|
Happiness
|
| |
| |
METRO, 4 June, 2008
 |
"Happiness is not achieved by the
conscious pursuit of happiness;
it is generally the by-product of other activities"
- Aldous Huxley |
|
World
Database of
Happiness |
|
|
Happiness Lengthens Life
Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against
falling ill. As a result, happy people live longer. The size of the effect
on longevity is comparable to that of smoking or not.
Science Daily
Aug 5, 2008
This is concluded from an analysis of 30 follow-up studies published in a
recent issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies.
There have been more reports of happy people living longer, but for long it
was unclear whether happiness causes longevity, since it can also be that
good health add both to happiness and longevity.
Scientists assess causality using long-term follow-up studies, taking
initial health into account. The results of such studies seemed
contradictory; several studies found the expected causal effect of happiness
on longevity, but other studies found no effect and some observed even
earlier death among the happy. The analysis of 30 follow-up studies showed
that the difference is in the people under investigation.
Happiness does not lengthen the life of seriously ill people, but it does
prolong the life of healthy people. Happiness appears to protect against
falling ill. One of the mechanisms behind that effect seems to be that
chronic unhappiness causes stress, which on its turn reduces immune
response.
Another possible mechanism is that happiness adds to the chance of adopting
a healthy life style.
An implication of this finding is that public health can also be promoted by
policies that aim at greater happiness for a greater number.
Journal reference:
Veenhoven et al. Healthy happiness: effects of happiness on physical health
and the consequences for preventive health care. Journal of Happiness
Studies, 2008; 9 (3): 449 DOI: 10.1007/s10902-006-9042-1
Adapted from materials provided by Erasmus University Rotterdam.
|
Happiness 'immune to life events'
Momentous events in your life such as having children, or
getting married, may make you happier, but only temporarily, say
researchers.
BBC Online
13 July 2008
Our basic happiness level essentially stays the same throughout adult life,
the Economic Journal reports.
Economists from the UK, US and France based their conclusions on a 20-year
analysis of the life satisfaction of hundreds of people from Germany.
Even after traumatic events, overall mood dipped but then recovered.
White Water Strategies
The study looked at a psychological process called "adaptation" - the way in
which humans adjust to new circumstances, good or bad.
The German volunteers, aged between 18 and 60 at the start of the study,
were then questioned again regularly over the following two decades and
asked to rate their own happiness.
They were also asked to report any major events so that the researchers
could plot the relationship between the event and overall levels of
satisfaction.
They found that only unemployment gave a long-lasting decline in overall
mood in the five years after the event.
In other traumatic events, such as widowhood or divorce, overall mood
dipped, but then recovered.
Negative events
For positive events, such as marriage or childbirth, the effect was equally
transient - the researchers calculated that the happiness increase delivered
by the birth of a child lasted for two years before the volunteers ratings
were back to normal.
Dr Yannis Georgellis, a senior lecturer at Brunel University, and co-author
of the report, said that it suggested that old adages such as "time heals"
were true in many cases.
He said: "It's consistent with other findings that people recover from
negative events very quickly - there was some literature on people who
became paraplegic, who, when interviewed a few years later, had similar
levels of happiness to those who had not been affected this way.
"Likewise, there are studies of lottery winners who are no happier in the
long term."
Francois Moscovici, director of psychological consultancy firm White Water
Strategies, said that there was plenty of evidence that people had a fixed,
underlying "range" of happiness, which could be temporarily affected by
major events, but not usually for long periods.
"There is the concept of a 'thermostat' of happiness - when a big event
happens to you, whether it is positive or negative, the spring stretches,
but returns back to its former state quite quickly."
|
|
|
New Study Reports On The State Of
Human Happiness
Psychologists have been fond of stating in recent years that
human happiness, or what psychologists call subjective well-being, is
largely independent of our life circumstances. The wealthy aren't much
happier than the middle class, married people aren't much happier than
single people, healthy people aren't much happier than sick people, and so
on.
Science Daily
Mar 2007
One might reasonably conclude, therefore, that changes in life circumstances
would not have long-term effects on our happiness. This indeed has been the
dominant model of subjective well-being: People adapt to major life events,
both positive and negative, and our happiness pretty much stays constant
through our lives, even if it is occasionally perturbed. Winning the lottery
won't make you happier in the long run (goes the theory), and while a
divorce or even a major illness will throw your life into upheaval for a
while, your happiness level will eventually return to where it was at
before--that is, its set point.
But new research, and reexamination of old research, is challenging some of
the claims of set-point theory.
In the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Richard
E. Lucas of Michigan State University and the German Institute for Economic
Research, reviews some recent studies suggesting that adaptation to changing
life circumstances only goes so far. "Happiness levels do change, adaptation
is not inevitable, and life events do matter," Lucas asserts.
To study adaptation, Lucas and his colleagues used data from two large
national prospective panel studies -- one in Germany and the other in Great
Britain. Unlike most previous studies of adaptation, these data were able to
capture levels of life satisfaction both prior to and after major life
events like marriage, divorce, unemployment, and illness or disability.
Lucas found that not all of life's slings and arrows are created equal. On
average, most people adapt quickly to marriage, for example -- within just a
couple of years, the peak in subjective well-being experienced around the
time of getting married returns to its previous levels. People mostly adapt
to the sorrows of losing a spouse too, but this takes longer -- about 7
years. People who get divorced and people who become unemployed, however, do
not, on average, return to the level of happiness they were at previously.
The same can be said about physical debilitation. Numerous recent studies
have demonstrated that major illnesses and injury result in significant,
lasting decreases in subjective-well being.
But Lucas also found that individual differences play an important role.
There's a lot of individual variation in the degree to which people adapt to
what life throws at them. What's more, individuals destined to experience
certain life events actually differ in their subjective well-being from
those not so fated -- even well before the occurrence of those events.
People who eventually marry and stay married, for example, tend to be
happier even 5 years before their marriage than those who are destined to
marry and get divorced.
Lucas stresses that his findings do not undercut the importance of
adaptation processes. Some degree of adaptation necessarily protects us from
prolonged emotional states that may be harmful, and helps us attune to novel
threats to our well-being rather than dwell on ones we are familiar with.
Adaptation also helps us detach from goals that have proven unrealistic.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Association
for Psychological Science.
|
The happiest man in the world?
... and you can learn how he does it, says
academic-turned-Buddhist monk
By Anthony Barnes
21 January 2007
To scientists, he is the world's happiest man. His level of mind control is
astonishing and the upbeat impulses in his brain are off the scale.
Now Matthieu Ricard, 60, a French academic-turned-Buddhist monk, is to share
his secrets to make the world a happier place. The trick, he reckons, is to
put some effort into it. In essence, happiness is a "skill" to be learned.
His advice could not be more timely as tomorrow Britain will reach what,
according to a scientific formula, is the most miserable day of the year.
Tattered new year resolutions, the faded buzz of Christmas, debt, a lack of
motivation and the winter weather conspire to create a peak of misery and
gloom.
But studies have shown that the mind can rise above it all to increase
almost everyone's happiness. Mr Ricard, who is the French interpreter for
Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took part in trials to show that
brain training in the form of meditation can cause an overwhelming change in
levels of happiness.
MRI scans showed that he and other long-term meditators - who had completed
more than 10,000 hours each - experienced a huge level of "positive
emotions" in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is associated
with happiness. The right-hand side, which handles negative thoughts, is
suppressed.
Further studies have shown that even novices who have done only a little
meditation have increased levels of happiness. But Mr Ricard's abilities
were head and shoulders above the others involved in the trials.
"The mind is malleable," Mr Ricard told The Independent on Sunday yesterday.
"Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we
manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a
skill. It requires effort and time."
Mr Ricard was brought up among Paris's intellectual elite in the 1960s, but
after working for a PhD in biochemsitry he abandoned his distinguished
academic career to study Tibetan Buddhism in the Himalayas.
A book of philosophical conversations he conducted with his father
Jean-Franois Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher, became an unlikely
publishing phenomenon when it came out in France in the late 1990s.
Mr Ricard is to publish his book Happiness for the first time in the UK next
month.
|
Happiness: Good for Creativity, Bad for
Single-Minded Focus
Happy people are open to all sorts of ideas, some of which
can be distracting
by JR Minkel
December 18, 2006
Scientific American
Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic
genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good
mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy
people have a harder time focusing.
University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in
each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections.
To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers
gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.
In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a
word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as "mower,"
"atomic" and "foreign." Solving the puzzle required participants to think
creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations--"lawn," "bomb" and
"currency"--to come up with the more remote answer: "power."
Interestingly, induced happiness made the subjects worse at the second task,
which required them to ignore distractions and focus on a single piece of
information. Participants had to identify a letter flashed on a computer
screen flanked by either the same letter, as in the string "N N N N N," or a
different letter, as in "H H N H H." When the surrounding letters didn't
match, the happy participants were slower to recognize the target letter in
the middle, indicating that the ringers distracted them.
The results suggest that an upbeat mood makes people more receptive to
information of all kinds, says psychologist Adam Anderson, co-author of the
study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA. "With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would
normally ignore," he says. "Instead of looking through a porthole, you have
a landscape or panoramic view of the world."
Researchers have long proposed that negative emotions give people a kind of
tunnel vision or filter on their attention, Anderson says. Positive moods
break down that filter, which enhances creativity but prevents laserlike
focus, such as that needed to recognize target letters in the second task,
he says.
As for the myth of the depressed but brilliant artist, Anderson speculates
that creativity may be a form of self-medication, giving a gloomy artist the
chance to adopt a cheerful disposition.
|
Researchers Seek Routes to Happier Life
As a motivational speaker and executive coach, Caroline Adams
Miller knows a few things about using mental exercises to achieve goals. But
last year, one exercise she was asked to try took her by surprise.
By MALCOLM RITTER
November 26, 2006
Every night, she was to think of three good things that happened that day
and analyze why they occurred. That was supposed to increase her overall
happiness.
"I thought it was too simple to be effective," said Miller, 44, of Bethesda.
Md. "I went to Harvard. I'm used to things being complicated."
Miller was assigned the task as homework in a master's degree program. But
as a chronic worrier, she knew she could use the kind of boost the exercise
was supposed to deliver.
She got it.
"The quality of my dreams has changed, I never have trouble falling asleep
and I do feel happier," she said.
Results may vary, as they say in the weight-loss ads. But that exercise is
one of several that have shown preliminary promise in recent research into
how people can make themselves happier -- not just for a day or two, but
long-term. It's part of a larger body of work that challenges a
long-standing skepticism about whether that's even possible.
There's no shortage of advice in how to become a happier person, as a visit
to any bookstore will demonstrate. In fact, Martin Seligman of the
University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have collected more than 100
specific recommendations, ranging from those of the Buddha through the
self-improvement industry of the 1990s.
The problem is, most of the books on store shelves aren't backed up by
rigorous research, says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University
of California, Riverside, who's conducting such studies now. (She's also
writing her own book).
In fact, she says, there has been very little research in how people become
happier.
Why? The big reason, she said, is that many researchers have considered that
quest to be futile.
For decades, a widely accepted view has been that people are stuck with a
basic setting on their happiness thermostat. It says the effects of good or
bad life events like marriage, a raise, divorce, or disability will simply
fade with time.
We adapt to them just like we stop noticing a bad odor from behind the
living room couch after a while, this theory says. So this adaptation would
seem to doom any deliberate attempt to raise a person's basic happiness
setting.
As two researchers put it in 1996, "It may be that trying to be happier is
as futile as trying to be taller."
But recent long-term studies have revealed that the happiness thermostat is
more malleable than the popular theory maintained, at least in its extreme
form. "Set-point is not destiny," says psychologist Ed Diener of the
University of Illinois.
One new study showing change in happiness levels followed thousands of
Germans for 17 years. It found that about a quarter changed significantly
over that time in their basic level of satisfaction with life. (That's a
popular happiness measure; some studies sample how one feels through the day
instead.) Nearly a tenth of the German participants changed by three points
or more on a 10-point scale.
Other studies show an effect of specific life events, though of course the
results are averages and can't predict what will happen to particular
individuals. Results show long-lasting shadows associated with events like
serious disability, divorce, widowhood, and getting laid off.
The boost from getting married, on the other hand, seems to dissipate after
about two years, says psychologist Richard E. Lucas of Michigan State
University.
What about the joys of having children? Parents recall those years with
fondness, but studies show childrearing takes a toll on marital
satisfaction, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes in his recent book,
"Stumbling on Happiness." Parents gain in satisfaction as their kids leave
home, he said.
"Despite what we read in the popular press," he writes, "the only known
symptom of 'empty nest syndrome' is increased smiling."
Gilbert says people are awful at predicting what will make them happy. Yet,
Lucas says, "most people are happy most of the time." That is, in a group of
people who have reasonably good health and income, most will probably rate a
7.5 or so on a happiness scale of zero to 10, he says.
Still, many people want to be happier. What can they do? That's where
research by Lyubomirsky, Seligman and others comes in.
The think-of-three-good-things exercise that Miller, the motivational
speaker, found so simplistic at first is among those being tested by
Seligman's group at the University of Pennsylvania.
People keep doing it on their own because it's immediately rewarding, said
Seligman colleague Acacia Parks. It makes people focus more on good things
that happen, which might otherwise be forgotten because of daily
disappointments, she said.
Miller said the exercise made her notice more good things in her day, and
that now she routinely lists 10 or 20 of them rather than just three.
A second approach that has shown promise in Seligman's group has people
discover their personal strengths through a specialized questionnaire and
choose the five most prominent ones. Then, every day for a week, they are to
apply one or more of their strengths in a new way.
Strengths include things like the ability to find humor or summon
enthusiasm, appreciation of beauty, curiosity and love of learning. The idea
of the exercise is that using one's major "signature" strengths may be a
good way to get engaged in satisfying activities.
These two exercises were among five tested on more than 500 people who'd
visited a Web site called "Authentic Happiness." Seligman and colleagues
reported last year that the two exercises increased happiness and reduced
depressive symptoms for the six months that researchers tracked the
participants. The effect was greater for people who kept doing the exercises
frequently. A followup study has recently begun.
Another approach under study now is having people work on savoring the
pleasing things in their lives like a warm shower or a good breakfast, Parks
said. Yet another promising approach is having people write down what they
want to be remembered for, to help them bring their daily activities in line
with what's really important to them, she said.
Lyubomirsky, meanwhile, is testing some other simple strategies. "This is
not rocket science," she said.
For example, in one experiment, participants were asked to regularly
practice random acts of kindness, things like holding a door open for a
stranger or doing a roommate's dishes, for 10 weeks. The idea was to improve
a person's self-image and promote good interactions with other people.
Participants who performed a variety of acts, rather than repeating the same
ones, showed an increase in happiness even a month after the experiment was
concluded. Those who kept on doing the acts on their own did better than
those who didn't.
Other approaches she has found some preliminary promise for include thinking
about the happiest day in your life over and over again, without analyzing
it, and writing about how you'll be 10 years from now, assuming everything
goes just right.
Some strategies appear to work better for some people than others, so it's
important to get the right fit, she said.
But it'll take more work to see just how long the happiness boost from all
these interventions actually lasts, with studies tracking people for many
months or years, Lyubomirsky said.
Any long-term effect will probably depend on people continuing to work at
it, just as folks who move to southern California can lose their
appreciation of the ocean and weather unless they pursue activities that
highlight those natural benefits, she said.
In fact, Diener says, happiness probably is really about work and striving.
"Happiness is the process, not the place," he said via e-mail. "So many of
us think that when we get everything just right, and obtain certain goals
and circumstances, everything will be in place and we will be happy.... But
once we get everything in place, we still need new goals and activities. The
Princess could not just stop when she got the Prince."
|
Happiness Buys Success
Some say success brings happiness, and others say it doesn't.
By LiveScience Staff
19 December 2005
In reality, a new study suggests, happiness buys success.
Scientists reviewed 225 studies involving 275,000 people and found that
chronically happy people are in general more successful in their personal
and professional lives. Importantly, their happiness tends to be a
consequence of positive emotions, the researchers conclude.
"When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic, and
energetic and others find them likable and sociable," said Sonja Lyubomirsky
of the University of California, Riverside. "Happy people are thus able to
benefit from these perceptions."
The results are detailed in the current issue of the Psychological Bulletin,
published by the American Psychological Association.
Previous research has often assumed that success and accomplishments bring
happiness, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues write.
"We found that this isn't always true," Lyubomirsky said. "Positive affect
is one attribute among several that can lead to success-oriented behaviors.
Other resources, such as intelligence, family, expertise and physical
fitness, can also play a role in people's successes."
Among the good things that come from happiness: positive perceptions of self
and others, sociability, creativity, a strong immune system, and effective
coping skills.
"Happy people are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling
marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance,
community involvement, robust health and even a long life," Lyubomirsky
said.
|
The secrets of happiness
Our correspondent has devoted his life to studying this
elusive emotion. He believes he has found the key
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
19/09/05
Happiness has been a puzzle to me for about 60 years, ever since
1944, when Europe was coming apart at the seams. My father was a consul in
Italy and my mother, sister and I had gone to live with my grandparents in
Budapest. I was ten years old and I watched with astonishment as relatives
and friends who were wealthy, educated and well-connected suddenly turned
into scared refugees in a land turned topsy-turvy. Walking out of the house
could get you a stray bullet from the Nazi invaders, or from one of the
Allied fighter-bombers cruising above. And each day the Soviet armies were
pulling closer. In this mindless milieu, it seemed obvious to ask: Why
cant seemingly sane adults live happily? My trust in grown-ups, in the
wisdom of culture, tradition and authority, suffered a severe blow. No
longer able to take normal life for granted, I resolved to understand what
happiness was and how best to achieve it.
During the subsequent teenage years of searching, all the obvious answers
fell short. Religion and philosophy were too dogmatic after all, they had
not helped to prevent the war. Literature and the arts seemed mere
palliatives to the otherwise wretched human condition. Then, in my late
teens, I stumbled upon the teachings of Carl Jung, a man whose psychology
confronted human frailty head-on. Unlike adult institutions such as the
Church or school, this was not hypocritical, neither was it dogmatic. Like
science, it seemed open to growth and improvement.
No surprise, then, that I decided to study psychology. But on arrival at the
University of Chicago 50 years ago, I was dismayed to find that academic
psychologists were trying to understand human behaviour from what they
learned from rats in the lab. Inadvertently, my vocation had been called.
Having decided to try to achieve personal happiness, I became more
ambitious. I resolved to build my career on trying to discover what made
others happy also. Initially, I studied people whose lives appeared to be
free and creative musicians, artists and athletes. Here were people who
devoted their lives to doing things they liked, rather than things that
reaped external rewards. I expanded the study by inventing a system called
experience sampling method. A random sample of people were asked to keep
an electronic pager for a week which was programmed to beep eight times a
day at random times. Every time it did so, they wrote down where they were,
what they were doing and with whom and filled out a numerical scale
charting how they felt, how much they were concentrating, etc. This system
has now been used on more than 10,000 people and the answers are consistent:
as with those living creative lives, they were happiest when in a state of
concentration.
Thirty years of research and 18 books later, I have proved that enduring
happiness is quite different from what most people think it is. It is not
something that happens. It is not something that can be bought or hoarded.
These conclusions have been confirmed over the years by those social
scientists brave enough to venture into the uncharted waters of happiness
research. Their surveys showed that wealth and comfort are not sufficient
conditions for a happy life. Nations where the per capita GNP is less than
10,000 are generally lower in happiness than nations above that threshold.
This suggests that a minimum of material comfort is necessary.
But below and above that dividing line, the way people assess their
happiness has very little to do with how much poorer or richer they are.
Multi-millionaires report being only infinitesimally happier than their
poorer fellows, while people living in poverty are often quite happy. Over
the years, I came up with the expression flow: a term to describe the
common denominator among those people who deemed themselves happy. The most
obvious component of happiness, I found out, is intense concentration, which
is the main reason that activities such as music, art, literature, sports
and other forms of leisure have survived. The essential ingredient for
concentration whether it happens when reading a poem or building a sand
castle is that it involves a challenge that matches ones ability. The
only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding
new opportunities to refine ones skills: do ones job better or faster, or
expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more
appropriate to your stage of life.
Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realised after the event. To
acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction the rock
climber would lose his footing, the chess player his game. Out of all the
moments pinpointed by people I have interviewed, their best are with
hindsight. Just as a smell might evoke a memory, happiness is realised in
its aftermath. As I look back at a life devoted to happiness, I often wonder
whether I have achieved it. Overall, I think I have and my belief that I
held the keys to its secret has helped immeasurably.
Ironically, my unhappiest moment was when I achieved what most would
consider success. When my book Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve
Happiness took off, I had to fight complacency and reclaim serenity. As I
get older, I find myself reinventing challenges. I gave a lecture to
businessmen during the recession of the 1990s. What affected them most, they
said, was an inability to nurture the young talent they believed would be
their legacy. When I asked Dr Jonas E. Salk, the inventor of the polio
vaccine, his main aim in life, he answered to become a good ancestor. The
ultimate challenge, perhaps, and one to which, in old age, I rise willingly.
|
Study finds happiness persists, despite
illness
Despite what able-bodied healthy people might think, people
with severe illnesses and disabilities don't wallow in misery and self-pity
all the time
By BJS
Created 02/10/2005
In fact, a new study finds, such patients on the whole may be just as happy
as those without major medical conditions. The finding adds to the growing
body of evidence that ill and disabled people adapt to their condition and
show a resilience of spirit that many healthy people can't imagine. It's
published in the new issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General by a team led by University of Michigan Health System researchers.
The researchers made their surprising finding by having 49 pairs of dialysis
patients and healthy people report their mood every few hours for a week,
using a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) such as a Palm. The
patients had all been in dialysis for at least three months, visiting a
hemodialysis center three or more times a week for hours at a time to have
their blood cleaned because their kidneys had failed.
Lead author Jason Riis, a former U-M graduate student now at Princeton
University, programmed the PDAs to beep randomly during each two-hour period
of an entire week, and prompt participants to report their mood at those
random moments by completing a quick series of ratings.
"The big advantage of using PDAs is that you can get representative
snapshots of a person's experience, rather than just relying on their
overall impressions of their lives," says Riis, adding that several studies
have shown such overall impressions to be biased in a variety of ways. "Our
snapshots revealed that the patients were in good moods the vast majority of
the time, and that their moods were not substantially worse than those of
the healthy people."
"This is further evidence that people adapt emotionally to serious
adversity, such as end-stage kidney failure," says senior author Peter Ubel,
M.D., a U-M professor of internal medicine and psychology, and a staff
physician at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. "People who haven't
experienced such adversity assume that it would destroy their happiness when
in truth it probably would not."
In fact, the researchers found that the healthy participants grossly
underestimated the extent to which patients can adapt to dialysis. When
asked to imagine that they were themselves dialysis patients, and to
estimate the percentage of time that they would experience various positive
and negative mood levels, the healthy participants assumed that they would
be miserable.
They thought they would experience negative moods most of the time, and on
average have moods that were much lower than what the real patients actually
experienced.
Interestingly, the patients themselves seemed to underestimate their own
adaptation. When asked to imagine the moods they would experience if they
had never experienced kidney failure, the patients estimated that they would
experience much better moods than those actually experienced by the healthy
study participants.
The study involved healthy participants whose age, gender, race and
education were similar to the patients. In all, 60 participants were white,
36 were black, and one was Hispanic.
The study does more than just give the first-ever glimpse into the
hour-by-hour happiness of seriously ill and healthy people, Ubel notes. It
may also help influence policy-level and personal decisions about treatments
for serious illnesses.
For instance, someone who has been healthy but who is facing a decision
about whether or not to have a colostomy, an amputation or a risky operation
might worry that the procedure would make his or her life miserable. But in
fact, it probably wouldn't.
That's not to say that a major health catastrophe doesn't change a person's
life, nor that going on dialysis, losing a limb or using a wheelchair
doesn't change a person's experience of life, Ubel says. It's also not to
say that such a major change wouldn't come without periods of frustration
and difficulty, risk of depression or effects on a person's social or
economic situation.
But the evidence from the new study, and from studies before it, suggests
that people who have gone through such changes tend to adapt their emotional
response to their new life. In the words of some of Ubel's patients, "What
use is there in complaining?"
"People are more resilient than they think they can be, and can get through
things that they probably would have never thought they could," says Ubel.
"The fact that people seem to be so poor at estimating the effect of illness
on mood calls into question some of the ways we use such quality-of-life
estimates in policy making and research."
In addition to recording the "snapshots" of mood, and the predictions of
what life would be like in the other group's shoes, the researchers also had
the patients and healthy controls recall the moods they had experienced
during the week they had carried the PDA. While healthy people slightly
underestimated their previous week's average mood, the patients were quite
accurate in recalling theirs. The researchers speculate that the patients'
recall accuracy may be involved in the adaptation process, but say that
further research is needed on this area.
The researchers now hope to expand the use of moment-based well-being
measures to assess people with a range of health conditions, including those
associated with pain and mental illness, where the adaptation story many be
quite different.
There was no difference between the 49 patients and the 49 healthy
participants in the average hour-by-hour rating of their overall mood, which
on the whole tended to be on the positive side. There was also no difference
between the two groups in the average measures of specific momentary moods,
such as "depressed," "pleased" or "worried/anxious." Even questions about
pain, tiredness and overall life satisfaction showed no significant
differences.
In addition to Ubel and Riis, the study team included George Loewenstein of
Carnegie Mellon University, Jonathan Baron and Christopher Jepson of the
University of Pennsylvania, and Angela Fagerlin of the University of
Michigan. Ubel directs, and Fagerlin is a member of, the U-M Program for
Improving Health Care Decisions, www.pihcd.org.
From University of Michigan
http://www.med.umich.edu/
|
Positive emotions slash bias, help people
see big picture details
Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big
picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people
think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University
of Michigan researchBy BJS
Created 02/01/2005 - 08:14
"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher
Kareem Johnson.
"Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival
when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal.
Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and
promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more
details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'"
To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos
of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members
of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of
another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers
found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about
10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap.
The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological
Science.
Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara
Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion
and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive
emotions.
Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic
to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral"
video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style
photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds.
Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive
emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative"
emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to
push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in
a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another
race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the
same.
The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a
"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the
world around them.
From University of Michigan [1]
Links
[1] http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo
Source URL: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/6838 |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|