Happiness

“The New Science of Happiness”

Discussion questions before reading the article

1. What do you think make people happy?
2. What makes you happy?
3. Would you be happier if you:

Won a million dollars?

Got a gorgeous girl friend/boy friend?

Got the dream job?

Wordlist

Chimes – klockspel

Paves the road – jämnar marken (gör saker lättare)

Less prone – mindre benägen

Recent survey – en färsk undersökning

Balmy – varmt väder

Salient – framträdande

Unveiled – avslöja

Previous – föregående

In descending order – I fallande ordning

Spouse – maka/make (någon man är gift med)

Identical vs fraternal twins – enäggs jämfört med tvåäggstvillingar

Traits – anlag

Circumstancial factors – som har att göra med ens omständigheter
marital status – relationer (t.ex. om man är gift eller single)

attributes

Life’s slings and arrows – unpleasant things that happen to you that you cannot  prevent. Usage notes: This phrase comes from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Slings and arrows are weapons used to attack people, and fortune means things that happen to you.

Limbs – lemmar (t.ex. ben och armar)

Paraplegic – förlamad

The allocation of attention – var uppmärksamheten är riktad

Futile – meningslöst

Grant money – pengar från fond

gratitude journal – tacksamhetsjournal

conscientiously – samvetsgrant

had no such gain – hade inte samma vinst

fatigue – trötthet

elaborate – utveckla (skriva mer om)

altruism – oegoism

beneficial – fördelaktigt

fuzzily – luddigt

gregarious – pratglad

dyed-in-the-wool – riktig, tvättäkta

habitual – vanemässig

reinforce – förstärka

biases – fördomar

 

 

The New Science of Happiness

By Claudia Wallis

Time, Jan. 09, 2005

So, what has science learned about what makes the human heart sing? More than one might imagine–along with some surprising things about what doesn’t ring our inner chimes. Take wealth, for instance, and all the delightful things that money can buy. Research by psychologist Edward Diener, among others, has shown that once your basic needs are met, additional income does little to raise your sense of satisfaction with life. A good education? Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness. Youth? No, again. In fact, older people are more consistently satisfied with their lives than the young. And they’re less prone to dark moods: a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that people ages 20 to 24 are sad for an average of 3.4 days a month, as opposed to just 2.3 days for people ages 65 to 74. Marriage? A complicated picture: married people are generally happier than singles, but that may be because they were happier to begin with (see page A37). Sunny days? Nope, although a 1998 study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy California are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too.

On the positive side, religious faith seems to genuinely lift the spirit, though it’s tough to tell whether it’s the God part or the community aspect that does the heavy lifting. Friends? A giant yes. A 2002 study conducted at the University of Illinois by Diener and Seligman found that the most salient characteristics shared by the 10% of students with the highest levels of happiness and the fewest signs of depression were their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them. “Word needs to be spread,” concludes Diener. “It is important to work on social skills, close interpersonal ties and social support in order to be happy.”

MEASURING OUR MOODS

Just last month, a team led by Nobel-prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University unveiled a new tool for sizing up happiness: the day-reconstruction method. Participants fill out a long diary and questionnaire detailing everything they did on the previous day and whom they were with at the time and rating a range of feelings during each episode (happy, impatient, depressed, worried, tired, etc.) on a seven-point scale. The method was tested on a group of 900 women in Texas with some surprising results. It turned out that the five most positive activities for these women were (in descending order) sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, and eating. Exercising and watching TV were not far behind. But way down the list was “taking care of my children,” which ranked below cooking and only slightly above housework.

That may seem surprising, given that people frequently cite their children as their biggest source of delight–which was a finding of a TIME poll on happiness conducted last month. When asked, “What one thing in life has brought you the greatest happiness?”, 35% said it was their children or grandchildren or both. (Spouse was far behind at just 9%, and religion a runner-up at 17%.)

CAN WE GET HAPPIER?

One of the biggest issues in happiness research is the question of how much our happiness is under our control. In 1996 University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken published a paper looking at the role of genes in determining one’s sense of satisfaction in life. Lykken, now 76, gathered information on 4,000 sets of twins born in Minnesota from 1936 through 1955. After comparing happiness data on identical vs. fraternal twins, he came to the conclusion that about 50% of one’s satisfaction with life comes from genetic programming. (Genes influence such traits as having a sunny, easy-going personality; dealing well with stress; and feeling low levels of anxiety and depression.) Lykken found that circumstantial factors like income, marital status, religion and education contribute only about 8% to one’s overall well-being. He attributes the remaining percentage to “life’s slings and arrows.”

Because of the large influence of our genes, Lykken proposed the idea that each of us has a happiness set point much like our set point for body weight. No matter what happens in our life–good, bad, spectacular, horrific–we tend to return in short order to our set range. Some post-tsunami images last week of smiling Asian children returning to school underscored this amazing capacity to right ourselves. And a substantial body of research documents our tendency to return to the norm. A study of lottery winners done in 1978 found, for instance, that they did not wind up significantly happier than a control group. Even people who lose the use of their limbs to a devastating accident tend to bounce back, though perhaps not all the way to their base line. One study found that a week after the accident, the injured were severely angry and anxious, but after eight weeks “happiness was their strongest emotion,” says Diener. Psychologists call this adjustment to new circumstances adaptation. “Everyone is surprised by how happy paraplegics can be,” says Kahneman. “The reason is that they are not paraplegic full time. They do other things. They enjoy their meals, their friends. They read the news. It has to do with the allocation of attention.”

In his extensive work on adaptation, Edward Diener has found two life events that seem to knock people lastingly below their happiness set point: loss of a spouse and loss of a job. It takes five to eight years for a widow to regain her previous sense of well-being. Similarly, the effects of a job loss linger long after the individual has returned to the work force.

When he proposed his set-point theory eight years ago, Lykken came to a drastic conclusion. “It may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller,” he wrote. He has since come to regret that sentence. “I made a dumb statement in the original article,” he tells TIME. “It’s clear that we can change our happiness levels widely–up or down.”

There are numerous ways to do that, they argue. At the University of California at Riverside, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky is using grant money from the National Institutes of Health to study different kinds of happiness boosters. One is the gratitude journal–a diary in which subjects write down things for which they are thankful. She has found that taking the time to conscientiously count their blessings once a week significantly increased subjects’ overall satisfaction with life over a period of six weeks, whereas a control group that did not keep journals had no such gain.

Gratitude exercises can do more than lift one’s mood. At the University of California at Davis, psychologist Robert Emmons found they improve physical health, raise energy levels and, for patients with neuromuscular disease, relieve pain and fatigue. “The ones who benefited most tended to elaborate more and have a wider span of things they’re grateful for,” he notes.

Another happiness booster, say positive psychologists, is performing acts of altruism or kindness–visiting a nursing home, helping a friend’s child with homework, mowing a neighbor’s lawn, writing a letter to a grandparent. Doing five kind acts a week, especially all in a single day, gave a measurable boost to Lyubomirsky’s subjects.

Why do exercising kindness and other virtues provide a lift? “Giving makes you feel good about yourself,” says Peterson. “When you’re volunteering, you’re distracting yourself from your own existence, and that’s beneficial. More fuzzily, giving puts meaning into your life. You have a sense of purpose because you matter to someone else.” Virtually all the happiness exercises being tested by positive psychologists, he says, make people feel more connected to others.

That seems to be the most fundamental finding from the science of happiness. “Almost every person feels happier when they’re with other people,” observes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “It’s paradoxical because many of us think we can hardly wait to get home and be alone with nothing to do, but that’s a worst-case scenario. If you’re alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.”

But can a loner really become more gregarious through acts-of-kindness exercises? Can a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist learn to see the glass as half full? Can gratitude journals work their magic over the long haul? And how many of us could keep filling them with fresh thankful thoughts year after year? Sonja Lyubomirsky believes it’s all possible: “I’ll quote Oprah here, which I don’t normally do. She was asked how she runs five miles a day, and she said, ‘I recommit to it every day of my life.’ I think happiness is like that. Every day you have to renew your commitment. Hopefully, some of the strategies will become habitual over time and not a huge effort.”

But other psychologists are more sceptical. Some simply doubt that personality is that flexible or that individuals can or should change their habitual coping styles. “If you’re a pessimist who really thinks through in detail what might go wrong, that’s a strategy that’s likely to work very well for you,” says Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College and the author of The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. “In fact, you may be messed up if you try to substitute a positive attitude.” She is worried that the messages of positive psychology reinforce “a lot of American biases” about how individual initiative and a positive attitude can solve complex problems.

Who’s right? This is an experiment we can all do for ourselves. There’s little risk in trying some extra gratitude and kindness, and the results–should they materialize–are their own reward.

Comprehension questions

Try to answer the questions in your own words. You are allowed to help each other but you should write the answers individually.

 

1. Name four misconceptions about what leads to happiness that Claudia Wallis brings up in the beginning of the article..
2. What according to research really makes us more happy?
3. How much of our happiness is under our control according to the article? Why is that part not under our control?
4. What was the surprising result of a happiness study of 900 women in Texas and why?
5. What does it mean that each of us has a happiness set point? Give at least two examples from Dr. Lykken’s study.
6. Give two examples from the article of how we can change our happiness level and explain how they work.

 

Discussion questions after reading the article

1. Have you changed your view on happiness after reading the article? In that case, why?
2. Are you going to change your habits as a consequence of reading the article? In that case, how?

 

Michael Norton: How to buy happiness

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness#t-117327

1. Name three bad things that could happen when you win the lottery.
2. Describe the experiment that was made on the campus of University of British Colombia.
3. What was the result of the experiment?
4. Was there any difference when they made the same experiment in Uganda? What was the difference if there was one?
5. What was the result from the experiment made on companies? Explain why!
6. What is Michael Norton’s message with his TED-talk? Do you agree or disagree with him? Why?