Background and Research

Psychologist Dr. Martin E. Seligman University of Pennsylvania "The Optimistic Child" "Learned Optimism"

One example of the incorporation of the work of others in our design process is how we used the work of Dr. Martin E. Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and later the President of the American Psychological Association and psychologist-of-the-decade for the 1990’s. His work, in the 1990’s was to construct a short, impactful program which was tested in Philadelphia’s school system - which was pointed towards preventing depression in depression-prone youth in Grades 5 and 6.

The 12 hour intervention with these youth was so successful that it reduced the number of youth in the group who could reasonably have been expected to become depressed in the ensuing years from 44% to 22%.

The program has been fined-tuned and imporved upon over the years , both by Dr. Seligman and others. The results currently are even better - and the program was successively “downloaded” from psychologists, first to teachers, and eventually to parents - while maintaining the same or better results. This program is laid out in his two books on the subject - Learned Optimism and The Optimistic Child.

An adaptation of the program was made available to every school on Australia in 2005 - and is available to every student who needs it.

We found it easy to fold Dr. Seligman’s work into our own. Seligman was using a method called simulation gaming - around which our colleague, Ken Victor had already developed programs - and which Dr. Brian Bailey had been using to train Revenue Canada executives as far back as 1990. We felt right at home with Seligman’s work because we had used the same methods.

Seligman's use of simulation was to find ways to get youth who had incorporated pessimistic thinking into their repertoire to review their thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of negative events in their lives - then to simulate in their own minds alternatives to the pessimism which they regularly brought to the event - and which predicted how they would integrate such events into their lives. Learning was remarkably fast and effective. In a mere 12 hours, pessimistic youth can learn how to reprogram their thinking so that future outcomes are not tainted by past failures.

We make use of Seligman's work in designing how debriefing after challenge events would be conducted. - and particular in the design of "High Council" - the aspect of our program which brings the youth who have just undertaken a challenge - to a discussion amongst themselves and adult mentors about what they have learned.

Further references to Dr. Seligman's work will be seen on the Applied Research Page