PSY 180

1. PSY 180 Lecture 3 Happiness

2. Why be happy? • Tal Ben-Shahar says that you can play the why game like kids- eventually you will get to the point where you say “because it makes me happy” • After that there is no where else to go • Called an ungrounded grounder because it requires no further rationale

3. Peterson • Starts with the yearbook study • Women that had duchenne smiles were more likely to be married and more likely to be happy with their marriages • Controlled for physical attractiveness

4. The nun study • Autobiographical essays about their childhoods were analyzed for emotional content • Counted the positive emotion words and negative emotion words • Those with more positive emotional content lived 10 years longer than their less happy counterparts • Believed to be a very good study because most of their lives is constant and controlled • A different study found that linguistic complexity for the writing samples predicted Alzheimer’s Disease reliably • Could be that those that wrote more sophisticated samples were less likely to get AD and thus were less likely to be depressed?

5. So… what is happiness? • Hedonism? • The idea that you should maximize pleasure and minimize pain • Eudaimonia • Happiness entails identifying one’s virtues, cultivating them, living in accordance with them • Pursuit of engagement • flow

6. Four types of happiness ideas (Ben-Shahar) • Rat-racer • Be unhappy now for happiness later • Hedonic • Be happy now and pay for it later • Nihilist • Be unhappy now and unhappy later (too bad, you’re screwed!) • Happiness • Be happy now and happy later

7. Eudaimonia leads to • Increased satisfaction • Across genders and nations

8. How to measure happiness? • Depends on how you define happiness • Hedonism: Pleasure vs pain • Experience sampling method • Overall trajectory or pattern of their lives • Desire theory: happiness is whether you get what you want or not (it doesn’t have to be pleasurable) • Ask the person what they desire • Objective list theory: happiness is achieving some universally accepted items (education…) • Need people to agree on those universal things • Most of these things are actually unrelated to happiness itself- so why have this be a measure?

9. Progress Paradox • Objective goods have increased over the past few decades • Literacy rates are higher • Life expectancy is longer • Information is more available • People have more things • Happiness has not increased, according to most surveys

10. Maybe this is a problem with survey ratings of happiness? • Maybe people are relatively judging their happiness

11. What are the various measures? • Quality of life • Overacrching label that includes emotions, experiences, appraisals, expectations, and accomplishments • Subjective well-being • Relatively high levels of positive affect and relatively low levels of negative affect • Aka life satisfaction • Happiness • Most of the research on these “different” things typically come to the same conclusions about the things that affect them

12. Most common technique • Just ask people • Are you happy or not… • Right now • During the past 4 weeks • In general • Problems? • Self-report is not always accurate • Everyone has bias and may bias their answers one way or the other

13. People overemphasize their current feelings • Schwartz and Strack (1999) • If you ask young adults about their dating life • Then follow it with life satisfaction • The two are strongly related • If you flip the order (life satisfaction first, then dating life) • The two are only weakly related • If you make people think about something that they are unhappy with, they then judge their life satisfaction as unhappy • If they are happy with their dating life, it will lead them to believe that their life satisfaction is happy

14. Cultural differences • Typically asians rate lower than others in life satisfaction • Could be due to the asian norm of not standing out • Not wanting to say that life is better than others, so they rate in the middle of the scale

15. US vs Korean youth • Family satisfaction links to life satifaction strongly in both • Self satisfaction is more associated with life satisfaction in the US than Korea • In Korea, school satisfaction is more associated with life satisfaction than in the US

16. US vs Japan • US: the best predictor of overall satisfaction is the domain in which one is most satisfied • Marriage is bad, health is bad, work is bad, kids are great- thus life is great! • Japan: the best predictor of overall satisfaction is the domain in which on is least satisfied • Marriage is good, health is good, work is good, kids are bad- thus life is bad!

17. Positive correlations with happiness and life satisfaction

18. Conclusions from the table • Demographic data doesn’t matter • Anyone can be happy • Being in contact with others does matter • In fact, when comparing happy vs very happy people, this is the one thing that still is strongly related • Personality factors are involved as well • Could be a factor of self-report- happy people see themselves favorably • Others seem to see them favorably too

19. Problems with correlations

20. Correlation does not equal causation

21. Depressive realism • Depressed vs non-depressed students in a condition where there was a button for them to press and a light went on and off randomly • They were asked to determine the relationship of what they did to the light • Depressed people were more accurate • Nondepressed people came up with complex ideas • “the light flashed when I pressed the button twice- first for 2 seconds and then for 5 seconds • Peterson argues that this is only true when addressing noncontingencies, but not contingencies • If they actually had control, they would not be very accurate at detailing that

22. H = S + C + V • Get from Seligman