Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman

Considered the founder of positive psychology and one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Seligman is currently the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. at Princeton and his PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former president of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA) and was President of the APA in 1998. He has authored over 300 scholarly publications and 25 books that have been translated into more than 35 languages.

Dr. Seligman recognized the significance of primals after reading Jer’s Master’s capstone in 2013. He then brought Jer on as a PhD student the next year and has advised and supported ongoing primals research in a variety of ways. Notable examples include helping to finetune the list of candidate primals that emerged from the exploratory qualitative projects, name primals, define primals, and write up results. He is the 11th and final author on the foundational 2019 Psychological Assessment primals paper.