RCSI MyHealth: Positive Psychology, Agency and Human Progress with Professor Martin Seligman

[Music] as chief officer of rcsi university of medicine and health sciences it is a personal pleasure to welcome you to this rcsi my health lecture positive psychology agency and human progress to be delivered by professor martin seligman from the university of pennsylvania at rcsi our mission is to educate nurture and discover for the benefit of human health the my health lecture series and positive psychology bring together two of the most important activities at rcsi in support of this mission firstly the rcsi my health series is part of the university's commitment to enhancing human health by

sharing expert driven health care information with the public as educators and researchers we have a responsibility to use our expertise knowledge and discovery to foster improvements in health and education in our communities our societies and around the world this year has demonstrated more than ever the value of evidence-based healthcare information and the role of academics clinicians and scientists in helping the public to understand more about their own health rcsi is wholeheartedly committed to the un's sustainable development goals as evidenced by our position of joint second in the world in the times higher education university impact

rankings 2021 for good health and well-being the university's position globally in this category reflects our singular focus on improving human health for the benefit of patients communities and across the globe the second major focus of rcsi is to educate and nurture healthcare professionals and by extension their patients in the life skills required not just to sustain them in their practice but to support them to thrive in the service of their patients professionalism a set of values of integrity altruism excellence and a commitment to continuous improvement is the cornerstone of an rcsi education the greatest threat

to professional behavior is burnout and loss of resilience building on the insights of professor martin seligman through a positive education program and our center for positive psychology and health we work to give our graduates the life skills to flourish in the modern health care environment i now invite professor anne hickey deputy dean for positive education at rcsi to introduce the my health guest lecturer professor martin seligman from the university of pennsylvania thank you professor kelly it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's my health guest speaker professor martin seligman martin is the zellerbach family professor

of psychology and director of the penn positive psychology center at the university of pennsylvania where he focuses on positive psychology resilience learned helplessness prospection optimism and positive education he is also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and build strengths and well-being martin is one of the most influential and popular psychologists of our generation he has written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books including best-selling and award-winning books such as learned optimism authentic happiness flourish and his most recent book the hope circuit an autobiography and memoir of his ideas described as a psychologist's

journey from helplessness to optimism martin has received numerous awards throughout his career including the american psychological society's william james fellow award for basic science the cattell award for the application of science and three lifetime distinguished scientist awards from the american psychological association most recently the apa's award for lifetime contributions to psychology in 2017. in 1996 martin was elected president of the american psychological association by the largest vote in modern history martin's mission is the attempt to transform social science to work on the best things in life including human strengths positive emotion good relationships meaning and

human flourishing in acknowledgment of his exceptional contribution and advancements in the field of psychology professor seligman has most recently been conferred with the highest academic award from the rcsi university of medicine and health sciences the honorary doctorate in science the rcsi community are delighted and honored to welcome professor seligman here today to take part in this rcsi my health series event following today's guest lecture i will be joined by professor kiran oboyel director of the rcsi center for positive psychology and health for a questions and answer session with professor seligman i am now going to

invite professor martin seligman to the stage to present his talk entitled positive psychology agency and human progress i am thank you for such a kind introduction it is a great pleasure for me today to be talking to the rcsi university of medicine and health sciences i'm going to talk today about the central issue that i've been working on for the last 55 years and that's the notion of agency and i'm going to talk about agency and its relationship to human progress and particularly i'll mention issues of health and success because of the audience my talk

today is in a loving memory of my very close colleague ed diener ed is the leading empirical scientist in positive psychology and uh as you will see much of what i have to say is indebted to his work so ed uh you've missed some weather but we've missed you a lot more um attend to the swan uh when i talk about different exercises for building agency and well-being uh the mystery of the swan will uh be clarified so in the next 45 minutes here's what i'm going to try to do i'm going to ask the

question of what is agency and i'm going to suggest to you that in my mind agency has three components one is efficacy and that is the belief that i can accomplish a given goal a second is optimism a belief that i can accomplish this goal into the future and the third is imagination the range of goals uh that you wish you can accomplish uh in life and i'm gonna suggest to you that human history has revolved around beliefs in agency and in particular when cultures and individuals believe they are agentic that is they believe they

can accomplish things in the world that's when we get innovation and progress and through much of human history because of the theology involved there's been a belief that humans can't and that it's only god that can or the gods and that's when we get stagnation so i'm going to talk about the history of agency in the west and i will also touch on uh the parallel history of agency uh in china and in the biblical mediterranean uh as i talk about the history of agency i'm going to take us up to 1800 when an enormous

burst of human progress occurs the age of progress and i know there are many people today whose ideology is there's been no human progress and i want to convince you about how fallacious that is and that notions of our future notions of positive psychology and very much depend on believing in human progress i'm going to talk about the barriers to progress as well i believe the world is in labor now it's headed for a new world and the question is what will it give birth to and i want to talk about the barriers about what

it will give birth to having done the history i want to talk about the three domains of agency that i've worked in in my life uh the first is helplessness and efficacy the second is optimism and positive psychology and the third is imagination and prospection these are the three components of agency agency being the belief that i can accomplish good things in the world the there have been at least three practical offspring of this work on agency one is positive psychotherapy a second is uh prospective psychotherapy and a third is positive education and i'll mention

all three of those and finally i want to talk about the emergence from a postcovid world what the barriers are and what might await us and finally i'm going to suggest to you that we're giving birth to something new the first age of agency is dawning so let me begin that's what i want to accomplish in the next 45 minutes so the first question is what is agency and uh importantly uh it's a mental state a belief uh it's the immediate cause of action it is the notion i can make a positive difference in the

world uh and it has three different components uh the first is efficacy which is the belief i can accomplish uh by my own actions a specific goal the second is future minded optimism which is the belief i can do this into the future into the long future and the third is imagination uh the range of goals that i believe i can accomplish and the hypothesis that i'm working under is when individuals over history when cultures believe in agency that's when progress occurs and unfortunately much of human history particularly in the west has uh believed in

the lack of agency and that's when we get stagnation so i basically am going to review uh history in this regard and the question of progress um so let me let me spend uh 10 or 15 minutes taking you through what i've been working on for the last uh two years uh uh sweeping through human history and what we can know about uh how agentic our ancestors were and if we start with our hunter-gatherer fishers ancestors these are ancestors before about 14 000 bc uh what we know from the hunter-gatherer fishers is they had agent

they had a limited agency they had efficacy about hunting gathering and fishing there's not much evidence that they had optimism uh the burying of the dead does not really occur until the next phase of human history and except for the cave paintings uh there's not much evidence of imagination the cave paintings i think have been wildly over interpreted and the cave paintings while they're imaginative they're not about the here and now by definition are seem to be memories of the great hunt killing the mastodon or the time we slaughtered another tribe starting around 11 000

years ago and uh due almost completely to the first major recent global warming uh something that may seem pedestrian to you but it's probably the most momentous occasion for increasing human agency agriculture begins begins in africa and in agriculture we have a lot of evidence first of efficacy but secondly very importantly of optimism in agriculture our ancestors planted seeds in the spring and then stayed around until harvest time and that's a great deal of future mindedness um in addition uh they had quite a lot of imagination and invention and that is we know from the

remnants of their language that they collected bread wheat they collected wheat they breaded they bred domestic animals they buried the dead and so we have for the first time in agriculture among our ancestors clear belief and efficacy about matters agricultural but also optimism about the long future irrigation occurs for the first time storage of grain occurs and we have uh evidence of imagination as well starting around uh 4000 bc we have our first writing so we're no longer inferring agency from what uh our ancestors did uh but writing begins about 3400 bc in sumer uh

and interestingly this is the bronze age and interestingly all writing and this is not just in sumer but this is in egypt and china uh mesopotamia as well there's no human agency all writing is about the gods and what we have both in the bible as i'll say and in the bronze age uh is a very strong belief that the gods have agency and the gods tell humans what to do uh this is very much the bronze age mentality and it's best seen uh in the beginnings of the the two great poems which start greco

roman fought the two homeric poems uh the iliad uh which is definitely bronze age it's the first it's as best we can can tell composed between a hundred and 200 years before the odyssey uh those of you who remember achilles probably also remember that he doesn't do anything uh athena hera tells him what to do tells him to go into battle tells him to steal his sword and uh one is hard put in the iliad to find uh any human efficacy it's the gods that have it it's very pessimistic uh and uh uh while the

gods have imagination uh human beings are very much creatures of the here and now and this changes radically in the next 200 years we're probably down to about 800 bc by now in the odyssey in which we have odysseus who has a mission a future-minded mission and that's getting back to ithaca uh the gods are there but they've retreated uh odysseus has will and has action he has plans for the future he's he's wily and he has great imagination uh and uh indeed this leads us to uh the golden age of greece which is very

strongly uh believes in agency uh all the golden age uh philosophers are highly agentic uh and indeed a greco-roman thought from the golden age through the stoics and very importantly uh through the early christian roman philosophers highly agentic in the early christian philosophers of the second and third century human beings can become holy they can achieve salvation they're going to be judged by god for what they accomplished uh whether or not they achieved salvation so what you see in greco-roman thought is at first no belief in agency and also very little evidence of progress then

a burst of belief in agency and huge greco-roman progress and this continues right up to the age of augustine now i wanted to track this in the bible as well so i did a complete lexical analysis of the old testament and new testament there's science here and that is agency efficacy optimism imagination have a lexicon a dictionary of words so for efficacy a paradigm word is choose or decide uh for optimism uh hope is a uh uh one of the lexicon for imagination possible truth are key words so i analyzed the entire old testament and

new testament through the parallel time of the greco-roman times and indeed what you find is that in the old old testament the five books of moses and job which is written about the same time there is almost no human agency god speaks tells you what to do and you obey and just to remind you of exodus moses encounters the burning bush god's in the burning bush and god tells moses go tell pharaoh let thy people let my people go do you remember what moses says when god tells him to do that moses says i can't

do it god i'm a stammerer i'm a stutterer and god says i will put the words in your mouth and that is indeed the flavor of the first five books of moses and the lexical analysis god commands the israelites obey this changes in kings this changes in the latter part of the old testament and very much in the new testament uh in uh the latter part of the new testament the latter part of the old testament the new testament highly agentic uh much more much less obedience much more efficacy human efficacy human imagination and human

optimism uh i wanted to know if this was more than just the greeks and romans and the jews and the christians so my colleagues from xinhua conducted a very important parallel history of china over the same period from the bronze age to about 200 a.d and basically you see the very same pattern that uh initially uh of this the shang chinese uh bronze age chinese it's the gods who do things this changes around the same time as greco-roman and bible unrelated cultures to human agency and the one thing the chinese find when they correlate it

with progress in china is there's not only individual agency but unlike greco-roman agency and biblical agency there's collective human agency as well and what we learned from china is that when individual agency is high when collective agency is high you get human progress when uh the gods do it or when the collective agency is so tyrannical as to suppress human agency you get collapse and that's pretty much the story of ancient china uh judeo-christian and greco-roman uh uh history and this all culminates uh in augustine uh uh some of you may call him saint augustine

i think he's a huge heavy uh he does something which i think injures the western world and uh that is uh he uh puts forward the thesis uh against pelagius that humans cannot accomplish the good humans cannot resist temptation and when they do it's only through the grace of god that it happens uh he reverts essentially to a bronze age mentality and this becomes the uh until aquinas the dominant uh doctrine that humans don't have agency except through the grace of god and we enter a thousand years of the middle ages the first 700 years

of which up until the time of abellard and aquinas are abs miserable absent invention i know there are apologists for the middle ages but none of them would want to live there but at any rate this is what continues until about the uh of florentine uh renaissance when the catholic church is liberalizing and you get people like pico and erasmus who claim that human beings have agency we're like toddlers we fall down but god lifts us up but we have to have motive power of our own to be lifted up uh so catholicism by 1500

uh is a be believing in human agency and along comes the reformation and i think you've been mistaught about the reformation the reformation is very anti-agentic uh luther and calvin believe in total depravity their augustinian they're worse than augustine they believe we're predestined they believe that humans have no efficacy uh and uh their view becomes the reformation until about 1660 when it's overthrown by the dutch and by the english and this gives rise to the industrial revolution which is the paradigm of human agency gives rise to an age of progress and here's what the age

of progress looks like i know you have colleagues in in the english department and history department uh who have a vested interest in saying there's been no human progress here's what to tell them imagine that newspapers only came out once a century what would the headline be in the january 1st 2001 newspaper about the 20th century it would be life expectancy across the globe doubled in the 20th century a remarkable event unprecedented and uh it's not just uh life expectancy doubling in 1800 at the start of the industrial revolution uh 90 of the world lived

on the equivalent of a dollar a day or less now 10 of the world lives on a dollar a day or less it moved from 9 to 11 during covid but importantly uh between breakfast and dinner yesterday a miracle occurred that is 300 000 people in the world came out of extreme poverty extreme poverty is disappearing and uh will disappear i believe by the end of many of your lifetimes literacy over the same period in 1800 only 10 percent of people in the world could read or write by 2016 86 percent uh both men and

women equally could read or write women's right to vote uh in uh 1893 only one nation new zealand uh gave women the right to vote in 2017 there are only two nations in the world uh in which women are not allowed to vote saudi arabia is one and ireland can probably guess what the other one is it's the vatican in which women are not allowed to vote freedom a percentage of people living in democracies one percent in 1816 uh about 60 percent now uh hunger if you go back to 1800 uh 90 of the world

was malnourished even by 1970 28 of the world was malnourished um now 11 of the world is malnourished child mortality uh in 1800 half year children uh would die before they reach their fifth birthday this is down to four percent in 2016. of battle deaths there are fewer soldiers dying on the battlefield today than at any time in human history uh we've entered what is called the great peace and it's not just battle deaths it's violence generally um if you were born in london 500 years ago your chances of dying a violent death would have

been between one and fifty and one in a hundred uh born in london today your chances of dying a violent death are one in fifty thousand uh smallpox eradicated cholera typhus completely treatable now and it's not just the material things uh education uh in 1860 one new song was copyrighted in 2015 six million new songs were released so that's human progress that's what uh human progress uh wrought now some of you are thinking progress what nonsense if you look around there are uh families falling apart the environment is threatened inequality is rising there is political

polarization uh suicide anxiety and depression arising and there is a systemic racism so these are the things we have to worry about and i will return to that when i ask the question what is the world giving birth to now um for me the key to human progress as i've said has been agency uh the belief that i can accomplish good things in the world and what i now want to take you through in about 15 minutes is the science behind agency uh and uh the relationship of my work to that so uh i'm going

to talk about helplessness and efficacy i'm going to talk about optimism and positive psychology and i'm going to talk about perspective and imagination the three great components of agency and three of the major things i've worked on over the last 55 years so let's start with helplessness and efficacy so starting 55 years ago we found that animals and human beings when they were confronted with bad events that they couldn't control inescapable shock inescapable noise unsolvable problems showed something we called learned helplessness they became profoundly passive and unresponsive later on and indeed when we looked in

detail at this if we took the nine major symptoms of human depression and we looked at uh people in the laboratory and animals in the laboratory undergoing helplessness we found eight of the nine symptoms um and so many people came to believe and a lot of the brain science confirmed it that learned helplessness was a good model of human munipolar depression we thought that animals and people had learned that nothing they didn't matter but when steve mayer began to unravel the brain circuitry in rodents underlying helplessness we found out it wasn't learned we found out

it was default and indeed one of the most gratifying things about working for 500 for 50 years in science uh is to find out you were wrong so we were wrong about helplessness it's the human and mammalian default to bad events we curl up but what we acquire is the opposite we acquire efficacy we acquire a belief in mastery we acquire hope for the future and what we've shown over the years is that efficacious people are persistent they keep going in the face of difficulty they're resilient when events like covid death of a child occur

they bounce back rapidly and the mechanism by which people come out who are efficacious is they try harder so specifically uh efficacious people when they're confronted with difficulty do more they try harder very importantly and particularly for you and i'll review some of this literature in about 10 minutes they're healthier their morbidity is lower and they live between six and nine years longer holding constant all the risk factors we know uh uh then non-efficacious pessimistic people and very importantly they're innovative uh they're creative the next area i worked in uh was optimism and where optimism

uh came from in my own work is when we gave inescapable events to humans and animals inescapable noise unsolvable problems of the people in the laboratory never became helpless and i began to wonder starting about 40 years ago what is it about some of you that makes you so resilient and we found out what it was uh and uh we asked the question if we learned from the people who bounced back and they were the optimists it turned out could we teach the rest of human beings their skills to prevent depression so what we found

out was that optimistic people people who go into the laboratory with three kinds of beliefs first that bad events are temporary and not permanent second that bad events are local and not globally ruinous and third that we can do something about bad events that defines optimism there are questionnaires that over five million people have taken and the first thing we found out about optimistic people they're the ones who didn't get depressed who didn't collapse and become helpless in the laboratory and indeed in life we found that optimistic people when bad events occur uh get depressed

at half to one-eighth the rate of pessimistic people people who believe it's going to last forever it's going to ruin everything and there's nothing i can do about it optimistic people succeed and try harder and give up less in school and so we measure things like uh iq and uh optimism and we look at grade point average and we find that optimistic people do better than their iq or augers at school pessimistic people do worse we found the same thing in 30 different professions that are optimistic people sell more life insurance policies than pessimistic people

and indeed in 30 different professions we find that optimistic people do better the one profession you may be able to guess in which pessimists do better law lawyers uh prudence being able to spot the worst that might happens makes you a good lawyer very good but it results in the profession with the highest divorce rate the highest depression rate and the highest suicide rate we find the same thing in sports that optimistic sports heroes olympic swimmers basketball players uh major league baseball optimistic swimmers of basketball players and baseball players do better under pressure pessimistic sports

figures do worse under pressure and uh most interestingly for this audience optimistic people live longer there are now about 20 studies of optimism and length of life uh and i'll tell you about a typical one uh recently a replication with a hundred thousand people but one dutch study a thousand dutch people at age 65 we measure all the risk factors for cardiovascular disease weight cholesterol blood pressure and the like this study waits 20 years a third of these people have died of cardiovascular disease the question is what predicts who dies and the biggest protective factor

is optimism uh indeed pessimism uh when you quantify it as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease contrasting the bottom quartile in pessimism to the upper quartile on the probability of dying from cardiovascular disease it's about equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day optimistic people are happier their subjective well-being is higher and this is what gave rise to positive psychology indeed and importantly in many ways the theme of what i want to tell you today is that having high well-being being agentic is a plausible personal medical corporate and planetary goals and

so it's incumbent on me to say what i mean by well-being so for me there are five different pillars of well-being these are uh over and above suffering over and above oppression what do non-suffering non-oppressed people strive for in life uh these are the pillars the first is positive emotion high subjective well-being the second is being in flow when time stops for you when you're completely at home the third uh component of well-being is good relationships the fourth is meaning mattering and purpose i want to matter and the fifth uh is accomplishment achievement for its

own sake so those are the five pillars of positive psychology positive psychology's mission is to measure these things to build them and very importantly to intervene in life to create more of them now very important to this and now i'm thinking about ed deaner's life work is we've known forever your grandmother knew that if you were healthy and successful in life you would have higher perma you'd be happier you'd have high subjective well-being well positive psychology turns this question around and it says okay that's fine but how about people who are happy to begin with

people who have hyperma people are optimistic what does this cause so i'm about to spend five minutes reviewing about a thousand studies on the effects of optimism and high subjective well-being on the rest of life perma as causal in all of these studies you hold constant to begin with things like how successful people are how healthy they are you know how much perma they have and then you ask over and above the baseline to what extent does perma cause uh different good things in life and here are the outcomes of high subjective well-being uh the

first is that uh optimistic in people with high subjective well-being live longer uh there is less morbidity uh and uh markedly lower mortality and that's holding constant uh what we know about physical risk factors uh people with high subjective well-being are uh have better social relationships uh misery loves company but company does not much like misery uh they're more productive at work uh uh they're better citizens their virtuous behavior is more uh they're more creative and they're more innovative and they're more resilient uh and uh for those of you who uh want to know the

details of this uh the uh uh these have been carried out in of the field called psycho positive psychotherapy and positive education and what these basically show is that there are about a dozen exercises that reliably raise agency reliably raise efficacy and optimism we're still trying to find out if imagination is teachable but the best reference for looking at the details of these interventions is a book that tayab rasheed and i put together called positive psychotherapy and i refer you to that the final thing that i worked on uh and that leads me to my

speculations about the future is uh imagination imagination being the range of scenarios that we envision that we can be efficacious in psychology from its beginning was very highly deterministic it believed that if we knew everything about the past and everything about the present and that if we studied memory and we studied what was going on now perception and motivation that we could predict the future and this has been an enormous failure psychology has not been able to predict the future and the reason for this in my mind is that we are not determined by the

past and the present rather we metabolize the past and present we uh select from the past the nutrients for the future and we excrete the toxins and the ballast and that leads to the psychology of imagination uh 50 of you right now if i stopped you and asked you what you were thinking would not be thinking about the present or the past fifty percent of you would be planning for the future thinking about the future and indeed there is a growing psychology of imagination the most important discovery in this field uh of the last 20

years is that we know the circuit in which imagination occurs and so pervasive is the circuit that when you put people in the donut and you look at fmri and you ask them uh to do an external problem like listen to a lecture uh do mental arithmetic and you uh chart uh what lights up in the brain you always have to have a control group the control group you say just lay there and don't don't do anything uh well what emerges from these literally a thousand studies is that what lights up in your brain when

you're asked to do an external task is very noisy you can track it down if you're a good statistician uh but it's not terrifically replicable but what lights up in the brain when i ask you just to lie there and don't do anything is so regular that it's called the default circuit it is a circuit that lights up if i ask you to imagine your future that's what we do that's what the brain does in default we are homo prospectus and as a result there are now endeavors in which we are trying to make people

better perspectives of the future but unlike uh efficacy and optimism which we know how to teach if anyone tells you they know how to make people more creative uh hold on to your wallet for now uh this all leads uh to the work on resilience and post-traumatic growth and it's with this i want to conclude because it's relevant to the postcovid world about 13 years ago the chief of staff the united states army george casey came to me and we launched a program to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder and to produce more post-traumatic growth and what

we found was that the same programs that raised efficacy and optimism in the schools and in psychotherapy prevented uh ptsd uh in the american military and increased post-traumatic growth and there were three basic findings of this uh first we could prevent it by teaching people the skills of resilience and positive psychology but secondly we could predict who was going to have ptsd this is highly relevant to covid today so uh this is based on a million a million soldiers when you join the army you take a a questionnaire that we've written called the g.a.t and

it has on it uh optimism pessimism questions and catastrophizing questions questions like when when bad things happen everything unravels uh it's the catastrophizers who are between 200 and 300 percent more likely when confronted with uh combat uh to come down with ptsd we also find that we can predict exemplary performance so in the course of five years uh 12 of these million soldiers won awards either for heroism or exemplary exemplary job performance and very interestingly uh we could predict this quite reliably it was the people who at the outset had high subjective well-being happy people

people with high positive emotion low negative emotion and high life satisfaction we're much more likely to win awards it tells you hire happy people and if you have unhappy people use the programs to create resilience now this brings me to my final remarks about covid um let me say something about what we know about covid uh from the research that's been going on during the covet period and what this tells us about the prospects postcovid first i have a very simple theory of human development there's a period of expansion teenage early adulthood uh finding a

mate finding work and then there's a period of contraction which occurs later in life and that's when you already have a mate and you have your work and you know what you love and you do it what we found is that it's people in the period of expansion who have been interrupted by covid whereas people my age who are in periods of contraction uh have either not been disrupted or shown post-traumatic growth uh same with old versus young people it's the young people who have been more disrupted by kovid even though it kills the old

people at a greater rate poor people have been more disrupted than rich people surprisingly in the united states political polarization occurred i had fought remembering the data from the the blitz in 1939 and 40 in london uh when the blitz began london was ringed with psychiatric uh uh emergency wards it was predicted that three million psychiatric casualties would occur in london um three months later they closed up there were no psychiatric casualties during the blitz and that's because brits unified against a common enemy and so what i thought that would happen with covid a common

non-human enemy so i've been dismayed to see we got polarization or and not uh unity about fighting this enemy we found that we could predict uh ptsd among people or covid catastrophizers and it's basically because there's a genetics of anxiety and depression some of you are predisposed to it and kovid has activated uh anxiety and depression so people who are prone to it uh have become more anxious and depressed so we can predict ptsd and we've found we can intervene by the uh resilience of programs to build well-being the main statistical effect we found uh

during covid is we measure it i don't think of mental illness and mental health as a dichotomy rather there's something in between the absence of mental illness does not lead to mental health there is this enormous purgatory in between and that's languishing it's not being mentally ill but it's not having hyperma either and statistically what we've found is that during covid particularly among uh the younger people uh many people have moved from flourishing high perma to languishing so one of our tasks as uh leaders and teachers and coaches and parents and physicians uh is to

build uh optimism now uh uh there is reason to believe that uh the kind of leadership that we need now is a leadership of optimism and hope and we need that leadership uh to be teaching in the schools uh and in corporations and in nations a psychology of hope and so uh i believe that an age of agency awaits us this is where the age of progress has been going if we can overcome the covid pandemic and this looks very promising now with the vaccines and with the treatment of kovid and we can avoid possible

economic collapse war racial warfare and climate catastrophe so i want to conclude in the following way what i've said in the last 45 minutes is that if we look at human history when humans believe in agency when humans believe their efficacious that's when progress occurs when their religion and philosophy tells them it's not human efficacy it's gods or the gods or chants that do it that's when you get stagnation and lack of progress uh the age of progress worked uh and uh indeed if we can overcome the present barriers and teach more efficacy more optimism

more imagination uh more human agency uh a new world awaits us now i believe the world is turning and it is vouchsafe to you uh as uh medical practitioners in ireland not just to watch the turning of the world but it is vouchsafe to you to turn the world now there are two views of what the world is giving birth to one was the great irish poet in 1920 uh william butler yates's view uh the pessimistic view uh yates asks uh uh what what monster what creature is now slouching its way to bethlehem to be

born that's the pessimistic view many people have it on the other hand i want to contrast uh juliana of norwich 1365. uh juliana was a monk in a cell outside of manchester um uh she had to be called julian in order to be a monk you had to have a a male name and in the middle of the black plague which by every criteria was much worse than covid a third to half of the european population dies there's no safety net there's no zoom uh no one knew the causes of what was going on 1365

in the middle of this here's what juliana of norwich said and it is my view of what the world is giving birth to now uh he said not thou shalt not be tempestif he said not thou shalt not be travailed he said not thou shalt not be diseased he said thou shalt not be overcome and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well thank you thank you professor seligman for that wonderful thought-provoking and inspiring presentation you've given our audience some great insights and a great deal to

think about and to work with and apply in their daily lives we're now going to move to to the questions and answer session i might start by continuing with the covet theme it's very difficult to discuss positive psychology without addressing our current global situation in relation to covet 19. the covet pandemic is being described as a once-in-a-century event and is still causing devastation in areas of the world yet despite the massive impact of this pandemic people are identifying silver linings from the experience what do you think are the psychological positives from the experience of this

pandemic well it's very interesting that the black plague uh that giuliana was right that the black plague within 50 years afterwards gave rise to the renaissance in that case the mechanism was that a third of people were killed and it was the first time that social mobility occurred in almost a thousand years in europe so the question is what what will covid give rise to uh what is being born and uh uh there's been interruption in the lives of young people and uh uh i think what we're learning about is what we value what we

can get along without i haven't spent uh a penny on new clothes in the last year and what we can now have a better time with and so for me uh the existence of zoom and interestingly i'm hard of hearing and so for the first time in the last 20 years i have subtitles i wouldn't have had this in the black plague uh so i can hear what's going on i could hear ann's question so i think we're giving birth to a society in which we're resetting our priorities we're asking uh what works and what

doesn't work and so far what we're seeing at least in the united states and in china as nations are coming out of kovid is a burst of prosperity a burst of re-employment and i i think we can look forward to that as well we also know who's been most hurt by it we've learned we could predict who's been most hurt by it and psychologically what i've said we have reason to believe that if we lead and we teach optimism and well-being we can assist the world to come out of covid better than when it started

so my great hope is we are in for a period of post-traumatic growth thanks martin that was a tremendously positive overview of progress that's been made in the last 100 to 200 years i i was reading aaron dottie roy recently and she said something interesting about pandemics that they they often act as portals between the current world and and the future world and hopefully we'll see some positives coming out of this current uh pandemic the question i want to ask you goes to the idea of us being negatively biased that we're more aware of the

negatives and the positives around us as we go through our lives and that to some extent is driven by the media so when you're looking at progress and thinking about positive progress we've made people don't know a lot about that so how does the media influence us to the degree that generally what it reports is is negative it's uh the job of the media it seems to be its remit to tell us what's wrong uh a little story karen about uh encounter i had with uh bill moyers who is the dean of american uh media

about a decade ago he came to the university of pennsylvania uh to speak about uh news and his thesis was that uh journalism uh the remit for journalism uh was to uncover what was hidden and i was chosen as the discussant and what i said to mr moyers was uh imagine bill that uh journalism was a hundred percent successful and it told us everything that was hidden and everything that was wrong and imagine even that it could undo those things where would we get to zero and that is because there is a world over and

above the absence of what's wrong there is a world of what's right what is the media's vision of nobility a virtue of a positive human future and so one of the unfortunate things karen about media it's its job to talk about what's wrong um it's not just the media by the way for ireland so as i read irish literature there is a long history of pessimism yates i think for the most part exemplifies it as well so i think the media uh a history of much irish pessimism uh both feed into uh the question of

this this monster uh slouching its way to bethlehem to be born but uh covet is opening up a world of possibilities a world we've not seen before uh while it's not headlines it is remarkable that in china and in the united states and in the nations that are coming out of covid you're seeing six percent growth uh in a a very sharp way uh and i think we've learned a great deal technologically and biologically uh the creation of an anti-viral that we could be immunized with within uh uh a year is one of the great

achievements of of medical and biological science so um uh we we must balance off yates and uh media uh pessimism uh with giuliana of norwich in my view thanks martin i love your reference there to yates uh i heard a great story about yates uh describing one of his friends who was irish he said that his uh abiding sense of melancholy uh sustained him through temporary periods of joy uh but the question i want to to ask you about is this state of languishing that you've spoken about and it's particularly relevant in the current uh

pandemic this state that many of us find ourselves in where it's not a it's not a mental illness as such but we're not happy uh and we don't have a sense of well-being either so for people listening uh tonight what would your advice be for us in terms of how we we move out of this state of languishing into a happier more positive sense of well-being despite of course still being dealing with a pandemic well we we know two things about from positive psychology uh about this first is during a lockdown the following data are

relevant so um sheldon cohn at pittsburgh has been interested in what psychological states uh are antiviral and what cohn did was to take several hundred volunteers isolate them and inject rhinoviruses into their nose and then ask the question who got a cold a rhinovirus is a coronavirus by the way and and uh who resisted getting colds very interestingly optimism and pessimism had no effect on getting infected what did have an effect was a high subjective well-being cheerful fun-loving smiling having a good time so the first uh lesson from positive psychology is during the lockdown have

as much fun as you possibly can i know it's difficult to do in lockdown but good food we bought a puppy sex love dancing music uh good cheer uh and the irish are very good at that uh so that may prevent infection a bit but coming out of kovid what we need is optimism that's what we know builds resilience and uh we know quite a bit about how to build optimism the single best uh thing we know and these are the things that are taught in resilience training is first uh to recognize the most catastrophic

thing you're saying to yourself covet has ruined my life i'm never going to be able to get back to work i'm never going to be re-employed and then to argue rationally against it and that is well people are getting jobs again the world is opening up the rate of rehiring in ireland is now uh higher than it was uh uh two years ago so argue rationally against your most catastrophic uh thinking uh when you hear a voice that says i'm unlovable i'm a reject i'll never i'll never find another job treat that voice as if

it was said by another person whose mission in life was to make you miserable and argue against it what you say there about optimism i think is is really tremendous martin and of course we're aware of your your pioneering research in relation to optimism and the link between that and agency and it struck me listening to you that a lot of what we're trying to do here uh in the rcsi is really to start giving people more control and to empower them more in relation to optimizing their own health and well-being and ann is doing

this at the under in the undergraduate program we're doing it with the public and at postgraduate level so i'd be interested to hear your comments on the importance of agency particularly as as you see it in relation to empowering people to look after their own health and well-being indeed all of our data tell us that when people are agent when they are more empowered when they more optimistic and believing in the future and believing in their own powers that their uh morbidity is lower and mortality is lower but i have to say that one other

thing happened during kovid that goes in the other direction karen and i can't forget it and that is gratitude about medicine and science it is just a remarkable achievement uh both politically and more so scientifically that a vaccine was developed within a year it wasn't developed by me it wasn't developed by you it was developed by other people and so i'm enormously grateful to medicine and science more grateful than i've ever been in my life before so on the one hand we want to increase our own empowerment on the other hand we have a lot

of reason for actually in many ways to be enormously grateful to science and medicine marty i might finish by asking one more question you've presented very powerful evidence for the power of positive psychology and its implications for good physical health and well-being how might we communicate the benefits and the skills of positive psychology and of agency at a population level i think this is a political question in many ways the data i i think are in i mean we have 20 well done studies now that show us that uh optimism high subjective well-being are major

protective factors uh for uh against illness and against death and now the question is uh disseminating that and educating people about it the data are in and what we need now is the right teaching the right public education the right uh public relations and the right politicians to lead us excellent marty thank you very much it's been a real pleasure talking to you today and we're hugely appreciative for the time that you've taken to be with us it's been fantastic martin to hear your your integration of your life's work in positive psychology thank you very

much for that and i also want to thank you for your tremendous support for us here at the rcsi as we move forward on our journey to improving health and well-being that concludes our questions and anxious discussion i wish to extend my very sincere thanks again to professor martin seligman for joining us today i will now hand over to professor hannah mcgee dean of the faculty of medicine and health sciences for her closing remarks [Music] thank you professor hickey professor seligman thank you for that most insightful and thought-provoking presentation may i also extend a thank

you to our rcc contributors professor ann hickey and professor kirin boyle for facilitating today's discussion the covert crisis has accelerated a global focus on well-being we already know that the pandemic will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications not least on our resilience and on our mental health never before has the rcsi mission to educate nurture and discover for the benefit of human health being so important through our csi my health we are committed to empowering people to make informed decisions about their own health and well-being and the series will continue to provide credible and accessible sources

of health information to the public finally my thanks to you our viewers for your engagement with the rcsi my health series and taking the time to join us for today's discussion with our distinguished guest professor martin seligman we hope you have found today's presentation and discussion of interest that you have learned about how applying the scientific principles of positive psychology can enhance health and well-being and that you feel inspired about your own capacity to imagine and create a more positive future please visit the rcsi website for further information on previous and future my health series

events from all of us here at rcsi university of medicine and health sciences thanks for watching and stay safe you