Hic Habitat Felicitas

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. 

 

 

I'm Back!

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.

1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers.  The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotion during social decision-making."

2) Check out Will Wilkinson's excellent discussion with Josh Knobe about experimental philosophy, the experience machine, the status quo bias and the endowment effect...

3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality." 

 

You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.

4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.

5) Apparently, for one reason or another, the gender of your supervisor has an influence on how happy you are at work.

6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry. 

7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."

Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...

This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."

8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."

9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."

10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.

11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be back soon...

                                                                                                  Excelsior!

                                                                                                  C.L.Sosis

You Can't Have One Without the Other...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

In May's issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, David Atkins reveals that people who report being "not very happy" are three times as likely as having an affair as those who report being "very happy." Atkins' research analyzed 1,439 responses from the 1998 General Social Survey of adults who had ever been married. Keep 'em smilin'!

                                                                         Excelsior!

                                                                         C.L.Sosis

P.S. You should also check out the article on the well-being of children born to teen mothers.

Hanky-Panky and Happiness...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald have shown that people who have sex once a week are a lot happier than those who have sex once a month (the optimal number of sexual partners in a year: one). Recently, J. Sabura Allen has shown that depressed (Australian) women have sex more often than happier women (regardless of whether or not they are in a relationship)!

                                                            Excelsior!

                                                            C.L.Sosis

Kahneman on Well-Being...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

I present you Nobel Prize Winner, Daniel Kahneman:

                                                                                       Excelsior!

                                                                                       C.L.Sosis

Seligman Slams Schoch (and Vernon)!

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Martin Seligman, the founding father of positive psychology, slammed Mark Vernons ridiculous report on Robert Schochs ludicrous inaugural lecture (based on his book) in the Guardian Unlimited. Here it is:

"Mark Vernon (2/2/2008), reporting a lecture by Richard Schoch, asks what has Positive Psychology taught us in the ten years since its inception. “In three words, not a lot - especially when compared with the insights buried in the ancient wisdom on the good life.” Perhaps Mr. Vernon and Mr. Schoch knew the following, but science did not know these things until recently, and the ancients certainly did not:

- Optimistic people are much less likely to die of heart attacks than pessimists, controlling for all known physical factors

- Women who display genuine (Duchenne) smiles to the photographer at age eighteen go on to have fewer divorces and more marital satisfaction than those who display fake smiles

- Externalities (e.g., weather, money, health, marriage, religion) totaled together account for no more than 15% of the variance in life satisfaction.

- Several specific exercises (www.reflectivehappiness.com) produce increases in happiness and decreases in depression six months later while other plausible exercises are mere placebos.

- The pursuit of meaning and engagement are much more predictive of life satisfaction than the pursuit of pleasure.

- Economically flourishing corporate teams have a ratio of at least 2.9 to1 of positive statements to negative statements in business meetings, whereas stagnating teams have a much lower ratio; flourishing marriages, however, require a ratio of at least 5:1

- Self-discipline is twice as good a predictor of high school grades as IQ

- Learning optimism at ages 10-12 halves the rate of depression as these schoolchildren go through puberty

- Happy teenagers go on to earn very substantially more income fifteen years later than less happy teenagers, equating for income, grades, and other obvious factors

- How you respond to good events that happen to your spouse is a better predictor of future love and commitment than how you respond to bad events.

- People experience more “flow” at work than at home.

More egregiously, Vernon tells us “the fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion.” If Vernon had bothered to crack Authentic Happiness (2002), the first major book in Positive Psychology, he would have found that its foundation is the denial that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Positive Psychology is the study of positive emotion and engagement and meaning; how to measure them rigorously and how to reliably build them."

Good job, Marty! Stick to Shakespeare, Schoch! I bet Vernon soiled his underoos!

                                                                                       Excelsior!

                                                                                       C.L.Sosis

Gender, Choice and Guilt...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Another excellent, provocative op-ed piece by Vicki Haddock appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle (P 19) this week. Feminism has liberated women, and now, women have more control then they ever have before, but recent studies (The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness and Are We Having More Fun Yet? Categorizing and Evaluating Changes in Time Allocation) reveal that a majority of American women report being less happy now than they did back in the early 1970s.

Men used to report lesser levels of happiness and life satisfaction than women. This is not so anymore. Women's self-described levels of happiness have fallen and now rest below that of men, in every age category, regardless of marital status, education and employment. If we were to consult 'objective measures' of well-being we would conclude that women are happier than they used to be because the material, social and political status of women's lives have improved in recent decades. According to 'subjective measures' this isn't so (yet another reason to pay careful attention to 'subjective measures' of well-being, lest we implement disastrous social reforms).

Furthermore, it turns out over the last four decades, women increasingly spend more time on paid  work, caring for adults and watching TV, and less time cooking, ironing, dusting, entertaining and reading, than in the 1960s, but it turns out that men are spending less time on paid work and relaxing more - including watching more TV. Men, it seems, are more comfortable with choice because they are more comfortable with being slobs.

Swarthmore psychology Professor Barry Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" argues that "more choices are better, but more and more choices are not. Too much choice produces not liberation but paralysis." Numerous studies suggest that consumers are less likely to buy products if they are given too many options.

The same principle, Haddock suggests, applies to women's life choices. According to Schwartz, even if you overcome paralysis and make a choice, you end up less satisfied than if you had fewer options, because all our decisions are imperfect. You end up thinking about the alternatives you didn't opt for. The imagined alternative induces you to regret the decisions you made. When you have no choice and things aren't perfect, you can blame the world, "but when you have all these choices and you still feel regretful and unsatisfied, you end up blaming yourself. Hence, guilt."

Haddock contends that "the alchemy of female content may be to make bold decisions and then refuse to be tormented by the seductive lure of the untaken path." Women--and men, for that matter--need not abandon perfectionism altogether, they just must learn to be content with imperfect pasts.

Women, Haddock points out, are more prone to take their emotional temperature. Darrin McMahon, a history professor at Florida State University and author of the book "Happiness: A History" argues that we live in a society where we feel pressure to be happy: "When we're not, we feel like failures," he says. "What we get is the unhappiness of not being happy" creating a vicious positive feedback cycle. I imagine this feedback cycle is probably even more fierce for women, because they are even more aware of how unhappy they are when they are unhappy.

It might just turn out that "there was enormous social pressure on women in the old days to pretend they were happy even if they weren't" as Freakonomics author and economist Steven Levitt suggests, but, don't forget: women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn, and a decade after college graduation, women earn 31 percent less than their male counterparts, and "even after adjusting for parenthood, choice of field, hours worked and the like, a quarter of the gap remained."

In my opinion, women report being less happy than men because: 1) women have more unpleasant responsibilities than men (studies indicate children make married couples less rather than more happy, I imagine women bear the brunt of the burden), and; 2) women are treated 'unjustly' (studies have shown unjust treatment--unequal rewards, for instance--have a negative effect on your subjective well-being), and; 3) women are expected to be happier than men even though they have more unpleasant responsibilities than men, (higher expectations, I imagine, create an unpleasant positive feedback even more intense than the cycle McMahon mentions), and; 4) 'consumer guilt' (a problem for men and women alike, which, again, is probably a bigger problem for women than men due to higher hedonic expectations), and; 5) women are more comfortable indicating they are unhappy (as Levitt Suggests) despite the fact admitting so is still taboo (it might also turn out that in this day and age women are encouraged to employ a 'masculinized' notion of well-being thus conclude they are less happy then men). As Haddock points out, the problem isn't simply freedom. It seems to me that the solution to the subjective well-being gender gap would be to continue to advance the basic feminist agenda: material, social and political equality.

                                                                                                 Excelsior!

                                                                                                 C.L.Sosis