Category: Happiness

Some people are genetically predisposed to spot negative events automatically, according to a new study published in Psychological Science (Todd et al., 2013).

A gene called ADRA2b seems to cause people to take particular note of negative emotional events.

The study’s lead author, Professor Rebecca Todd explained:

“This is the first study to find that this genetic variation can significantly affect how people see and experience the world. The findings suggest people experience emotional aspects of the world partly through gene-coloured glasses — and that biological variations at the genetic level can play a significant role in individual differences in perception.”

The study used a phenomenon called ‘attentional blink‘ and involved participants looking at a series of positive, negative and neutral emotional words. Those who had the ADRA2b gene variant were more likely to perceive the negative emotional words than those without it.

Positive emotion words, though, were perceived by those with and without the gene to the same degree.

This could help explain why it is that some people seem particularly predisposed towards seeing the negative aspects of the world around them, while it passes others by.

Of course, we all need to spot very strong emotional stimuli around us–like a loved one in pain or anger and aggression in others–but paying too much attention to negative events can obviously make us unhappy.

Not only is the gene linked to differences between people in their attention, but also to memory. People with the gene likely also find negative events are enhanced in their memories.

It may mean that people with the gene are more likely to suffer from uncomfortable flashbacks to negative memories or even posttraumatic stress disorder.

Statistically, around 50% of Caucasians have the ADRA2b gene variant, but the rates are much lower in other ethnicities.

As with many genes, though, they interact with the environment: their effect on our individual psychology is partly determined by our upbringing, those around us and how we choose to think and act.

Just because there is a gene that influences our starting point, that doesn’t stop us having some control over where we end up.

→ Want to change your habits of thought? Check out my book ‘Making Habits Breaking Habits: How to Make Changes That Stick‘. Out in paperback in the US on Dec 10.

Image credit: Kevin McShane

New research suggests the right kind of happiness can change the code that defines our very being: our genes.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the pattern of gene expression within the cells responsible for fighting off infectious diseases and defending the body against foreign materials (Fredrickson et al., 2013).

The 80 participants in the study also reported their levels of two different types of happiness:

1. Feeling good or hedonic happiness: the kind you get from straightforward self-gratification, like having a good meal, or buying yourself a new car.
2. Doing good or eudemonic happiness: the kind you get from working towards a noble goal and searching for meaning in life.

Stronger expression of antibody genes

What the researchers found was that people experiencing different mixtures of both types of happiness felt equally happy. For conscious experience, neither type of happiness beat the other.

A difference emerged, though, at the genetic level. In those with higher levels of ‘doing good’ happiness, there was a stronger expression of antibody and antiviral genes.

In contrast, people with higher levels of feeling good happiness had weaker expression of antibody and antiviral genes.

Steven Cole, one of the authors of the study explained:

“What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion. Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds.”

So, while doing good and feeling good both make us feel happy, it’s doing good that benefits us at the genetic level.

The lead author, Professor Barbara L. Fredrickson, suggests that:

“We can make ourselves happy through simple pleasures, but those ’empty calories’ don’t help us broaden our awareness or build our capacity in ways that benefit us physically. At the cellular level, our bodies appear to respond better to a different kind of well-being, one based on a sense of connectedness and purpose.”

Image credit: Dennis Holzberg

Healthy people want to be happy.

And there’s little doubt about all the benefits of positive emotions. Amongst other things, they make us more sociable, allow us to think more flexibly and they’re associated with better physical and psychological health.

It’s little wonder that pursuing happiness has become a modern obsession, an obsession that psychologists have mostly encouraged (see: 10 Easy Activities Science Has Proven Will Make You Happier Today).

But, like any emotion, it has it’s time and place. Happiness comes and goes with the ups and downs of everyday life and too much emphasis on being happy all the time can be a problem.

Yale University’s Dr June Gruber has spent years researching happiness and has found that sometimes, at the extremes, the search for happiness can go wrong. But where are those extremes?

Gruber and her colleagues have looked at positive and negative emotions in particular and identified four dark sides to the pursuit of happiness (Gruber et al., 2013), each of which shows that sometimes the pursuit of pure happiness can go wrong:

1. Too much

It might seem crazy to talk about ‘too much’ happiness, but, like gorging on chocolate, you can have too much of a good thing.

Along with overall life satisfaction, happiness is about the balance between positive and negative emotions that you experience every day. To thrive, we need both the positive and the negative.

It’s an interesting observation that we have a name for some of the people who don’t experience negative emotions: we call them psychopaths.

That’s not to say that anyone who is too happy is a psychopath, but there are interesting parallels.

There are also interesting parallels between the experience of too much positive emotion and mania. Manic people sometimes go into happiness overdrive—taking all kinds of risks in their exuberance—with disastrous consequences for their professional and social lives.

Even putting aside those with personality disorders, there’s evidence that being too happy can lead to important negative outcomes.

Negative emotions provide us with all kinds of important signals: that we are breaking society’s rules, that we are in danger or that the risks we are taking are too big. Without these warning signals we’d get ourselves into a lot more trouble.

In other words: unpleasant as they are, we occasionally need to feel bad. It’s part of our very being.

2. Wrong time

If we need our bad feelings sometimes, then when?

Broadly, we need them when things go wrong. Without those appropriate negative emotions, things can go awry. Here are a few examples:

• People who are too happy don’t see the warning signs of dangerous people or situations and may be more ready to trust when they shouldn’t. It’s no wonder that happier people also tend to be more gullible.
• The fear response prepares the body for fight or flight: but with a silly happy smile on their face, it’s less likely they’ll get away quickly or win the fight.
• People often think more systematically when they are experiencing negative emotions. Conversely happiness makes you think everything is OK and to carry on as normal.

In certain situations, then, negative emotions, like anger and benign envy, are the right response, and can even help motivate us in situations where it’s required.

So, happiness is a wonderful feeling, but isn’t always the appropriate and most effective response to a situation. Sometimes negative emotions turn out to be much more useful.

3. Wrong way

It’s one of the great ironies of life that sometimes the more you pursue happiness, the further away it gets.

And this is backed up by some studies showing that when people make a special effort to make themselves happy, they actually feel less happy as a result.

One study in which people tried to force themselves to be happy while listening to a piece of music found that they were less happy than those who just listened without making any special effort.

Part of the problem is feeling disappointment with our own feelings. If I specifically try to feel happier, and it doesn’t work, it is particularly disappointing, and makes me feel worse than if I just let the emotions come as they will.

None of this means that pursuing happiness is a waste of time—it just has to be done in the right way. As June Gruber puts it:

“Pursuing happiness may lead to positive outcomes if people are given the right tools to do so. Tools that may lead to lasting increases in happiness and well-being include flexible and adaptive emotion regulatory abilities, greater awareness of what will make oneself happy, and engagement in happiness-enhancing activities rather than directly pursuing happiness.”

4. Wrong type

So, how can there be a wrong type of happiness? Surely happiness is happiness is happiness? It all feels the same.

Well, not quite. Take the simple example of flying off on your holidays: there’s excitement, expectation, a strong feeling of wanting to get started. You can’t wait to get there and start exploring. This is happiness that’s all about arousal and feeling excited.

Then there’s the sort of happiness when you are sitting in the garden after a hard day’s work and a good meal. You feel satisfied and content. The sun is setting, the trees are rustling; there’s the distant sound of relaxed laughter. This type of happiness is all about calmness, relaxation and the feeling of a job well done.

Set against these ‘good’ types of happiness, here are a couple of examples of the wrong type:

• Pride that’s undeserved: this is the kind of pleasure that, for example, school-yard bullies seem to take in doling out random violence on others. Although they may get pleasure in the moment, though, in the long-term this leads to guilt and embarrassment.
• Culturally inappropriate: culture can partly determine how we experience happiness. For example, amongst Chinese people, the sense of happiness in terms of contentment is more culturally valued than the European-American sense of happiness as excitement and adventure. There’s some evidence that being out of step with prevailing cultural values of what happiness is can be damaging.

June Gruber summarises it like this:

“Types of happiness that engender negative social consequences or that are in conflict with a culture’s norms do not appear to have exclusively positive long-term effects and may even have negative effects.”

Happiness from meaning

“It is possible to have too much happiness, to experience happiness in the wrong time, to pursue happiness in the wrong ways, and to experience the wrong types of happiness. In such cases, happiness may not be adaptive and might even lead to harmful consequences.” (Gruber et al., 2013)

Instead life should be about having a sense of purpose that is personally meaningful, about developing strong relationships with others and about giving and receiving support.

Happiness is likely to come along the way to these more long-term goals and not by the pursuit of pleasure on its own.

Image credit: Mr Van Meelen

What has happened to people’s happiness all around the world as they’ve faced the economic crisis? How have they coped with job losses, less money coming in, the sense of despair and lack of control over a nightmare that seems to have no end?

That’s the question that Helliwell et al. (2013) ask in a new paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

They guessed that one answer is one of the oldest in human civilisation: by pulling together.

Pulling together, though, has a new fancy name: social capital. Here are the kinds of things which tell you whether a group of people have ‘social capital’:

• How many people do volunteer work in the community?
• How many people have done a favour for a neighbour in the last month?
• How many people have given a little money to charity (about $25)?
• How many people regularly have meals together as a family?

These go on and on, but you get the general idea. It’s essentially doing nice things for other people around you; they don’t have to be that dramatic like donating a liver, just little boyscout-type activities count.

They then looked at a huge amount of data on both social capital and happiness across 255 metropolitan areas in the US and drew this conclusion:

“…communities with greater social engagement are happier than otherwise equivalent communities and that life evaluations fell by less, in response to unemployment increases, in those communities with high levels of a broad measure of social engagement.”

So social capital has a protective effect: by pulling together through doing little things for each other, people helped keep their spirits up during the economic crisis.

Happy countries

Helliwell et al. (2013) also found the same when they compared between countries, not just between US metropolitan areas. They divided countries into those which had become happier since the crisis, those which remained about the same and those that had become less happy.

In the group of countries with falling levels of happiness (which includes the US but not the UK):

“We saw that average happiness drops were far greater than could be explained by their lower levels of GDP per capita, suggesting that social capital and other key supports for happiness were damaged during the crisis and its aftermath.”

In contrast, South Korea is a country whose average levels of happiness have rocketed up since the economic crisis. This is partly because the economy has recovered remarkably well, but maybe also because of policies that have encouraged social capital. Here’s the President of South Korea explaining:

“Korea has already proposed a new way forward from the global crisis. […] We decided to share the burden. Employees chose to sacrifice a cut in their own salaries and companies accepted to take cuts in their own profits because they wanted to save their employees and co-workers from losing their jobs.”

More than social: pro-social

The explanation for these effects is that humans are fundamentally pro-social so:

“…they get happiness not just from doing things with others, but from doing things both with and for others. Despite a wealth of findings that those who do things for others gain a bigger happiness boost than do the recipients of generosity, people underestimate the happiness gains from unselfish acts done with and for others”

Image credit: Shena Pamella

According to a new study by Kawakami et al. (2013), sad music is enjoyable because it creates an interesting mix of emotions; some negative, some positive. In their study, they found that:

“…the sad music was perceived to be more tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music.”

They reached this conclusion by asking…

“…44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music. Each participant was required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception of the music and their own emotional state.”

The key to enjoying sad music is that although we perceive the negative emotions, our felt emotions aren’t as strong as these perception. Perhaps this is because:

“Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion.”

Although we can’t currently explain the cathartic effect of sad music—or indeed sad art in general—perhaps:

“…we initially experience negative emotion, such as sadness, and subsequently experience pleasant emotion because of the rewarding effect of enjoying art. Thus, the experience of listening to sad music may ultimately elicit pleasant emotion.”

This is just one of the psychological reasons why music is important.

You can also try the experiment for yourself. Here is one of the pieces they used in the research, it’s Glinka’s “La Séparation” in F minor. How does it make you feel?

Image credit: Scott Schiller