Direito

Chapter I
What Is Well-Being?
The real way positive psychology got its start has been a secret until now. When I was president-elect of the American Psycho logical Association in 1997, my email tripled. I rarely answer phone calls, and I never do snail mail anymore, but because there is a twenty four-hour a day bridge game on the Internet, I answer my email swiftly und diligently. My replies are just the length that fits the time it takes for my partner to play the hand when I am the dummy. (I am seligrnaioæpsych.upenn.edu, and you should feel free to email me if you don’t mind one-sentence answers.) One email that I received in late 1997, however, puzzled me, and I put It Into my “huh?” folder. It said simply, “Why don’t you come up to see me in New York?” and was signed with initials only. A couple of weeks Later, I was at a cocktail party with Judy Ro din, then the president of the University of Pennsylvania, where I have taught for forty years. Judy, now the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, was a senior at Peen o when I was a first-year graduate student, and we both worked in psychology professor Richard Solomon’s animal lab. We became fast friends, and I watched with admiration and more than a little envy when Judy zoomed at an astonishingly young age from president of the Eastern psychological Association, to chairman of psychology at Yale University, to dean, and to provost at Yale, and then to president at Penn In I between, we even managed to collaborate on a study investigating the correlation of optimism with a stronger immune system in senior citizens when Judy headed the MacArthur Foundation’s massive.
Project on psychoneuroimmunology—the pathways through which Psychological events influence neural events which in turn influence Immune events. “Do you know a ‘PT’ who might have sent me an email inviting Me to New York?” I asked Judy, who knows everybody who is anybody. “Go see him!” she gasped. So two weeks later, I found myself at an