Being in touch with what we do well underpins the readiness to change,” David continued. “This is related to the Losada ratio. To enable us to hear c… - Martin E P Seligman

exploders,” people who have frequent outbursts of temper, also have more cancer than normal people.

Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.

They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world.