34-9 What is the feel-good, do-good phenomenon, and what is the focus of positive psychology research?

People aspire to, and wish one another, health and happiness. And for good reason. Our state of happiness or unhappiness colors everything. Happy people perceive the world as safer and feel more confident. They are more decisive and cooperate more easily. They rate job applicants more favorably, savor their positive past experiences without dwelling on the negative, and are more socially connected. They live healthier and more energized and satisfied lives (Boehm et al., 2015; De Neve et al., 2013; Mauss et al., 2011; Stellar et al., 2015).

Moods matter. When your mood is gloomy, life as a whole seems depressing and meaningless—and you think more skeptically and attend more critically to your surroundings. Let your mood brighten, and your thinking broadens and becomes more playful and creative (Baas et al., 2008; Forgas, 2008; Fredrickson, 2013). Relationships, self-image, and hopes for the future also seem more promising. One study showed that the happiest 20-year-olds were later more likely to marry and less likely to divorce (Stutzer & Frey, 2006). In another study, which surveyed thousands of U.S. college students in 1976 and restudied them at age 37, happy students had gone on to earn significantly more money than their less-happy-than-average peers (Diener et al., 2002).

Moreover—and this is one of psychology’s most consistent findings—happiness doesn’t just feel good, it does good. In study after study, a mood-boosting experience such as recalling a happy event has made people more likely to give money, pick up someone’s dropped papers, volunteer time, and do other good deeds. Psychologists call it the feel-good, do-good phenomenon (Salovey, 1990).

The reverse is also true: Doing good also promotes good feeling. One survey of more than 200,000 people in 136 countries found that, nearly everywhere, people report feeling happier after spending money on others rather than on themselves (Aknin et al., 2013; Dunn et al., 2014). Feeling good even increases people’s willingness to donate kidneys. And kidney donation leaves donors feeling good (Brethel-Haurwitz & Marsh, 2014). Young children also show more positive emotion when they give, rather than receive, gifts (Aknin et al., 2015). Some happiness coaches harness the do-good, feel-good phenomenon as they assign people to perform a daily “random act of kindness” and keep records of the results.

William James was writing about the importance of happiness (“the secret motive for all [we] do”) as early as 1902. By the 1960s, the humanistic psychologists were interested in advancing human fulfillment. In the twenty-first century, under the leadership of American Psychological Association past-president Martin Seligman, positive psychology is using scientific methods to study human flourishing. This young subfield includes studies of subjective well-being—our feelings of happiness (sometimes defined as a high ratio of positive to negative feelings) or sense of satisfaction with life.

Taken together, satisfaction with the past, happiness with the present, and optimism about the future define the positive psychology movement’s first pillar: positive well-being. Seligman views happiness as a by-product of a pleasant, engaged, and meaningful life.

Positive psychology is about building not just a pleasant life, says Seligman, but also a good life that engages one’s skills, and a meaningful life that points beyond oneself. Thus, the second pillar, positive character, focuses on exploring and enhancing creativity, courage, compassion, integrity, self-control, leadership, wisdom, and spirituality.

The third pillar, positive groups, communities, and cultures, seeks to foster a positive social ecology. This includes healthy families, communal neighborhoods, effective schools, socially responsible media, and civil dialogue.

“Positive psychology,” Seligman and colleagues have said (2005), “is an umbrella term for the study of positive emotions, positive character traits, and enabling institutions.” Its focus differs from psychology’s traditional interests during its first century, when attention was directed toward understanding and alleviating negative states—abuse and anxiety, depression and disease, prejudice and poverty. Indeed, articles on selected negative emotions since 1887 have outnumbered those on positive emotions by 17 to 1.

In ages past, times of relative peace and prosperity have enabled cultures to turn their attention from repairing weakness and damage to promoting what Seligman (2002) has called “the highest qualities of life.” Prosperous fifth-century Athens nurtured philosophy and democracy. Flourishing fifteenth-century Florence nurtured great art. Victorian England, flush with the bounty of the British Empire, nurtured honor, discipline, and duty. In this millennium, Seligman believes, thriving Western cultures have a parallel opportunity to create, as a “humane, scientific monument,” a more positive psychology, concerned not only with weakness and damage but also with strength and virtue. Thanks to his leadership, the movement has gained strength, with supporters in 77 countries from Croatia to China (IPPA, 2009, 2010; Seligman, 2004, 2011).

34-10 How do time, wealth, adaptation, and comparison affect our happiness levels?

THE SHORT LIFE OF EMOTIONAL UPS AND DOWNS Are some days of the week happier than others? In what is likely psychology’s biggest-ever data sample, social psychologist Adam Kramer (at my [DM’s] request and in cooperation with Facebook) did a naturalistic observation of emotion words in “billions” of status updates. After eliminating exceptional days, such as holidays, he tracked the frequency of positive and negative emotion words by day of the week. The most positive moods days? Friday and Saturday (FIGURE 34.6). A similar analysis of emotion-related words in 59 million Twitter messages found Friday to Sunday the week’s happiest days (Golder & Macy, 2011). For you, too?

Over the long run, our emotional ups and downs tend to balance out. This is true even over the course of the day. Positive emotion rises over the early to middle part of most days and then drops off (Kahneman et al., 2004; Watson, 2000). A stressful event—an argument, a sick child, a car problem—can trigger a bad mood. No surprise there. But by the next day, the gloom nearly always lifts (Affleck et al., 1994; Bolger et al., 1989; Stone & Neale, 1984). Our overall judgments of our lives often show lingering effects of good or bad events, but our daily moods typically rebound (Luhmann et al., 2012). If anything, people tend to bounce back from a bad day to a better-than-usual good mood the following day.

Even when negative events drag us down for longer periods, our bad mood usually ends. A romantic breakup feels devastating, but eventually the wound heals. In one study, faculty members up for tenure expected their lives would be deflated by a negative decision. Actually, 5 to 10 years later, their happiness level was about the same as for those who received tenure (Gilbert et al., 1998).

Grief over the loss of a loved one or anxiety after a severe trauma (such as child abuse, rape, or the terrors of war) can linger. But usually, even tragedy is not permanently depressing. People who become blind or paralyzed may not completely recover their previous well-being, but those with an agreeable personality usually recover near-normal levels of day-to-day happiness (Boyce & Wood, 2011). So do those who must go on kidney dialysis or have permanent colostomies (Riis et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2009). Even if you lose the use of all four limbs, explained Daniel Kahneman (2005), “you will gradually start thinking of other things, and the more time you spend thinking of other things the less miserable you are going to be.” Contrary to what many people believe, even most patients “locked in” a motionless body do not indicate they want to die (Bruno et al., 2008, 2011; Nizzi et al., 2012; Smith & Delargy, 2005).

The surprising reality: We overestimate the duration of our emotions and underestimate our resiliency.

WEALTH AND WELL-BEING “Do you think you would be happier if you made more money?” Yes, replied 73 percent of Americans in a 2006 Gallup poll. How important is “being very well off financially”? Very important, say 82 percent of entering U.S. collegians (FIGURE 34.7).

Money does buy happiness, up to a point. Having enough money to buy your way out of hunger and to have a sense of control over your life predicts greater happiness (Fischer & Boer, 2011). As Australian data confirm, the power of more money to increase happiness is strongest at low incomes (Cummins, 2006). A $1000 annual wage increase does a lot more for the average person in Malawi than for the average person in Switzerland. Raising low incomes will increase happiness more than will raising high incomes.

Once we have enough money for comfort and security, piling up more and more matters less and less. Experiencing luxury diminishes our savoring of life’s simpler pleasures (Cooney et al., 2014; Quoidbach et al., 2010). If you ski the Alps once, your neighborhood sledding hill pales. If you ski the Alps every winter, it becomes an ordinary part of life rather than an experience to treasure (Quoidbach et al., 2015).

And consider this: During the last half-century, the average U.S. citizen’s buying power almost tripled. Did this greater ability to purchase material goods—enabling larger homes and twice as many cars per person, not to mention iPads and smart phones—also buy more happiness? As FIGURE 34.8 shows, Americans have become no happier. In 1957, some 35 percent said they were “very happy,” as did slightly fewer—33 percent—in 2012. Much the same has been true of Europe, Australia, and Japan, where increasing real incomes have not produced increasing happiness (Australian Unity, 2008; Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002, 2008; Di Tella & MacCulloch, 2010). Ditto China, where living standards have risen but life satisfaction has not (Davey & Rato, 2012; Easterlin et al., 2012). These findings lob a bombshell at modern materialism: Economic growth in affluent countries has provided no apparent boost to morale or social well-being.

HAPPINESS IS RELATIVE: ADAPTATION AND COMPARISON Two psychological principles explain why, for those who are not poor, more money buys little more than a temporary surge of happiness and why our emotions seem attached to elastic bands that pull us back from highs or lows. In its own way, each principle suggests that happiness is relative.

HAPPINESS IS RELATIVE TO OUR OWN EXPERIENCE The adaptation-level phenomenon describes our tendency to judge various stimuli in comparison with our past experiences. As psychologist Harry Helson (1898-1977) explained, we adjust our neutral levels—the points at which sounds seem neither loud nor soft, temperatures neither hot nor cold, events neither pleasant nor unpleasant—based on our experience. We then notice and react to variations up or down from these levels. Thus, after an initial surge of pleasure, improvements become our “new normal,” and we then require something even better to give us a happiness boost.

So, could we ever create a permanent social paradise? Probably not (Campbell, 1975; Di Tella et al., 2010). People who have experienced a recent windfall—from a lottery, an inheritance, or a surging economy—typically feel elated (Diener & Oishi, 2000; Gardner & Oswald, 2007). So would you, if you woke up tomorrow to your utopia—perhaps a world with no bills, no ills, and perfect scores. But after a time, your utopia would become your new normal. Before long, you would again sometimes feel gratified (when events exceed your expectations) and sometimes feel deprived (when they fall below), and sometimes feel neutral. The point to remember: Feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, success and failure are judgments we make based partly on our prior experience (Rutledge et al., 2014). Satisfaction, as Richard Ryan (1999) said, “has a short half-life.” Ditto disappointment, which means that you may bounce back from a setback sooner than you expect.

HAPPINESS IS RELATIVE TO OTHERS’ SUCCESS We are always comparing ourselves with others. And whether we feel good or bad depends on who those others are (Lyubomirsky, 2001). We are slow-witted or clumsy only when others are smarter or more agile. When we sense that we are worse off than others with whom we compare ourselves, we experience relative deprivation.

When expectations soar above attainments, we feel disappointed. Thus, the middle- and upper-income people in a given country, who can compare themselves with the relatively poor, tend to have greater life satisfaction than their less-fortunate compatriots. Nevertheless, once people reach a moderate income level, further increases buy little more happiness. Why? Because as people climb the ladder of success they mostly compare themselves with local peers who are at or above their current level (Gruder, 1977; Suls & Tesch, 1978; Zell & Alicke, 2010). “Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful,” noted British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1930/1985, p. 90). Thus, “Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are” (1930, pp. 68–69).

Over the last half-century, inequality in Western countries has increased. Consider the ratio of pay of an average American CEO listed in Standard & Poor’s stock market index (the S&P 500) to the average employee. In 1965, the ratio was 20 to 1. By 2012, the ratio had swelled to 354 to 1 (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014). The rising economic tide shown in FIGURE 34.8 has lifted the yachts higher than the rowboats. Does it matter? Yes. Places with great inequality have higher crime rates, obesity, anxiety, and drug use, and lower life expectancy (Kawachi et al., 1999; Ratcliff, 2013; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Times and places with great income inequality also tend to be less happy—a result that people’s social comparisons help explain (Cheung & Lucas, 2015; Hagerty, 2000; Helliwell et al., 2013; Oishi et al., 2011).

Just as comparing ourselves with those who are better off creates envy, so counting our blessings as we compare ourselves with those worse off boosts our contentment. In one study, university women considered others’ deprivation and suffering (Dermer et al., 1979). They viewed vivid depictions of how grim city life could be in 1900. They imagined and then wrote about various personal tragedies, such as being burned and disfigured. Later, the women expressed greater satisfaction with their own lives. Similarly, when mildly depressed people have read about someone who was even more depressed, they felt somewhat better (Gibbons, 1986). “I cried because I had no shoes,” states a Persian saying, “until I met a man who had no feet.”

34-11 What are some predictors of happiness, and how can we be happier?

Happy people share many characteristics (TABLE 34.1 below). But why are some people normally so joyful and others so somber? Here, as in so many other areas, the answer is found in the interplay between nature and nurture.

Genes matter. In one study of hundreds of identical and fraternal twins, about 50 percent of the difference among people’s happiness ratings was heritable—attributable to genes (Gigantesco et al., 2011; Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). Other twin studies report similar or slightly less heritability (Bartels & Boomsma, 2009; Lucas, 2008; Nes et al., 2010). Identical twins raised apart are often similarly happy. Moreover, researchers are now drilling down to identify how specific genes influence our happiness (De Neve et al., 2012; Fredrickson et al., 2013).

But our personal history and our culture matter, too. On the personal level, as we have seen, our emotions tend to balance around a level defined by our experience. On the cultural level, groups vary in the traits they value. Self-esteem and achievement matter more to individualist Westerners. Social acceptance and harmony matter more to those in collectivist cultures such as Japan, which stress family and community (Diener et al., 2003; Fulmer et al., 2010; Uchida & Kitayama, 2009).

Depending on our genes, our outlook, and our recent experiences, our happiness seems to fluctuate around our “happiness set point,” which disposes some people to be ever upbeat and others more negative. Even so, after following thousands of lives over two decades, researchers have determined that our satisfaction with life can change (Lucas & Donnellan, 2007). Happiness rises and falls, and it can be influenced by factors that are under our control. A striking example: In a long-term German study, married partners were as similarly satisfied with their lives as were identical twins (Schimmack & Lucas, 2007). Relationship quality matters.

If we can enhance our happiness on an individual level, could we use happiness research to refocus our national priorities more on the pursuit of happiness? Many psychologists believe we could. Ed Diener (2006, 2009, 2013), supported by 52 colleagues, has proposed ways in which nations might measure national well-being. Happiness research offers new ways to assess the impacts of various public policies, argue Diener and his colleagues (Diener et al., 2015). Happy societies are not only prosperous but are also places where people trust one another, feel free, and enjoy close relationships (Helliwell et al., 2013; Oishi & Schimmack, 2010). Thus, in debates about the minimum wage, economic inequality, tax rates, divorce laws, and health care, people’s psychological well-being should be a prime consideration—a point now affirmed by 43 nations that have added well-being measures to their national agendas (Diener et al., 2015). Britain’s Annual Population Survey, for example, asks its citizens how satisfied they are with their lives, how worthwhile they judge their lives, and how happy and how anxious they felt yesterday (ONS, 2015). Such measures may help guide nations toward policies that decrease stress and foster human flourishing.

Your happiness, like your cholesterol level, is genetically influenced. Yet as cholesterol is also influenced by diet and exercise, so happiness is partly under your control (Layous & Lyubomirsky, 2014; Nes, 2010). Here are 11 research-based suggestions for improving your mood and increasing your satisfaction with life.