Donald B Verrilli Jr
2012-04-03 20:59:37 UTC
"Psychologists are exploring the notion that a good balance to achieve
would be experiencing three positive emotions (such as joy,
compassion, gratitude or hope) for every one negative (disgust,
embarrassment, fear, guilt, sadness)."
=====================
"Too much happiness can make you unhappy, studies show"
By Marta Zaraska
April 2, 2012
The happier you are, the better, right?
Not necessarily.
Studies show that there is a darker side to feeling good and that the
pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you . . . well, less happy.
Too much cheerfulness can make you gullible, selfish, less successful
— and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Happiness does have benefits (beyond feeling good, of course). It can
protect us from stroke and from the common cold, makes us more
resistant to pain and even prolongs our lives. Yet, June Gruber, a
professor of psychology at Yale University who has studied happiness,
warns that it’s important to experience positive moods in moderation.
She compares happiness to food: Although necessary and beneficial, too
much food can cause problems; likewise, happiness can lead to bad
outcomes. “Research indicates that very high levels of positive
feelings predict risk-taking behaviors, excess alcohol and drug
consumption, binge eating, and may lead us to neglect threats,” she
says.
How else can excessive joy, or having lots of positive emotions and a
relative absence of negative ones, hurt you?
First, it may hamper your career prospects. Psychologist Edward
Diener, renowned for his happiness research, and his colleagues
analyzed a variety of studies, including data from more than 16,000
people around the world, and discovered that those who early in their
lives reported the highest life satisfaction (for example, judging it
at 5 on a 5-point scale) years later reported lower income than those
who felt slightly less merry when young. What’s more, they dropped out
of school earlier.
Included in the studies was one involving a group of American college
freshmen who in 1976 claimed to be very cheerful. Surveyed again when
they were in their late 30s, they earned, on average, almost $3,500 a
year less than their slightly less cheerful peers. Why? Diener
suggests that people who don’t experience much sadness or anxiety are
rarely dissatisfied with their jobs and therefore feel less pressure
to get more education or change careers.
Psychologists point out that emotions are adaptive: They make us
change behavior to help us survive. Anger prepares us to fight; fear
helps us flee. But what about sadness? Studies show that when we are
sad, we think in a more systematic manner. Sad people are attentive to
details and externally oriented, while happy people tend to make snap
judgments that may reflect racial or sex stereotyping.
Fooling the jury
In a 1994 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Northwestern University psychologist Galen Bodenhausen and his
colleagues asked 94 undergraduates to participate in a simulated
“students’ court.” They were told they would be making a judgment
after reading about a case that occurred on a different campus. Before
the “court” opened, half of the participants were induced into a
positive mood (they had been instructed to think and write about an
event that had made them feel particularly good), while the other half
was asked to recall the mundane events of the previous day (to leave
them in a neutral mood). The results were clear: Those in a happy mood
were more likely to find a fellow student named “Juan Garcia” guilty
of beating up a roommate than one identified as “John Garner.” The
control group was pretty much equally divided between “Juan” and
“John.”
That happy people are more prone to stereotypic thinking was supported
in research by Joe Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University
of New South Wales in Australia. In an experiment published in the
December 2011 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology,
Forgas asked students to read a philosophical essay by a “Robin
Taylor,” to which a photograph of the presumed author was attached.
Some of the students received a picture of a middle-aged, bearded man;
others of a young woman in a T-shirt. Even though the essays were
identical, those students who had been induced to feel happy judged
the man’s work more competent than the woman’s. Their non-induced
colleagues declared both essays to be of equal quality.
Anyone who has committed a crime should hope that the jury that tries
him is happy. According to Forgas, his experiments show that cheerful
people are easier to deceive, couldn’t detect lies as easily as those
in negative moods and couldn’t tell a thief from an honest person.
Forgas had 117 students watch specially chosen video clips to induce
them into either positive or negative moods. Later they were asked to
watch another film: an interrogation of people accused of the theft of
a movie ticket. Some of the suspects really did steal and were lying
about their action; others were honest. Yet those students who were
made to feel happy did not detect guilt above chance level (50
percent). Their sad colleagues fared batter: They could spot a thief
more often than chance would predict.
And there are more flip sides of happiness: Feeling good makes people
more selfish (if asked to divide raffle tickets between themselves and
others, they’ll keep more in their pockets than sad people) and worse
at defending their opinions (they produce weaker, less detailed
arguments). The happiest of us are also less creative than those who
describe themselves as just “happy enough.”
Listen to the music
Even just striving to feel cheerful might make us less happy. Jonathan
Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and his colleagues asked a group of 120 people to
listen to Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” a complex composition that
is not that easy on the ear. He discovered that those who listened to
the music with a specific intent to make themselves happy or
constantly monitored how much they were enjoying themselves ended up
enjoying themselves less than those who just focused on the
experience.
In another experiment, Schooler found that 83 percent of 475 people
interviewed were disappointed with their New Year’s Eve celebrations
of 2000. The most dissatisfied? Those who anticipated having a bash
and put the most energy into preparations.
“It’s a delicate balance between savoring experiences, being able to
appreciate, say, a glass of good wine, and excessively being
preoccupied with ‘Am I having fun yet?’ ” says Schooler, who compares
striving for happiness with looking at a faint star. If you try to
gaze directly at it, it disappears; but if you keep it to the side and
don’t make it the focus of your attention, you might actually enjoy
it.
Keeping score
According to psychologist Iris Mauss, the more someone pursues
happiness, the more he or she will probably end up feeling
disappointed. In a study of 43 women published in August 2011 in the
journal Emotion, Mauss, then at the University of Denver, showed that
those who read a newspaper story designed to induce feelings of
happiness felt lonelier after watching Clint Eastwood’s and Meryl
Streep’s doomed love in “The Bridges of Madison County” than did a
control group whose members were given an emotionally neutral
newspaper story to read before watching the movie.
Mauss confirmed her laboratory findings by using diary studies: 206
participants, both men and women, completed happiness surveys and then
were asked to fill out diaries on 14 consecutive days in which they
wrote about stressful events that occurred and how lonely they felt.
Mauss found that those to whom being happy was extremely important
felt lonelier after experiencing a stressful event than those who
didn’t make such a big deal of wanting to be cheerful.
But don’t burn your “how to be happy” books just yet. “I’d hate to see
depressed people, who could gain benefits from self-help books,
throwing them out,” says Schooler. “Just don’t keep a score on how
happy you are. What’s bad is when people make happiness their explicit
goal all the time.”
So how happy is happy enough? Gruber points out that it’s important to
accept whatever one’s level of happiness is — as long as you are not
clinically depressed, of course — and the negative feelings you may
have. Following work of other psychologists, she and her colleagues
are now exploring the notion that a good balance to achieve would be
experiencing three positive emotions (such as joy, compassion,
gratitude or hope) for every one negative (disgust, embarrassment,
fear, guilt, sadness).
[Zaraska is a Canadian freelance journalist and novelist. She lives in
France.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/too-much-happiness-can-make-you-unhappy-studies-show/2012/04/02/gIQACELLrS_story.html#weighIn
would be experiencing three positive emotions (such as joy,
compassion, gratitude or hope) for every one negative (disgust,
embarrassment, fear, guilt, sadness)."
=====================
"Too much happiness can make you unhappy, studies show"
By Marta Zaraska
April 2, 2012
The happier you are, the better, right?
Not necessarily.
Studies show that there is a darker side to feeling good and that the
pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you . . . well, less happy.
Too much cheerfulness can make you gullible, selfish, less successful
— and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Happiness does have benefits (beyond feeling good, of course). It can
protect us from stroke and from the common cold, makes us more
resistant to pain and even prolongs our lives. Yet, June Gruber, a
professor of psychology at Yale University who has studied happiness,
warns that it’s important to experience positive moods in moderation.
She compares happiness to food: Although necessary and beneficial, too
much food can cause problems; likewise, happiness can lead to bad
outcomes. “Research indicates that very high levels of positive
feelings predict risk-taking behaviors, excess alcohol and drug
consumption, binge eating, and may lead us to neglect threats,” she
says.
How else can excessive joy, or having lots of positive emotions and a
relative absence of negative ones, hurt you?
First, it may hamper your career prospects. Psychologist Edward
Diener, renowned for his happiness research, and his colleagues
analyzed a variety of studies, including data from more than 16,000
people around the world, and discovered that those who early in their
lives reported the highest life satisfaction (for example, judging it
at 5 on a 5-point scale) years later reported lower income than those
who felt slightly less merry when young. What’s more, they dropped out
of school earlier.
Included in the studies was one involving a group of American college
freshmen who in 1976 claimed to be very cheerful. Surveyed again when
they were in their late 30s, they earned, on average, almost $3,500 a
year less than their slightly less cheerful peers. Why? Diener
suggests that people who don’t experience much sadness or anxiety are
rarely dissatisfied with their jobs and therefore feel less pressure
to get more education or change careers.
Psychologists point out that emotions are adaptive: They make us
change behavior to help us survive. Anger prepares us to fight; fear
helps us flee. But what about sadness? Studies show that when we are
sad, we think in a more systematic manner. Sad people are attentive to
details and externally oriented, while happy people tend to make snap
judgments that may reflect racial or sex stereotyping.
Fooling the jury
In a 1994 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Northwestern University psychologist Galen Bodenhausen and his
colleagues asked 94 undergraduates to participate in a simulated
“students’ court.” They were told they would be making a judgment
after reading about a case that occurred on a different campus. Before
the “court” opened, half of the participants were induced into a
positive mood (they had been instructed to think and write about an
event that had made them feel particularly good), while the other half
was asked to recall the mundane events of the previous day (to leave
them in a neutral mood). The results were clear: Those in a happy mood
were more likely to find a fellow student named “Juan Garcia” guilty
of beating up a roommate than one identified as “John Garner.” The
control group was pretty much equally divided between “Juan” and
“John.”
That happy people are more prone to stereotypic thinking was supported
in research by Joe Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University
of New South Wales in Australia. In an experiment published in the
December 2011 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology,
Forgas asked students to read a philosophical essay by a “Robin
Taylor,” to which a photograph of the presumed author was attached.
Some of the students received a picture of a middle-aged, bearded man;
others of a young woman in a T-shirt. Even though the essays were
identical, those students who had been induced to feel happy judged
the man’s work more competent than the woman’s. Their non-induced
colleagues declared both essays to be of equal quality.
Anyone who has committed a crime should hope that the jury that tries
him is happy. According to Forgas, his experiments show that cheerful
people are easier to deceive, couldn’t detect lies as easily as those
in negative moods and couldn’t tell a thief from an honest person.
Forgas had 117 students watch specially chosen video clips to induce
them into either positive or negative moods. Later they were asked to
watch another film: an interrogation of people accused of the theft of
a movie ticket. Some of the suspects really did steal and were lying
about their action; others were honest. Yet those students who were
made to feel happy did not detect guilt above chance level (50
percent). Their sad colleagues fared batter: They could spot a thief
more often than chance would predict.
And there are more flip sides of happiness: Feeling good makes people
more selfish (if asked to divide raffle tickets between themselves and
others, they’ll keep more in their pockets than sad people) and worse
at defending their opinions (they produce weaker, less detailed
arguments). The happiest of us are also less creative than those who
describe themselves as just “happy enough.”
Listen to the music
Even just striving to feel cheerful might make us less happy. Jonathan
Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and his colleagues asked a group of 120 people to
listen to Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” a complex composition that
is not that easy on the ear. He discovered that those who listened to
the music with a specific intent to make themselves happy or
constantly monitored how much they were enjoying themselves ended up
enjoying themselves less than those who just focused on the
experience.
In another experiment, Schooler found that 83 percent of 475 people
interviewed were disappointed with their New Year’s Eve celebrations
of 2000. The most dissatisfied? Those who anticipated having a bash
and put the most energy into preparations.
“It’s a delicate balance between savoring experiences, being able to
appreciate, say, a glass of good wine, and excessively being
preoccupied with ‘Am I having fun yet?’ ” says Schooler, who compares
striving for happiness with looking at a faint star. If you try to
gaze directly at it, it disappears; but if you keep it to the side and
don’t make it the focus of your attention, you might actually enjoy
it.
Keeping score
According to psychologist Iris Mauss, the more someone pursues
happiness, the more he or she will probably end up feeling
disappointed. In a study of 43 women published in August 2011 in the
journal Emotion, Mauss, then at the University of Denver, showed that
those who read a newspaper story designed to induce feelings of
happiness felt lonelier after watching Clint Eastwood’s and Meryl
Streep’s doomed love in “The Bridges of Madison County” than did a
control group whose members were given an emotionally neutral
newspaper story to read before watching the movie.
Mauss confirmed her laboratory findings by using diary studies: 206
participants, both men and women, completed happiness surveys and then
were asked to fill out diaries on 14 consecutive days in which they
wrote about stressful events that occurred and how lonely they felt.
Mauss found that those to whom being happy was extremely important
felt lonelier after experiencing a stressful event than those who
didn’t make such a big deal of wanting to be cheerful.
But don’t burn your “how to be happy” books just yet. “I’d hate to see
depressed people, who could gain benefits from self-help books,
throwing them out,” says Schooler. “Just don’t keep a score on how
happy you are. What’s bad is when people make happiness their explicit
goal all the time.”
So how happy is happy enough? Gruber points out that it’s important to
accept whatever one’s level of happiness is — as long as you are not
clinically depressed, of course — and the negative feelings you may
have. Following work of other psychologists, she and her colleagues
are now exploring the notion that a good balance to achieve would be
experiencing three positive emotions (such as joy, compassion,
gratitude or hope) for every one negative (disgust, embarrassment,
fear, guilt, sadness).
[Zaraska is a Canadian freelance journalist and novelist. She lives in
France.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/too-much-happiness-can-make-you-unhappy-studies-show/2012/04/02/gIQACELLrS_story.html#weighIn