Martin Elias Peter Seligman is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong advocate of well-being and positive psychology theories. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists. A 2002 survey published in the *Review of General Psychology* ranked Seligman as the 31st most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Seligman is a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught at Cornell University. He is the director of the university’s Center for Positive Psychology. Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998. He is the founding editor-in-chief of *Prevention and Treatment* (an APA electronic journal) and serves on the advisory board of *Parents* magazine.
Seligman, along with Christopher Peterson, worked to create what they described as a “positive” counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). While the DSM focuses on what can go wrong, *Character Strengths and Virtues* (2004) is designed to look at what can go right. In their research, they examined cultures and spans of thousands of years—from ancient China and India to Greece and Rome, and on to contemporary Western cultures—to distill a manageable list of highly valued virtues. Their list includes six character strengths: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. These six virtues are not hierarchically ordered; none is more fundamental or primary than the others.