Category: Happiness

Some people are genetically predisposed to spot negative events automatically, according to a new study published in Psychological Science (Todd et al., 2013).

A gene called ADRA2b seems to cause people to take particular note of negative emotional events.

The study’s lead author, Professor Rebecca Todd explained:

“This is the first study to find that this genetic variation can significantly affect how people see and experience the world. The findings suggest people experience emotional aspects of the world partly through gene-coloured glasses — and that biological variations at the genetic level can play a significant role in individual differences in perception.”

The study used a phenomenon called ‘attentional blink‘ and involved participants looking at a series of positive, negative and neutral emotional words. Those who had the ADRA2b gene variant were more likely to perceive the negative emotional words than those without it.

Positive emotion words, though, were perceived by those with and without the gene to the same degree.

This could help explain why it is that some people seem particularly predisposed towards seeing the negative aspects of the world around them, while it passes others by.

Of course, we all need to spot very strong emotional stimuli around us–like a loved one in pain or anger and aggression in others–but paying too much attention to negative events can obviously make us unhappy.

Not only is the gene linked to differences between people in their attention, but also to memory. People with the gene likely also find negative events are enhanced in their memories.

It may mean that people with the gene are more likely to suffer from uncomfortable flashbacks to negative memories or even posttraumatic stress disorder.

Statistically, around 50% of Caucasians have the ADRA2b gene variant, but the rates are much lower in other ethnicities.

As with many genes, though, they interact with the environment: their effect on our individual psychology is partly determined by our upbringing, those around us and how we choose to think and act.

Just because there is a gene that influences our starting point, that doesn’t stop us having some control over where we end up.

→ Want to change your habits of thought? Check out my book ‘Making Habits Breaking Habits: How to Make Changes That Stick‘. Out in paperback in the US on Dec 10.

Image credit: Kevin McShane

New research suggests the right kind of happiness can change the code that defines our very being: our genes.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the pattern of gene expression within the cells responsible for fighting off infectious diseases and defending the body against foreign materials (Fredrickson et al., 2013).

The 80 participants in the study also reported their levels of two different types of happiness:

1. Feeling good or hedonic happiness: the kind you get from straightforward self-gratification, like having a good meal, or buying yourself a new car.
2. Doing good or eudemonic happiness: the kind you get from working towards a noble goal and searching for meaning in life.

Stronger expression of antibody genes

What the researchers found was that people experiencing different mixtures of both types of happiness felt equally happy. For conscious experience, neither type of happiness beat the other.

A difference emerged, though, at the genetic level. In those with higher levels of ‘doing good’ happiness, there was a stronger expression of antibody and antiviral genes.

In contrast, people with higher levels of feeling good happiness had weaker expression of antibody and antiviral genes.

Steven Cole, one of the authors of the study explained:

“What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion. Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”

So, while doing good and feeling good both make us feel happy, it’s doing good that benefits us at the genetic level.

The lead author, Professor Barbara L. Fredrickson, suggests that:

“We can make ourselves happy through simple pleasures, but those ’empty calories’ don’t help us broaden our awareness or build our capacity in ways that benefit us physically. At the cellular level, our bodies appear to respond better to a different kind of well-being, one based on a sense of connectedness and purpose.”

Image credit: Dennis Holzberg

Healthy people want to be happy.

And there’s little doubt about all the benefits of positive emotions. Amongst other things, they make us more sociable, allow us to think more flexibly and they’re associated with better physical and psychological health.

It’s little wonder that pursuing happiness has become a modern obsession, an obsession that psychologists have mostly encouraged (see: 10 Easy Activities Science Has Proven Will Make You Happier Today).

But, like any emotion, it has it’s time and place. Happiness comes and goes with the ups and downs of everyday life and too much emphasis on being happy all the time can be a problem.

Yale University’s Dr June Gruber has spent years researching happiness and has found that sometimes, at the extremes, the search for happiness can go wrong. But where are those extremes?

Gruber and her colleagues have looked at positive and negative emotions in particular and identified four dark sides to the pursuit of happiness (Gruber et al., 2013), each of which shows that sometimes the pursuit of pure happiness can go wrong:

1. Too much

It might seem crazy to talk about ‘too much’ happiness, but, like gorging on chocolate, you can have too much of a good thing.

Along with overall life satisfaction, happiness is about the balance between positive and negative emotions that you experience every day. To thrive, we need both the positive and the negative.

It’s an interesting observation that we have a name for some of the people who don’t experience negative emotions: we call them psychopaths.

That’s not to say that anyone who is too happy is a psychopath, but there are interesting parallels.

There are also interesting parallels between the experience of too much positive emotion and mania. Manic people sometimes go into happiness overdrive—taking all kinds of risks in their exuberance—with disastrous consequences for their professional and social lives.

Even putting aside those with personality disorders, there’s evidence that being too happy can lead to important negative outcomes.

Negative emotions provide us with all kinds of important signals: that we are breaking society’s rules, that we are in danger or that the risks we are taking are too big. Without these warning signals we’d get ourselves into a lot more trouble.

In other words: unpleasant as they are, we occasionally need to feel bad. It’s part of our very being.

2. Wrong time

If we need our bad feelings sometimes, then when?

Broadly, we need them when things go wrong. Without those appropriate negative emotions, things can go awry. Here are a few examples:

• People who are too happy don’t see the warning signs of dangerous people or situations and may be more ready to trust when they shouldn’t. It’s no wonder that happier people also tend to be more gullible.
• The fear response prepares the body for fight or flight: but with a silly happy smile on their face, it’s less likely they’ll get away quickly or win the fight.
• People often think more systematically when they are experiencing negative emotions. Conversely happiness makes you think everything is OK and to carry on as normal.

In certain situations, then, negative emotions, like anger and benign envy, are the right response, and can even help motivate us in situations where it’s required.

So, happiness is a wonderful feeling, but isn’t always the appropriate and most effective response to a situation. Sometimes negative emotions turn out to be much more useful.

3. Wrong way

It’s one of the great ironies of life that sometimes the more you pursue happiness, the further away it gets.

And this is backed up by some studies showing that when people make a special effort to make themselves happy, they actually feel less happy as a result.

One study in which people tried to force themselves to be happy while listening to a piece of music found that they were less happy than those who just listened without making any special effort.

Part of the problem is feeling disappointment with our own feelings. If I specifically try to feel happier, and it doesn’t work, it is particularly disappointing, and makes me feel worse than if I just let the emotions come as they will.

None of this means that pursuing happiness is a waste of time—it just has to be done in the right way. As June Gruber puts it:

“Pursuing happiness may lead to positive outcomes if people are given the right tools to do so. Tools that may lead to lasting increases in happiness and well-being include flexible and adaptive emotion regulatory abilities, greater awareness of what will make oneself happy, and engagement in happiness-enhancing activities rather than directly pursuing happiness.”

4. Wrong type

So, how can there be a wrong type of happiness? Surely happiness is happiness is happiness? It all feels the same.

Well, not quite. Take the simple example of flying off on your holidays: there’s excitement, expectation, a strong feeling of wanting to get started. You can’t wait to get there and start exploring. This is happiness that’s all about arousal and feeling excited.

Then there’s the sort of happiness when you are sitting in the garden after a hard day’s work and a good meal. You feel satisfied and content. The sun is setting, the trees are rustling; there’s the distant sound of relaxed laughter. This type of happiness is all about calmness, relaxation and the feeling of a job well done.

Set against these ‘good’ types of happiness, here are a couple of examples of the wrong type:

• Pride that’s undeserved: this is the kind of pleasure that, for example, school-yard bullies seem to take in doling out random violence on others. Although they may get pleasure in the moment, though, in the long-term this leads to guilt and embarrassment.
• Culturally inappropriate: culture can partly determine how we experience happiness. For example, amongst Chinese people, the sense of happiness in terms of contentment is more culturally valued than the European-American sense of happiness as excitement and adventure. There’s some evidence that being out of step with prevailing cultural values of what happiness is can be damaging.

June Gruber summarises it like this:

“Types of happiness that engender negative social consequences or that are in conflict with a culture’s norms do not appear to have exclusively positive long-term effects and may even have negative effects.”

Happiness from meaning

“It is possible to have too much happiness, to experience happiness in the wrong time, to pursue happiness in the wrong ways, and to experience the wrong types of happiness. In such cases, happiness may not be adaptive and might even lead to harmful consequences.” (Gruber et al., 2013)

Instead life should be about having a sense of purpose that is personally meaningful, about developing strong relationships with others and about giving and receiving support.

Happiness is likely to come along the way to these more long-term goals and not by the pursuit of pleasure on its own.

Image credit: Mr Van Meelen

What has happened to people’s happiness all around the world as they’ve faced the economic crisis? How have they coped with job losses, less money coming in, the sense of despair and lack of control over a nightmare that seems to have no end?

That’s the question that Helliwell et al. (2013) ask in a new paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

They guessed that one answer is one of the oldest in human civilisation: by pulling together.

Pulling together, though, has a new fancy name: social capital. Here are the kinds of things which tell you whether a group of people have ‘social capital’:

• How many people do volunteer work in the community?
• How many people have done a favour for a neighbour in the last month?
• How many people have given a little money to charity (about $25)?
• How many people regularly have meals together as a family?

These go on and on, but you get the general idea. It’s essentially doing nice things for other people around you; they don’t have to be that dramatic like donating a liver, just little boyscout-type activities count.

They then looked at a huge amount of data on both social capital and happiness across 255 metropolitan areas in the US and drew this conclusion:

“…communities with greater social engagement are happier than otherwise equivalent communities and that life evaluations fell by less, in response to unemployment increases, in those communities with high levels of a broad measure of social engagement.”

So social capital has a protective effect: by pulling together through doing little things for each other, people helped keep their spirits up during the economic crisis.

Happy countries

Helliwell et al. (2013) also found the same when they compared between countries, not just between US metropolitan areas. They divided countries into those which had become happier since the crisis, those which remained about the same and those that had become less happy.

In the group of countries with falling levels of happiness (which includes the US but not the UK):

“We saw that average happiness drops were far greater than could be explained by their lower levels of GDP per capita, suggesting that social capital and other key supports for happiness were damaged during the crisis and its aftermath.”

In contrast, South Korea is a country whose average levels of happiness have rocketed up since the economic crisis. This is partly because the economy has recovered remarkably well, but maybe also because of policies that have encouraged social capital. Here’s the President of South Korea explaining:

“Korea has already proposed a new way forward from the global crisis. […] We decided to share the burden. Employees chose to sacrifice a cut in their own salaries and companies accepted to take cuts in their own profits because they wanted to save their employees and co-workers from losing their jobs.”

More than social: pro-social

The explanation for these effects is that humans are fundamentally pro-social so:

“…they get happiness not just from doing things with others, but from doing things both with and for others. Despite a wealth of findings that those who do things for others gain a bigger happiness boost than do the recipients of generosity, people underestimate the happiness gains from unselfish acts done with and for others”

Image credit: Shena Pamella

According to a new study by Kawakami et al. (2013), sad music is enjoyable because it creates an interesting mix of emotions; some negative, some positive. In their study, they found that:

“…the sad music was perceived to be more tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music.”

They reached this conclusion by asking…

“…44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music. Each participant was required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception of the music and their own emotional state.”

The key to enjoying sad music is that although we perceive the negative emotions, our felt emotions aren’t as strong as these perception. Perhaps this is because:

“Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion.”

Although we can’t currently explain the cathartic effect of sad music—or indeed sad art in general—perhaps:

“…we initially experience negative emotion, such as sadness, and subsequently experience pleasant emotion because of the rewarding effect of enjoying art. Thus, the experience of listening to sad music may ultimately elicit pleasant emotion.”

This is just one of the psychological reasons why music is important.

You can also try the experiment for yourself. Here is one of the pieces they used in the research, it’s Glinka’s “La Séparation” in F minor. How does it make you feel?

Image credit: Scott Schiller

Emotions aren’t just things that happen to us, they are vital components of how we reason, motivate ourselves, think about the past and future and how we communicate with others.

Our emotional selves are sometimes remarkably resilient, sometimes out of control and often difficult to understand. Good feelings inevitably fade, while negative ones can stay with us forever.

To help explore your emotional side, here are my top articles from PsyBlog on the psychology of emotions:

1. Does Keeping Busy Make Us Happy? – People dread being bored and will do almost anything to keep busy, but does keeping busy really make us happy?
2. The Upside of Anger: 6 Psychological Benefits of Getting Mad – We tend to think of anger as a wild, negative emotion, but research finds that anger also has its positive side.
3. 12 Laws of the Emotions – Emotions follow their own rules, like that of situational meaning, habituation, closure and concern.
4. The Psychological Immune System – We get over bad moods much sooner than we predict, thanks to the covert work of the psychological immune system.
5. What “The Love Bridge” Tells Us About How Thoughts and Emotions Interact – How much control do you have over your emotions?
6. The Power of Regret to Shape Our Future – Why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, but will happily exchange pens.
7. 4 Ways Benign Envy is Good For You – Feeling green with envy? If it’s the right type of envy, maybe it’s no bad thing…
8. Duchenne: Key to a Genuine Smile? – Experiments cast doubt on the classic marker of a genuine smile.
9. The Surprising Power of an Emotional ‘Memory Palace’ – Can a ‘memory palace’ help you recall happier times, even when life is hard?
10. 4 Life-Savouring Strategies: Which Ones Work Best? – We can increase our positive emotions and life satisfaction by using the right mix of savouring strategies.
11. The Psychology of Nostalgia (in under 300 words) – Nostalgia has been rehabilitated from a disease of the mind to a beneficial emotional experience.
12. 4 Dark Sides To The Pursuit of Happiness – Fake smile? Here’s how to avoid four hurdles on the road to happiness.
13. Depression: 10 Fascinating Insights into a Misunderstood Condition – Ten insights into a very common and widely misunderstood condition.

Image credit: Alvaro Tapia

“Imagine that you have two letters in your mailbox. One notifies you that you were caught on camera speeding and must pay a fine. Another is a nice handwritten letter from your best friend who lives in a foreign country. Which one would you prefer to read first?” (Sul et al., 2012)

We are forced to make decisions like this all the time. The habitual way in which we deal with how to order our happy and less happy experiences may have important consequences for how happy we feel overall.

In a new study participants were given pairs of everyday events, both uplifting and depressing, to see how they chose to order the experiences (Sul et al., 2012).

Some of the pairs were both uplifting, some both depressing and some mixed, for example:

• You lost a $250 gift certificate for a department store.
• You had a good time with some of your friends.

Participants could not only choose the order of the events but also their timing. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, people preferred to spread out the pairs of uplifting events, and the same was true of the pairs of depressing events.

When both good and bad things happen you don’t usually want it all on the same day. It’s better to spread out both pain and pleasure—the pain so you can recover and the pleasure so you can savour it.

Bad mood buffer

Life, of course, tends to be more mixed and so it’s the mixed pairs that are most interesting. How did people deal with pairs of good and bad events?

Firstly, about three-quarters of people preferred to get the bad news first. This is a consistent finding: most people prefer to end on a happy event rather than a depressing one.

Secondly, the researchers found that people who reported being happier showed a stronger tendency to use a positive social event, like meeting up with a close friend, right after losing some money. They seemed to have the potentially happy habit of using socialising more quickly after their loss to fix their bad moods.

Happier people also tended to use socialising as a buffer against negative events, no matter what they were.

In contrast less happy people tended to use positive financial events as buffers against negative events, rather than social ones.

We can’t tell directly from this study that this method of off-setting depressing events with happier social ones really does make people happier overall, although it’s a very good bet that it does.

This is a great insight into the everyday experience of how we choose to order painful and pleasurable experiences. It’s a step on from whether you choose the good or bad news first, and starts to tell us something about when and how the good news can be most effective at cheering us up.

Image credit: Prince Lang

Help comes from a new survey of research on money and happiness gloriously titled ‘If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right‘ (Dunn et al., 2011).

They are trying to explain this paradox:

“Wealthy people don’t just have better toys; they have better nutrition and better medical care, more free time and more meaningful labor—more of just about every ingredient in the recipe for a happy life. And yet, they aren’t that much happier than those who have less. If money can buy happiness, then why doesn’t it?”

Their answer is that we tend not to maximise our money because the human mind is surprisingly poor at working out what will make it happy. The conclusions they reach aren’t just useful for wealthy people, they can help all of us.

Here are the 8 pieces of advice:

1. Why Many Small Pleasures Beat Fewer Larger Ones
2. The Dangers of Comparison Shopping
3. Why Spending Money on Others Promotes Your Happiness
4. Buy More Experiences and Less Stuff
5. Buy Less Insurance
6. How to Get More Pleasure from Your Money
7. The Impressive Power of a Stranger’s Advice
8. How to Dodge Buyer’s Remorse

Image credit: iChaz

There’s a standard psychological mistake people can make when wondering how to spend their hard-earned cash.

Here are a few examples, see if you can spot the pattern:

• A camping holiday seems like fun when you abstractly imagine escaping the rat-race and getting back to nature. It doesn’t seem so much fun when you’re stuck in a cold, wet field, desperate for a proper hot meal.
• A big, expensive DSLR seems like a good idea when you think about the amazing high-res photos you’ll be able to take. But it turns out you can’t be bothered to carry a big, heavy camera around all the time, so in reality it doesn’t get used much.
• You imagine that buying a wreck of a house and doing it up means you can realise your perfect lifestyle vision. When you move in and start work, all you really want is to get rid of the dust and mess and have a normal life: your vision is forgotten.

The answer is that we tend to think abstractly about our potential purchases. The further off in time and space they are, the more abstractly we think about them.

Buy smart by thinking concrete

One of the problems of thinking abstractly about our purchases is that we tend to forget about the gritty details. And it’s the details that have a frighteningly high capacity to make us happy (or unhappy).

We know this because research finds that our happiness is predicted better by the details of our everyday lives than it is by our overall life circumstances (see Kahneman et al. 2004 and Kanner et al., 1981).

In other words happiness comes from the small pleasures in life. By the same token it’s the little hassles that are most apt to get us down. Exactly the same is true in the workplace where little hassles are a hefty predictor of job satisfaction (see: 10 Psychological Keys to Job Satisfaction).

Unfortunately when we plan our purchases we tend to make the mistake of thinking in the abstract and forgetting about the day-to-day details.

To make purchases that will give us the most happiness (and avoid buyer’s remorse) we need to think as concretely as possible. It might not sound as fun, but thinking about how we’re going to use the item or service on a daily basis is more likely to guide us towards the choice that will make us the happiest.

Image credit: the trial

Most people are much better at giving advice than taking it. When it comes to spending our money, we like to think we know best what will make us happy.

What does the guy next door or a colleague at work know about how we should spend our money? Well, a lot more, it turns out, than we might think.

Imagine you are going on a 5 minute speed date with a stranger. Before you meet them, I’ll let you have only one of these two pieces of information about them:

1. Either: a photograph of them with an autobiography.
2. Or: the rating of a previous speed dater (who is a stranger to you).

Which one do you think will better predict how much you’ll enjoy the speed date? You or the stranger?

If you are like most of the participants in an experiment by Gilbert et al. (2010) then you’ll go for number 1. The reason is probably that you prefer to make your own judgement rather than rely on someone else.

We’re all different, right? So, one person’s perfect partner is another person’s slow, painful descent into hell.

In the experiment, though, the ratings of a previous speed dater were the best predictor of how much people enjoyed their speed date. Gilbert and colleagues call this the surprising power of neighbourly advice.

Ask the audience

Here’s one that’s even weirder.

First of all, let’s give you a couple of options to choose from. Imagine now that I give you a chocolate chip cookie to taste. Which do you think would better predict how much you will enjoy it:

1. You imagine yourself eating it.
2. Someone else guesses from watching your facial expression as you first see the cookie.

Perhaps you’re a bit more wary now? If so, you’d be right.

When McConnell et al. (2011) carried out this experiment they found that observers were better at predicting participants’ pleasure than they were themselves.

This suggests three things:

1. We aren’t that good at predicting what we’re going to enjoy (one reason is the impact bias).
2. Our unconscious knows better what we’re going to enjoy than our conscious mind (at least in some circumstances).
3. Other people can pick up on this just by watching our faces.

I don’t think we can argue from this that other people can make all our monetary decisions for us, that’s going too far. But we can say that people who are somewhat similar to us are likely to be better than we might imagine at predicting what we will like.

We have a tendency to ignore other people’s advice about how to spend, thinking we are better off making our own judgements. On the contrary, this research suggests we should pay more heed to other people’s advice as it can be better than our own judgements.

So when spending our money, we are better off to ask, and heed, the advice of others as they may well have a better insight into what we’ll enjoy than we do ourselves, especially if they’ve already experienced it themselves.

Image credit: hobvias sudoneighm