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Christopher Peterson

University of Michigan
chrispet@umich.edu



Christopher Peterson has been at the University of Michigan since 1986, where he is presently Professor of Psychology and formerly Director of Clinical Training. He also holds an appointment as an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, in recognition of his contributions to undergraduate teaching.

His original doctoral training (1972-1976) was in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Colorado, where he became interested in individual differences in cognitive characteristics. He maintained this interest during his postdoctoral retraining in clinical psychology (1979-1981) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began to use the perspective of the learned helplessness model to investigate psychopathology, specifically depression, and physical well-being. He is currently turning his attention to positive psychology and is spending the second of three years at the University of Pennsylvania working with Martin Seligman on a project funded by the Mayerson Foundation which entails the creation of (a) a coherent classification of human strengths and virtues and (b) a reliable and valid strategy for assessing these aspects of excellence.