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Happiness vs. Unhappiness |
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Positive emotions increase life
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People 'get happier as they age'
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| Achieving Fame, Wealth, and
Beauty are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says If you think having loads of money, fetching looks, or the admiration of many will improve your life — think again. A new study by three University of Rochester researchers demonstrates that progress on these fronts can actually make a person less happy. May 14th, 2009 Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry PhysOrg.com "People understand that it's important to pursue goals in their lives and they believe that attaining these goals will have positive consequences. This study shows that this is not true for all goals," says author Edward Deci, professor of psychology and the Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University. "Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community," Deci says. The research paper, to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Research in Personality, tracked 147 alumni from two universities during their second year after graduation. Using in-depth psychological surveys, the researchers assessed participants in key areas, including satisfaction with life, self-esteem, anxiety, physical signs of stress, and the experience of positive and negative emotions. Aspirations were identified as either "intrinsic" or "extrinsic" by asking participants how much they valued having "deep, enduring relationships" and helping "others improve their lives" (intrinsic goals) versus being "a wealthy person" and achieving "the look I've been after" (extrinsic goals). Respondents also reported the degree to which they had attained these goals. To track progress, the survey was administered twice, once a year after graduation and again 12 months later. This post-graduation period was selected because it is typically a critical developmental juncture for young adults, explains lead author Christopher Niemiec, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University. "During this formative period, graduates are no longer in the home or at the university. For the first time, they are in a position to determine for themselves how they want their lives to proceed." As with earlier research, the study confirmed that the more committed an individual is to a goal, the greater the likelihood of success. But unlike previous findings, this analysis showed that getting what one wants is not always salubrious. "There is a strong tradition in psychology that says if you value goals and attain them, wellness will follow," says Niemiec. "But these earlier studies did not consider the content of the goals." What's "striking and paradoxical" about this research, he says, is that it shows that reaching materialistic and image-related milestones actually contributes to ill-being; despite their accomplishments, individuals experience more negative emotions like shame and anger and more physical symptoms of anxiety such as headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy. By contrast, individuals who value personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health are more satisfied as they meet success in those areas. They experience a deeper sense of well-being, more positive feelings toward themselves, richer connections with others, and fewer physical signs of stress. The findings in this study support Self-Determination Theory, a well-established theory of human motivation developed by two of the paper's authors, Deci and fellow University psychologist Richard Ryan. The theory holds that well-being depends in large part on meeting one's basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Intrinsic aspirations make people happy because they fulfill these foundational needs, conclude the authors. "Intrinsic aspirations seem to be more closely related to the self, to what's inside the self, rather than to what's outside the self," Niemiec explains. Striving for wealth and adulation, on the other hand, does little to satisfy these deep human requirements, at least within this early career stage of life. In addition, this was a well-educated sample, and the authors stress the need for research in other demographics and age ranges. Yet for this young adult group, the authors suggest that time devoted to extrinsic pursuits, like working long hours, often crowds out opportunities for psychologically nourishing experiences, such as relaxing with friends and family or pursuing a personal passion. Craving money and adoration also can lead to a preoccupation with "keeping up with the Joneses" ― upward social comparisons that breed feelings of inadequacy and jealousy. And unlike the lasting benefits of caring relationships and hard-earned skills, the thrill of extrinsic accomplishments fade quickly; all too soon, the salary raise is a distant memory and the rave review forgotten. More information: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622897/description#description |
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| People Who Wear Rose-colored
Glasses See More, Study Shows A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience suggesting that seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.
Science Daily |
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| Bitterness as mental illness? Bitter behavior is so common and deeply destructive that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Los Angeles Times May 25, 2009 You know them. I know them. And, increasingly, psychiatrists know them. People who feel they have been wronged by someone and are so bitter they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances. This behavior is so common -- and so deeply destructive -- that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder. The behavior was discussed before an enthusiastic audience last week at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn. in San Francisco. The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge. "They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior. Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job, relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens -- they don't get the promotion, their spouse files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team -- a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters. "Embitterment is a violation of basic beliefs," Linden says. "It causes a very severe emotional reaction. . . . We are always coping with negative life events. It's the reaction that varies." There are only a handful of studies on the condition, but psychiatrists at the meeting agreed that much more research is needed on identifying and helping these people. One estimate is that 1% to 2% of the population is embittered, says Linden, who has published several studies on the condition. "These people usually don't come to treatment because 'the world has to change, not me,' " Linden says. "They are almost treatment resistant. . . . Revenge is not a treatment." Nevertheless, Linden suggests that people once known as loving, normal individuals who suddenly snap and kill their family and themselves may have post-traumatic embitterment syndrome. That's reason enough for researchers to study how to treat the destructive emotion of bitterness. |
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| A life worth living: The
science of human flourishing What do we know about human well-being? The answer is, surprisingly little, compared with what is known about human illness, dysfunction and disease. December 9th, 2008 Medicine & Health / Psychology Scientific progress on the positive side of human functioning lags woefully behind strides on the negative side of health assessment, treatment and research. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. Growing empirical research has documented the remarkable capacity of some individuals, from early life through old age, to thrive in the face of life's challenges and setbacks. Positive emotions as a basic building block of flourishing in the face of adversity What good are positive emotions, and why do scientists care about whether people are feeling good? Historically, the prevailing scientific view in the field of psychology was that efforts to understand positive emotions should take a back seat while psychologists learn more about how to effectively treat the suffering generated by negative emotions. But what if positive emotions could help to explain some of the problems that negative emotions produced? Emerging research indicates that when we look at the question in a multivariate way, we do not find a single, simple answer to the question of how positive emotions influence health. Instead, the most accurate assessment is to say that it is a process that proceeds along at least three intersecting pathways. -- Positive emotions undo negative emotion arousal. Converging empirical work on positive emotions has raised the possibility that positive emotions are important facilitators of adaptive recovery, undoing the autonomic arousal generated by negative emotions. In laboratory studies in which positive and negative emotions are experimentally induced, researchers have found that positive emotions are linked to faster cardiovascular recovery from negative emotions. Other investigations have confirmed the importance of positive emotions in fostering recovery from such stressful life events as interpersonal loss. -- Positive emotions fuel psychological resilience. What psychological traits are implicated in generating and maintaining positive emotions in the face of stress? Emerging adult literature suggests that individual differences in psychological resilience may account for the adaptive ways in which life stressors are encountered, managed and transformed. Indeed, psychological resilience may serve to strengthen resistance to stress by affording greater access to positive emotions, which, in turn, may help provide a momentary respite from ongoing stress. -- Positive emotions trigger emotional and physical well-being. By undoing lingering negative emotions and fueling psychological resilience, positive emotions should also enhance people's emotional and physical well-being. The results of recent longitudinal studies suggest that psychological resilience may enhance the effects of positive emotion, triggering an upward spiral of prolonged positive emotionality. However, the capacity for positive emotional engagement in times of stress has consequences that are not just emotional but physiological. Research with older adults suggests that deficits in positive emotions create a subtle but persistent difference in cardiovascular function that sets the stage for trouble in later life. By accelerating cardiovascular recovery from daily stress, positive emotions may benefit health by averting delays in adaptation to subsequent stressors. In sum, the notion that positive emotions have adaptive value is no longer contestable, but what precisely this means for individual lives and societies has not been fully appreciated. However, one thing is for sure: When our positive emotions are in short supply -- when we feel hemmed in by such negative emotions as fear and sadness -- we become stuck in a rut and painfully predictable. But when our positive emotions are in ample supply -- when we feel lifted by the centripetal force of our closest relationships -- we take off and become generative, resilient versions of ourselves. Tips for Promoting Positive Emotions 1. Find meaning in everyday life through (a) reframing adverse events in a positive light; (b) infusing ordinary events with positive value; and (c) pursuing and attaining realistic goals. 2. Explore relaxation techniques (e.g., imagery, muscle and meditation exercises) that create conditions conducive to experiencing contentment and inner calmness. 3. Make connections by reaching out to others. 4. Engage in activities that you enjoy and find intrinsically motivating. 5. Take care of yourself by eating right, getting enough sleep and engaging in regular physical activity. Provided by Cornell University |
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| Put on a happy face: It helps
you see the big picture That photo of your smiling kids on the refrigerator door might do more than just make you feel good; you might make healthier food choices after looking at it. www.physorg. com November 17, 2008 A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that positive moods can increase our ability to understand the big picture. "A positive mood enhances efforts to attain future well-being, encourages broader and flexible thinking, and increases openness to information," write the study's authors Aparna A. Labroo (University of Chicago) and Vanessa M. Patrick (University of Georgia). The researchers investigated the scientific basis for the simple practice of surrounding oneself with positive things. The first study presented identical statements to study participants. The statements in each set were preceded by either a smiley face or a frowny face."The results revealed that simply associating a smiley with a statement resulted in the statement being construed at a higher, more abstract level." In follow-up studies, the authors induced positive and negative moods by asking participants to describe either the happiest or unhappiest days in their lives. They then filled out three different questionnaires to determine the level of abstract versus concrete thinking. All three questionnaires showed that people in a good mood thought more abstractly. The authors explain that being in a good mood allows people to step back emotionally. "The research demonstrates that by signaling that a situation is benign, a positive mood allows people to psychologically distance themselves from the situation," the authors write. "Those in a positive mood not only adopt higher-order future goals and work harder toward attaining them, but also reduce their efforts when goals are proximal or concrete," they conclude. Source: University of Chicago |
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METRO, 4 June, 2008 |
"Happiness is not achieved by the
conscious pursuit of happiness; |
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World Database of Happiness |
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Happiness Lengthens Life |
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| 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." |
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New Study Reports On The State Of
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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." |
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| Happiness Buys Success Some say success brings happiness, and others say it doesn't.
By LiveScience Staff |
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| 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. |
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| 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/ |
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| 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 research By BJS |
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