Hic Habitat Felicitas

Is Well-Being the Embodiment of Happiness?

In the 1970's Paul Eckman (pictured above) suggested, based on his work with the preliterate Fore people of Papau New Guinea, that there are 6 basic, universally recognizable human emotions: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness. Recently, Eckman's theory has been questioned by scientists who argue that there are actually only 4 basic emotions. Here's a video abstract explaining the basis of the critique...

Now, according to a new study, which is like a cross between the work of William James and Eckman, certain emotions are embodied and they are culturally universal. An emotion, such as shame, is experienced throughout the entire body, not just in the brain, in the same way--a feeling of warmth in the cheeks, say--in different cultures. In this study, approximately 700 participants from Finland, Sweden and Japan, pointed out where in the body they experienced increased and decreased 'activity' during the experience of specific emotions. Behold, the emBODY tool...

All of the groups surveyed generated remarkably similar responses. The image below shows the regions where people reported feeling increased or decreased activity when feeling each emotion.

How should we interpret this data?

It should be noted that West Europeans and East Asians are different, but they also resemble each other in a bunch of different ways. We wear shoes. We cook food. We drive cars. Part of the reason: We face the same challenges and our cultures come up with similar solutions. Assuming that these self reports are accurate and that they describe something, questions remain. Do these consistent cross-cultural somatic-affective correlations reflect an innate feature of human beings, something about the biological bedrock of Homo sapiens generally, or does some of this data reflect behavior which has been learned? Just how much of this is the result of conditioning and culture?

I find the idea this type of stuff is innate intriguing and attractive. I'm just not sure this study convinces me. In other words: I want to know what a Himba subject (such as the one pictured above), would say.

Let's set aside our doubts about the experiments and take a look at the glowing image of the happy person. Beautiful, isn't it? If you follow this blog, you know happiness is an extremely important mental state because it feels good and, it seems, it is generally good for you too. This is a bit puzzling. How does all of this work? Why are its effects felt throughout the body?

This research might eventually make it easier to pick out particular third person physiological indicators of specific emotions, as well as locate and describe the physiological systems which generate the emotions themselves. More importantly, it might also help us identify the symptoms and treat the underlying causes of emotional disorders. We might finally figure out why it seems that happiness is so important to our well-being, overall. Perhaps well-being is merely happiness embodied...

 

 

Smiling and Thin Slicing...

The fact that we can make accurate predictions on the basis of thin slices of experience is well-documented. It seems that we can also make fairly accurate predictions about your general well-being--things such as health and personal and professional success as well as happiness--simply by looking at the grin on your face. Before I go on, you should take this test...

Chances are, you didn't do well. That's probably because you were unaware of the fact that when we fake a smile we voluntarily contract the zygomatic major muscle (this raises the corners of the mouth) but when we are happy, and grin genuinely, our orbicularis oculi muscle also contracts involuntarily (these claims are somewhat controversial--for instance, it seems like some of us can fake these smiles if we are instructed to). The inauthentic, please-kill-me-I-am-already-dead-inside smile has come to be known as the 'Botox' smile. This is because plastic surgeons minimize the appearance of crow's feet by injecting botulinum toxin into the orbicularis oculi muscle, paralyzing it...

 

Sometimes, phony smiles are referred to as Pan-Am smiles, because tired and annoyed flight attendants are often required to be courteous and grin when they are interacting with rude passengers. David Foster Wallace called this "the professional smile" in his 1996 essay “Shipping Out”:

You know this smile – the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement – the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee.

Anyhoo, Duchenne smiles are bona fide smiles in which the zygomatic major muscles and orbicularis oculi muscles contract. On the left, we see the Pan-Am smile. On the right we see the Duchenne Smile.

Duchenne smiles are named after the man who identified them: Duchenne de Boulogne. Illustrations of Duchenne's fascinating photographs, in which he faradized his assistant's face, were featured in Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals...

Your slices should be thin, but they shouldn't be too thin. In the test you took earlier, you probably were just looking at the mouths of subjects and you probably did worse than those who were focusing on the mouths and eyes. It turns out honest-to-goodness Duchenne smiles can be used to predict a number of desirable outcomes.

In 2010, scientists looked at 230 photos of baseball players from 1952 and identified Duchenne smiles. Those with Duchenne smiles were more likely to be alive 60 years later. In a 2009 study, scientists looked at childhood and college yearbook photos. Those who smiled least in their photographs were roughly five times more likely to get a divorce than those who exhibited Duchenne smiles. This research corroborated a 2001 study that showed Duchenne smiles in senior yearbook photographs predicted a variety of positive outcomes 30 years later. People with Duchene smiles didn't just have better marriages than those who didn't. They were happier. They had better cognitive skills and more stable personalities. They were even more likely to report leading more fulfilling lives.

Why does thin slicing work so well in these cases?

When thin slicing works, as it does in the nun study (which focuses on autobiographies), it is probably because it locks in on an indicator of a causal antecedent of a particular phenomenon. Perhaps positive emotions, which cause Duchenne smiles and are, in turn, caused by positive emotional dispositions, are at the heart of a good life. It seems that Duchenne smiles are closely correlated with activity in the left anterior temporal region of the brain, which is associated with positive affect. 

Perhaps, one might argue, positive affect is the essence of well-being...

 

2013 Stanford Roundtable on the Psychology of Happiness and Well-Being!

An all-star panel featuring Jennifer Aaker, Firdaus Dhabhar, Ian H. Gotlib, David Kelley and Sonja Lyubomirsky...check it out, folks!

 

The stuff about happiness, set points, twin studies and behavioral genetics (10:30) is hard for me to listen to for reasons I discuss here. 

Disproving the Pleasure Paradox!

John Stuart Mill (pictured), discussing the paradox of hedonism (or pleasure), once pointed out that happiness:

was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness...aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way...ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. (Mill, pp. 117-118)

Mill, and many other philosophers (Sidgwick and Aristotle, arguably), have insisted that trying to be happy is counterproductive because, they assumed, it is difficult to acquire happiness directly. They advised us to focus on things other than happiness, otherwise, we would be doomed to sadness. Recent studies suggest this thesis might be wrong. Trying to be happy doesn't necessarily obstruct the experience of happiness and trying to be happy, it seems, can enhance our happiness.

Bibliography --

Mill, J. S., & Robson, J. M. (1989). Autobiography. London, England: Penguin Books.

 

The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality...

Hyperborean Happiness!

The Columbia University Earth Institute released the 2013 World Happiness Report.  Here's a summary: 

1) The world is slightly happier than it was 5 years ago despite the global financial crisis. People in Sub-Saharan Africa are gaining a bit of wealth and becoming much happier. The tendency for Latin American countries to be happier in general (what Ronald Inglehart calls the "latino bonus") perseveres. Mexico came in at 16th, but the United States, which is comparatively wealthy, is in 17th place. 

2) Democratic, socialist countries (democracies with high taxes and strong social welfare programs) are happier than other countries, in general. Of course, this might be because they are richer countries, generally. There are reasons to doubt this hypothesis. After all, the United States trails far behind other wealthy democracies, such as our neighbors to the north. Canada came in 6th! 

3) Whether you live in the tropics doesn't seem to matter much. Countries with sunny weather aren't especially happier, whereas the places with the longest, coldest, darkest winters are among the happiest. Denmark is always so gosh darn happy! Jamaicans, not so much. 

 

Gilbert: Fighting Fallacies With Fallacies?

I'm a big fan of Daniel Gilbert. His work on affective forecasting is top-notch. The book Stumbling on Happiness is insightful and compulsively readable. Why is he selling retirement planning services?

 

 

 

I acknowledge that we often underestimate how much money we are going to need for retirement and how long we are going to live. I also recognize that we care about tomorrow a bit less than we care about today. That said, the premise of this advertisement, designed to persuade us to invest with Prudential, is another infamous fallacy: the availability heuristic!

What is Daniel Gilbert thinking?  

Let's assume that being poor in your golden years is a bad thing. Now, consider the fact that it is more likely that we will participate in retirement plans if we are automatically enrolled because of the status quo bias (there are problems with this strategy, but they can be easily remedied with some careful decision making on the part of conscientious policy makers).

So, what is Daniel Gilbert thinking?

I'm not a psychic, but something along these lines, perhaps: If you can get us to avoid doing bad things by manipulating our cognitive biases, such as the status quo bias, you should. Geriatric poverty is worse than misleading the public, all things considered. Prudential indeed... 

Do Hedons Hurt Your Genetic Code?

In an extremely interesting new study, scientists attempted to identify the molecular mechanisms that cause the well-documented correlation between health and psychological well-being.  According to the scientists, those who reported relatively high levels of eudaimonistic or 'meaningful' well-being had more healthy biomarkers--often associated with genes involved in antibody and antiviral responses--and fewer unhealthy biomarkers--often associated with genes involved in proinflamatory responses--than those who reported relatively high levels of hedonic or 'meaningless' well-being (which I shall refer to as happiness, here). Heritability statistics are often misinterpreted by positive psychologists (taken as evidence that our genes delimit our hedonic potential) so I worry that positive psychologists might also misunderstand what this study implies.

For instance, you might take this study as evidence that "doing good trumps feeling good." I have a number of concerns with this interpretation. Let's start off with an obvious criticism: it's easy to confuse corrleation with causation here. For all we know, assuming biomarkers track health, those who reported high levels of eudaimonic well-being would have been even healthier if they were happier or those without any happiness wouldn't have enjoyed the supposed health benefits of eudaimonic well-being. Presumably the scientists had this concern in mind when they said, "direct experimental manipulations of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being will be required to clearly define their causal effects." This is true and potentially problematic, because there is a bunch of evidence that seems to suggest that positive affect or "feeling good" causes positive health outcomes.

Here's a second problem: It could also be the case, given the evidence, that hedonistic lifestyles, rather than the happiness that frequently accompanies those lifestyles, caused the correlation between happiness and the unhealthy biomarkers. The scientists rejected this possibility because, "the observed differences in gene expression were also independent of demographic, health, and behavioral risk factors (age, sex, race/ ethnicity, BMI, smoking, alcohol consumption, minor illness symptoms)..." They concluded that it isn't a hedonic lifestyle that's causing the harmful difference, thus, it must be the hedons themselves! Perhaps this is premature. I can imagine a bunch of other plausible confounding variables. Where on earth were these hedonists getting their jollies? Sex? Narcotics? Music? Fighting?

Here's a third, related, worry: the researchers suggested that the features associated with unhealthy biomarkers might have been advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptadness but they appear to ignore the possibility that they might still be adaptive. Things have changed, sure, but happy folks who lack eudaimonia might be more fit from an evolutionary point of view than happy folks who have eudaimonia in certain contemporary environments. They might be healthier, too. Even if we grant that eudaimonic well-being is changing how the genes are expressed on a cellular level, this may or may not translate to positive health outcomes. There is no reason to believe that eudaimonia is a panacea.

Last, but not least, the conclusion isn't as startling as it might seem at first glance. According to epigentics, our genes respond to environmental influences. For instance, it has been shown that the rearing habits of mother rats caused lifelong changes in their offspring despite no change in the relevant nucleotide sequence. The study which is the subject of this post simply shows that genes are merely modulated by the environment, not changed. Those who have reported on this story have been a tad misleading in order to be provocative, I think. The correlation between eudaimonic well-being and what is often used as an indicator of the presence of a certain gene is not evidence that that eudaimonic well-being is changing the genes themselves. Claims about molecular physiology are extremely interesting, of course, but not nearly as scintillating and sexy as allusions to genetic transformation!

The Experience Machine, Inverted, Revisited and Updated...

I've talked about the experience machine and the status quo bias in a previous post, but if you're interested, you can check out the original article about the 'inverted experience machine' here.

UPDATE: Joshua Knobe recently produced a video explaining experimental philosophy using the experience machine as an example. Here it is!

 

 

 

Happiness and Well-Being: It's About Time?

Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the Stanford Prison Experiments, has been dabbling in positive psychology. He argues that we can use framing effects, which can distort our recollection of our emotional states and by extension our ability to predict what will make us happy, to our advantage. The method, Time Perspective Therapy (TPT), involves determining our attitudes towards the past, present and future (using the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory) and, in some cases, adjusting these attitudes (you can check out the inventory and identify your 'time profile' here). So far, TPT has helped improve the lives of those with post traumatic stress disorder, but as Zimbardo points out in this quick TED talk, this research might be used to help us all get along better in one way or another. Naturally, part of this project involves identifying the ideal attitudes. I imagine which attitudes are 'ideal' depends, at least in part, on what we want and our environment. In any case, take a look at this compelling video in which he discusses his research as well as the fascinating work of social psychologist Robert Levine on time perception and it's relationship to culture, age and gender.