Category: Positive Psychology

Can you measure your happiness like your temperature?  Is it possible to accurately say who is happier than who?  When I told people I was writing a chapter on measuring happiness, I got skeptical reactions.  A lot of people don’t see happiness as something that can be measured.  They say it’s too abstract, too subjective, too hard to quantify.  So if you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you, but hopefully I can convince you otherwise.

Methods of measuring happiness range from deceptively simple to extremely complex.  The more complex the method, the more accurate the results are.  The simplest way is to just ask people how satisfied they are with their life on a scale of one to ten.  More complex ways range from questionnaires that are 20+ items long, to brain imaging scans using state-of-the-art technology.  In the middle-ground are the ‘life-satisfaction’ questionnaires; these measure the specific definition of happiness described in the last section, and that that’s the definition I’ll be using here.

When we’re in a happy state, it’s something we can feel physically.  Now, we could find a way to measure that physical feeling somehow: maybe with brain scans, heart/pulse rates, or something like that.  We’d then get a nice, objective way of measuring happiness.  But the problem is, there may be a difference between the objective measurement of happiness and your subjective experience of it.

For example, some people are real adrenaline junkies. They love bungee jumping, performing in front of crowds, and diving out of aeroplanes. Others can really do without that kind of thing.  An objective measurement can tell us the status of our physical body, but not necessarily how happy we are with that status.  Imagine believing you are happy but being assured that you are not, or vice versa; this seems OK for something like temperature, but incorrect for happiness.

Therefore any measurement of a person’s happiness has to include their evaluation of their own state- we just need a way to quantify these evaluations.  This is why happiness is measured with questionnaires and scales – you’d miss important information if you measured it only as a physical feeling.

Sources of static when measuring happiness

The way to measure these evaluations is to use a specially designed questionnaire. Going over the process of how these questionnaires is designed is beyond the scope of this book, but it involves starting with lots of potential questions and finding the best combination through many studies and lots of statistical analysis. But once they are made, the problem of accuracy comes up; are people good judges of their happiness?  The problem is a slippery one, because we’re rejecting a purely objective definition of happiness.  We’re in the realm of subjectivity, where happiness cannot be completely separated from peoples’ own standards.

Imagine two completely identical people, in two completely identical alternate universes.  They have the exact same lives, experiences and feelings, in every single way, except one; one of them is more pessimistic in his judgement of his life.  Our subjective measurement would show him as being less happy, but is he really less happy than his alternate self?

In one sense he cannot be- he has the exact same life, experiences the same good emotions, and feels the same amount of pleasure.  On the other hand, if his pessimism means he wants more, shouldn’t that dissatisfaction be included when measuring his happiness?

In other words, shouldn’t people choose their own criteria of what they’re happy with?  They should, but standards can be fickle.  Today I’m happy with my house, tomorrow I want a bigger one.  Maybe the day after that I don’t want a big house anymore.  Our happiness measurement would detect these fluctuations; like static picked up along with the ‘signal’ of happiness we’re trying to tap into.

This is not such a bad thing.  The way we consistently judge our lives affects our feelings of happiness.  If you regularly use a higher standard to judge your situation by than what you have achieved, you’ll get less happy.  This is called negative self-talk and it’s what some types of therapy work at fixing.  Likewise, if you lower your standards of judgement, you’ll tend to get happier with what you have; this is generally known as appreciation or gratitude.

There are other sources of static too, like ‘impression management’.  If someone going on a date asked you for advice, you’d be quite a troublemaker if you suggested they be as unhappy as possible.  Happy, positive people are more attractive, so you might expect people to report a happiness score that they view as being attractive.  This explains why you get higher happiness scores if you do surveys by interview than by post, and even more so if the interviewer is of the opposite sex!

Mood might also cause some static.  Imagine being asked how satisfied you are with your life when you’ve just had the best day of your life, compared with your worst.  You’d probably be rational to a point, because you’re specifically being asked to look at your life overall, but the way your day went would definitely have an impact.

These sources of static cast a shadow of doubt of the measurements.  We need some more objective things to compare our scores with, to make sure that the signal coming through the static is strong enough.

Cleaning up the Signal

To find out how much signal is getting through the static, the questionnaires of happiness must be compared with objective things that already we know are related to happiness.  Because such a large amount of research has been done in this area, I’ll only give a quick overview of this work.

First of all, if you give someone a happiness questionnaire twice, one month apart, the results are very similar. This consistency shows that people don’t just respond randomly, and it suggests there is more to the results than people’s mood at the time of answering. Of course we would not expect the results to be identical, because many things can happen in a month, but we would expect a correlation.

Emotions and feelings are processed in the brain, so that’s another good place to look.  As you probably know, the brain is split up into two hemispheres.  You might not know, that the left hemisphere is associated with positive emotions and feelings, and the right hemisphere with negative ones (to be specific, the left- and right-prefrontal cortices).  If you record brain activity when people watch funny films, the left side lights up; during sad films, the right side activates.  People with injuries to the left side are more likely to become depressed, and people with damage on the right side can actually get an increase in good feelings. So how do happiness questionnaires compare with brain scans?  Well, it turns out that people who score higher on happiness questionnaires actually have more activity in the left hemisphere. (3) So these questionnaires are related in the correct way to brain activation – another sign that they do what they are supposed to.

As mentioned previously, there’s a chance people might lie when completing these questionnaires, and say they’re happier than they are to give a good impression.  This can be tested for by asking friends, family and independent observers to fill out the questionnaire as if they were the person in question.  My friends and family would know if I’m happy, and random people would have some idea.  They wouldn’t get the same exact score as me of course, because they aren’t me (so few of us are in fact).  But for happiness measurements to be taken seriously, they have to correlate with friend and observer reports – and they do.

Another objective thing to compare against is the ultimate symbol of happiness – the smile.  Look at the picture below:

A ‘real’ smile, called a ‘Duchenne’ smile, is where the eyes wrinkle up on the outside along with the smile.  If someone isn’t smiling with the eyes, they’re probably faking it. See the crow’s feet on the guy’s eyes, indicating a real smile. The girl is only smiling with the lips – no crow’s feet = not a real smile.  As you’d expect, people with higher happiness scores tend to give more Duchenne smiles than people with lower scores.

Hey, it works!

Even though it might have seemed far fetched to measure an abstract thing like happiness, with a questionnaire, of all things, there really is a signal coming through the static.  All the evidence points to that signal being happiness; or at least, something it’s logical to label ‘happiness’.  It’s not a perfect method, but the signal to noise ratio is good enough that these questionnaires can be useful.

How would you define happiness? Is it an emotion? A state of mind? A decision? Is it a reaction to things that happen to us, like pain, or is it something we can create ourselves? It’s tough to define happiness, because it’s a very abstract, subjective concept. Whatever it is though, it’s a powerful motivator – almost everything we do is motivated by how much happiness we think we’ll get from it.

Even though happiness has such a big role in our lives, we don’t seem to spend much time thinking about what it is. Most people just take it for granted, but others haven’t been satisfied with that; philosophers have been pondering on happiness for thousands of years, and in the last couple of decades, scientists have been studying it too. All of this work has given new insight into what happiness is, why it’s there, and most importantly, how to get
it.

Everyone intuitively knows what happiness feels like, and people are also quite good at telling you what will make them happy. Try asking them. You’ll probably get responses involving money or the opposite sex, but if you’re lucky you might get a more thoughtful response. If you’re very lucky, you might get some good ideas for future Christmas presents. If you ask what happiness actually is, however, you get less detailed replies and the occasional blank face. People don’t ponder this, because it doesn’t seem like useful information for everyday life.

So what is it?

Well for starters, there’s a strong element of subjectivity to happiness. Different things elicit it for different people. Listening to 80s power ballads might make me happy, but not you. OK bad example, everybody loves power ballads. But you get my point. So when trying to form a definition of happiness, it’s best not to focus on the specifics of what causes it in different people – there’d be too much information to make sense of any of it. Instead, we have to look at what all these different things have in common. The most obvious commonality is pleasure. If you find bike rides, massages or films pleasurable, then you’d probably agree that these things make you happy. Also if you think of the last time you were really happy, you’d probably say it was pleasurable. But
despite what my ex-girlfriend might claim, pleasure isn’t always a short-lived thing. You could distinguish between short-term but intense pleasure, like elation or excitement, and more enduring but less intense feelings, like contentedness, relaxation, or the feeling that you are part of something meaningful, bigger than yourself.

And what’s the hidden commonality behind short-term and long-term pleasure? It’s that something, or things in general, are going better than might be expected – or better than some alternative. So it seems reasonable to include pleasant feelings somewhere in the definition of happiness. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the opposite, pain, being part of it. Or is it? Can you think of an example of when a person could be in pain but be happy? (That doesn’t involve PVC and whips, thank you very much…). What about if a climber fell off a cliff but survived? He might be in great pain while he recovered in hospital, but at the same time be happy to be alive.

Happiness is more than just a feeling

The man who survives falling off a cliff can’t feel happiness at the same time as the agonising pain, but on judgement, comparing his situation to a grim alternative, he might be happy with it. There are many other examples and counter-examples you might think of, but one thing seems clear; it’s possible to be happy without feeling happy. Look at it this way; if I say ‘I am happy to see you!’, I’m talking about a feeling (well, either that or I’m lying). If I say ‘I am happy with my life’, I’m not talking about a feeling, I’m making a judgement.

Why? Because I can completely experience the event ‘seeing you’, whereas I can’t experience ‘all my life’ at once. All I can do is compare all the positive feelings I tend to have with all the negative feelings I experience. Or maybe I’d compare my current situation with some expectation I hold. Either way, my happiness when seeing you is something, it exists in some physical way. My happiness with my life does not exist as such; it only reflects things that do exist (or did).

So there’s something else to happiness beyond mere feelings, something cognitive. It’s not really a valid question to say which one of these two things – positive feelings or positive judgements – ‘is’ happiness; they are different levels of the same thing. If you define happiness as a feeling, you would conclude that happiness is erratic; shifting up and down, minute-by-minute, in response to whatever is going on (or not going on). Your conclusion would be correct, but limited, because you would not know whether a person is happy with all the ups and downs.

For example, one couple in a volatile relationship might like the drama. Another couple might enjoy a relatively boring but stress-free life. But on balance, both couples might be equally happy with their relationship (although each will not understand how the other can be!).

Because feelings and judgements are two levels of the same thing you would expect there to be some overlap. And there is. This is why you get people saying ‘happiness is a decision’ or a ‘happiness is a state of mind’. By deliberately altering judgements, the part of feelings that overlaps with it will start to change too. You see this in people who take cognitive-behavioural therapy; they learn judge situations in a different way, and it’s about as effective as prozac at making people happier, given enough time. Likewise, it’s natural that if you do a lot of things that result in the feelings of happiness, then over time this will affect your judgements of how happy you are. That’s quite obvious; when you sit and reflect you’ll have more happy memories on which to base your judgement.

Scientists have focused their work mostly on the judgement definition. They prefer to study things that are stable over time: if feelings were used, the research would be all over the place. Also, judgements are a higher-level definition; judgements can tell you about feelings, but feelings can’t necessarily tell you about judgements.
Psychologists have termed judgements ‘Subjective Well Being’, or ‘life-satisfaction.’ They’ve also come up with other definitions and explanations for happiness, but this subjective well being is the one with the most research behind it. So I’ll focus on that one in this book, but I’ll continue to just call it happiness for consistency.
The real advantage defining happiness in this way is that it gets around the subjectivity problem. When you judge your life, you take into account the things that make you happy, and when I judge my life, I take the things that make me happy into account. If we are able to use our own judging criteria, we could compare our happiness, if there was some way to measure it. Well there is, and in the next section we’ll look at how it is been possible to quantify happiness.

Some people argue that Emotional Intelligence is actually a set of skills. This makes me think, why is it called emotional intelligence, and not Emotional Skill, or something like that? Is it really an intelligence? Or if a set of skills can form an “emotional intelligence”, then can any set of skills be considered an intelligence?

Intelligence is “the ability to carry out abstract thought, as well as the general ability to learn and adapt to the environment.” (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2004, p198). Most researchers now refute the concept of ‘g’ – a common general factor that influences intelligence in each domain – which is what we generally think of when we think intelligence. Also the concept of IQ seems very narrow and misses out on a range of behaviours that you might intuitively consider to be indicative of intelligence. Currently, researchers seem to favour the idea of multiple intelligences, that each cover different domains separately, one of which being emotional intelligence, but we also have social intelligence, IQ, verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, and so on.

What distinguishes these intelligences from each other? And does emotional intelligence fit the bill, or is it better considered only as a set of skills? According to Mayer, Salovey and Caruso (2004) intelligences…

* Process a distinct type of information

Emotional intelligence certainly ticks this box. Emotions are conveyed not only verbally, but through our body language, behaviour, and facial expressions; and in the latter case, the information appears to be a human universal, consistent across culture (Ekman, 2003). Whether you go to modern, pre-industrial, or tribal societies, everyone smiles when happy, frowns when sad, etc. It’s a common ‘language’.

* Must be operationalised in a ‘test’ format, for which there are more-or-less right answers

If we take an IQ test, there is one correct answer to each question. I took the MSCEIT (an EI test; see Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, and Sitarenios, 2003) a while back, and I definitely didn’t see that – not through the whole test.

There was one section in particular, which Andy Roberts of Breath London who was administering my feedback, said is frequently questioned.

There were a load of pictures, for instance, a bunch of grey squares, and you had to answer “How much happiness is shown in this picture?”, and things like that. Is there really a right or wrong answer to that?

Another one was a picture of a rock in a lake. Maybe I’m missing something, but how can that be happy? Its a rock in a lake. Apparently there is a right answer, which is judged by consensus and expert criteria. I’m sorry, but I don’t care how many people think that a rock is happy – it isn’t. And who can be an expert on the happiness of rocks in lakes? Or are we supposed to say how happy it makes us? Because what if rocks in lakes just don’t make me smile? Does that mean I can’t recognise happiness in people? On the other hand, if it’s measured by consensus, are we sure that identifying the happiness shown by a rock in a lake carries over to identifying emotions in people. For example, would people with average EI give a different score to people with high EI? How would we know?

However, the other items on the test such as facial expression and emotion name recognition, certainly would have closer associations with actual emotional expression (and clearer right/wrong answers).

* Shows patterns of correlations similar to other intelligences

Apparently EI is ‘factorally unified’ and correlates modestly with other intelligences. So it’s a distinct construct but at the same time you wouldn’t necessarily expect someone very high in EI to be very low in, say verbal intelligence.

By the way, if you’re wondering why intelligences can correlate, but we can’t find ‘g’, a general factor of intelligence, read this page, for a comprehensive explanation. To quote the author “This doubtless more than exhausts your interest in reading about the subject; it has certainly exhausted my interest in writing about it.”

* It should develop with age

According to Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, (2004), there is evidence that EI develops with age, which meets the third criteria for an intelligence.

So it looks like EI does tick all the boxes – not completely inside the lines – but mostly so. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a set of skills – after all you could break down an IQ test into various cognitive skills – but it’s not only that.

By the way, Bob Sternberg, the big name in intelligence research, the guy who made the call for the study of multiple intelligences back in the 1980s, also of triangular theory of love fame, has a very interesting definition of intelligence:

“I define [intelligence] as your skill in achieving whatever it is you want to attain in your life within your sociocultural context, by capitalizing on your strengths and compensating for, or correcting, your weaknesses.”

I’ve talked about strengths and weaknesses a lot. Perhaps, some years down the line there will be a strengths intelligence – the ability we have to recognise our personal strengths into our every day lives. Maybe when the strengths models are better developed, we will be able to compare them against the criteria for an intelligence.

How much strength is shown by this rock in a lake?

References:

Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions Revealed, NY: H. Holt

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2004). Emotional intelligence: Theory, findings, and implications. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 197-215.

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., & Sitarenios, G. (2003). Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT V2.0. Emotion, 3, 97-105.

How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but it takes six months and the bulb has to want to change!

Humour has a potentially valuable place in therapy; a large number of papers argue for the benefits of it in a therapeutic setting. There is also a lot of information about humour styles out there, and what type of humour is appropriate in different settings.

BUT… is there any work on how to teach humour skills to professionals? It’s alright to advise a talk therapist to “use humour,” but humour could potentially have a severely negative effect too, if used ineffectively. So it seems that proper training may be needed.

And also, in a broader sense, humour is useful in sales, business, teaching; even in romance! So what about general humour training? We have comedy improv clubs and what-not, and these might be effective in their own way, but it’s not going to convince the scientists and practitioners to go to a comedy club to help their patients. For that, there would need to be theoretical papers, randomised controlled trials, and so on, which is ironic since these are some of the least amusing things you’re likely to come across. But I decided to see if there was any science in this area. Can humour be learned, or is it just a gift?

The Controlled Trial

“When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everybody laughed. They’re not laughing now.” – Bob Monkhouse

As I looked through the research, unfortunately, I found very few studies. I managed to found one controlled test of a humour training intervention. Nevo, Aharonson, and Klingman (1) subjected 101 female teachers to a 20-hour humour training program, consisting of 14 individual units. At the end of the test, the treatment group saw greater improvements in measures of ‘humour production’ as rated by peers, compared to pre-test measurements and the control group. And subjectively, the participants felt that the program was moderately effective. So it does seem from this one study, that humour can be learned.

An interesting finding, however, was that ‘trait-level’ measures of humour were less sensitive to changes following the program; which might question how long these benefits last for. Maybe you have to keep practising to keep your game up.

The Uncontrolled Trial

McGhee (2) devised an 8 week humour development program, aimed at the lay audience. Franzini (3) mentions that this program is backed by a self-report follow up, but as yet I have not found it. If anyone knows of it, please let me know.

General skill or scripted sessions?

The local yoga club was in high spirits, despite the horrific Superglue accident. (credit: lululemon athletica)

Here’s another point – do we train professionals in humour production, then let them loose on their clients? Or do we systematically develop a set of lines and comments, a sort of therapists jokebook, that are tested and proven to be funny, appropriate, non-triggering, and so on? By doing so, we might increase the ‘hit-rate’ of the humour, but we may lose a certain authenticity to the interaction’s normal, organic flow. Carl Rogers and others have suggested that an authentic relationship between client and counsellor is an essential part of the therapeutic process – structured humour may get in the way of this. But in other fields this may work well.

Theoretical benefits of studying humour training

As well as looking for practical benefits in applied settings, there might be other uses to studying humour training. One in particular could be in linking the findings with the evolutionary fields. Evolutionary psychologists have been trying to find the adaptive function of humour and laughter for a while, and they’ve focused a lot of attention on attraction.

They suggest that humour evolved, essentially, as a way of attracting a mate by displaying the health of your brain and your immunity to social pressure through your fantastic wit, hence making your genes something of a commodity to members of the opposite sex.

So far, researchers have found certain types of humour to be more attractive than others; self-depricating humour is apparently the best one, as long as you’re already high-status (4). If you’re not already seen as high-status, self-depricating humour has the opposite effect on your perceived attractiveness (these researchers are also to be commended for the use of the word “diss” in the title of a scientific paper). But if humour training can be measured somehow, this would be better way to test these theories too – for example are people viewed as more attractive, so they meet more partners, etc., after a humour training program, all other things being equal?

Overall, there is little research in this area, despite many papers noting the benefits of humour in a range of professional and personal settings, and this could be a fruitful area for future study.

References:

(1) Nevo, O., Aharonson, H., & Klingman, A. (1998). The development and evaluation of a systematic program for improving sense of humor. In W Ruch (Ed.), The sense of humor: Explorations of a personality characteristic (pp.385-404). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

(2) McGhee, P.E. (1994). How to develop your sense of humour: An 8 step humour development training program. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

(3) Franzini, Louis (2001). Humor in Therapy: The Case for Training Therapists in Its Uses and Risks. The journal of General Psychology, 128(2), 170-193.

(4) Greengross, G., & Miller, G.F. (2008). Dissing Oneself versus Dissing Rivals: Effects of Status, Personality, and Sex on the Short-Term and Long-Term Attractiveness of Self-Deprecating and Other-Deprecating Humor. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6(3), 393-408.

There is a lot of information out there about the benefits of optimism in numerous areas of life. The research shows that optimists aren’t necessarily blind to the world, seeing it with rose-tinted glasses, which is a common criticism of books and programs aimed at developing optimism in people. In fact, optimism seems to be in many cases a highly desirable decision making or belief strategy. And being optimistic implies a positive anticipation of a desired outcome; sometimes when all the evidence points to a different one occurring.

Rather than writing the “10 steps to optimism”, I want to look into this a little more deeply. Why have we evolved the ability to think this way? Surely the best way to guide behaviour would be to hold beliefs that are as accurate as possible, and making decisions based on them. I would have assumed that these would be the most accurate decisions you could make. So you might argue that natural selection would tend towards accurate thinking, but this doesn’t match up with the evidence base on optimism or other cognitive biases (or simply the experience of being human).

To explain the ultimate origin of optimism, it is necessary to figure out whether having a system in the brain that allows for overly favourable perception or cognition can be beneficial to survival or reproduction, and also to see how the system would relates to other ideas in evolutionary theory.

To give a specific example, consider the tendency of men to overestimate the sexual interest of women (1). This is of course an adaptive strategy, because male reproduction is limited only by the number of partners they can meet, and since it costs little or nothing to ‘try it on’, being optimistic and assuming the best means fewer missed opportunities. Natural selection would therefore favour men who are optimistic about women’s interest in them, as opposed to those with accurate perceptions.

This balance of costs and benefits is how optimism is said to have evolved. In a situation where a caveman or cavewoman has to make a decision, but they are uncertain about the outcome, sometimes they are going to get it wrong. But, is it more costly to make false positive errors, or false negative errors? This problem is called error management theory (1), and it ties in nicely with the idea of positive illusions, which we’ve discussed before in the context of relationships.

Taylor and Brown (2) propose that positive illusions help motivate people to pursue goals with a low objective level of success, such as the terminally ill individual whose positive illusion about the disease leads her to positive health behaviours.

In such a situation (and in others), optimism and pessimism can lead to different negative outcomes – optimism might lead to wasting time and energy in pursuits that are not beneficial, and pessimism might lead to passivity and missing out on potential opportunities.

Reasoning forward we can see a route through which optimism can evolve in a world where the outcomes of decisions are often uncertain – if the cost of trying and failing is low (compared to the benefit of succeeding), then optimism is the best strategy – better, even, than a decision that is made on accurate information (3).

Coming back to increasing chances of survival and reproduction, we find that positive illusions tend to be aimed toward the self, and particularly about characteristics that other people find desirable – when asked about others, the illusions disappear (4) – with the exception of our positive illusions towards our romantic partners; but we’ve seen that these are ultimately self-serving as they help sustain the relationship.

Likewise, pessimism is thought to have evolved by the same pressure of natural selection, but this time acting on a different area of the brain. This allows for variation in the things we can be optimistic and pessimistic about, depending on the particular situation (see reference 3 for more info on this).

Recommended Reading

• Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

References:

(1)Haselton, M. G. & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81-91.

(2) Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193-201.

(3) Haselton, M., & Nettle, D. (2005). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47-66

(4) Campbell, J. D. (1986). Similarity and uniqueness: The effects of attribute type, relevance and individual differences in self-esteem and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 281-294.