Happiness & Public Policy

This is silly: 

Contrary to the common notion that paying taxes can be a painful experience, researchers at the University of Oregon say the practice actually may trigger feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

“Paying taxes can make citizens happy,” Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology, said in a release accompanying the study in the Friday issue of Science.

How was this determined?

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, the researchers observed the brain activity of 19 women who were given a balance of $100 each. The researchers created the effect of taxation by making mandatory withdrawals from their account. The withdrawn money was actually sent to a food bank’s account.

Participants also made additional choices about whether to give away more money or keep it for themselves.

The study found that two reward-related areas of the brain — the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens — lit up during the taxation test. These areas are typically activated when a person experiences feelings of satisfaction, as they do after having eaten a meal.

“The fact that mandatory transfers to a charity elicit activity in reward-related areas suggests that even mandatory taxation can produce satisfaction for taxpayers,” the study said.

When the participants voluntarily gave the charity more money, the activation area was larger — a finding that, according to the researchers, sheds light on why people make donations.

Complaints…

(1) The $100 wasn’t theirs to start with—was not the fruit of the their labor, etc. Giving people a little money and then taking some of it away again is, well, giving people some money … but less than maybe they thought they were going to get at first. How is that like a tax?

(2) The money was sent to a food bank to feed the hungry. That’s nice! But the idea that this simulates what taxes generally fund strains credulity. Why not tell people instead that the money is going to buy bombs that will incidentally kill civilians in humanitarian wars? Or that it is going to a subsidy for a farmer with an income four times the subject’s? That would be rather more realistic.

(3) Even if our taxes flow exclusively to food banks and adopt-a-puppy programs and we do get some lift out of this, is it greater than the lift we would have gotten from the money otherwise? They show that giving money away voluntarily does even more for folks. So how does giving money away measure up to eating a piece of chocolate cake, basking on a beach on the Italian coast, opening the box with your new iPhone in it? Until we know, we know nothing much.

Robin Hanson on bunk neuroscience narratives, here.

This is weird:

Exposure to a type of bacteria found in soil boosts happiness levels and could help restore healthy immune functions in people who are depressed and prone to infection, says a study.

British scientists led by Chris Lowry at Bristol University treated lung cancer patients with the bacteria, named ‘bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae’, and found improvement in their quality of life, reported the online edition of BBC News.

However, they said more work is needed to determine if the bacteria has anti-depressant properties through activation of serotonin neurons - a chemical in the brain that helps maintain a ‘happy feeling’, and seems to help keep our moods under control by helping with sleep, calming anxiety and relieving depression.

Seems low-effort enough. Let’s get dirty!

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.

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.