Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman—renowned worldwide as the “father of Positive Psychology”—has led visionary leaps in the scientific research, empirical data and personal understandings of human flourishing. This course explores the past, present and future of positive psychology as a journey through the key scientific leaps led by Dr. Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center and Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. There are no prerequisites.
Stage 6: Whole Force Resilience
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science
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University of Pennsylvania
1422 ratings
Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology
From the lesson
The Skills of Well-being Can Be Learned, Taught, and Transformative
In this module, Dr. Martin Seligman shares the great leaps in scientific understanding that created the foundation for a science of well-being at individual, communal, and global levels.
Meet the Instructors
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology & Director, Positive Psychology Center
Positive Psychology Center
[MUSIC]
Whereupon General Casey did a couple of remarkable things.
First, he said, well, I should describe General Casey's position in the Army.
He had been the Head of the Iraq War and
had recently been moved upstairs by President Bush to Chief of
Staff where David Petraeus took his place and began the surge.
And in this context, General Casey said
I aim to create an army that is just as psychologically fit as physically fit.
And here' how I want to do it.
The General staff has read your work on positive education and
we see that you teach teachers the skills of resilience and
positive psychology, and they then teach it to the students and
you measure how the students do.
Well, that's the Army model.
And I said, it is, sir?
Yes.
Said, we have 40,000 teachers in the Army.
Said, really?
Said yes, the drill sergeants.
So your job, Professor Seligman,
will be to train all the drill sergeants in resilience and positive psychology.
And they will train the 1.1 million soldiers and
we will measure what the effect is on the force.
Another thing that General Casey did, which is different from anything I had
experienced, whenever you have a good idea or I have a good idea,
we'd try to convince our colleagues to do it.
General Casey ordered that from that day forward, positive psychology and
resilience would be taught throughout the entire United States Army.
And he allocated $125 million to do it.
And the next thing he did was, there was a female brigadier general
sitting on each extreme of this gleaming table.
And I knew one of them, General Laurie Sutton.
She's a general who has wounded soldiers do Greek tragedy.
And gets them to out their negative emotions.
That's not at all my kind of intervention.
And so I was relieved when General Casey said I want you to work
with Rhonda Cornum, the Brigadier General at the other side of the table.
And he said, she's the Chief Urologist of the United States Army.
I thought he said neurologist.
So, I said, I'll be delighted to work with a neurologist.
[LAUGH] Well, that was where Ronda and I started.
He said, you and Ronda come back
in 60 days and report to me.
So, Rhonda comes up to the University of Pennsylvania the next day,
she drives her RV up.
And I get to meet [COUGH] one of the most remarkable human beings I've every met.
She the Head of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, the program.
And my job is the Chief Civilian Advisor.
And we have two task before us.
The first is to develop a test of resilience and well being.
So, the Army tests everything, but it's usually the negative stuff.
So, they don't test things like how happy are you,
how much meaning do you have, what are your strengths, and the like.
So, Rhonda and I immediately
assemble about 10 people, five military, five civilian,
under Chris Petersen the day before Christmas, we're moving very quickly.
And this group writes a 140 item test
of positive psychology resilience,
as well as the usual variables.
And we, so they write a test.
And then the second thing that needs to be done is to teach
resilience, and to teach positive psychology.
So, it's now 60 days later, we go to the Pentagon again.
And it's the same assemblage of all these generals around the table.
And General Casey says report and Rhonda says,
sir we've developed a test, it's called the Global Assessment Tool
for resilience and for positive psychology and we piloted it with 10,000 soldiers.
This gives you an idea of the scale at which the Army is moving.
So 10,000 people have taken this and they psychometrically validate it, and
General Casey says, good.
general occasions as good.
What are you and Marty going to do next?
And Rhonda says, well we'd like to run a pilot study on teaching
positive psychology and resilience to the Army.
So, we'd like to take 100 drill sergeants and
5,000 troops and 100 control drill sergeants.
Whereupon, General Casey interrupts and says,
soldier, talking to General Cornum, we're at war.
I don't want a pilot study.
We've read the literature on positive education, it's sufficient.
I want you to roll this out across the United States Army.
Move out soldier, and he leaves.
So, where we are is under orders to teach this, we want to do a pilot study.
He said by the time pilot results are in, the war will be over and
won't do anyone any good.
So, Karen Reivich joins us, we take our manual for
teachers and we adapt it with the the help of colonels, captains,
and corporals to change it for the United States Army.
So, we wrote the manual and then for the next
five years, 180 drill sergeants would come to the University of Pennsylvania.
Karen Reivich developed a faculty of MAP students and
clinical psychologists and we would teach the drill sergeants resilience and
positive psychology with just the same formula that we talked about before.
Nine day program.
The first three days are mental toughness, the next three days are strengths, and
the final two or three days are leadership and social skills.
And, we've now graduated more than 30,000 drill sergeants,
it's now taught throughout the entire United States Army.
I'll tell you about the results in a moment, but
before telling you the quantitative results,
the qualitative results are remarkable.
So, you've got a 180 drill sergeants there.
And they're sitting in the ballroom at the Sheraton.
And in the first few minutes they're leaning back away from us, and
they're thinking, what is this feminine psychobabble that's going to emasculate
the United States army, that we've been ordered to Philadelphia to come and learn?
But after the first hour, they're leaning forward, and at the end of the ninth day,
70% of them volunteer to become teachers of teachers of teachers.
And the modal response on the evaluation of the course
is 4.9 out of 5 is the rating typically, but
the modal response is the best course I ever had in the Army.
And I was really wondering why, and
I think I found out one morning when I came in for breakfast at the Sheraton.
And one of the drill sergeants sat down with me.
The night before we had talked active constructive responding,
in which when your spouse comes to you with a victory, how to enhance and
capitalize the victory rather than put it down or being indifferent.
And the drill sergeant over breakfast says,
about 9 o'clock last night I called home and
I talked to my 11 year old son and he just hit a home run in little league.
And after about five minutes we talked.
And then he said, is this really you, daddy?
That's the active ingredient.
It revivifies the drill sergeants, but
it's a culture change in which they're looking for the best in people.
And they're doing the best.
And indeed there are two sets of results.
First, because it's been adopted in the entire United States Army,
we no longer have a control group.
So, everyone gets it.
So, the best we could do was as it was being rolled out slowly,
to look at people who had gotten it, and people who didn't have training.
And so, first the analyst found, so
there's a group of analyst who analyze the data, not us.
The Army is spending millions of dollars to see if this works.
So, what you find for optimism and for
coping skills is that the soldiers who have been trained in resilience, when
they're deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, they get better at those variables.
Where as the control group gets worse.
And then on about 8,000 soldiers
we have hard data on diagnosis.
And so, roughly if you've been through resilience training,
resilience training halves the rate of substance abuse the next 12
months after deployment, and it significantly lowers the amount of post
traumatic stress disorder, panic, and depression diagnosis combined.
So, it's become a regular program within the Army.
The Army has declared it officially effective.
It has the same status now as doing push-ups in the Army.
And importantly, from the very beginning, I told the Army that I did not want
them to be dependent on the University of Pennsylvania or on me for this program.
So, this is taught by soldiers now throughout all the forts of the Army.
So, the way that happens,
when 180 drill sergeants come to us and then we train them.
We then pick out the five very best and they become trainers of trainers,
and then the best of those become trainers of trainers of trainers.
So, now this has evolved to be a regular institution within the Army.
And it's my belief that General Casey indeed has
created an Army that's on the road to being
just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit.
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