Can We Cultivate Our Own Happiness?

Sept. 4 -- If you want to be happy, forget about winning the lottery, getting a nose job, or securing a raise.

In his new book,

Authentic Happiness, psychologist Martin Seligman argues that overall lifetime happiness is not the result of good genes, money, or even luck.

Instead, he says we can boost our own happiness by capitalizing on the strengths and traits that we already have, including kindness, originality, humor, optimism, and generosity. He has christened the discipline "Positive Psychology," arguing that we would be better off building on our own strengths rather than bemoaning, and, hence, trying to repair, our weaknesses.

By frequently calling upon their strengths, people can build up natural buffers against misfortune and negative emotions, he said.

An Epidemic of Depression?

Seligman is leading the charge in what might be called Happiness Revolution in psychology.

Since World War II, psychologists have focused on fixing what is broken — repairing psychosis, and neurosis. Research has piled up steadily when it comes to looking at patients who are neurotic or dysfunctional, while the happy or joyful people among us have received little scientific scrutiny.

When Seligman did a search to find academic articles about such "positive psychology" he found only 800 out of 70,000.

"Psychologists tend to be concerned with taking a negative 8 person, and helping him get to negative 2," said Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. "My aim is to take a plus 2 person and boost him to a plus 6."

In the last 50 years, statistics have show that we are less happy as a people.

"While our quality of life has increased dramatically over that time, and we've become richer, we're in an epidemic of depression," Seligman said. "Depression is 10 times more common now, and life satisfaction rates are down as well."

Seligman argues that the new science he writes about is shifting psychology's paradigm away from its narrow-minded focus on pathology, victimology, and mental illness towards positive emotion, virtue and strength, and positive institutions that increase people's happiness quotient.