Seligman gives a nod to the value of pessimists; you want your pilot and your chief financial officer to think about what could go wrong. Negative emotions are important. "They have evolved," he said, "for good reasons: fear to signal danger, anger to signal trespass, sadness to signal loss." Two of his heroes - Lincoln and Churchill - were famous depressives.
But some critics see pessimism more positively.
In her book The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, Julie Norem, a Wellesley College psychologist, argues that defensive pessimists, people who think through all the bad things that could happen and what they might do about them, do just fine. In fact, they become more anxious when they try to think positively.
Barbara Ehrenreich, a cell-biologist-turned-social-critic, skewers Seligman in her latest book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, for insisting on conducting an interview with her among the Monets at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and describing happiness in a too-simple equation.
(Seligman was no more impressed with her science than she was with his. "A 1968 Ph.D. in biology," he said, "is not much help with modern statistical analyses.")
Like Held, who disapproves of the "tyranny" of positive attitude, Ehrenreich sees the positivity movement as constricting.
"Positive thinking did not abolish the need for constant vigilance; it only turned that vigilance inward," she wrote. "Instead of worrying that one's roof might collapse or one's job be terminated, positive thinking encourages us to worry about the negative expectations themselves. . . . It ends up imposing a mental discipline as exacting as that of the Calvinism it replaced."
