Foundations of Psychology: Academic Lineage Project

Term Project: Academic Lineage Paper

Angela Lee Duckworth is a well-known professor in the University of Pennsylvania due to her studies on the intangible concepts of self-control and GRIT. Her research on GRIT has gained a lot of attention in the past years, as it examines other individual differences that may indicate academic and professional success, besides IQ or family income. Grit refers to the passion and perseverance to achieve particular long-term goals. Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews and Kelly (2007) validate the Grit Scale by demonstrating that those individuals who posses passion, perseverance and the drive to work vigorously through challenges, failure and adversity are better positioned to reach higher achievements and long term goals. Higher levels of grit were associated with higher GPA in students, longer retention for cadets in Military Academy and higher scores of participants in the National Spelling Bee competition, which served as empirical evidence that the grit scale is significant in a variety of settings.

Before attaining her Ph.D. in psychology and becoming a professor in the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth first graduated from Neurobiology in the University of Oxford in 1992. During her twenties, she worked as a management consultant and then taught math for five years at public schools in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. She then decided to go back to school, and in 2006 she completed her Ph.D. on non-IQ predictors of achievement with the assistance of her advisor Dr. Martin Seligman.

Martin Seligman is known for founding a new field of study called positive psychology, which evidently had a lot of influence in Duckworth’s work. Both of their research has been focused on improving personal growth on the average person, instead of working within the disease model. Seligman wanted to make relatively untroubled people happier, more productive and more fulfilled, so he began to study optimism. He defined optimism as reacting to problems with a sense of confidence and high personal ability. From this interest, he began studies to prove if pessimists could learn how to be optimists, and indeed, results demonstrated “learned optimism” could occur (Gillham, Reivich, Jaycox, & Seligman, 1995). This resulted in the creation of the Penn Resiliency Program, which serves to teach young students how to develop and nurture an optimistic way of thinking and decrease their pessimistic thoughts.

Later, Seligman (2002) published in his book about the three kinds of happiness. First, the pleasant life in which a person seeks to maximize their positive emotions. Second, the life of engagement in which the individual seeks out flow, this is a state of deep and undistracted involvement on moderately challenging activities. According to Seligman, in order to achieve flow, one has to identify their signature strengths, which are positive psychological traits individual to each human being. Lastly, the third orientation is the life of meaning, which leads individuals to seek happiness in something bigger than themselves. However, in 2011 Seligman publishes an alternative and readjusted well being theory better known as the PERMA model, which concludes that there are five elements to measure well being in a person: pleasure, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. He believes that the two added elements are key for well-being and happiness. Powerful and positive relationships play an important role in an individual’s life as well as accomplishments, which involve the pursuit of success and goals (Seligman, 2011).

The biggest inspiration for Seligman’s initiative in positive psychology came from one of his earliest findings. According to Maier, Peterson and Schwartz (2000), during the mid 1960’s, Seligman worked with his advisor Richard L. Solomon in the animal-learning laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Solomon was working on his new theory of avoidance learning, based on the fact that animals could learn a behavior to avoid an aversive event. Animals would be given a warning signal followed by an electric shock through the floor, as a response the rat would find some escape such as to climbing away from the shock. As the pattern was repeated the rat would learn to avoid the shock by reacting as soon as the warning signal was presented. From this, Solomon and his students developed a “transference of control” experiment in order to explain avoidance learning. First, they would establish a classic conditioning of fear by pairing a neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus, such a warning light with a shock. In another environment a different stimulus would be used as a warning signal, such as a tone in order to establish avoidance learning. The third phase involved presenting the initial classical conditioned stimulus to see if the animal would perform the avoidance response. Surprisingly, the animals exposed to the avoidance procedure failed to avoid the shock after the warning signal was presented, and some often failed to escape the shock entirely.

In 1967, Seligman had done his Ph.D. on “The disruptive effects on unpredictable shock,” with the behaviorist influence of Solomon’s experiments. Seligman and Maier, both graduate students at the time kept questioning what was it about the shock that could interfere with future learning. Seligman and Maier reasoned that it had to be something the animal learned from the inescapable shock that would make them fail to learn how to escape. In fact, the animal realized that the shock termination was independent to their behavior, which would eventually suppress the motivation in attempting to escape (Maier & Seligman, 1976). These findings on learned helplessness were extrapolated to how humans tend to feel helpless when they cannot change a situation. Eventually, from this research, Seligman decided to investigate ways in which learned helplessness could be overcome.

Furthermore, Richard L. Solomon continued his studies and his primary focus became the opponent-process theory of acquired motivation, which explains that when one emotion is experienced another one is suppressed, such as fear and relief or pain and pleasure. With repetition of the processes, the first emotion is suppressed and the second process becomes strengthened. To demonstrate this he used the opiate addiction as a model for the emotional pairing of pleasure and the emotional symptoms of withdrawal. At first, the use of a drug will produce high levels of pleasure and low levels of withdrawal, but with time the levels will decrease as withdrawal increases. Eventually, this will motivate the individual to keep using the drug in search for increased pleasure, despite the lack of pleasure it actually provides (Solomon, 1980).

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