Kitabı oku: «Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood», sayfa 2
In contrast, Seligman’s Good Life is one built mainly upon satisfaction. Someone living the Good Life derives much of their happiness from engaging in worthwhile activities like work, parenting or study, and attaining goals that mean something to them. They may not always be grinning with joy, because they sometimes do things that are difficult or unpleasant, but they nonetheless feel good about the life they are living.8 If all is going really well, you could have a life that is both Pleasant and Good. A Good Life rich in satisfaction may also be a Pleasant Life. Someone who has a loving partner, close friends, an interesting job and a stimulating social life may have experiences that are both satisfying and pleasurable. There is no rule against having both.
More than pleasure
Equating happiness with pleasure has been a common error throughout history. Across the centuries, various sages, politicians and gurus have preached that the ultimate aim in life should be the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.9
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Jeremy Bentham and like-minded utilitarian philosophers championed a world view that made happiness synonymous with pleasure. Bentham, whose stuffed remains are still on display in University College, London, regarded pleasure as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, and argued that playing pub games was just as good as composing a symphony if it produced the same amount of pleasure. He famously asserted that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ should be the supreme criterion for morals and legislation. Bentham even tried to devise objective methods for measuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number using his ‘felicific calculus’, but the task was beyond him.
Twenty-first-century attitudes are not vastly different, in that many people are still inclined to focus on pleasure rather than satisfaction when thinking about happiness. This mindset, which evaluates happiness in terms of feelings rather than thoughts, lies at the heart of our consumerist ‘me’ culture, and it starts early in life. Young children readily discover the immediate fix that comes from a pleasurable experience like eating chocolate or watching TV. Satisfaction is more elusive, since it requires thinking, effort and a certain amount of patience. Children can all too easily develop a lifelong habit of relying on short-term pleasures rather than learning to attain satisfaction. As we shall see later, a child’s ability to resist the desire for instant gratification, in return for greater benefits at a later time, is a good predictor of subsequent happiness and success.
Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with pleasure: personally, I am in favour of having as much as I can get. One of the simplest and most reliable ways of making yourself feel better, at least for a while, is to do something you enjoy. For many people, listening to music is a reliable way of eliciting powerful sensations of pleasure and relaxation. Research using brain-scanning techniques has revealed that pleasurable responses to music are mediated by the same regions of the brain that respond to other pleasurable stimuli including sex, food and recreational drugs.10 Listening to music can also ease anxiety and induce a physiological relaxation response, which is why music therapy has been used successfully for many years to help patients suffering from painful medical conditions.
But, as I have said, there is more to happiness than pleasure. William James, who was one of the founders of modern psychology, put it like this: ‘If merely “feeling good” could decide, then drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.’ It’s good to feel – but it’s also good to think. After all, thinking is one of the hallmarks of being human. A life built on pleasure alone can be empty and one-dimensional – a life for grazing animals, as Aristotle scathingly described it. Taken to excess, the Pleasant Life can be self-destructive and unhappy. Elvis Presley and the Marquis de Sade reportedly lived lives rich in pleasurable sensations and the gratification of physical appetites, but not everyone would regard their later years as enviably happy in the broader sense. At the other end of the spectrum, saintly figures have lived lives rich in self-sacrifice and satisfaction but rather short on pleasure. There is something to be said for a happy life built on generous measures of both.
How is happiness measured?
Throughout this book I will be referring to evidence drawn from published scientific research into the nature and causes of happiness. Some of this work is cited in the References section at the end. However, you might be wondering how scientists could possibly know all these things. After all, happiness is an essentially private experience. And if you ask someone how happy they are, can you trust their answer? Investigating happiness is not a trivial problem. Fortunately (or I could not have written this book) psychologists have devised an array of proven and reasonably reliable techniques for measuring happiness, which they have been studiously deploying for many years.
How, then, do psychologists go about measuring happiness? In most cases they do it simply by asking direct questions to suitably selected samples of people. A number of special questionnaires (or ‘scales’, as they are known in the trade) have been developed for this purpose. Some are designed specifically to assess pleasure, displeasure or satisfaction with life, while others are intended to assess happiness in the round. The simplest versions use a single question, such as ‘How satisfied are you with your life in general?’ The respondent answers on a scale of, say, one to ten. More sophisticated versions use many different questions (or ‘items’) which are designed to probe specific aspects of pleasure, displeasure or satisfaction. For example, the Oxford Happiness Inventory contains 29 different items, and for each item the respondent must select one of four statements that best describe how they have been feeling over the past several weeks – for example, ‘I do not feel happy/I feel fairly happy/I am very happy/I am incredibly happy’.
Asking people directly is not the only way of gauging their happiness. Other techniques have also been devised. These include conducting one-to-one interviews, asking partners, friends or close relatives to assess the individual’s happiness, and measuring levels of various hormones and neurotransmitter chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, cortisol and endorphins. Another widely used technique is known as experience sampling or mood sampling. In this case, the subjects carry a notebook or miniature electronic recorder around with them and make a note of their current experience, activity, mood or level of happiness at various times throughout their normal day, whenever they receive a prompt from a pager or timer.
Memory can also cast light on happiness. Studies have found that happy people find it easier than unhappy people to remember good events in their lives and to forget bad events. Unhappy people are typically faster at recalling unpleasant memories than pleasant memories. This seems to be partly because happy people actually experience more positive events than unhappy people, and partly because they are more likely to interpret any event in a positive way.
Happiness – or, rather, positive mood – can also be gauged by recording how much time people spend smiling. However, only certain types of smile indicate genuine jollity. Experiments have revealed that the so-called Duchenne smile, which involves smiling with the eyes as well as the mouth, is a true indicator of positive mood, whereas a mouth-only smile is not. The non-Duchenne smile is the contrived, have-a-nice-day smile of the fake who feels they should appear happy even when they are not. Researchers have found that people can sense whether a stranger is smiling or frowning from the sound of their voice alone, without seeing their face. In fact, you can judge whether someone is smiling just from hearing them whisper.
A good mood even has a distinctive smell. Scientists have discovered that people can judge whether someone is in a positive mood from their body odour alone. In one experiment, men and women were made to feel either cheerful or frightened by showing them funny or scary films, while their armpit odours were collected on gauze pads. A week later, the researchers presented these gauze pads to complete strangers and asked them to decide which ones had come from people in a jolly mood and which from frightened people. They were able do this – not perfectly, but well above chance levels. This ability to divine mood from smell is not as remarkable as it might seem. We humans are primates, and zoologists have known for decades that other species of primates communicate information about their emotional states, particularly fear, through smell.
One reason for placing a degree of trust in psychologists’ measurements of happiness is that these very different techniques produce results that are broadly in accord with each other. Thus, people who report feeling in a good mood and satisfied with their lives are also likely to be judged happy by their friends, to have a lot of objectively positive experiences, to smile more, to have lower levels of stress hormones in their bloodstream, and to find it easier to remember nice events. They probably smell jolly as well. Another reason for believing that measurements of happiness are meaningful is that they relate consistently to other indicators of well-being. Measures of happiness are reasonably good predictors of people’s mental health, the state of their personal relationships and family life, their success at work or in the classroom, their physical health and even how long they live. (We will be exploring these connections between happiness, health and other aspects of well-being in the next chapter.)
One day it should be possible to judge how happy someone is by analysing the patterns of electrical activity in their brain. Scientists have made some progress in this direction, but the technology is still far from mature. Techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) brain scanning have revealed that particular moods or emotions are consistently accompanied by distinctive patterns of electrical and chemical activity in various regions of the brain.11 The brain activity patterns associated with happiness and sadness are quite different from one another, reinforcing the view that they are distinct mental states. A recent series of brain-scanning studies has shown that happiness is particularly associated with heightened electrical activity in an area on the left side of the brain known as the dorsal-superior region of the left prefrontal cortex. Individuals who routinely display higher levels of activity in this brain area are found to be better at regulating their emotions and faster at recovering emotionally from unpleasant experiences.
It may not be too many years before measurements of brain activity provide a new window on happiness. Meanwhile, scientists are able to assess happiness in meaningful ways, and are beginning to unravel its causes and consequences.
THREE Why does happiness matter?
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Happiness breeds success
Happiness may be the supreme goal, but what seems to dominate many people’s lives on a daily basis is the quest for material success. If you are a young person grinding your way through the qualification mill of school, or an adult slogging away at a demanding job, then you might feel that the pathway to happiness and the pathway to success lead in opposite directions. To be successful, it seems, you must choose hard work over cosy pastimes like schmoozing with friends. To be happy, on the other hand, you should downshift and follow your heart. The siren of happiness beckons you to do more of what you fancy, but the taskmaster of success demands that you keep striving. For parents, this dilemma can seem to apply to their children as well. Should they be pressurising their children to study harder or should they just allow them to relax and be happy?
The encouraging steer from science is that happiness and success are not mutually exclusive, nor even in competition with one another. The supposed dichotomy between happiness and success is false. In fact, happiness and success are natural bedfellows.
Happiness breeds success. The evidence from research shows that happy people are generally more successful in material terms than unhappy people. On average, they do better in their careers and earn more money; they are also healthier and live longer. Now, you might suspect that rich, successful people are happier simply because their success and wealth make them happy. But that is not even half the story. The relationship between happiness and success works even more strongly in the other direction: in other words, happiness breeds success more than success breeds happiness.
Happiness and success are intertwined because the key personal qualities that promote success are mostly the same ones that promote happiness. Success is linked with happiness, both in school and the adult workplace, because success and happiness are built from many of the same basic ingredients. These include social and communication skills, emotional literacy, freedom from excessive anxiety, motivation, resilience, optimism, self-esteem, an ability to think clearly, wisdom and physical health. If you have these qualities in abundance you are well equipped to be both happy and successful.
Happiness starts contributing to success early in life. Numerous studies have confirmed that happier children perform better at school than less happy children, other things being equal. For example, children who feel good about themselves demonstrate greater abilities in reading, spelling and maths, and are judged by their teachers to be more popular, more cooperative and more persistent in the classroom. Happy children are also more resilient and better able to handle life’s knocks. Conversely, unhappy children typically achieve less at school and are more likely to seek relief from chemicals: unhappiness, low self-esteem and anxiety are major risk factors for drug abuse and alcoholism in young people as well as adults.
One of the many reasons why happy children tend to do better in school is because happiness boosts mental performance. Children (and adults) are faster at learning and faster at performing mental tasks when they are in a happy mood than when they are feeling low. Experiments have demonstrated, for example, that children are up to 50 per cent faster at solving mental arithmetic problems when they are in a good mood.
Happiness and success continue to be intertwined in adult life. Happy people are typically more energetic, more sociable, more creative and more decisive than unhappy people. They feel more in control of their lives and are more optimistic. These characteristics help them to achieve and succeed in whatever they are doing. Unhappy people, on the other hand, are more inclined to be passive, introspective and indecisive – characteristics that can get in the way of achievement, both in the workplace and elsewhere.
One crucial ingredient of both happiness and success is the ability to form and maintain personal relationships. Few jobs can be done really well by someone who cannot get on with other people. Another key ingredient is emotional literacy, which means being able to understand and respond appropriately to your own emotions and other people’s emotions. Again, it is hard to excel in most jobs if you are incapable of reading or dealing effectively with common emotions like anger, jealousy or anxiety.
A basic level of social and emotional competence is essential for success in school or the workplace, as well as for happiness. Indeed, research suggests that social skills and emotional literacy have a bigger influence on work performance and career success than specific academic skills or intelligence (in the narrow, IQ, sense of the word). Knowing someone’s score on a conventional IQ test would enable you to make a relatively weak prediction about their future career success (provided their IQ was within the normal range). Other attributes such as social skills, emotional literacy, motivation, communication skills and resilience are usually far more significant in the long term.
Creativity is another area where happiness is a powerful ally. Living, as we do, in a knowledge economy means that the ability to think creatively has become increasingly important in the world of work. More and more jobs depend on being able to generate original ideas and solve problems in ways that cannot be reduced to simple procedures. (Of course, even in the Stone Age, humans needed to innovate in order to survive and thrive, so there is nothing really new about this.) Numerous scientific studies have shown that happiness helps to stimulate creativity and problem-solving. For instance, in one experiment volunteers were given a candle, a box of matches and a box of drawing pins, and were challenged to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax would not drip on the floor. The creative solution was to empty the matchbox, pin it to the wall and use it as a candle-holder. The experimenters found that people were much more likely to solve the problem if they had first been put in a good mood by watching a funny film. Happiness (or, at least, a jolly mood) helped them to think creatively.
Being happy systematically changes the way we view the world. When we are feeling low we tend to take a narrower and more defensive view: we concentrate on what is going wrong and search for solutions. When we are feeling happy, however, our thinking tends to become more expansive, more open-ended and more constructive. Instead of dwelling on specific problems, we look for new ways of doing things.
Psychologists have discovered that people think more in terms of the big picture when they are in a happy mood, whereas they are inclined to focus on detail when feeling sad. In one study, volunteers were shown a drawing and were later asked to reproduce it from memory. Those who were feeling happy were better at reproducing the general effect of the drawing, whereas those who felt less happy tended to concentrate on specific details of the drawing and were worse at capturing its overall effect. The drawings produced by happy people were more recognisable and more like the original. (Incidentally, the connection between happiness and big-picture thinking implies that you might be better off tackling some tasks when you are not feeling especially joyful. Tasks that require a focus on detail and a defensive approach to problem-solving, such as filling in tax forms, buying a car or taking an exam, are probably better done when you are feeling a little restrained.)
Converging evidence that we see the world in a more open-minded way when we are happy has led the American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson to develop her ‘broaden-and-build’ theory of positive emotions. Fredrickson argues that positive emotions like feeling happy have evolved over the course of human evolutionary history because they help individuals to survive and reproduce. And they do this by broadening our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Feeling joyful or happy makes us more playful, more curious, more creative, more sociable and more reflective. This widening of perspective enables us to build up our physical, mental, emotional and social resources when the going is good. We can later draw upon these resources if faced with an opportunity or a threat. For instance, a happy person will tend to be more sociable and outgoing, which in turn will strengthen their personal relationships. When the going gets rough, these relationships might be crucial to their well-being. By broadening our range of thoughts and actions, Fredrickson argues, positive emotions make us more resilient and better able to cope with adversity.
An obvious parallel can be drawn here between happiness and play. Children and young animals of many other species spend a lot of their time engaged in seemingly pointless activity known as play. A hallmark of play, as opposed to ‘serious’ behaviour, is that it appears to have no immediate benefits. In fact, play does have important benefits, but these are mostly long-term. By playing, the individual acquires valuable skills and experiences, and develops their physical, social and mental skills. Play is about building foundations for the future. We shall return to play later.
As well as being good for parents and good for children, happiness is good for organisations and for society as a whole. On average, happy employees perform better at their jobs, have lower levels of absenteeism, and are less likely to quit than unhappy employees. Studies have found that happy workers are typically more satisfied with their jobs, more productive and more persistent. They aim for higher goals and earn more money. In fact, the general level of personal happiness among employees is a better predictor of good performance and low staff turnover than how satisfied they specifically feel about their jobs. In the long term, happiness is a stronger motivator than money.
The clear implication of all this is that any enlightened organisation should regard improving the happiness of its employees as a legitimate and important business objective. Organisations could seek to do this in various ways – for example, by enabling individuals to maintain a better work-life balance, developing their skills, making them feel valued, and helping them to maintain good physical and mental health. The dreary reality is that few organisations think in this way. Happiness receives no mention in most companies’ strategic plans or annual objectives.
Outside school or the workplace, happiness continues to work its spell in myriad ways. If, like most people, you believe that being popular and having lots of friends is an indicator of success, then happiness is what you should be chasing, both for yourself and your children. One of the most consistent characteristics of happy people is that they get on well with others. Research confirms that happy people are generally more sociable, more empathetic, more cooperative, more generous, more energetic and more competent in their dealings with others. Happiness and sociability go hand in hand. One of the recurring themes in this book is that personal relationships are of central importance to happiness.
Research has also shown that we have a higher quantity and quality of social interactions when we are happy. For instance, experiments have demonstrated that people become measurably more sociable and outgoing when they are put in a good mood (by showing them an amusing film, for example). Happy people find social encounters more satisfying, they adopt a less cautious social style, and they are more inclined to be cooperative and generous. What is more, this link between sociability and happiness works both ways: sociable people become happier and happy people become more sociable, creating a virtuous circle. On the flip side, unhappiness can erode social relationships. Individuals suffering from low mood or mild depression are apt to behave in ways that elicit negative responses, which in turn adds to their unhappiness.
The mutually reinforcing connection between unhappiness and social isolation is illustrated by Moaning Myrtle, the doleful ghost in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Myrtle, who haunts the girls’ toilets in Hogwarts School, has turned her social isolation into a self-reinforcing state by indulging in extremes of self-pity. Myrtle is glum because everyone avoids her, and everyone avoids her because she is glum. In her rare social encounters, Myrtle instantly assumes the worst and accuses her interlocutor of making fun of her. Without provocation she moans about people calling her rude names behind her back. Being down in the dumps can result in a downward spiral.
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