Read more: “How to be happy: Putting well-being on the agenda“
Editorial: Don’t get too happy
It’s good for your health, it makes you smarter – and our brains are hard-wired for it. New Scientist counts our reasons to be cheerful
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DOOM and gloom are the order of the day across most of the western world. Economies are faltering, the cost of living is going up and many people’s real income is falling. For some, unemployment is a reality now or in the near future. If the pursuit of happiness is supposed to be one of our goals, prospects appear bleak.
Take a closer look, and it isn’t that simple. In fact, economic hard times have little impact on how happy most people feel. Indeed, it would appear that we humans are built to experience happiness, and understanding why is helping us work out what enhances our feelings of well-being. It even points to ways we can adapt to cope with the hardships the recession may bring, and keep smiling whatever happens.
One thing that is clear is that once life’s basics are paid for, the power of money to bring happiness is limited. In fact, it can be positively harmful to our sense of well-being. of the University of Liège, Belgium, and colleagues recently asked a group of people to taste a piece of chocolate in their laboratory. They found that the wealthier members of the group spent less time savouring the experience, and reported enjoying the chocolate less than the subjects who weren’t so well off. The same was also true of one group in a separate experiment. This time, half the people had been primed with images of money before they tasted the chocolate. These participants enjoyed the tasting less than a group who had not seen the images, suggesting that just the thought of money is enough to stem our enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures ().
So just what is it that makes us happy? Happiness can take the form of many different positive emotions (See “Happiness is…”), and some hints of what makes us happy may come from work that questions why these emotions first evolved. The answer isn’t as obvious as it is in the case of negative emotions. These are clearly beneficial in the rough and tumble of survival: anger readies us to fight an opponent, fear makes us run away from danger, and disgust steers us away from contaminated foods and other sources of infection. Although there is no shortage of evidence that feelings of pleasure – obtained by finding a tasty meal or a sexy mate, for example – are important in rewarding and consolidating beneficial behaviours, it is harder to explain how the more diffuse positive emotions such as awe, hope or gratitude evolved.
This troubled psychologist of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so she started looking for evolutionary benefits that pleasure might confer. “I thought there must be more to it than this,” she recalls.
Fredrickson’s “broaden and build” theory proposes that happiness and similar positive states of mind improve our cognitive capacities while we are in safe situations, allowing us to build resources around us for the long term. That’s in marked contrast to the effects of negative emotions like fear, which focus our attention so we can deal with short-term problems. “Positive feelings change the way our brains work and expand the boundaries of experience, allowing us to take in more information and see the big picture,” Fredrickson argues.
“Positive feelings change the way our brains work, allowing us to take in more information”
Since she proposed it in 1998 in the Review of General Psychology (), her theory has gathered a wealth of experimental support. Eye-tracking and brain-imaging experiments, for example, have revealed that positive moods increase and broaden the scope of visual attention, helping the brain gather more information.
A happy solution
Feeling good has also been shown to improve people’s creativity and ability to solve problems. In one experiment, subjects were shown a video of comedy bloopers to lighten their mood, before being presented with a practical problem involving a box of matches, a box of tacks and a candle. They were told to attach the candle to a pinboard in such a way that wax didn’t drip on the floor (the solution is to use the matchbox as a plinth for the candle). The experimenters found that people who had viewed the comedy clips were more likely to solve the problem than controls who saw a mathematics documentary intended to put them in a more neutral mood ().
Other experiments have found that a good mood improves people’s verbal reasoning skills (). And various studies have shown that when people are in a good mood, their social skills improve: they become more gregarious and trusting of others, and deal more constructively with criticism.
These changes concern the “broaden” part of Fredrickson’s hypothesis. The “build” part predicts that we learn from the cognitive benefits of fleeting positive emotions, and so develop a more lasting positive state of mind. “As positive emotions compound, people actually change for the better,” she says.
Fredrickson found initial, though tentative, empirical support for this idea in 2001 with studies of the same group of healthy students before and after the 11 September attacks on the US. The subjects who reported more positive emotions before the attacks also had fewer depressive symptoms after the attacks. Looking more closely, she found that although they also felt the same kind of grief as their peers, these students coped by feeling positive emotions such as gratitude for the safety of their friends and awe at the bravery of firefighters rescuing survivors. Although not conclusive, the results supported the idea that cultivating a positive mindset in good times helps us learn mechanisms that enable us to feel better in bad times, which is in line with the broaden-and-build theory ().
More recently, she trained a group of adults in a form of meditation that encouraged them to think positively about someone they loved, and then to extend those feelings to people they might not feel so close to. After seven weeks of practising the technique for a few minutes each day, the participants scored higher on a range of positive emotions – not just increased affection for their loved ones. Overall, the participants reported greater joy, hope, gratitude, pride, interest and awe. They also experienced better relationships with others. Importantly, these changes carried over to days on which the subjects didn’t meditate. These benefits depended on the amount of time people spent meditating, and, as the broaden and build theory would have predicted, they amplified as the study progressed, suggesting that the temporary positive experiences were building on one another and leading to more lasting changes in their brains (). Other studies using different forms of meditation – including “mindfulness”, which involves cultivating calm awareness of bodily sensations and thoughts – have also shown that they promote temporary positive emotions (Annals of Behavioral Medicine, vol 35, p 331), though it’s not so clear whether these would build up over time to provide more lasting changes.
As philosophers have long pointed out, immediate pleasures and a positive mood are not to be confused with what the Greeks called eudaimonia, the deeper level of happiness associated with a flourishing and contented life. Yet Fredrickson’s work shows a clear connection between the two. “Positive emotions give us more tools to handle life’s ups and downs, and that’s what makes life more satisfying and us happier,” she says.
From this, you might conclude that the happier we are, the better we will be at tackling the tasks facing us – but that’s true only up to a point. at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has shown that positive moods can make us more gullible, less able to develop persuasive arguments, and more likely to make careless decisions. This has led of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, among others, to argue that there is an optimum level of life satisfaction – around 7 or 8 out of 10 on the standard scale – at which we flourish. And indeed, this is the average level of happiness found in the majority of western countries (see map), where most people live fairly comfortable, safe lives.
Cummins thinks that this happiness level may have been selected for during evolution. Numerous studies have found that our happiness is pre-programmed to a certain extent, with genetic differences accounting for about 50 per cent of the variation between people. If happiness is controlled by our genes, the idea that natural selection might have pushed the population as a whole towards a certain level of happiness would certainly be plausible. “As long as people can maintain a normal lifestyle, they will experience that level of happiness,” says Cummins.
“Genetic differences account for about half of the variation in happiness between people”
Recession not depression
Does this tell us anything about how people will fare in a recession? Studies of previous economic crises lend support to Cummins’s view. , emeritus professor of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, examined the global recession of the early 1980s to see how changing economic fortunes affected the well-being of affluent western societies. “We found essentially no effect whatsoever,” he says. Life satisfaction dipped only slightly in the year following the recession, and sales of tranquillisers and rates of diagnosed depression remained steady. “I see no reason to expect this crisis to be any different – unless it gets really bad.”
What about the impact on those dealt the heaviest blows? Someone who loses their job and their income could be forgiven for not feeling great about their life. Fredrickson suggests that her findings could help people bolster their emotional defences against such troubles. Pursuing small, momentary pleasures should help to build resilience to stressful events, she says.
That still leaves us a long way from a detailed road map to happiness, but of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is trying to plot a little more of the route. She has already found that different positive emotions broaden, build and buffer in different ways: feelings of joy tend to make people calmer and less easily upset by any negative events they later encounter, whereas a sense of gratitude makes people feel more in control and encourages a proactive attitude towards dealing with such events, Kirby says. She is now investigating whether particular positive emotions are more effective than others at bolstering a general feeling of well-being in hard times.
Fredrickson’s techniques won’t work for everybody. For example, Weiting Ng and of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigated how people with different personality types responded to coping strategies that involve reinterpreting negative events to see positive aspects, and thinking about how to change the situation or learn from it. This showed that while these techniques worked well in people low in neuroticism, they were of little benefit to highly neurotic people ().
So which strategy will work for you? Fredrickson recommends trying out several different ones and concentrating on those that feel right. And don’t expect an instant effect. , a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, says that as with any new skill, mastering these techniques takes practice. A lot of concentration and conscious effort are needed at first, but over time the skills become habitual and reflexive. If a happier future appeals, why not give it a go?
Mood boosters
- Write a diary. Simply writing about a positive experience has been shown to increase people’s life satisfaction, with the benefits lingering for two weeks after the task (). A further study found that a group of subjects who wrote about their emotions for just 2 minutes a day, over two days, reported fewer physical health complaints four weeks down the line ().
- Dispute negative thinking. This is a technique borrowed from cognitive behavioural therapy, in which you catch negative thoughts as they arise and ask: “Is there really reason to think like this? Can I reframe this in a more positive way?”
- Meditate. Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues have shown that meditation can relax both your body and your mind, with many beneficial effects for well-being and happiness (). It’s not easy, however, and you may need some training before you get going.
- Nurture meaningful relationships with family and friends. More than simply improving your well-being, it might just save your life. “Social resources and ties to groups are one of the key buffers protecting us against unhappiness,” says Fredrickson. A recent meta-analysis of 148 studies on links between the quantity and quality of social relationships and mortality suggests that being socially isolated is about as bad for your health as smoking or drinking excessively, and worse than being obese ().
- Beware consumerism. Buying more possessions won’t make you as happy as spending money on social activities or new and exciting experiences (The Journal of Positive Psychology, vol 4, p 511).
Happiness is…
Happiness, in its everyday sense, is akin to pleasure or joy, something we experience in the moment as a result of enjoyable activities. Besides pleasure, there are of course many different positive emotions, such as awe, pride, and gratitude that might also contribute to our general mood.
When psychologists talk about happiness, however, they usually use the term to mean our overall and long-term subjective well-being and life satisfaction. Happiness in this broader sense is mostly probed with questionnaires that ask subjects to rate how much they agree or disagree with statements such as “In most ways my life is close to ideal,” or “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.” When averaged over a group such as a nation, these measures can be used to generate a measure of collective happiness. Importantly, recent psychological research is explaining how those fleeting positive emotions contribute to this longer-lasting satisfaction and contentment with our life.
