Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most of its history, psychology had concerned itself with all that ails the human mind: anxiety, depression, neurosis, obsessions, paranoia, delusions. The goal of practitioners was to bring patients from a negative, ailing state to a neutral normal, or, as University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman puts it, "from a minus five to a zero." It was Seligman who had summoned the others to Akumal that New Year's Day in 1998--his first day as president of the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.)--to share a vision of a new goal for psychology. "I realized that my profession was half...
...mentally hale and hearty. Some of Seligman's own research, for instance, had focused on optimism, a trait shown to be associated with good physical health, less depression and mental illness, longer life and, yes, greater happiness. Perhaps the most eager explorer of this terrain was University of Illinois psychologist Edward Diener, a.k.a. Dr. Happiness. For more than two decades, basically ever since he got tenure and could risk entering an unfashionable field, Diener had been examining what does and does not make people feel satisfied with life. Seligman's goal was to shine a light on such work...
Apparently, it drives Malcolm Gladwell crazy too because he has written a whole book about it titled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown; 277 pages). Gladwell isn't a psychologist or a tennis pro. He's a journalist, a staff writer for the New Yorker, but he likes to dabble in those kinds of intriguing, messily interdisciplinary problems, to which he brings his singularly lucid, clarifying intellect...
...what goes into the box and what comes out of it. The unconscious mind is astonishingly good at filtering out superfluous data and seizing on essential truth, we learn, but too much time or information can confuse and blind it. And the unconscious mind can be trained. The psychologist John Gottman can watch a 15-minute videotape of a husband and wife about whom he knows nothing and predict with 90% accuracy whether they will still be married in 15 years. Gladwell, with his infernal gift for coining buzzwords, calls the rapid analysis performed by the unconscious mind "thin slicing...
...plucks them from every imaginable field of human endeavor. The art historian who can instantly spot a forgery that fooled a battery of scientific tests but can't explain why. The ornithologist can identify at 200 yards an exotic bird he's never seen in flight before. The psychologist who has catalogued the 10,000 expressions of which the human face is capable. Gladwell hangs with superstar car salesmen and emergency-room cardiologists, badass battlefield commanders and improv-comedy troupes. He even talks to speed daters. Says a disappointed woman, memorably, about a roomful of unsuccessful suitors: "They lost...