Half Empty Read Free

calling for a glorious new epoch of sad-sack sobriety. All Norem was saying was that there should be room enough at the table for a greater spectrum of feeling. That one’s cognitive style was ultimately as value neutral as the color of one’s hair, even though pessimism might very well feel less pleasurable than optimism (although try telling that to the adolescent girl voluptuously bathing in that exquisite sea of heartbreak as she is locked in her bedroom listening to music and sketching portraits of limpid-eyed, tear-shedding soulful girls with lank hair and guitars, all while hating her parents). Pointing out that negative emotions are in no way lesser than theircitrus-colored counterparts, just different, might seem incredibly basic, but it was an absolutely revolutionary statement.
    That said,
The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
had a very narrow focus, one almost completely free of bombast or polemic. What it most definitely was
not
, for example, was a takedown of the reigning school of the prevailing culture, the positive psychology movement. This deeply funded but loosely organized group of clinicians and researchers was dedicated to returning the field of psychology to its original three missions of curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more fulfilling, and fostering human talent. According to the group’s founder, Dr. Martin Seligman, the author of such books as
Learned Optimism
and
The Optimistic Child
, we had lost sight of all but the first objective since World War II, concentrating too much on the sick and unhappy and leaving the relatively well and potentially excellent among us to fend for themselves.
    “We became a victimology … Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue,” Seligman wrote in his monthly column for the
APA Monitor
in 1989, the year he served as president of the American Psychological Association. We have managed to help people go from negative five to zero, he says, but if you’re looking to get up into the positive integers, mental health–wise, you’re on your own. The happy and gifted among us were essentially taking their marching orders from the vast, gray masses of the unhappy bottom and middle. The movement was an attempt to address this imbalance.
    Seligman refers to that which is solely concerned with disease and disorder as “remedial psychology.” “How has it happened that the social sciences view the human strengths and virtues—altruism, courage, honesty, duty, joy, health, responsibility, and good cheer—as derivative, defensive, or downright illusions,while weakness and negative motivations—anxiety, lust, selfishness, paranoia, anger, disorder, and sadness—are viewed as authentic?” he asks.
    While Norem had no quarrel with the movement’s desire to study all human emotion and not just the troubled end of the spectrum, she did have issues with its premise. “Any movement should only have the status of a scientific movement if the outcomes of research, what is going to be proclaimed to be adaptive or healthy, are not preordained.” It’s far easier to swallow a mouthful of honey than one of curry powder, but one doesn’t then judge the former an elixir and the latter poison. Positive feelings may redound to positive outcomes, but it isn’t a given, despite what we are told, and we
are
told, all the time and in countless ways. “The consequences are not inherent in the emotion itself. It is a sloppy assumption that hedonically positive emotion is related to positive outcomes. Positive emotions
may
, of course, relate to good things, but there is no necessary relationship. Pride, for example, is positive in that it feels good. It may lead people to work hard or behave well, but it may also lead them to treat others shabbily. Embarrassment is negative because nobody likes how it feels, and it can have negative consequences, but it can also be a powerfully pro-social emotion