I used to think that consummate love couldn't last long because adaptation effects would inevitably extinguish passion and therefore, the most a long term couple could hope for was companionate love (it should be pointed out that these are specialized terms). It turns out, thankfully, I was dead wrong!
Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron (of Stony Brook University) discovered that, "romantic love, without the obsession component typical of early stage romantic love, can and does exist in long-term marriages, and is associated with marital satisfaction, well-being, and high self-esteem."
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 emotionduring social decision-making."
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.
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.
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.
"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!
Happiness, however, could also cost you. It turns out that "The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale), but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale)." Furthermore, the study found that 10s earned significantly less money than eights or nines. Their educational achievements and political engagements were also much lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.
These findings challenge the ubiquitous assumption that indicators of success or objective well-being increase as happiness, or subjective well-being increases. While many indicators of success and well-being do correspond to higher levels of happiness, the researchers report, those at the uppermost end of the 10 point life satisfaction scale are in some respects 'worse off' than their slightly less satisfied counterparts. It should be noted that the study reaffirms the finding that happy people are more successful in social realms, engaging more often in volunteer activities and maintaining more stable relationships.
The researchers predicted that moderately satisfied people might be 'more successful' in some realms than those who report being more satisfied. This prediction was based on the hypothesis that profoundly happy people may be less inclined to alter their behavior or adjust to external changes even when such flexibility offers an 'advantage'.
The student study revealed a similar pattern in measures of academic and social success. In this analysis, students were categorized as unhappy, slightly happy, moderately happy, happy or very happy. Success in the categories related to academic achievement (grade-point average, class attendance) and conscientiousness increased as happiness increased, but dropped a bit for the individuals classified as very happy. In other words, the happy group outperformed even the very happy in grade-point average, attendance and conscientiousness. Those classified as very happy scored significantly higher on things like gregariousness, close friendships, self-confidence, energy and time spent dating.
The data, Diener argues, indicate that happiness may 'need to be moderated for success' in some areas of life, such as income, conscientiousness and career: “The people in our study who are the most successful in terms of things like income are mildly happy most of the time.” In an upcoming book on the science of well-being (Rethinking Happiness) Diener notes that being elated all the time is not always good for one’s success — or even for one’s health. Reviews of studies linking health and emotions show that for people who have been diagnosed with serious illnesses, being extremely happy doesn’t always improve survival rates, Diener said. This may be because the elated don’t worry enough about issues that can have profound implications for their ability to survive their illness: “Happy people tend to be optimistic and this might lead them to take their symptoms too lightly, seek treatment too slowly, or follow their physician’s orders in a half-hearted way.”
The problem here, is obvious. Diener is defining optimality in objective terms, and in doing so, he seems to presuppose that certain states of affairs have independent value, which is to say, he seems to believe, that success (among other things) matters whether or not it undermines our subjective well-being. Does Deiner really assume that these goals are valuable even if they undermine our subjective well-being overall? He seems to assume, implicitly, that happiness is costly in certain circumstances because being happy can, occasionally, be an obstacle to achievement (for instance), which is valuable even if it doesn't make us happy. One might wonder whether we should want the things we value if they make us unhappy, that is, if they compromise our subjective well-being. In light of these studies, we might just conclude that we should, upon reflection, adjust our preferences and values (if we can).
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