ent: identifying and using your higheststrengths in order to belong to and servesomething larger than you are. We callthese larger things Positive Institutions.

In this part of the course we read someof the primary literature on Positive In-stitutions (e.g., Robert Putnam’s BowlingAlone and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning ) and we do a set of exercisesdesigned to connect the students tothings larger than their own successesand failures. In one exercise, they createa family tree of strengths and virtues byhaving their parents, grandparents, andsiblings take the via test, and by inter-viewing their parents about dead rela-tives. In another, they mentor a youngerstudent who is facing the speci½c issuesthey faced and solved in high school orcollege. In another, they write theirvision of a positive human future andwhat their role in bringing it aboutmight be. In another, they write theirown obituary from the point of view oftheir grandchildren, emphasizing theirown legacy.

We read George Vaillant’s Aging Well,which seems to demonstrate that Ameri-can higher education is not teaching itsstudents the Good Life. In a sixty-yearlongitudinal study of the lives of 268 topmembers of the Harvard classes of 1939 –1942 and 456 Core City men of Bostonfrom the same era, Vaillant came upwith a robust and disturbing ½nding:higher education made little or no dif-ference for “success in life.” (I hasten to add that Vaillant, like I, means notchampagne and Porsches, but a life wellled, a eudaimonic life.) Looking at a pan-oply of indicators such as life satisfac-tion, marital happiness, physical vitality,freedom from depression, longevity, lackof alcoholism, job promotions, maturity,and enjoyment, Vaillant found that theCore City men did as well as the Harvard

graduates, save for two variables: higherHarvard incomes and more Harvard en-tries in Who’s Who. My students werenot at all puzzled by this, although theywere discom½ted that their parents werepaying six ½gures for such an education.“We are taught the wrong stuff at col-lege,” they said. “If college taught thematerial we’ve learned in this course,higher education would lead to successin life.”

To end the course–having read the lit-erature on memory and hedonics thatshows that what people most rememberabout any endeavor is how it ends17–weparallel our serious introductions withserious farewells. Each of us picks ourfavorite ending–of a movie, poem, orpiece of music–explains it and thenpresents it in a ½nal all-day session.

All in all, teaching this subject hasbeen the most gratifying teaching I havedone in my forty years as an instructor. Ihave seen young lives change before myeyes, and more importantly, I have neverbefore seen such engagement and suchmature intellectual performances by un-dergraduates. So encouraged, I am nowteaching this material both at the intro-ductory level in college and at the pro-fessional level once a week on the tele-phone to a massive audience of clinicalpsychologists, social workers, executivecoaches, and life coaches.18

Teaching about the Good Life is by nomeans the unique province of a psychol-ogy course. Indeed, if the pursuit of eu-daimonia can be taught to psychologystudents steeped in a century of victim-

17 Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Fredrickson,Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redel-meier, “When More Pain is Preferred to Less:Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science 4 (6)(November 1993): 401–405.

18 <www.authentichappinesscoaching.com>.

ology and shallow hedonics, think howeasily this lesson might be taught to stu-dents who have previously encounteredthe better examples of well-led livesfound in the humanities. A stance, more-over, that gives the best in life equal foot-ing with the worst, that is as concernedwith flourishing as with surviving, thatis as interested in building as in repair-ing, should ½nd a comfortable home inmost any discipline. In the end, I believethat we learn more when lighting can-dles than when cursing the darkness.

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