Happiness
Are you happy? Unless you're not happy you might not have thought much about it. And if you're not happy then you might not be in the best frame of mind to do much about it.
Happiness is no trifle. The Americans take it sufficiently seriously to have it in their Declaration of Independence, where it says that everyone has certain inalienable rights, including the pursuit of happiness.
What is happiness? Ask an expert, such as a person with an international reputation in the field of happiness research, Oxford University psychologist, Dr Michael Argyle. That's what 5AN's Keith Conlon did when Professor Argyle was in Adelaide, having been in Australia for a symposium on happiness as part of the International Congress of Psychology. This is their conversation, with a few comments contributed by 5AN listeners.
KC: What do psychologists say happiness is about?
MA: There are three main components. One is commonly being in a state of joy or positive emotion, "positive affect" as we call it. Another is being in a state of satisfaction with your life as a whole or various aspects of your lif e. The third is not being depressed, anxious, ill and so on. The three things are somewhat separate but loosely correlated.
KC: Are we talking about a momentary thing or a longer-term state?
MA: Well, the joy thing varies from moment to moment. Anyone can have these moments, but then happy people tend to have more of them, and their typical mood is at a higher level than those who are depressed or usually in a sort of low mood. The second thing -- satisfaction -- is a sort of permanent state.
KC: How much does work come into satisfaction and then to happiness?
MA: There a three really important sources of happiness. The most important one is not work, I think, but close and supportive social relationships with other people: wife, family, friends and work-mates. That's terribly important. Friends in particular are one of the most reliable sources of joy for some reason (and we're trying to find out why).
Work is the second, deriving happiness from what we call "intrinsic work satisfaction". That's actually enjoying doing the job itself. This is terribly important as well as the work relationships.
The third is leisure. It's really important to find some really satisfying and constructive kinds of leisure (a little more serious and demanding than watching television shall we say).
KC: We asked around what happiness means to people, and had responses like "hearing birds singing". You wouldn't classify that as happiness would you, but it might be a moment of joy?
MA: Well this leads into another topic. These are not definitions of happiness but examples of what makes individuals feel in a good mood, and it's very important.
Some people in America drew up a list of three hundred and twenty pleasant activities, and although I don't think they mentioned listening to birds, nature is certainly one of the things on the list.
One form of "happiness therapy" involves keeping track of pleasant activities. In a nutshell you keep a diary for about a month and you tick off the nice things you've done each day, and record your mood by the end of the day, and after a little computing you can soon find out what are the things which make each person happy, the things which really work for each individual.
KC: Do they vary a lot from person to person?
MA. They very quite a bit. Having found out what makes a person happy, we try to persuade them to do it more often, providing it's not too illegal, immoral, expensive, a public nuisance or something. Most of them are all right in fact! The things which typically cheer people up are things like being with friends, eating and drinking, achievement or success, sex, physical activity and sport (which is a very good one), and the very odd lot (odd to a psychologist): nature, music, reading a good book. We don't really understand why those cheer people up but they certainly do.
KC: Psychologists don't know why playing or listening to music works?
MA. Right, and particularly why nature induces a sense of joy. We've no idea why but it certainly does. We just don't know what the process is. Somehow it finds its way to, or triggers, the pleasure centres of the brain. What exactly that route is and why it goes that way, we just don't know.
Sport we do know. We know that physical activity releases substances known as endorphins, and they are a bit like antidepressants in the way they operate, and -that's more or less understood.
CALLER: I think the happiness you've discussed so far is somewhat limited. I'd like to talk about the greatest and wisest man's search for happiness, King Solomon. He was perhaps the wisest, most brilliant & richest men in history. He had gardens, he wrote music and poetry, he had a thousand wives (if that's a measure of happiness), and yet he was dissatisfied. The actual fact is that we have been created with a propensity to be dissatisfied. And if you never have dissatisfaction you would never hope. It's the cycle of nature, you're never satisfied.
MA: Could I make two comments on that. It's absolutely right, we are very much a goal-seeking and striving kind of organism, but this in itself doesn't make us unhappy. The actual pursuit of the goal can be very enjoyable, unless we set aspirations which are very high and which we're not going to attain.
One of the curious findings about happiness is that old people are more satisfied, and in many ways more happy, than young people. The explanation is a very simple one: old people's aspirations have come down and their attainments and achievements have come up till they almost meet.
But to go back to all these very rich people. This was one of the topics we were discussing at the conference in Sydney: does being very rich make you happy? And one of the participants from the University of Illinois did an amazing study of very rich people in America, all of whom earning over ten million dollars a year. The question is: were they happy? And they were a bit happier than the average American, but not very much more. In fact you could do better than that by simply getting married.
CALLER: Happiness is very simple: if you honestly try to make someone else feel better you will be happier.
MA: We've had some very intriguing experiments on this by psychologists, one which I like very much by a researcher at the University of Arizona. He did a laboratory experiment where one lot of subjects did a boring task but thought this would help the blind in some way. The other lot of subjects did the same boring task and thought it was simply a boring task. Afterwards they were allowed to be paid more or less what they wanted to be paid. Those who, thought they'd helped the blind didn't want paying, they had been rewarded already. This had cheered them up, simply doing what they thought was something socially useful. It also works the other way round, that people who are happier are actuary more altruistic, more kind to other people and so on.
KC: Does it also mean that if you're not happy you tend not to be nice to other people?
MA: Not necessarily, but that can happen too. But we were also talking about the importance of relationships, and a very important thing about relationships is one's concerns for other people. If you want to sustain an important relationship you've got to look after them. It's very much a central part of it.
Some people are simply happier than others, given the same circumstances. And the question is: what is it about some people that makes them happy, and others less happy? And that's one thing we're working on at my place of work, and two things have come out so far:
One is that extroverts are considerably happier than introverts, though we don't yet know why. And another is that happy people tend to think in a more positive way. When something good happens to them, they tend to think that they did it all by themselves, just as depressed people when something bad happens to them, they think they did that. That's led to various forms of therapy, persuading people to look at things in a more positive way.
CALLER: I find that happiness comes from, not so much what we do or how we think of the world, but how we see ourselves. True happiness for me is being comfortable with myself, being able to love myself, being able to see who I am really and being able to say that I like who I am. I see happiness as something like peace and contentment, a general sense of well-being because we are happy with who we are.
MA. Yes, certainly another aspect of happy people is that they are not in a state of conflict with themselves, and they feel a sense of integration of the personality or whatever we might like to call it. And also of course having a feeling of self-esteem, accepting yourself.
Another big and very interesting field of happiness research is inducing it in the laboratory ... what we call "mood induction". This is done in various ways, and one of them is music, playing happy music. One that has been used is the Delibes Copelia Suite. For some reason it cheers many people up. And you can make people miserable too ... a terrible thing is a Prokovief Suite played at half speed. It's terrible, I wouldn't play it to a sick dog.
Another way is simply to sit for ten minutes thinking about recent very happy events, in a very concrete way calling up images. That cheers people up a greet deal. The trouble with these techniques is that they don't last very long, they cheer you up for about ten or fifteen minutes and that's it. So we need to know some better method than that.
One way I've been playing with is to get two people to talk to each other about happy events. That seems to work quite well too. The problem though is sustaining it.
CALLER: I believe everybody has a choice: you can choose either to be happy or you can choose to be unhappy. The worse thing that can happen to you is than you can die. Apart from that you can always find a bit of happiness. If you decide to be unhappy, you're a mug, aren't you?
MA: I don't know about that, you may need some help to do it. If you want to be happy, what can you do about it? Well, let's just sum this up: you can try to rearrange your life a bit to improve and strengthen your close relationships, that you have more satisfying work and that you have more constructive leisure. To some extent you can do those things. If you don't have the social skills for making friends or keeping relationships, you may need some professional help with that one. But then there are other things that we've been working at, forms of happiness therapy, and I've covered some of the points ... you can encourage people to engage in their pleasant activities, you can do morning and evening positive mood induction, you can do some social skills training, and you can do a little cognitive therapy to persuade them to look at things in a more positive way. Those are the main things we can put into happiness therapy.
CALLER: I've been waiting for someone to call and say that religion is the answer, but before they do I'd like to say I'm an extremely happy atheist. Put I think the main barrier for a lot of people is loneliness. It's an enormous social problem, it's not recognised.
MA: Loneliness is something we psychologists have done a lot of work on. There are many lonely people, it's a very common thing to experience, particularly amongst the young. It can be helped by better community facilities where you can meet people, but the barrier seems to be more inside the person, more in the person's skills in two main areas: there are many lonely people who spend a lot of time with friends but still feel lonely. The difference is that they don't talk about sufficiently personal or intimate things. Talking about politics or sport doesn't stop you feeling lonely, you've got to talk about yourself.
Secondly, lonely people are often not very good at making friends and making contact. They're not very good at getting to know people.
But getting on to the atheism bit, certainly religion is a very great source of joy for many people, and actually I am one of them. But curiously enough its importance as a source of happiness is quite moderate over the population as a whole.
KC: Can we touch on the economic cost ... unhappy people may take more sickies and it hurts the economy, for example?
MA: Ah! Yes they do. There is a correlation between low job satisfaction and absenteeism, and of course leaving your job.
© ABC 1988
