Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile

Happiness The Science Behind Your Smile

The sources of joy are quite varied. One recent study identified the main ones as interactions with friends, food, drink, and sex, and the experience of success in some domain (1) – page 33
What happened was that those considering negative recent events reported lower satisfaction than those considering positive recent events. But those considering negative distant events reported themselves as happier than those considering positive distant events. The interpretation of this result is all to do with frame of reference. Those considering recent events included them in their summary of how life was going now, and so positive ones made them happier and negative ones more gloomy. Those considering past events used them as a comparison with how their life was now. Therefore considering only positive events from the past was bound to make the present a bit disappointing, but consider some awful things from the past, and suddenly the present looks like an improvement. (2) – page 37
More than 90% of the 11,269 respondents chose 5 or above. More than half of them chose 8, 9, or 10, with 8 the most frequent choice overall. These results are very much in keeping with those of dozens of other surveys in many different countries. When asked, most people say that they are happy or very happy, and this result is robust as regards age, place, sex, or different ways of asking the question. (3) – page 49
people report higher levels of well-being in face-toface interviews than in postal surveys. This effect is particularly pronounced when the interviewer is of the opposite sex (4) – page 53
The study showed that, indeed, those who got married were happier at the outset than those who did not. However, this is not the whole story. The transition to marriage in an individual was also associated with a substantial increase in happiness over and above whatever love and work baseline they were at. Within two years, though, this hike had generally melted away, and they were essentially back at baseline. Interestingly, the researchers observed considerable variation in the response to marriage. People who responded with a very large increase in happiness in the short term retained that increment for many years. On the other hand, some people, whose initial reaction to marriage was relatively weak, were actually less happy a couple of years later than at the outset. (5) – page 81-82?
They were irritated by the noise, but most felt that they would eventually adapt. One year on, they were just as irritated, and had become more pessimistic about the possibility of ever adaptating. There is little evidence that people ever do. This is an interesting case because, in general, people underestimate their own capacity to adapt to a negative life event. In this case, they thought they could adapt and in fact could not (6)… there is some evidence that the improvement in well-being is real and lasting. Several studies report increased body and life satisfaction, and decreased psychiatric problems, amongst women who have had breast procedures (7) – page 84
one large study examined reports of happiness and well-being in the same individuals 7 to 12 years apart, and found a very substantial correlation between the scores at the two time periods. Life events will make only a modest difference to this picture. Studies have contrasted people with stable life circumstances and those going through major life upheavals, or those with rising incomes and those with falling incomes, and they still find that the best predictor of how happy people are at the end of the study is how happy they were at the beginning. It is as if happiness or unhappiness stem in large part from how we address what happens in the world, not what actually happens. Further evidence for this view comes from the fact that people who are happy in their jobs are also happy in their hobbies. If happiness depended mainly upon the objective situation, then you might think that people who found their jobs horrible would develop their hobbies and be especially happy in them, whilst people who loved their jobs would itch for Monday morning to get back into action. In fact, the more enjoyment people get from Monday to Friday, the more they get evenings and weekends too. Some people just get more enjoyment. (8) – page 92
The correlation between neuroticism and unhappiness has often been found in the corresponding literature before… In fact, extroverts do tend to be happier… I think the most likely explanation for the greater happiness of extroverts is that they are more likely to do things with a strong emotional reward (9)… Many studies have shown that creative and influential individuals in the arts and public life are higher than average in neuroticism. In some important sense, it is their dissatisfaction that drives them to achieve in domains humanity counts as valuable (10) – pages 101-102
People who rate their happiness as unusually high are low-neuroticism extroverts who spend little time alone. Thus, at the moment of asking, they are more likely to have just come from some social interaction or other. (11)… that the restlessness of extroverts makes their family lives unstable in the long term. Moreover, they have an increased risk of serious accidents and hospitalizations. Nothing in life is without a downside, and thus the slightly greater happiness of extroverts is not necessarily to be envied, but merely seen as a trade-of (12)… Individuals who score highly on scales of agreeableness and conscientiousness also tend to be happier (13) – page104?
It turns out that high neuroticism scorers simply have more bad things happen to them. Their financial affairs worriers and enthusiasts and their social relationships are unsettlingly likely to go belly-up. Extroverts, on the other hand, are more likely to experience changes for the better in many life domains. Individuals high in another dimension, called Openness to Experience, just had more things happen to them, both good and bad. This dimension is not correlated with happiness… (14) – page 106
When a cocaine addict lying in the PET machine thinks about smoking crack, there are two areas inside the middle of the brain that are particularly active. These are known as the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. The role of the amygdala in emotional reactions has long been understood. It is hyperactive in depression and anxiety, and when it is removed or damaged in both animals and people, there is an odd syndrome where the processing of emotions is impaired. Experimental monkeys and rats with no amygdalas lose their ability to discriminate emotional value… The amygdala is not just involved in the negative emotions, though. When a monkey feels the sweet taste of fruit juice on its tongue, or sees the juice container coming round, there is a volley of activity in the amygdala. Thus the best interpretation of what the amygdala does is that it acts as an ‘emotional hub’ (15) – page 120
mechanisms that control the wanting of things are not identical to those that control the liking of them once they arrive. The two are after all logically quite distinct. You could crave for something very much, but take little or no pleasure in it once you had it (16)… Opioids do seem to be directly involved in pleasure (17) – pages 125-127
studies have found evidence in the blood or brains of depressed, suicidal, and violent individuals that serotonin activity is unusually low (18)…Serotonin-boosting drugs affect behaviour in precisely the way you would expect if they were shifting the relative weighting of the negative and positive emotion systems. They reduce worry, fear, panic, and sleeplessness. They increase sociability, co-operation and positive emotion (19)… Most intriguingly, serotonin in wild monkeys has been shown to be related to social position. Low-ranking individuals have high levels of stress hormones and relatively low concentrations of blood serotonin. High-ranking individuals on the other hand, spend more time grooming, have lower stress hormones, and higher serotonin. And in a troupe with no alpha male, a subordinate given Prozac will rise to alpha status… . Rather confusingly, administration of an SSRI to a small American lizard, the Green Anole, has precisely the opposite effect, causing dominant individuals to lose status… It may be that in lizards, status is maintained by aggression, whereas in primates it is maintained by alliances. SSRI administration would reduce the former and facilitate the latter (20) – pages 130-132
When volunteers in PET studies were made to feel sad by watching a film clip or being asked to generate sad memories, one locus of increased activation was in the right frontal cortex, and the same finding has come from comparing depressed patients with normal volunteers with the brain at rest. Similarly, the relative strength of left and right frontal brain activation before an experiment has begun is a good predictor of the way a person will respond to an emotional experience. People with an excess of left hemisphere activity will respond in a strongly positive way to positive film clips, whereas people with an excess of right hemisphere activity will respond in a strongly negative way to negative ones. Thus, the balance of activity in the brain at rest must reflect the person’s emotional ‘preset’, which is presumably in turn controlled by serotonergic circuits (21)… the higher the levels of right frontal brain activation at rest, the less effective, in terms of the amount of antibody produced, the person’s immune response was to the vaccine… it seems that general emotional state, determined in part by asymmetry of frontal brain activation, controls the magnitude of the stress response (22)… They were able to classify the youngsters into relatively inhibited and uninhibited individuals, on the basis of things like staying close to mother, trying out new toys, talkativeness, and so on. They later showed that the inhibited children, whilst at rest, had relatively greater right side activation, and the uninhibited ones greater activity on the left (23) – pages 136-138
the more complex a person’s self-image is, the less their happiness in life swings up and down when they do well or badly at something. The reason is very clear; if I am just an academic, and I have an academic setback, then my whole self seems less efficacious and worthwhile. However, if I have many other facets to myself, then the effect of the setback on my identity is much less severe. (24) – page 156

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