Seligman, Martin E. P.

Martin Elias Peter Seligman was born August 12, 1942, in Albany, New York. He majored in philosophy at Princeton University and in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, taking his PhD in 1967 under the supervision of the noted learning theorist Richard Solomon. Except for a brief stint teaching at Cornell University and sabbatical leaves at various universities and research centers, Seligman has spent his entire professorial career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the department of psychology. For close to four decades, Seligman has contributed to psychology and allied metal health professions as a basic scientist, theorist, teacher, administrative leader, and public intellectual. He is best known for his work on learned helplessness, depression, optimism, and positive psychology.

In the 1960s, when Seligman first entered psychology, learning theory attracted those who aspired to general accounts of behavior and believed that the theories and findings of basic psychology had immediate and important implications for the improvement of human life. Although animal learning research has largely vanished as a discrete field within psychology, Seligman has remained true to the original premise and promise of the field and follows the example set by 20th-century luminaries such as Hull, Tolman, Miller, Mowrer, and Skinner.

Seligman has shown great diversity in the methods, theories, and applications he has pioneered. Over the years, he has not only assimilated, applied, and redirected important intellectual currents in psychology but also created many of these currents himself. Perhaps his greatest talent is his ability to present ideas to the field in such a way that other psychologists become excited and then build productively on the foundations he provides.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, along with fellow graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, Seligman discovered and then investigated the phenomenon of learned helplessness. Animals exposed to uncontrollable aversive events in one situation later showed striking deficits in different situations; that is, they behaved helplessly. Seligman chose to interpret this phenomenon in cognitive terms, at the time a radical approach, and he proposed that the animal learned in one situation that its responses were independent of outcomes. This learning was represented as an expectation of response-outcome independence that was generalized to other situations to produce the observed deficits. He then demonstrated the analogous phenomenon among people and went on to propose that the basic learned-helplessness phenomenon might serve as a laboratory model for reactive depression. So began a line of research still thriving today.

Another early contribution made by Seligman was his lucid and innovative examination of prepared learning, associative learning predisposed by evolution. Some associations are easier to acquire than are others because the predisposition to acquire them is hardwired into the organism by the selection advantage it provided to distant ancestors. So, it proved highly useful to survival for organisms to readily learn to associate gastric upset with novel tastes. In contrast, other associations are acquired only with great difficulty because it is unlikely that they reflect the typical causal texture of natural environments. Seligman's ideas represented a radical perspective at a time when learning theories all made the assumption of equipotentiality: All learning occurs in the identical way. Seligman then proposed that simple phobias were acquired by processes of prepared learning, accounting in one swoop for their selectivity, rapid acquisition, and resistance to extinction. And so began another line of research still pursued today.

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