Happiness Read online

  Broaden and Build

  The function of positive emotions seems less obvious. What good is being cheerful? How might feeling joyful help us? It turns out that feeling good is a special gift that helps us thrive and function. According to Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, positive emotions serve a definite purpose: they "broaden and build" our personal resources. Just as our paychecks can be spent on material items like hybrid cars and Harry Potter books, our positive moods lead us to seek out and cultivate relationships, think more creatively, and show curiosity and interest in new activities. In one study, for instance, participants who felt happy expressed interest in engaging in more activities than did those who were in a negative mood. In another study, people put in a good mood expressed more interest in both active and passive social and nonsocial activities. They also expressed more energy for doing the activities. You probably recognize this phenomenon from your own life: when you are feeling sad you don't feel like doing much, but when you are feeling joyful many activities sound great.

  Few people realize that many of our personal resources, whether it is our closest friendships, success at work, or a new skill, are accumulated when we are in positive moods. Positive emotions energize us to develop our physical, intellectual, and social resources. To investigate this possibility, Fredrickson conducted a study in which she assessed people's moods and then examined their creative coping strategies in the moment and at a follow-up session five weeks later. Sure enough, the folks who were in a good mood during the initial research session were more likely to exhibit creative problem solving and better coping strategies.

  One aspect of building resources you may not have considered is the process of play. When we are feeling joyful, our playful spirit emerges. Play is more than just idle leisure time; it is an opportunity to practice new skills and bond with others. For children, play is unscripted, and offers the opportunity to try new ways of doing things, or practice newly acquired abilities. For parents, the sight of their sons and daughters mimicking the skills of adulthood is common. Kids pretend to change diapers, make bottles, grocery shop, cook and clean, pack for a trip, buy goods with credit cards and money, build homes, drive cars, put on makeup, and style their hair. These are practice runs for later in life, when they will be applying these skills in earnest.

  For adults, play is no less functional. Although adults generally do not engage in make-believe play, they participate in board games, sports, and leisure activities such as hiking and painting. In each instance, adult recreation subtly builds our resources. Many board games, for example, require social coalition building, challenge us to make creative connections, hone our strategic abilities, help to build our working vocabularies, and give our minds some exercise. Similarly, athletic activities offer an opportunity for us to maintain our physical fitness, as well as form bonds of loyalty. Games of chance and ability are the testing grounds for the ideas, words, friendships, and skills that we will call upon later when the stakes are higher. But, as useful as play is, we mostly want to do it when we are in a good mood. We usually experience positive emotions when things are going well, and these are the times when we can afford to build our resources for the future. Play may have seemed like just relaxation to you before now, and a few people even consider it to be a waste of time, but many forms of leisure are in fact quite helpful in living a more successful life.

  Another broadening and building benefit of positive emotion is the way in which we seek out and connect with others. When we feel affection toward other people, whether it is platonic or romantic, we tend to want to spend time socially with them. Happiness and love lead us to listen with concern, help when called upon, and exert the effort to maintain existing relationships. We are far more likely to go dancing with our friends or attend a party if we are feeling upbeat and energetic. We are even more likely to brave new experiences, such as attending a new church, giving a new sport a try, or choosing a new coffee shop or restaurant when we are in a good mood.

  Cheerfulness and optimism serve to widen our social circle. How does this process work? Consider the case of human infants. Babies smile, even before their eyesight is developed enough to clearly see adult faces, suggesting this is an innate behavior. Adults, in turn, react to smiling babies with predictable ooh-ing and ah-ing, and shower the infant with attention. Thus, the smile, as an outward manifestation of happiness, serves from the beginning to connect us to others. Further proof for this comes from research that found that people who suffer from facial paralysis, and who cannot smile, have difficulty in social relationships. Thus, we are prewired to make connections with others - relationships that are necessary for our personal and physical well-being - and happiness is the grease that allows this evolutionary machinery to work.

  In the end, our personal and social capital - our knowledge, insight, friends, families, skills, and creativity - are more valuable even than our material resources. Luckily, we are evolutionarily adapted to develop these important assets when we are feeling good. Happiness and related positive emotions function to encourage us to broaden and build a wide range of resources that, ultimately, lead to personal fulfillment and societal well-being.

  Regulating Negative Emotions

  We explained that negative emotions such as sadness and guilt are functional, and that we ought to experience them some small portion of the time. What we have not said, and what many readers will be able to attest to, is that negative feelings have a downside in that they can feed on themselves. Although embarrassment and anger are not necessarily pleasant to experience, they can be habit forming. For some people, anger is exciting, and they can learn to feed off the negative emotional dramas in their lives. For other people, self-pity can act as a blanket, one that individuals can swaddle themselves in for a kind of perverse security. The danger of negative feelings isn't in experiencing them - we all do - but in getting too comfortable with them, so that they rival our positive emotions in frequency and intensity. Fortunately, positive emotions can serve to regulate and dampen these unpleasant feelings if they become too strong or common. In this way, emotions are like a teeter-totter, in which the heavier weight of good feelings controls the seesaw action.

  Consider the case of a couple in the middle of a fight, an inevitable experience familiar to most of us. Marital arguments, unfortunately, have a way of dragging on longer than they should. Who hasn't followed their spouse into the next room, even after the debate is supposedly over? Anger can keep the fight going long after the issue itself is resolved. Fortunately, happiness can serve as an emotional firewall, protecting us from doing further harm to our relationships. Frequently, for instance, either the husband or the wife will abruptly make a joke, or something will occur that will suddenly seem funny to both parties. Intensely negative arguments sometimes deteriorate into quizzical laughter, in which the spouses wonder at the absurdity of what, only moments earlier, seemed worth fighting over. This is our natural positivity defense kicking in, and it is the way in which the referee of happiness calls the end to the game of negativity.

  Positive emotions serve to bring us back to our baseline by undoing our negative feelings. Just as sweating helps cool us down to our normal temperature after exercise, happiness can restore us after a negative emotional event. In fact, happiness, like sweating, has a direct effect on our physiological arousal. Fredrickson conducted a study in which she showed short scary movies to the participants. As expected, the films were arousing, and were accompanied by reactions of fear. After screening the horror films, Fredrickson showed clips from funny, neutral, or depressing movies. Participants who saw the amusing clips returned to their baseline cardiovascular levels within twenty seconds, compared with the forty to sixty seconds their counterparts who were exposed to the neutral and negative movies required.

  Fredrickson found similar results in a study in which participants were affected by real-world conditions. In a sample of college students whose moods were teste
d both before and after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, positive emotions were associated with less depression, more resilience, and more personal growth among the happier students. This suggests that positive individuals have an advantage over others, in that they can bounce back more easily from the occasional negative situations they will certainly encounter.

  Challenges Look Easier When You Are Happy

  Another clear benefit of good moods is the effect they have on our motivation. Research shows that positive emotions make goals seem easier to achieve, and therefore happiness adds an extra boost of enthusiasm and perseverance to our personal pursuits. Professors Dennis Proffitt and Gerald Clore from the University of Virginia found that people in a good mood see the world as an easier place than those in a negative mood, who see it as scarier and more difficult. In an early study, they asked research participants to estimate the steepness of a hill in front of them. The researchers instructed participants to wear a heavy backpack. Under the increased physical load, people guessed that the hill was far steeper than the backpack-free participants had estimated.

  In the next round of research, Proffitt and Clore took a new group of participants to the same hill, and played classical music composed by either the upbeat, bouncy Mozart or the despondent Mahler. This time, when the participants made their slope estimates, those who had been subjected to the emotionally heavy Mahler pieces estimated the steepness of the hill at 31 degrees. Compare this with the estimate of 19 degrees made by those who were treated to the light, flute-filled Mozart compositions.

  The researchers next manipulated moods more directly. They took the research participants to the top of the hill and had them estimate the slope from above. Some of the participants had to stand on the top of a stable wooden box when making their guesses, while others stood atop a wobbly skateboard. As you might imagine, those folks who were on the less stable footing of the skateboard reported more fear, and thought the angle of the hill was steeper than did those on the solid box. Same hill, different perceptions. In yet another study, conducted at the University of Virginia, students were asked how far it would be to walk to Monticello, the famed home of Thomas Jefferson. The students guessed that it was closer if they were with a friend than they did if they were alone. Thus, negative emotions can make the world look frightening, whereas positive moods make the hills of life appear smaller and distances look shorter.

  Coming Chapters on Happiness and Psychological Wealth

  It is because happiness is associated with action and forward thinking that we are not only able to survive, but to thrive, develop, and progress. When people are in a good mood, they are more likely to be sociable, creative, playful, and energetic - all of which can help them further build their resources. Happiness, then, helps create psychological wealth.

  The following chapters of this book outline the evidence showing that the benefits of happiness are obvious in concrete ways in areas such as health and longevity, work and income, and social relationships. Indeed, for social relationships, positive emotions may be the primary elixir. Even for something as seemingly ephemeral as spirituality, positive emotions are helpful.

  As important as happiness is for effective functioning in diverse realms of life, there are limits. One need not be intensely happy to function well, and a smidgeon of negative emotions at the right times is helpful. Thus, in chapter 12, we describe how the best level of happiness for doing well varies in different domains. We also discuss how seeking continual bliss is not only doomed to failure, but can be destructive. Thus, being happy most of the time is good, but euphoria is necessarily a rare occurrence. In the rest of this book, we will describe the scientific evidence for our two principles, and give concrete examples of how they are manifested in life.

  Part I I

  Happy People Function Better

  3

  Health and Happiness

  Take a moment and picture your next physical exam. You wait for fifteen minutes reading old copies of People to catch up on celebrity gossip, and then you are called to the examination room. As usual, your doctor peers into your ears and nose, checks your blood pressure, listens to your heart, hits your knees with a rubber hammer, and administers the digital rectal exam to check your prostate, if you happen to have one. All the while he or she peppers you with questions about your exercise, diet, and smoking habits. Then the doctor does something completely unexpected and asks about how happy, optimistic, and satisfied you are. What is going on here? This is a medical office, not a psychotherapist's couch! Nonetheless, an emerging body of research suggests that probing your happiness is one of the most important things your doctor can do to predict your health and longevity, and to offer you advice on how to live healthier and longer. Yet few physical exams actually include this easy assessment. This is not a criticism of doctors; of course, the vast majority of them do a remarkable job of treating their patients. Instead, ignoring your feelings is simply a component of how we tend to think of health in general. In health-conscious modern societies, most folks pay attention to diet and exercise, but overlook emotion's vital role in overall health. Books about your "real age," for example, help you calculate your longevity based on a variety of health indicators, but rarely do they include how happy you are. We are out to set the record straight!

  Ample evidence now indicates that happiness is very important to your health, and we believe that your doctor must ask about your happiness if he or she really wants to keep you physically and mentally healthy. Along with Lipitor for your high cholesterol, beta blockers for your high blood pressure, a nicotine patch to cure your smoking habit, and diet and exercise to correct your obesity, your physician could assign you gratitude exercises and savoring training to reduce your unhappy moods and create more positive emotions in you. Among the proof that happiness is beneficial to health is the fact that people who are happy become sick less often than unhappy people. Just imagine a life with fewer doctor's office visits, shorter hospital stays, and more health and vitality! In scientific studies of happy people, those who are satisfied with their lives and have an optimistic outlook tend to report fewer symptoms of illness, and actually get sick less often when measured objectively. In this chapter, we will present compelling evidence that happiness influences health in a variety of ways. We hope to convince not only you, but your doctor as well. Our aim is therefore no less than to improve medical practice around the world.

  A Hotel in Pennsylvania, Room 305

  We begin our tour of the scientific evidence in Room 305 of a hotel near Pittsburgh, which we will call the Vacation Inn. The Vacation Inn is a typical university campus hotel with long hallways and simple but pleasant rooms. We recently stayed in this hotel for a couple of nights. It was a comfortable stay, but certainly not the Ritz-Carlton at Waikiki Beach. Unlike the Ritz-Carlton, however, the Vacation Inn was once the location for a fascinating study on health and illness. Under the leadership of the Carnegie Mellon professor Sheldon Cohen, a team of scientists sequestered research participants in the hotel. Our stay in Room 305 was an attempt to get a feel of what it would be like to stay isolated there as part of a scientific experiment on health and happiness. Professor Cohen and his colleagues recruited men and women who were willing to be isolated on a floor of the hotel for a week while the scientists ran them through a series of medical tests intended to explore the link between moods and health. The research team paid participants hundreds of dollars apiece to live quarantined in the hotel so that their environment could be carefully controlled. Before arriving at the research site, participants completed surveys at home that asked about their moods, as well as their general positivity and negativity, and were screened for antibodies that indicated whether they suffered from certain illnesses or had been exposed to them in the past.

  On their first day at the Vacation Inn, the participants were infected with a cold virus, with a threatening-sounding name like "rhinovirus 39," or a strain of the flu. (Although the experiment was carefully c
ontrolled and monitored, we have changed the name of the hotel so that nobody will worry about exposure to stray germs there.) Then they lounged around watching television, reading, or talking on the phone, while the illness slowly crept through their bodies and took hold of them. Over the days that followed, the participants were not allowed to leave their floor of the hotel, did not have close physical contact with anyone (including other participants), and ate only the food that was served to them. They could have no visitors. The participants whiled away the hours and days waiting for the virus to run its course, but they had plenty of medical poking and prodding to break the tedium.

  Each day during the study, participants reported to a medical desk where their noses were flushed with a saline solution spray, and researchers carefully analyzed what was washed out. Next, their mucus was weighed. One subject wrote in her diary that they put a lot of stuff in your nose, but fortunately, they also take a lot of stuff out." When the experimenters were not around, the participants put their dirty tissues in baggies so that the researchers could weigh them. Urine, blood, and saliva samples, as well as daily inspections of ears and throats, completed the medical probing. Finally, the participants answered symptom checklists to complain about the severity of their illness.