In 1998 Martin E.P. Seligman decided to teach an undergraduate seminar in positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. This was based on his idea “that psychology should turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage”.

Simply put, the seminar focused on what gives people positive experiences. Themes included kindness, play, life as art, flow and more.

His experience is described here, and apparently it was extremely positive. One student put it like this: “Positive psychology was a course that seemed to grab all of the young burgeoning psychologists in the room by their throats and say ‘Hey! The world should be smiling a lot more than it is! What are you going to do about it?'”