Read more about The PERMA Model; humanperformance.ie/what-is-resilience In the late 1960s, the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman and his research associate, Steven Maier, were part of a team that discovered the phenomenon of “learned helplessness." They found that dogs, rats, and mice, when subjected to mild electric shock over which they had no control, would learn to accept it, making no attempt to escape.