Seligman, Martin E. P., Ph.D.; Learned Optimism – How to Change Your Mind and Your Life and Authentic Happiness – Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, 1990 and 2002.

Martin Seligman is a former president of the American Psychological Association, and is widely regarded as the father of Positive Psychology. He is credited with broadening the focus of psychological research from “pathology, victimology and mental illness” to include positive emotion and ways for cultivating mental health.

He writes that he was “a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine” until his five-year-old daughter challenged him to change his ways. His epiphany occurred when she said that she had been a whiner from the time that she was three until she was five, but on her fifth birthday had decided to stop whining. “And if I can stop whining,” she said, “you can stop being a grouch.”

In Learned Optimism, Seligman offers a series of techniques that may show you how to rise above pessimism and the depression that accompanies negative thoughts.