Happiness & Public Policy

From Trizle. I find this blog’s mixture of middle-manager biz-speak and overexcited, indiscriminate, completely inauthentic mash-up of various forms of slang completely idiotic, yet nevertheless entertaining.

An article on neuroscientist Richard Davidson:

Findings from Davidson’s lab clearly suggest that a sense of well-being should not be considered as the simple absence of disease or depression, but rather as the presence of a distinct profile of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation characterized by a pattern of unique neurobiological substrates. Moreover, these patterns of brain function appear to influence peripheral biology in ways that may be consequential for health.

Cortisol is a stress hormone produced by the adrenal cortex. It is triggered whenever we feel threatened, but prolonged exposure can increase blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and suppress the immune system.

“We have found that individuals who show very effective regulation of negative emotions also show a more adaptive pattern of cortisol release,” explained Davidson.

Cortisol is naturally higher in the morning and reaches a low point just before bedtime. According to Davidson’s findings, individuals who show the highest levels of well-being and most effective emotion regulation are those who also show the lowest levels of cortisol at night. The ability to automatically regulate this stress hormone may play a critical role in mediating the health consequences associated with high degrees of happiness.

Davidson’s research also shows that positive and negative emotions produce activity in very different paths of the brains. It turns out that one place the blue bird of happiness likes to roost is the left prefrontal cortex.

Research reveals that people experiencing anxiety, anger or depression show the most brain activity in the right prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead. Those experiencing positive outward-reaching emotions show more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. What’s more, people seem to be predisposed genetically and through their experiences towards being either more left-brained or right-brained, that is, more cheerful or sad.

Davidson promotes the idea that meditation can improve happiness:

“There are many other ways to change the brain, but we know that meditation is a family of procedures that yields virtuous change: we now know that we can learn to cultivate compassion, kindness, altruism, and cooperation, largely through meditation, which produces change in specific brain surfaces,” Davidson said.

I like meditation, but I worry that buying into a full-on ethos of meditative mindfulness can turn you into a passive milquetoast with no creative edge. Am I wrong? The pluralist’s motto: “There is never no cost.” So what’s the cost of meditation? My guess: you cannot sublimate aggression, frustration, and anxiety into creative production if you’ve largely eliminated them. I’d be happy to lose most of my frustration, but I feel like I often need more, not less, aggression, and that a certain amount of anxiety (but not too much!) keeps me focused. I doubt my optimal degree of serenity is even close to my potential maximum.

Only about 2.2 percent of women in China consider sex as the most valuable factor to make them happy, a recent survey has found. About 22.5 percent of the women surveyed prioritized love as the big happiness maker, because the word ’sex’ was still considered as a taboo.

[…]

Citing a reason for a low percentage of women linking their happiness to sex, a leading sexologist in the country said that traditionally the word ’sex’ carried negative meanings. “The word was stereotyped with negative meanings. A good woman should not like sex. Love is a beautiful word,” said Li Yinhe, a noted sexologist and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.”But, power, money and sex all represent the negative things. It (power) shows big progress. More and more women want to achieve their life value, which eclipses the importance of the private life for women. When women start to value self fulfillment, they become more equal to men,” the China Daily quoted her as saying. [emphasis added]

People who tell you there isn’t significant cultural variation in the way people answer survey questions are dreaming.

Whole thing here.

A few interesting thoughts on technology and quality of life from game designer Jane McGonigal.

Here’s a good overview of Richard Lucas’s recent work on adaptation. Lucas has found that adaptation is generally not as complete as previously thought.

The thrill of marriage generally lasts about two years.

The agony of divorce, on the other hand, can last a lifetime.

That’s according to Richard Lucas, a psychology professor at Michigan State University.

Lucas studies happiness - “the thing we call subjective well-being to make it sound more scientific,” he said - and how our levels of happiness can change.

For years, the accepted wisdom among psychologists has been that those levels don’t change. Much.

The article offers a Lucas quote that emphasizes the importance of invidividual variation and the hazards of cross-sectional studies:

Lucas said there is an optimistic message to be gleaned from his results and that message has to do with the variety of individual reactions to any life event.

“For example, when we look at marriage, on average, people come back to where they were in about two years,” he said.

“But there’s a lot of variability in the amount of change that occurs. There are actually a lot of people who get a large boost in happiness following marriage, but they’re balanced out by those people who don’t get any change or even have a decline in happiness.”

The important thing to know is what kind of person you are, and the kinds of conditions under which your kind of person will find lasting satisfaction, not what happens to people on average.

Great line, from Alison Rowat in The Herald:

Some bravehearts, sickened by their acquisitiveness, resolve never to buy another gizmo. Children of the sixties are especially prone to crises of consumer confidence. There are few sadder sights than an old hippie clutching a digital wine thermometer and wondering where it all went wrong. They wanted to change the world, man, not ensure the Chablis was the right temperature.

The moral:

Gadget buyers shouldn’t be judged too harshly. As well as keeping millions in work, they are investing in an idea, a dream of themselves as better, healthier, less stressed, more sociable individuals. Have coffee machine, have friends round for dinner. Have juicer, be Dame Kelly Holmes. If only happiness did come in a pod or with a plug attached. The simple, boring truth is that the finest cup of coffee in the world is the one poured from a battered old flask at the top of a hill just climbed. The most delicious toasties are the ones carried to your sick bed by a loved one. And feeling the need to check the temperature of a bottle of wine before serving is really God’s way of telling you to get out more.

Sounds about right, whatever a toastie is.

Good, but somewhat dated backgrounder in Psychology Today on dopamine:

Dopamine now seems everywhere in the brain: running through four main brain pathways, picked up by five different types of receptors–each with several subtypes, many still just being defined. Suddenly, the neurotransmitter is the target of research into happiness, attention, extroversion, self-confidence, and goal-direction.

“Dopamine, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” jokes George Koob, Ph.D., a professor of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Excitement about dopamine is now so high, says Koob, that the danger is not underestimating its reach but exaggerating it: “Today’s gig is that dopamine is a kind of everyman’s neurotransmitter because it does everything. And the fact is, it doesn’t.”

I keep stressing the biochemical complexity of good feelings. Serotonin does one thing, dopamine another, etc., and there may be tradeoffs among each kind of good feeling. Except it’s not like each neurotransmitter is responsible for just one kind of feeling. Each actually does a lot of things, and so knowing the levels of certain neurotransmitters tells us less than we might think in the absence of further knowledge about the activity levels of various kinds of receptors. I guess it would be convenient if there was some single substance, “happy juice,” coursing through our veins that could be measured, but there isn’t. The more we know, the more complex it gets.

Here’s a test at George Loewenstein’s CMU lab. Via John Tierney.

The future of the “Does money make you happy?” debate lies in individual-level longitudinal studies of the relationship between different consumption patterns, life satisfaction, and various dimensions of positive affect. This is a nice start in thinking about the effects of different patterns of consumption.

The McKibben nonsense below has moved me to share a very short excerpt from my forthcoming Cato paper:

—

The best studies are those that track people over time and see what happens to their happiness as their circumstances change. One such study used the reunification of East and West Germany—and rapidly rising incomes in the East—as a kind of natural experiment to test whether increasing incomes do make us happier. In a paper entitled “Money Does Matter!” the authors write:

average life satisfaction in East Germany increased by around 20% between 1991 and 2001, leading to a clear convergence with West Germany. Importantly, increased real household incomes in East Germany accounted for around 35–40% of this increase, which corresponds to the economists’ view that money surely matters.

On the flip-side, sudden reductions in income correlate strongly with declining subjective well-being. Hagerty and Veenhoven note that “in Russia average happiness decreased by two points following the Rubel crisis in the mid 1990s, which severely disorganized the economy. As the Russian economy began to pick up, so happiness also began to rise.”

—

Note that these are quite recent papers using state-of-the-art research methods. McKibben doesn’t even deign to actually cite a single study or social scientist by name.

—

Citations

Paul Frijters, John P. Haisken-DeNew and Michael A. Shields, “Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Incomes and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification,” American Economic Review 94, no. 3 (June 2004).

Ruut Veenhoven and Michael Hagerty, “Rising Happiness in Nations 1946–2004: A Reply to Easterlin,” Social Indicators Research 79 (2006).

From a silly Bill McKibben LA Times op-ed:

New data suggest that we’ve been flying blind for many decades. We made an assumption — as a society and as individuals — that more was better. It seemed a reasonable bet, and for a while it may have been true. But in recent years economists, sociologists and other researchers have begun to question that link. Indeed, they’re finding that at least since the 1950s, more material prosperity has yielded little, if any, increase in humans’ satisfaction.

In the 1990s, for instance, despite sterling economic growth, researchers reported a steady rise in “negative life events.” In the words of one of the study’s authors, “The anticipation would have been that problems would have been down.” But money, as a few wise people have pointed out over the years, doesn’t buy happiness. Meanwhile, growth during the decade increased carbon emissions by about 10%.

Further, economists and sociologists suggest that our dissatisfaction is, in fact, linked to economic growth. What did we spend our new wealth on? Bigger houses, ever farther out in the suburbs. And what was the result? We have far fewer friends nearby; we eat fewer meals with family, friends and neighbors. Our network of social connections has shrunk. Do the experiment yourself. Would you rather have a new, bigger television, or a new friend?

Second paragraph: What researchers!? Third Paragraph: which economists and sociologists? Name them. McKibben simply has no idea what he’s talking about. There is almost NO credible empirical data in support of the proposition that economic growth or increasing individual incomes makes people less happy. Indeed, almost all the evidence points resolutely in the other direction. And it’s not even true that growth reduces social cohesion. It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt, either. There’s no trade-off between friends and new televisions. He’s just tossing out falsehoods left and right. What a fraud.

If he wants to cut carbon emissions, he should say: “Cutting carbon will cut into growth, and almost all evidence indicates that a decrease in the rate of growth will lead to lower average levels of life satisfaction. But I think it’s worth it.” That, at least, would have the virtue of truth.

The famous 1978 paper by Brickman, Coates & Janoff-Bulmann on paraplegics and lottery winners created a sort of conventional wisdom around a very strong view of adaptation or reversion back to an ex ante hedonic “set-point” after an big external positive or negative hedonic shock. The new conventional wisdom is that some but generally not all big hedonic gains and losses dissipate due to adaptation. Here’s a good summary of recent work from Diener and Oishi:

In 1978 Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman presented evidence from paraplegics and lottery winners to offer empirical support for the idea that adaptation brings us all back down to hedonic neutrality, irrespective of how good or bad the event was originally experienced. It should be noted, however, that in a closer inspection, the evidence of Brickman et al. for adaptation was mixed (i.e., paraplegics were not as happy as others). Our recent studies offer stronger support for adaptation, as well as the modifications that must be made to the original theory. First, it appears that people adapt over time, but not always completely back to the point where they started. For instance, we found that both widowhood (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2003) and unemployment (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2004) led to lower levels of life satisfaction even many years after the event. Although people showed adaptation over time after the event occurred, they had not adapted completely back to their former levels of life satisfaction even after five years. Despite the fact that people may not adapt to all conditions, we have found that they adapt to the smaller rewards and setbacks of everyday life (Suh, Diener, & Fujita, 1996).

A couple recent papers by Andrew Oswald and friends speaks directly to the old conventional wisdom. In this paper, Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee “provide longitudinal evidence that individuals who become disabled go on to exhibit recovery in mental wellbeing. Adaptation to severe disability, however, is shown to be incomplete.” And in this paper, on medium-sized lottery winners, Oswald and Jonathan Gardner

offer new evidence by using longitudinal data on a random sample of Britons who receive medium-sized lottery wins of between £1000 and £120,000 (that is, up to approximately U.S. $200,000). When compared to two control groups — one with no wins and the other with small wins — these individuals go on eventually to exhibit significantly better psychological health. Two years after a lottery win, the average measured improvement in mental wellbeing is 1.4 GHQ points.

The GHQ is a measure of general psychological well-being that ranges from 0 (best) to 36 (worst). Healthy individuals score from 10-13. To put the result from the lottery study in perspective, about the worst possible thing that can happen to you in terms of psychological well-being is the death of a spouse. The average loss in GHQ points from such a devastating loss is 5 GHQ points. So, the size of the positive effect of winning a medium-sized lottery is about 1/3 of the negative effect of losing a spouse. I’d call that significant.

They conclude:

The paper’s main result — that a windfall is followed eventually by a significant improvement in mental health — contrasts with standard interpretations of the work of Brickman et al (1978). An advantage of the present study is that we follow the same individuals through time and do not have to rely on cross-section comparisons.

Better research methods are consistently showing that adaptation is not complete, and that persisting gains in a number of kinds of psychological well-being flow from gains in material well-being.

In one scene of the Terry Gilliam classic Brazil, there is a poster with a campy illustration of a 1950s American-looking family all wearing rictus grins in a huge car that says “Happinness” and then something else. I think I’ve seen the image other than on the poster in Brazil, and I’d like to use it on the blog masthead, if it is not locked down by copyright. Anyone know where I can find it? If I become ambitious, I may try to find a screencap…

Interesting findings in SciAm article on UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky:

Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies’ effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky is also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you happier? “I’m a basic researcher, not an applied researcher, so I’m interested not so much in the strategies but in how they work and what goes on behind the scenes,” she explains.

Initial results with the interventions have been promising, but sustaining them is tough. Months after a study is over, the people who have stopped the exercises show a drop in happiness. Like a drug or a diet, the exercises work only if you stick with them. Instilling habits is crucial. Another key: “fit,” or how well the exercise matches the person. If sitting down to imagine your best possible self (an optimism exercise) feels contrived, you will be less likely to do it.

The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed–and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. “A lot of people don’t apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives,” Lyubomirsky declares, “but the effort it takes is enormous.”

This last is an important observation that points to the idea that more happiness may not be better as long as there is some cost to increasing one’s happiness level. When you hit the point where the cost of the marginal unit of effort is greater than the benefit of the marginal unit of happiness, then you’re as happy as you want to be, even if you could in some sense be happier.

The San Jose Mercury LA Timesreports Claremont Graduate University is offering a new psychology Ph.D. program centered on happiness studies led by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

This is no New Age enterprise. The Ph.D. program in the emerging field of positive psychology marks an advance for serious research into human happiness and related quality-of-life concerns. It is an arena drawing the attention of psychologists, as well as neuroscientists, economists and even political scientists.

Although the desire to live a better life is fundamental for ordinary folks - think pursuit of happiness - researchers long have devoted their energies elsewhere.

“Most research on human behavior has focused on what goes wrong in human affairs: aggression, mental disease, failure and so on,” said Claremont Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is a pioneer in positive psychology and a leader of the doctoral program.

Csikszentmihalyi, whose 18 books include the 1990 best seller, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” calls the study of human pathologies essential but adds, “We don’t know enough about what makes life worth living, what gives people hope and energy and enjoyment.”

He and his partner in running the program, psychologist Jeanne Nakamura, emphasize that their work is not aimed at a self-help audience.

Such studies can involve tracking hundreds of people over a week and paging them at random times to ask how
they are feeling. Are they happy? Creative? Energetic? Researchers then correlate those feelings with what the people are doing, the settings they are in and who they are with, among other things.

A while back, Tyler Cowen linked to the recent Oswald and Blanchflower NBER paper, “Is Well-Being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle” (paywall) reporting its conclusion: “ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid to late 40s.” Tyler commented: “It’s a good thing I don’t believe in that nasty happiness research…” Over on Slate Joel Waldfogel reports on the paper in an article on “The Midlife Happiness Crisis” as if it conveyed interesting information about age and happiness, and seems to me to totally misunderstand the point of the paper:

[Blanchflower and Oswald] document how happiness evolves as people age. While income and wealth tend to rise steadily over the life cycle, peaking around retirement, happiness follows a U-shaped age pattern.

Both Tyler and Waldfogel seem to think this paper is telling us something about how happy you are likely to be at a various points in life. But that’s not what the paper is about. It is about the effect of age, per se, on happiness. That is to say, they’re filtering out various correlates of age, like wealth and health, which generally have large effects on life-satisfaction. So this is a study of how happy people are with their age at various ages. The paper, as far as I understand it, says that people are least happy with their age at middle age. It does not say that people are least happy at middle age. Sadly, this completely ruins Waldfogel’s Slate piece. This is largely the fault of the authors for not making this sufficiently clear. Here is a key passage from the abstract:

A robust U-shape of happiness in age is found. Ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid to late 40s. The paper also shows that in the United States the well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time. In Europe, newer birth-cohorts are happier.

By “ceteris paribus” here they mean controlling for the effect of most everything important to happiness other than how old you are, well-being reaches a minimum … in people’s mid to late 40s.” They simply don’t show that the well-being of successive birth-cohorts all things considered has fallen in the US. Newer cohorts are actually wealthier and healthier than older ones, which would predict increasing happiness overall. But B&O are controlling for the effects of things like wealth and health. So, basically, they’re saying Americans have become increasingly unhappy with being middle-aged, which is sort of interesting. Sort of.

In the paper they make clear note of what they’re not measuring–which is to say, overall life satisfaction–but they are far from fastidious in their use of terms like “well-being.” Here’s a couple of statements about what they’re filtering out in the attempt measure the effect of how many years we have been alive, in isolation from most everything else:

The paper’s concern is with the ceteris paribus correlation between well-being and age, so we later partial out other factors, such as income and marital status, that both alter over a typical person’s lifetime and have effects upon well-being.

[…]

an important issue is whether in happiness equations it is desirable to control in some way for health and physical vitality. There is here no unambiguously correct answer, but the approach taken in the paper is not to include independent variables that measure physical health. This is partly pragmatic: our data sets have no objective measures and few subjective ones. But the decision is partly substantive: it seems interesting to ask whether older people are happier once only simple demographic and economic variables are held constant.

Sorry to say, I don’t think this is very interesting. I don’t see why this is that useful to know, though I do suppose it would be interesting to find out why Americans (but not Europeans) increasingly think being middle-aged sucks. If you want to say something interesting about how happy people are at various ages, I like Easterlin’s approach [pdf], which takes things like satisfaction with health, finances, career, and family at different points in the life cylce into account. He finds that, all things considered, the happiest point of our lives is precisely when Blanchflower and Oswald find we’re least happy with our age. That is kind of interesting!

[Flickr photo courtesy of placinsun.]

From the IHT:

Darrin McMahon still cannot define happiness after spending six years researching and writing a book about it.

While that has been a frustration, the Florida State University history professor said it is also what gives happiness its power and allure.

[…]

“The concept of luck is embedded in the very word happiness — luck or fortune,” McMahon said. “That’s true in every Indo-European language. It’s a really striking thing, all the way back to the ancient Greek and moving forward.”

Happiness is linked to such words as happen and happenstance. Greek tragedies were filled with the idea that happiness was a matter of fate.

“The Gods are spiteful and capricious,” McMahon said. “Just when you think everything’s going well, they pull the rug out from you and send a thunderbolt down.”

That began to change with Socrates, but the concept of humans having some control over their own happiness did not flower until the 18th century.

“If you ask somebody today what happiness is, they’ll inevitably tell you that it involves feeling good,” McMahon said.

But it meant something more to the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle held that happiness was based on a lifetime of experience. You could not really tell if you were happy until you were dead. Many felt virtue was the key to happiness even though it took suffering to achieve. Cicero once said a virtuous man could be happy even while being tortured.

Christianity maintained the link between virtue and happiness. During the Enlightenment, though, thinkers began to focus more on pleasure and the ability of people to pursue, if not always attain, happiness.

While pleasure today has become virtually synonymous with happiness, McMahon believes the older concept of a life well lived has not been entirely lost.

“You push most people and they will admit that, well, it’s not enough to be happy simply to be pleasured as it were,” he said. “You need other things, and they’ll talk about family and they’ll talk about love and they’ll talk about meaning and so forth.”

McMahon will be writing the lead essay in next month’s edition of Cato Unbound, and I’ll be commentator. Should be fun!

From the Feb. 12 New Yorker’s wonderful profile [pdf] of Paul and Patricia Churchland by Larissa MacFarquhar [pdf].

One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven my car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’”

I’ve actually come to think and talk a bit like this, though not to this degree. I believe it is true, as MacFarquhar writes of Paul Churchland:

The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile’s complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine.

As anyone who has had the misfortune of being my girlfriend/primary oxytocin source knows, I have an annoying habit of microanalyzing my physical/subjective states. I only wish I had access to some kind of biofeedback machine so I could better calibrate my physicalist vocabulary. There are detectable qualitative distinctions between different kinds of positive and negative states, and there really is no reason why we should be so dumbfounded, inarticulate, or (usually our best) cleverly metaphorical when it comes to describing the character of our inner lives. Further, I think that once one gets a subjective grasp of the difference between the effects of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, glucocorticoids, prolactin, testosterone, etc., monistic conceptions of pleasure and happiness become almost self-evidently false, and a kind of pluralism comes to seem almost inevitable as the trade-offs between different kinds of physical/qualitative states become apparent.