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

As director of the

rcsi

university of medicine and health sciences, it is a personal pleasure to welcome you to this conference of

rcsi

my health,

positive

psychology

and

human

progress

agency

, which will be given by

professor

martin

seligman

of the university of Pennsylvania At RCSI Our Mission is to Educate, Nurture and Discover for the Benefit of Human Health The My Health and Positive Psychology Lecture Series bring together two of the most important activities at RCSI In support of this mission First, the RCSI My Health Series is part of the university's commitment to improving

human

health by sharing expert-driven health care information with the public as educators and researchers, we have a responsibility to use our knowledge and discovery to foster improvements in health and education in our communities, our societies and all over the world.

This year has demonstrated more than ever the value of evidence. Health information based on health information and the role of academics, doctors and scientists in helping the public understand more about their own health. RCSI is fully committed to the United Nations sustainable development goals, as evidenced by our joint second place position in the world in higher education university times. 2021 Impact Rankings for Good Health and Wellbeing The university's global standing in this category reflects our singular focus on improving human health for the benefit of patient and global communities. The second main focus of rcsi is to educate and nurture health professionals and by extending to their patients the life skills necessary not only to sustain them in their practice but to support them to thrive in serving 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.

Drawing on the insights of Professor Martin Seligman, through a

positive

education program and our Center for Positive Psychology and Health, we work to provide our graduates with the life skills to thrive in the modern healthcare environment. I now invite Professor Anne Hickey, Vice Dean of Positive Education at RCSI, to introduce My Health guest lecturer, Professor Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you Professor Kelly, it is my great pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker, Professor Martin Seligman. Martin is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Positive Psychology 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 strength and well-being. Martin is one of the most influential and popular psychologists of our generation. He has written more than 350 academic publications and 30 books, including best-selling and award-winning books such as Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, 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 william james award in basic sciences, the cattell award for the application of Science and three Lifetime Awards for Distinguished Scientists from the American Psychological Association, most recently the APA Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology in 2017.

In 1996, Martin was elected president of the American Psychological Association. of psychology by the largest vote in modern history Martin's mission is the attempt to transform the social sciences to work on the best things in life, including human strengths, positive emotions, good relationships, meaning and human flourishing in recognition of his Exceptional contribution and advancements to the field of psychology, Professor Seligman has recently received the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences' highest academic award, the Honorary Doctorate of Science, The RCSI community is delighted and honored to give him welcome

professor

seligman

here today to participate in this rcsi my health series event, after today's guest lecture, i will be joined by professor kiran oboyel, director of the rcsi center for positive psychology and health, for a question and session of answers 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 thank you for his kind introduction. It is a great pleasure for me today to speak with the rcsi university of medicine and health sciences today I am going to talk about the central topic that I have been working on for the last 55 years and that is the notion of agency and I am going to talk about agency and its relationship with the human being. progress and I will particularly mention issues of health and success because of the audience, my talk today is in loving memory of my very close colleague Ed Diener Ed is the leading empirical scientist in positive psychology and, as you will see, much of what I have I have to say that he is indebted to his work, so ed, uh, you've missed some of the weather, but we've missed you a lot more, um, pay attention to the swan, uh, when I talk about different exercises to develop agency and Well, uh, the mystery of the Swan will be cleared up, so in the next 45 minutes this is what I'm going to try to do.

I'm going to ask the question of what agency is and I'm going to suggest to you that, in my opinion, agency has three components. one is efficacy and that is the belief that I can achieve a certain goal, the second is optimism, the belief that I can achieve this goal in the future and the third is imagination, the range of goals that you wish you could achieve in life and I'm going to suggest to you that human history has revolved around beliefs in agency and, in particular, when cultures and individuals believe that they are agents, that is, they believe that they can achieve things in the world, that is when we get innovation. and progress and through much of humanity.

In history, because of the theology involved, there has been a belief that humans can't and that only God can or the gods and that's when we get stuck, so I'm going to talk about the history of agency in the West and also I touch on the parallel history of agency in China and in the biblical Mediterranean. As I talk about the history of the agency, I'm going to take us back to 1800, when a huge explosion of human progress occurs, the age of progress, and I know it. There are many people today whose ideology is that there has been no human progress and I want to convince them how fallacious that is and that the notions of our future, the notions of positive psychology and depend largely on believing in human progress, which I'm going to talk about.

The barriers to progress I also think the world is in labor now heading into a new world and the question is what will give birth and I want to talk about the barriers about what will give birth after history has been made. I want to talk about the three domains of agency that I have worked in in my life. The first is helplessness and effectiveness, the second is optimism and positive psychology, and the third is imagination and prospection. These are the three components of agency, being belief. that I can achieve good things in the world, there have been at least three practical outcomes of this work on agency, one is positive psychotherapy, a second is prospective psychotherapy and a third is positive education and I will mention all three and finally I want to talk about the emergence of a post-covid world, what are the barriers and what might await us and finally I will suggest to you that we are giving birth to something new, the first era 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 most importantly, is it a state of mind, is it a belief, is it the immediate cause of action, is it the notion that I can make a positive difference in the world. and it has three different components, the first is efficacy, which is the belief that I can achieve a specific goal with my own actions, the second is future-oriented optimism, which is the belief that I can do this in the future by long term, and the third. it's the imagination, the range of goals that I think I can achieve and the hypothesis that I'm working under is when individuals throughout history, when cultures believe in agency, that's when progress happens and unfortunately much of human history, particularly in the West, has believed in a lack of agency and that's when we stagnate, so basically I'm going to review history in this regard and the question of progress, so let me spend 10 or 15 minutes explaining to you in What have I been working on? the last two years, going through human history and what we can know about how agentic our ancestors were, and if we start with our hunter-gatherer, fishermen ancestors, these are ancestors from before 14,000 BC.

C., approximately, what we know about the hunter. the fishermen-gatherers had agency, they had limited agency, they had efficiency in hunting, gathering and fishing, there is not much evidence that they had optimism, the burial of the dead does not actually occur until the next phase of human history, a exception of cave paintings. uh there's not much evidence of imagination, I think the cave paintings have been overinterpreted and the cave paintings, although imaginative, don't refer to the here and now, by definition they seem to be memories of the great hunt that killed the mastodon or the moment in which we massacred another tribe about 11,000 years ago and due almost entirely to the first major recent global warming, something that may seem trivial to you, but is probably the most momentous occasion for increasing human agency, agriculture begins in Africa and In agriculture we have a lot of evidence, first of all, of effectiveness, but secondly, very importantly, of optimism in agriculture, our ancestors planted seeds in the spring and then they stayed until harvest time and that is a great mentality for the future, in addition, they had a lot of imagination and invention, and we know from the remains of their language that they collected bread wheat, gathered wheat, breaded it, raised domestic animals, buried the dead and thus we have for the first time in history agriculture among our ancestors a clear belief and efficacy about No matter agriculture, but also optimism about the long-term future.

Irrigation occurs for the first time. Grain storage occurs and we also have evidence of imagination. From the year 4000 BC. C. we have our earliest writings, so we are no longer inferring agency from what our ancestors did, but writing begins around 3400 BC. C. in Sumer, and curiously this is the bronze age and, curiously, all the writing and this is not only in Sumer, but it is in Egypt and China, in Mesopotamia, also, there is no human agency. All of scripture is about the gods and what we have both in the Bible as I will say and in the bronze age uh it's a very strong belief that the gods have agency and the gods tell humans what to do uh this is largely measure the mentality of the bronze age and is best seen in the beginnings of the two great poems that begin with the Greco-Roman war, the two Homeric poems, the Iliad, which is definitely the bronze age, is the first, the best that We can say, composed between one hundred and 200 years before the odyssey. those of you who remember Achilles probably also remember that he does nothing 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 to find in the iliad to find uh any human Effectiveness is the gods who have it is very pessimistic uh and uh uh while the gods have imagination uh human beings are largely creatures of the here and now and this changes radically in the next 200 years, we will probably be around 800 BC. now in the odyssey in which we have Odysseus who has a mission a mission with a vision for the future and that is to return to Ithaca uh the gods are there but they have retired uh Odysseus has will and action he has plans for the future he is cunning and he has a great imagination uh and uh in fact this takes us to uh the golden age of Greece which is very strong uh believes in agency uh the whole golden age uh philosophers are highly agentive uh and in fact a Greco-Roman thought since the age of gold to the Stoics and, very importantly, through the early Roman Christian philosophers, highly agentic in the early Christian philosophers of the second and third centuries, human beings can become holy, they can achieve salvation, they will be judged by god for what they achieved, 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 a enormous Greco-Roman progress and this continues until the time of Augustine.

He now he also wanted to trace this in the Bible,so I did a complete lexical analysis of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Here there is science and that is agency, effectiveness, optimism, imagination, I have a lexicon, a dictionary of words, so, for effectiveness, a paradigmatic word is chosen. or decide uh for optimism uh hope is one of the lexicons for the imagination, possible truth are key words, so I analyzed the entire Old Testament and the New Testament through the parallel time of the Greco-Roman era and, in fact, what what you find is that in the old testament the five books of moses and job that were written around 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 the exodus moses meets the burning bush god in the Bush fire and God says to Moses, go and tell Pharaoh, let your 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 stutterer 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 lexical analysis god commands the Israelites to obey this changes in the kings these changes in the last part of the old testament and much in the new testament uh in uh the last part of the new testament the last part of the old testament the new testament highly agent uh much more much less obedience much more effectiveness human efficiency imagination human optimism and human optimism uh, I wanted to know if this was more than just the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews and the Christians, so my colleagues at Xinhua carried out a very important parallel history of China during the same period from the age of bronze. until approximately 200 AD. and basically you see the same pattern that, initially, of this Shang Chinese, Bronze Age Chinese, it's the gods who do things, this changes almost at the same time as the Greco-Roman and biblical cultures not related to human agency and The One thing that the Chinese find when they correlate it with progress in China is that there is not only individual agency but, unlike Greco-Roman agency and biblical agency, there is also collective human agency and what we learned from China is that when Individual agency is high when collective agency is high, you get human progress when the gods do it or when collective agency is so tyrannical as to suppress human agency, collapse occurs and that is pretty much the story of the ancient China, Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman history, and this all culminates uh in Augustine uh uh some of you may call him Saint Augustine I think he's a big bore uh he does something that I think harms the Western world and uh that's uh he presents the thesis uh against pelagius that humans cannot achieve good humans cannot resist temptation and when they do it is only through the grace of God that it happens.

He essentially reverts to a bronze age mentality and this becomes the dominant doctrine, until Aquinas, that humans have no agency except through the grace of god and we enter a thousand years of the middle ages, the first 700 years of which until the time of Abellardo and Aquinas are miserable abs without invention. I know there are apologists for the Middle Ages, but none of them would want to live there. but in any case this is what continues until the florentine renaissance, when the catholic church is liberalizing and there are people like pico and erasmus who claim that human beings have agency, we are like little children, we fall but god picks us up. but we have to have our own driving force to be elevated, so Catholicism for the year 1500 is believing in human agency and then comes the reformation and I think you've got it wrong about the reformation, the reformation is very anti-agent. uh luther and calvin believe in total depravity their augustinians are worse than augustine they believe we are predestined they believe humans have no efficacy uh and uh their view becomes the reformation until about 1660 when it is overthrown by the dutch and the english and this gives rise to the industrial revolution, which is the paradigm of human action, it gives rise to an era of progress and this is what the era of progress looks like.

I know you have colleagues in the English department and the history department who have vested interests. When saying that there has been no human progress, this is what to tell you. Imagine that newspapers only came out once a century. What would be the headline in the newspaper on January 1, 2001 about the 20th century? Life expectancy around the world. would double in the 20th century Remarkable unprecedented event and it is not just that life expectancy doubled in 1800 at the beginning of the industrial revolution. 90 people in the world lived on the equivalent of a dollar a day or less.

Now 10 people in the world live on a dollar a day or less. It went from 9 to 11 during covid, but the most important thing is that yesterday, between breakfast and dinner, a miracle happened: 300,000 people in the world escaped extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is disappearing and I believe it will disappear at the end of many of your lives. literacy during the same period in 1800 only 10 percent of people in the world could read or write by 2016 86 percent both men and women could read or write equally women's right to vote in 1893 only one nation new zealand gave women the right to vote in 2017 there are only two nations in the world where women are not allowed to vote saudi arabia is one and ireland can probably guess which one is the other is the vatican in which women are not allowed to vote freedom in a percentage of people living in democracies one percent in 1816 about 60 percent now hungry if we go back to 1800 90 of the world was malnourished even in 1970 28 of the world was malnourished now 11 of the world is malnourished infant mortality uh in 1800 half-year-old children would die before their fifth birthday, this has been reduced to four percent in 2016.

Of battle deaths, today there are fewer soldiers dying on the battlefield than in any another moment in human history. We have entered what is called the great peace and it is not just about deaths in battle, it is violence in general, um, if you had been born in London 500 years ago, your chances of dying violently would have been between one in fifty and one in hundred, born in London today, your chances of dying violent deaths are one in fifty thousand uh smallpox eradicated cholera typhus completely treatable now and it's not just material things uh education uh in 1860 a new song was copyrighted in 2015 they were released six million new songs so that's human progress that's what uh human progress uh forged now some of you are thinking about progress what nonsense if you look around there are families falling apart the environment is threatened inequality is rising there is political polarization uh suicide anxiety and depression arise and there is systemic racism so these are the things we have to worry about and I will come back to that when I ask the question: what is the world giving birth to now?

For me, the key to human progress, as I said, has been agency, the belief that I can achieve good things in the world. and what I now want to explain to you in about 15 minutes is the science behind the agency uh and uh the relationship of my work to that so I'm going to talk about helplessness and effectiveness. I'm going to talk about optimism and positive attitude. psychology and I'm going to talk about perspective and imagination, the three big components of agency and three of the most important things I've worked on for the last 55 years, so let's start with powerlessness and effectiveness. 55 years ago we discovered that animals and human beings, when faced with bad events that they could not control, inescapable shock, inescapable noise, unsolvable problems, showed something we call learned helplessness, became deeply passive and unresponsive later on, and In fact, when we look at this in detail if we take the nine main symptoms of human depression and we look at people in the laboratory and animals in the laboratory suffering from helplessness, we find eight of the nine symptoms, and many people came to believe and much 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 didn't matter, but when Steve Mayer began to unravel the rodent brain circuits underlying helplessness In fact, one of the most rewarding things about working for 500 for 50 years in science is discovering that you were wrong and that we were wrong about helplessness. It is the human and mammalian defect in the face of bad events. We snuggle, 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 have shown over the years is that effective people are persistent, they keep going in the face of difficulties, they are resilient when events occur such as the death of a child from covid they recover quickly and the mechanism by which people become effective is that they try harder, so specifically, effective people when faced with difficulties do more, they try harder, something very important and particularly for you, and I will review something from this. literature in about 10 minutes they are healthier their morbidity is lower and they live between six and nine years longer keeping constant all the risk factors that we know uh uh so pessimistic people who are not effective and very importantly they are innovative uh they are creative The next area in which work was optimism and where optimism came from in my own work is when we gave unavoidable events to humans and animals inescapable noise unsolvable problems of people in the laboratory were never left defenseless and I began to wonder from the age of 40 years ago, What is it about some of you that makes you so resilient and we found out what it was?

We asked the question: if we learned from the people who recovered and were the optimists, it turned out that we could teach the rest. of humans their abilities to prevent depression, so what we discovered was that optimistic people go to the laboratory with three types 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 the bad events that define optimism. There are questionnaires that have been answered by more than five million people and the first thing we discover about optimistic people are those who did not become depressed, those who did not collapse or become helpless.

In the lab and, in fact, in life, we found that optimistic people, when bad events occur, get depressed at half to one-eighth the rate of pessimistic people, people who believe it's going to last forever, They will ruin everything and there is nothing you can do about it. optimistic people are successful, they try harder and they give up less in school, so we measure things like uh iq and uh optimism and we look at GPA and we find that optimistic people do better than their IQ or augers in school pessimistic people do worse I found the same thing in 30 different professions that are optimistic, people sell more life insurance policies than pessimistic people and in fact in 30 different professions we found that optimistic people do better in the only profession where you can guess how pessimists do better as lawyers. prudence being able to detect the worst that can happen makes you a good lawyer, a very good one, 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 as the optimistic sports heroes, the Olympic swimmers. basketball players uh major league baseball optimistic swimmers of basketball players and baseball players perform better under pressure pessimistic sports figures perform worse under pressure and the most interesting thing for this audience optimistic people live longer now there are about 20 studies about optimism and life span uh and I'll tell you about a typical one, recently a replication with a hundred thousand people, but a Dutch study, a thousand Dutch people at the age of 65, we measured all the risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, 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 greatest protective factor is optimism, in fact, pessimism, when quantified as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, contrasting the lower quartile of pessimism with the upper quartile of pessimism.

The probability of dying from cardiovascular disease is approximately equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day. Optimistic people are happier. Their subjective well-being is greater and this is what gave rise to positive psychology, in fact and importantly. In many ways, the theme of What I want to tell you today is that having high well-being as an agent is a medical goalpersonal, corporate and planetary plausible, so it is up to me to say what I mean by well-being, so for me there are five different pillars of well-being. -be these are, uh, beyond suffering, beyond oppression, why do people who don't suffer and aren't oppressed struggle in life? uh, these are the pillars, the first is positive emotion, a high subjective well-being, the second is flow when time stops for you, when you are completely at home, the third component of well-being is good relationships, the fourth is the meaning and purpose that I want to matter and the fifth is achievement for its own sake, so those are the five pillars of positive. psychology The mission of positive psychology is to measure these things to build them and, very importantly, intervene in life to create more of them.

Now it's very important for this and now I'm thinking about Ed Deaner's life's work. We have known it forever. Your grandmother knew that. If you were healthy and successful in life you would have a higher perma you would be happier you would have high subjective well-being Well, positive psychology turns this question around and says okay, okay, but what about people who are happy to start? People who have hyperma are optimistic, what causes this? 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 these studies. stay consistent to start with things like how successful people are, how healthy they are, do you know how much perma they have and then ask, beyond the baseline, to what extent does perma cause different good things in life and here they are the results of high subjective well-being the first is that optimistic people with high subjective well-being live longer there is less morbidity and notably lower mortality and that remains constant what we know about physical risk factors uh people with high subjective well-being have better social relations uh misery loves company but company doesn't like misery very much uh they are more productive at work uh uh they are better citizens their virtuous behavior is more uh they They are more creative and they are more innovative and they are more resilient uh and uh for those of you who want to know the details of this uh, uh uh, these have been carried out in the field called psychopositive psychotherapy and positive education and what they basically show is that there are about a dozen exercises that increase agency, reliably increase effectiveness and optimism.

We're still trying to figure out if imagination can be taught, but the best reference for looking at the details of these interventions is a The book that Tayab Rasheed and I put together is called positive psychotherapy and I refer you to that. The last thing I worked on that leads me to my speculations about the future is imagination, imagination is the range of scenarios we imagine we can. Being effective in psychology from its beginnings was very deterministic; He 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 happening now, perception and motivation, we could predict the future and This has been a huge failure, psychology has not been able to predict the future and, in my opinion, the reason for this is that we are not determined by the past and the present, but rather we metabolize the past and the present, we select nutrients from the past. for the future and we excrete the toxins and the ballast and that leads to the psychology of imagination. 50 of you right now, if I stopped you and asked you what you're thinking, you wouldn't be thinking about the present or the past, fifty percent of you.

We would be planning the future thinking about the future and, in fact, there is a growing psychology of imagination. The most important discovery in this field in the last 20 years is that we know the circuit in which imagination occurs and it is so pervasive that when you put people on the donut and look at the fmri and ask them to solve an external problem like listen to a lecture. You do mental math and record what lights up in your brain. You always have to have a control group. control group you say just stand there and don't do anything uh well what emerges from these literally a thousand studies is that what turns on in your brain when you're asked to do an external task is very loud and you can track it.

Figure it out if you're a good statistician, eh, but it's not tremendously replicable, but what turns on in the brain when I ask you to just stand there and do nothing is so regular that it's called the default circuit. It's a circuit that lights up if I ask you to imagine your future that's what we do that's what the brain does by default we are homo prospectus and as a result there are now efforts where we are trying to make people have better perspectives of the future. future but unlike uh effectiveness and optimism that we know how to teach if someone tells you they know how to make people more creative, put away your wallet for now, all of this leads you to the work on resilience and post-traumatic growth, and it's with this What I want I conclude because it is relevant for the post-covid world.

About 13 years ago, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, George Casey, came to see me and we launched a program to prevent PTSD and produce more post-traumatic growth, and what we found was that the same programs that increased efficacy and optimism in schools and in psychotherapy prevented post-traumatic stress disorder in the US military and increased post-traumatic growth and there were three basic findings of this. First, we could prevent it by teaching people resilience skills. and positive psychology, but secondly, we could predict who was going to have PTSD, this is very relevant to covid today, so this is based on a million soldiers, when you join the military, you answer a questionnaire that we have written called g.a.t and it has in it uh optimism pessimism questions and catastrophic questions questions like when bad things happen everything falls apart uh it's the catastrophists who are 200 to 300 percent more likely when faced with combat uh of getting PTSD we also found that we can predict exemplary performance, so over the course of five years, 12 of these million soldiers won awards for heroism or exemplary job performance, and interestingly, we were able to predict this from Quite reliably, it was the people who initially had high subjective well-being. happy people people with high positive emotions, low negative emotions and high life satisfaction, we are much more likely to win awards, that tells you to hire happy people and if you have unhappy people, use programs to build resilience.

Now this brings me to my final comments on covid um let me say something about what we know about covid uh from the research that has been done during the greed period and what this tells us about the postcovid outlook first I have a theory very simple of human development there is a period of adolescent expansion early adulthood, finding a partner, finding a job and then there is a period of contraction that occurs later in life and that is when you already have a partner and you have your job and you know what that you love and do it.

What we found is that these are people in the expansion period that have been interrupted by Covid, while people my age who are in contraction periods have not been interrupted or have shown post-traumatic growth. The same goes for the elderly versus the young, it is the young who have been most disrupted by kovid. Even though it kills older people at a higher rate, the poor have been more disturbed than the rich, surprisingly political polarization occurred in the United States. I had struggled remembering the facts of the bombing in 1939 and '40 in London, uh, when the bombing started.

I was surrounded by psychiatric emergency rooms it was predicted that there would be three million psychiatric casualties in London three months later they closed there were no psychiatric casualties during the Blitz and that's because the British united against a common enemy and then what I thought would happen with covid as a common non-human enemy, so I have been dismayed to see that we have polarization or no unity to fight this enemy. We found that we could predict PTSD among people or Covid catastrophists and it's basically because there is genetics. of anxiety and depression, some of you are predisposed to it and kovid has activated anxiety and depression, so people who are prone to it have become more anxious and depressed, so we can predict post-traumatic stress disorder and we have discovered that we can intervene through resilience.

Of the programs to generate well-being, the main statistical effect that we found during covid is that we measure it. I don't think of mental illness and mental health as a dichotomy, but rather there is something in between: the absence of mental illness does not lead to mental health. there is this huge purgatory in the middle and that is languishing, it is not having a mental illness, but it is not having hyperma and statistically what we have found is that during covid, particularly among the younger ones, many people have gone from a flourishing high perma to languish so much.

One of our tasks as leaders, teachers, coaches, parents and doctors is to generate optimism now, there is reason to believe that the type of leadership we need now is a leadership of optimism and hope, and we need it. leadership, to be teaching in schools, and in corporations and in nations, a psychology of hope, so I think an era of agency awaits us, this is where the era of progress has gone if we can overcome the pandemic of covid and this. It looks very promising now with the vaccines and with the kovid treatment and we can avoid a possible economic collapse, war, race war and climate catastrophe, so I want to conclude as follows, what I have said in the last 45 minutes is that yes we look in human history when humans believe in agency when humans believe in their efficacy that is when progress happens when their religion and philosophy tell them that it is not human efficacy it is the gods or the gods or songs that do it there it's when there is stagnation and lack of progress in the era of progress it worked uh and uh in fact if we can overcome the current barriers and teach more effectiveness more optimism more imagination uh more human agency uh a new world awaits us now I think the world is changing and it is safe for you uh as medical practitioners in Ireland to not only watch the world turn but it is safe for 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 the vision of william butler yates uh the pessimistic view uh yates asks uh uh what monster what creature is now sliding towards Bethlehem to be born that is the pessimistic vision that many people have, on the other hand I want to contrast uh juliana of norwich 1365. uh juliana was a monk in a cell on the outskirts of manchester um uh she had to be called julian to be a monk you had to have a male name and in the middle of the black plague which by all standards was much worse than covid between a third and half of the European population dies there is no safety net there is no zoom uh nobody knew the causes of what was happening 1365 in the middle of this this is what Juliana of Norwich said and it is my vision of what the world is giving to light now uh he said no you will not be tempestuous he said no you will not suffer labor pains he said no you will not be sick he said you will not be defeated and all will be well and all will be well and all will be well thank you, thank you Professor Seligman for that wonderful, thought-provoking and inspiring presentation. .

You have given our audience great ideas and a lot to think about, work on, and apply in their daily lives. Now we will move on to the question and answer session. I might start by continuing with the theme of greed. It is very difficult to talk about positive psychology without addressing our current global situation regarding greed 19. The greed pandemic is described as a once in a century event and is still causing devastation in areas of the world, however, Despite the massive impact of this pandemic, people are identifying positive aspects of the experience, what do you think are the positive psychological aspects of the experience of this pandemic?

Well, it's very interesting that the Black Death, uh, that Giuliana was right, that the Black Death The plague within 50 years after that gave rise to the rebirth, in that case the mechanism was that a third of the people died and it was the first time that social mobility occurred in almost a thousand years in Europe, so the question is what will give rise to covid. to uh what is being born and uh uh there has been a disruption in the lives of young people and uh uh I think what we are learning is what we value that we can manage without I haven't spent a penny on new clothes in the last year and with what now we can spend abest time and, for me, the existence of Zoom and, interestingly, I am hard of hearing and for the first time in the last 20 years, I have subtitles that I would not have.

I had this in the black plague, so I can hear what's going on. I could hear Ann's question, so I think we are giving rise to a society where we are resetting our priorities, asking ourselves what works and what doesn't. work and so far what we are 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 reemployment and I think we can expect that too, we know that too. We have learned who has been harmed most and, psychologically, what I have said we have reason to believe that if we lead and teach optimism and well-being we can help the world to come.

We came out of Covid better than when it started, so my great hope is that a period of post-traumatic growth awaits us. Thanks Martin, it was a tremendously positive overview of the progress that has been made over the last 100 to 200 years. He was reading Aaron Dottie Roy. Recently, he said something interesting about pandemics: They often act as portals between the current world and the future world, and hopefully we will see some positive aspects of this current pandemic. The question I want to ask you goes to the idea. that we have a negative bias, that we are more aware of the negatives and positives around us as we go through our lives and that, to some extent, is driven by the media, so when you look at progress and think in positive progress, I have made people not know much about that, so how do the media influence us to the extent that generally what they report is negative?

It's the media's job, it seems to be their purview to tell us what's wrong, kind of. Karen's story about the meeting I had with Bill Moyers, who is the dean of American media about a decade ago, he came to the University of Pennsylvania to talk about news and his thesis was that journalism, the purpose of journalism was to discover what was hidden and they chose me as a commentator and what I told mr. moyers was imagine bill that journalism was one hundred percent successful and told us everything that was hidden and everything that was wrong and imagine even that you could undo those things where we would reach zero and that is because there is a world above the absence of what is wrong there is a world of what is right what is the vision of the nobility of the means a virtue of a positive human future and therefore both one of The Unfortunate Things, Karen, about the media.

Her job is to talk about what's wrong. It's not.By the way, just the media for Ireland, so as I read Irish literature there is a long history of pessimism, yachts, I think for the most part it also exemplifies that, so I think the media has a story of a lot of Irish pessimism, both fuel the question of this, this monster, uh, leans towards Bethlehem to be born, but uh, greed is opening up a world of possibilities, a world we haven't seen before, uh, even if they aren't headlines, it is notable that in China, in the United States and in the nations that are emerging from covid are seeing six percent growth, in a very marked way, and I think we have learned a lot technologically and biologically, the creation of a antiviral with which we could be immunized within. uh uh a year is one of the great achievements of medical and biological science so um uh we must balance yates and uh media uh pessimism uh with giuliana of norwich in my opinion thanks martin I love your reference to yates uh I heard a great story about yachting, which describes one of his friends who was Irish, and said that his permanent sense of melancholy sustained him during temporary periods of joy, but the question I want to ask you is about this state of languor that you are in.

I've talked about it and it's particularly relevant in the current pandemic, this state that many of us find ourselves in where it's not a mental illness as such, but we're not happy and we don't have a sense of well-being. That being the case for people listening, tonight, what would be your advice to us in terms of how we get out of this state of languor into a happier, more positive sense of well-being despite, of course, still dealing with a pandemic? I know two things about positive psychology, the first is during lockdown, the following data is relevant, so Sheldon Cohn in Pittsburgh has been interested in what psychological states are antiviral and what Cohn did was take several hundred volunteers, isolate them and inject them. rhinovirus in the nose and then ask who caught a cold, a rhinovirus is a coronavirus, by the way, and who resisted catching a cold.

It is very interesting that optimism and pessimism had no effect when infected, what did have an effect was high subjective well-being. be cheerful, fun loving, smile, have a good time, so the first positive psychology lesson is during lockdown, have as much fun as you can, I know it's hard to do in lockdown, but good food, we bought a puppy , sex, I love dancing, music, uh. Good cheer, and the Irish are very good at that, so that may prevent infection a little bit, but coming out of Kovid, what we need is optimism, that's what we know builds resilience and we know quite a bit about how to build optimism from The best way.

The first thing we know and these are the things that are taught in resilience training is to recognize the most catastrophic thing that you are saying to yourself. Greed has ruined my life. I will never be able to work again. I'm never going to be employed again and then rationally argue against it and that's a good thing, people are getting jobs again, the world is opening up, the reemployment rate in Ireland is now higher than it was two years ago, so argue rationally. against your most catastrophic thought uh when you hear a voice that says I'm not worthy of being loved I'm a reject I'll never find another job treat that voice as if it were spoken by another person whose mission in life was to make you miserable and argue against it From what you say there about optimism, I think it's really tremendous, Martin, and of course we're aware of your pioneering research around optimism and the link between that and agency, and I was interested to hear it. you that a lot of what we're trying to do here at the rcsi is really start to give people more control and empower them more around optimizing their own health and well-being and ann is doing this at the bottom of the undergraduate program we are doing it with the public and at the graduate level, so I would be interested to hear your comments on the importance of agency, particularly as you see it in relation to empowering people to take care of their own health and welfare.

In fact, all our data tells us that when people are agents, when they have more power, when they are more optimistic and believe in the future and believe in their own powers, their morbidity and mortality are lower, but I have to say that something else It happened during Kovid going in the other direction Karen and I can't forget it and it's the gratitude for medicine and science. It is simply a remarkable achievement, both politically and scientifically, that a vaccine has been developed in one year. It was not developed by me, it was not developed by you, it was developed by other people, so I am enormously grateful to medicine and science, more grateful than ever in my life, so on the one hand, we want to increase. our own empowerment, on the other hand, we have many reasons to, in fact, in many ways, be enormously grateful to science and medicine marty.

I might end by asking one more question: you have presented very powerful evidence of the power of positive psychology and its implications for good physical health and well-being. How might we communicate the benefits and skills of positive psychology and agency at a population level? ? I think this is a political question in many ways, I think the data is there, I mean we have 20, well. There have been studies that show us that optimism and high subjective well-being are important protective factors for illness and death and now the question is to spread that and educate people about it.

The data is available and what we need now is the right teaching the right public education the right public relations and the right politicians to guide us excellent marty thank you very much, it has been a real pleasure talking to you today and we greatly appreciate the time you have taken to be with you For us, it's been fantastic, Martin, to hear your integration of your life's work into positive psychology. Thank you so much for that and I also want to thank you for the tremendous support you give us here at the rcsi as we move forward on our journey to better health. and well-being that concludes our questions and anxious discussion.

I would like to extend my 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. Thank you, Professor Hickey, Professor Seligman, thank you for that very insightful and thought-provoking presentation. Can I also extend a thank you to our rcc collaborators, Professor Ann Hickey and Professor Kirin Boyle, for facilitating today's discussion? The covert crisis has accelerated a global focus on well-being. As we already know that the pandemic will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications, especially on our resilience and mental health, never before has rcsi's mission to educate, nurture and discover for the benefit of human health been 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 commitment to rcsi. my health series and taking the time to join us for today's discussion with our distinguished guest professor martin seligman, we hope that you found today's presentation and discussion interesting and that you learned about how the application of the scientific principles of Positive psychology can improve health and well-being. be and feel inspired about your own ability to imagine and create a more positive future. Visit the rcsi website for more information on past and upcoming events in my health series from all of us here at rcsi university of medicine and health sciences.

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