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!
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