Clinical
Corner Ð Positive Psychology and Kids
BETHESDA, MD. -- Positive psychology techniques that aim to instill a
sense of optimism halved the rate of depression in three studies of young
adults and children that included as much as 10 years of follow-up, Martin
Seligman, PhD, said at a meeting on preventing depression sponsored by the
National Institutes of Health.
The goal of positive psychology is to enhance basic human strengths such
as optimism, courage, honesty, self-understanding, and interpersonal skills,
instead of focusing on "the broken things" and on repairing the
damage of past traumas, said Dr. Seligman, professor of psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Positive psychology is meant to
help the individual use inner resources as a buffer against setbacks in life
and as a means to master adversity whenever it crops up, so that he or she does
not sink into depression, he said. "It's not about how to heal; it's about
how to have a great life," explained Dr. Seligman, who also is immediate
past president of the American Psychological Association.
He and his associates developed an intervention that was designed to
instill a sense of optimism, which they defined as a positive way of construing
the failures and setbacks that normally occur in life. "If you think that
failures are stable and pervasive -- that they'll last forever and undermine
everything you try to do -- you'll get depressed. But if you can view them as
temporary or affecting only a small part of your life, you won't get
depressed," Dr. Seligman explained.
In a research project involving university students, Psychologists
screened students using a questionnaire that measured the students' optimism.
The students who scored the lowest for optimism were then randomly assigned
either to no intervention or to a workshop that was designed to develop skills
to boost their optimism. Principal among the skills taught in the workshop was
the cognitive therapy approach known as "disputing." The students were
taught to recognize their own negative thoughts about themselves and to argue
against these thoughts as though they were disputing an external critic, Dr.
Seligman said.
The 126 subjects who took part in the workshops and the 119 controls
were then followed up for 8-10 years. During young adulthood, those who had
participated in the positive psychology program when they were in college were
half as likely to have episodes of moderate unipolar depression (13%) as were
the control subjects (27%). Similarly, the subjects who had taken part in the
workshops had half the rate of generalized anxiety disorders, compared with the
controls, he said.
Dr. Seligman and his associates then studied 10- to 12-year-old children
who had symptoms of mild depression. In this study, 67 children participated in
a similar positive psychology intervention and 47 served as controls. After 2
years of follow-up, the rate of mild to moderate depression was twice as high
among the controls (44%) as among the children who had participated in the
intervention (22%).
In a third study, University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. David Yu
reported similar results after 3 months of follow-up of 10- to 12-year-olds in
Beijing. He studied 104 children who underwent a positive intervention and 116
children who served as controls, he said.
Michael Sherman specializes in teaching Positive Psychology skills to
adults and children.