PSY 180

Lecture 3

Happiness

Why be happy?

• Tal Ben-Shahar says that you can play the why game like kids- eventually you will get to the point where you say “because it makes me happy”– After that there is no where else to go– Called an ungrounded grounder because it

requires no further rationale

Peterson

• Starts with the yearbook study– Women that had duchenne smiles were more

likely to be married and more likely to be happy with their marriages

– Controlled for physical attractiveness

The nun study

• Autobiographical essays about their childhoods were analyzed for emotional content– Counted the positive emotion words and negative emotion words– Those with more positive emotional content lived 10 years

longer than their less happy counterparts

• Believed to be a very good study because most of their lives is constant and controlled

• A different study found that linguistic complexity for the writing samples predicted Alzheimer’s Disease reliably– Could be that those that wrote more sophisticated samples were

less likely to get AD and thus were less likely to be depressed?

So… what is happiness?

• Hedonism?– The idea that you should maximize pleasure

and minimize pain

• Eudaimonia– Happiness entails identifying one’s virtues,

cultivating them, living in accordance with them

• Pursuit of engagement– flow

Four types of happiness ideas (Ben-Shahar)

• Rat-racer– Be unhappy now for happiness later

• Hedonic– Be happy now and pay for it later

• Nihilist– Be unhappy now and unhappy later (too bad,

you’re screwed!)

• Happiness– Be happy now and happy later

Eudaimonia leads to

• Increased satisfaction– Across genders and nations

How to measure happiness?

• Depends on how you define happiness– Hedonism: Pleasure vs pain

• Experience sampling method• Overall trajectory or pattern of their lives

– Desire theory: happiness is whether you get what you want or not (it doesn’t have to be pleasurable)

• Ask the person what they desire

– Objective list theory: happiness is achieving some universally accepted items (education…)

• Need people to agree on those universal things• Most of these things are actually unrelated to happiness

itself- so why have this be a measure?

Progress Paradox

• Objective goods have increased over the past few decades– Literacy rates are higher– Life expectancy is longer– Information is more available– People have more things

• Happiness has not increased, according to most surveys

Maybe this is a problem with survey ratings of happiness?

• Maybe people are relatively judging their happiness

What are the various measures?

• Quality of life– Overacrching label that includes emotions,

experiences, appraisals, expectations, and accomplishments

• Subjective well-being– Relatively high levels of positive affect and relatively

low levels of negative affect– Aka life satisfaction

• Happiness• Most of the research on these “different” things

typically come to the same conclusions about the things that affect them

Most common technique

• Just ask people– Are you happy or not…

• Right now• During the past 4 weeks• In general

• Problems?– Self-report is not always accurate

• Everyone has bias and may bias their answers one way or the other

People overemphasize their current feelings

• Schwartz and Strack (1999)– If you ask young adults about their dating life

• Then follow it with life satisfaction– The two are strongly related

– If you flip the order (life satisfaction first, then dating life)

• The two are only weakly related

– If you make people think about something that they are unhappy with, they then judge their life satisfaction as unhappy

– If they are happy with their dating life, it will lead them to believe that their life satisfaction is happy

Cultural differences

• Typically asians rate lower than others in life satisfaction– Could be due to the asian norm of not

standing out• Not wanting to say that life is better than others, so

they rate in the middle of the scale

US vs Korean youth

• Family satisfaction links to life satifaction strongly in both

• Self satisfaction is more associated with life satisfaction in the US than Korea

• In Korea, school satisfaction is more associated with life satisfaction than in the US

US vs Japan

• US: the best predictor of overall satisfaction is the domain in which one is most satisfied– Marriage is bad, health is bad, work is bad,

kids are great- thus life is great!

• Japan: the best predictor of overall satisfaction is the domain in which on is least satisfied– Marriage is good, health is good, work is

good, kids are bad- thus life is bad!

Positive correlations with happiness and life satisfaction

Small Medium LargeAge Number of friends Gratitude

Gender Being married Optimism

Education Religiousness Being employed

Social class Levels of leisure activity

Frequency of intercourse

Income Health Positive affect

Having children Extraversion Self-esteem

Intelligence Internal locus of control

attractiveness

Conclusions from the table

• Demographic data doesn’t matter– Anyone can be happy

• Being in contact with others does matter– In fact, when comparing happy vs very happy people,

this is the one thing that still is strongly related

• Personality factors are involved as well– Could be a factor of self-report- happy people see

themselves favorably– Others seem to see them favorably too

Problems with correlations

Correlation does not equal causation

Depressive realism

• Depressed vs non-depressed students in a condition where there was a button for them to press and a light went on and off randomly– They were asked to determine the relationship of

what they did to the light– Depressed people were more accurate– Nondepressed people came up with complex ideas

• “the light flashed when I pressed the button twice- first for 2 seconds and then for 5 seconds

– Peterson argues that this is only true when addressing noncontingencies, but not contingencies

• If they actually had control, they would not be very accurate at detailing that

H = S + C + V

• Get from Seligman