DanielR IB Psychology HL

Martin Seligman became famous in the field of humanistic psychology when he introduced the concept of learned helplessness. He was born in New York in 1942. At the age of thirteen, he experienced doubtful abnormal behaviors from his father. Seligman was then taken out of public school and was put into a private military academy, filled with rich upper-class kids. This made him feel rejected and alone. The experience at military contributed to his feeling of learned helplessness. Soon after that, his father experienced severe strokes, and had to be sent to the hospital. Seligman heard him told his mother, “Irene. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything after this. All I believe in is you and the children, and I don’t want to die”. This introduced Seligman to the suffering that helplessness emerged from.

Later he earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Princeton University. Then he completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in three years, where he later returned there as a professor. Seligman had experimented with dogs and unavoidable mild electric shock stimuli, which attracted him to the importance of developing human potential. After research and experimentation, he shifted his focus from the negative to the positive view of behavior. He took this chance to focus on a new psychological method of understanding healthy development when he the President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1998. The new focus was known as “positive psychology”.