Happiness & Public Policy

Good name for an album. Also, supposed to be one of the key pieces of evidence providing objective corroboration for happiness self-reports. Duchenne smiles are “real” smiles, the ones you make when someone cracks a funny joke and your eyes wrinkle and everything, not phony prom picture smiles. Some research has shown that expressing Duchenne smiles is correlated with heightened activity in the font left part of the brain, which is associated with experiences of pleasure. And people who Duchenne smile more report that they are happier.

But what are we to make of this, from Paul Griffiths and Andrea Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion,” forthcoming in the Cambridge Handbook Of Situated Cognition, Robbins, P and Aydede, M (Eds):

One of the most important experimental paradigms for a situated perspective on emotion is the study of ‘audience effects’ – differences in emotional response to a constant stimulus which reflect differences in the expected recipient(s) of the emotion. Amongst the most dramatic effects are those obtained for the production of the so-called ‘Duchenne smile’ – the pattern of movement of mouth and eyes generally accepted as a pan-cultural expression of happiness (Ekman, 1972). Ten-pin bowlers are presumably happiest when they make a full strike, less happy when they knock down a few pins. However, bowlers rarely smile after making a full strike when facing away from their bowling companions and smile very often after knocking down a few pins when they face their companions (Kraut & Johnston, 1979). Spanish soccer fans show a similar pattern in their facial response to goals, and issue Duchenne smiles only when facing one another (Fernández-Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1997). Fernández-Dols & Ruiz-Belda also demonstrate that at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, although Gold medalists produced many signs of emotion during the medal ceremony, they produced Duchenne smiles almost exclusively when interacting with the audience and officials.

These results suggest that smiles are not outpourings of happiness which are merely witnessed by other people, but rather affiliative gestures made by one person to another with respect to something good which has occurred. This fits the model of emotions as strategic moves in the context of a social transaction. Obviously, people do smile and produce other classical emotional expressions when they are alone, but studies suggest that they do so far less often than one might expect. Even such apparently reflexive displays as facial expressions produced in response to tastes and smells appear to be facilitated by an appropriate social setting and the same appears to be the case for pain expressions (Russell, Bachorowski, & Fernández-Dols, 2003). Furthermore, it would be a mistake to conclude that audience effects are absent when a physical audience is absent. Solitary subjects who mentally picture taking part in a social interaction produce more emotional facial signals than subjects who focus on the emotional stimulus without an imagined audience. Fridlund has described this as ‘implicit sociality’ and remarked that his experimental subjects display to the ‘audience in their heads’ (Fridlund, 1994; Fridlund et al., 1990).

If Duchenne smiles are subject to audience effects, and especially if they are strategic (which is not to say they are contrived or fake–one of the author’s main points is that emotions are there to strategically manage social interaction), we maybe we shouldn’t make that much of them.

If Griffiths is right, “being happy” may be a longstanding social strategy. Take a different example to get the idea or emotion as strategy. Ever met anyone who cries any time they don’t get their way, or who grows sullen whenever there is conflict. This is, in part, a way of managing other people. Similarly, someone who is “happy” may depend strategically on behaving happily (again, this is not faking it) in order to seem likable, to reduce social friction, or maybe as a way to mask latent malevolence or aggression. We should expect that people for whom happiness plays this kind of strategic social role to both earnestly smile more and to have a self-image as a happy person. This should show up on the happiness survey. And it is plausible that being “a happy person” would require the activation of the neural correlates of positive affect.

However, just as we wouldn’t want to say that the unsmiling Olympic champion is not happy, I don’t think we’d want to say that people for whom happiness is not so strategically central are not equally happy in some deeply important sense, even if they’re not so often getting that tickle in the left frontal lobe that goes along with the Duchenne smile.

The Griffith essay is full of good examples of strategic emotion. People get angrier when their anger can get them restitution. Embarrassment as a signal of one’s realization that one has violated a norm. I like the account of sulking:

Sulking is a behavioral strategy for seeking a better deal in a relationship – an emotional game of ‘chicken’ in which transactions that benefit both parties are rejected until appropriate concessions are obtained. The question confronting an agent deciding whether to become upset in this way is not whether they have been slighted simpliciter, but whether taking what has happened as a slight and withdrawing cooperation will give them leverage. Once again, this strategic appraisal of the situation may be realized by a relatively simple mental mechanism.

I’d very much like to see a strategic account of happiness. Maybe it will turn out that some of our gains in self-reported happiness come from increasingly widespread adoption of the “being happy” social management strategy. And it may be a very good thing to have a society where “being happy” is a good way of getting what you want, even if “being happy” isn’t the same thing as the sense of meaningful well-being we all hope for. Fun stuff!