Do you know what it takes to be happy?

New research may change your view about leading the happy life.  Consider these two questions:

1.       Is it the ordinary, or extraordinary, that makes us happy? and

2.       Does happiness lie in feeling good or doing good?

Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Happiness 

If it’s hedonic happiness that you’re after (that is, happiness derived from pleasure), you’re not alone. After all, who among us doesn’t spend a portion of our time pursuing “the good life.”  And it’s not that we’re selfish – for years health experts have instructed us that happiness breeds well-being.

But a new study, out of the University of North Carolina and UCLA, has us rethinking the link between happiness and health. The researchers took an entirely unique approach, examining happiness from a biological view – measuring the difference between hedonic happiness (happiness desired from pleasure) and eudaimonic happiness (happiness based on “meaning” or a sense of purpose). Their findings surprised even long-time researchers.

Wrote Steven Handel, in a piece for www.theemotionmachine: “The researchers found that individuals who scored high on meaningful happiness ('eudaimonic well-being') showed healthier gene expression than those who only scored high on pleasurable happiness (or 'hedonic well-being'). The implication of this study is that meaningful happiness can improve our well-being on both a psychological and biological level.”

According to a report from www.wharton.upenn: Lead researchers “[Steven] Cole and [Barbara] Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives — proverbially, simply here for the party — have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.”

Handel quoted Frederickson and Cole who pointed out that “feelings of loneliness, grief, and loss can often activate a stress response in our genes. They put our bodies into an unhealthy state where we feel like our lives are being physically threatened. However, having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life can often give you a sense of connectedness and belonging, especially with other people, which counteracts this ‘threat mode’ response.”

This study’s bottom line: feeling good (pleasure, hedonic pursuit) may not be enough for long-term health. 

Ordinary vs. Extraordinary

What experiences generate the most happiness: the extraordinary (e.g., sky diving, deep sea fishing, mountain climbing) or the ordinary (dinner with family, social gatherings of friends and family)?  The answer has more to do with how old you are (or how old you think you are) than the experiences themselves.  That’s the chief finding drawn from a series of studies by Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner and then-Wharton PhD candidate Amit Bhattacharjee.

Explained Mogilner: “Irrespective of how old you are, experiences that are self-defining make you happy. But as you get older, there is a real shift in what experiences you use to define yourself.”  

In large part, the researchers found, a person’s view of happiness correlates to how many years they believe they have left on earth.  In one of their eight studies, the researchers focused on age, but not a person’s actual age – instead, they asked participants about how much time they thought they had left in life.

Their chief hypothesis and finding: participants who felt as if they had more time left on earth were more likely to derive greater levels of happiness from extraordinary experiences, while those who thought they had less time ranked ordinary and extraordinary events equally. “We were thinking less in terms of age and more in terms of ending,” Bhattacharjee says. “You take the day-to-day stuff for granted when you have plenty of days left for experiences.”

Added Bhattacharjee: “Practitioners have this notion that extraordinary experiences are inherently better than ordinary ones, and the more they convert ordinary to extraordinary, the more they will sell. But it really depends on the brand and the goal of that brand.”

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Are you better at remembering, or forgetting?

Forget everything you know about memory.  Emerging research threatens to rewrite our understanding of two critical skills – our ability to remember, and our ability to forget.

First memory.  New research out of Germany maintains that as we age, our cognitive abilities don’t necessarily become weaker, it’s simply that that we have more data to sort through, thus the delay in retrieving it. 

And forgetting?  A variety of reports insist that learning to forget (i.e., “memory extinction”) is one of the more useful skills that we can develop.  Yet, it remains undervalued and rarely taught.  

Before we dive in, we’ll also explore these memorable questions:

·         Who forgets more, women or men?

·         How close are we to developing a pill to forget bad memories?

We turn first to the age-old notion that as we mature, our memory fades.  Explains Dr. Michael Ramscar of Tubingen University:

“The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more.”

Ramscar, who led a team of researchers, maintains that most standard cognitive measures are flawed. As quoted in www.psypost.com, Ramscar said: “The human brain works slower in old age, but only because we have stored more information over time.” Without question, accumulated knowledge poses a challenge to memory, but researchers maintain that we shouldn’t confuse “processing time” with memory itself. Added Ramscar, as quoted in psypost.com:

“Imagine someone who knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2,000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?”

Ramscar’s team added that standardized vocabulary tests “massively underestimate the size of adult vocabularies,” according to psypost.com.

Learning to (forgive and) forget

Imagine if you were able to let go of bad memories, or personal insults. Imagine how much happier you might be.  This, of course, is the art or forgetting – the ability to forget traumatic memories or personal judgments that, for whatever reason, remain in your psyche.

Explains Ingrid Wickelgren, in her piece for Scientific American:

“The ability to repress is quite useful. Those who cannot do this well tend to let thoughts stick in their mind. They ruminate, which can pave a path to depression. Weak restraints on memory may similarly impede the emotional recovery of trauma victims.”

 She later adds:

“The ability to forget, however, is not immutable. If you practice applying your mental brakes, unwanted memories tend to fade. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, suppression therapy might someday aid in the treatment of mood and cognitive disorders. Because intentional forgetting depends on controlling which thoughts and memories seep into our awareness, the science of rejected recollections might also help scientists understand consciousness.”

In other news:

The Forgetting Pill: MIT scientists last fall reported that they’ve identified a gene (Tet1) that plays a critical role in "memory extinction," the process by which old memories are replaced by new ones. The hope is that if researchers can find a way to medically boost Tet1, it may be possible to help those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or addiction.

Men vs. Women:  A 48,000 person study out of Norway found that men, on average, report that they are more forgetful than women. Said lead author Professor Jostein Holmen, as quoted in spring.org.uk: “It was surprising to see that men forget more than women. This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous.” The study did not measure memory, but instead focused exclusively on people’s perception about their own memory. Said spring.org.uk: “Still, the importance of looking at subjective memory impairment is to see if it might predict cognitive problems in the future, like dementia.”

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Good vs. evil: is it innate? Or is it something we learn?

The debate rages: are we born knowing the difference between good and evil or do we develop our moral code from our parents, and society?  In other words, are babies truly a blank slate, or is morality innate?

Yale professor Paul Bloom, author of a new book called Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, maintains that humans are born with a hard-wired morality.  In research conducted with his wife, Karen Wynn, also a professor at Yale, Bloom demonstrated that babies as young as three months old can judge a person’s character. Explained Yale News: “Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice.”

Some question Bloom’s findings, among them, Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychology at Cambridge University and author of The Science of Evil. Said Baron-Cohen, in a New York Times article:  “Bloom has found that infants as young as 3 months old reach for and prefer looking at a ‘helper’ rather than a ‘hinderer,’ which he interprets as evidence of moral sense, that babies are ‘drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy.’ He may be right, but he hasn’t proved innateness. Proving innateness requires much harder evidence — that the behavior has existed from Day 1, say, or that it has a clear genetic basis. Bloom presents no such evidence.”

Professor Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at the University of Colorado, would likely side with Bloom over Baron-Cohen. Author of Wild Justice, Bekoff maintains that morals are hard-wired not only in humans, but in all mammals. Further, he maintains that this innate moral code provides the social glue that allows aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups. According to an article in The Telegraph: “[Bekoff] has compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to have an innate sense of fairness, display empathy and help other animals that are in distress.”

Kent Keith, author of the Universal Moral Code, clearly is in the Bloom-Bekoff camp. On his web site (www.universalmoralcode.com), Keith explains: "People who regularly lie, cheat, steal, and murder make up a very small percentage of the world's population – perhaps only 5 or 6 percent. These people cause a lot of pain and tragedy, but they are a small minority. The most significant fact is that literally billions of people – the other 94 or 95 percent of the world's population – follow fundamental, universal moral principles on a daily basis.”

The central question remains: Do human beings begin life with a sense of morality?  And the more urgent question becomes: if all mammals automatically know right from wrong, what’s our role as parents and members of society? In other words, what steps should we take to advance and strengthen that code? 

Commented parent Lyz Lenz, on the parenting site Babble:

"Children know the world is deep and dark and bright and beautiful. We don't have to teach them that. Instead, we have to equip them to slay the monsters and hold fast to what is true and good."

Explained Professor Frans de Waal, primate behaviorist at Emory University (as quoted in The Telegraph article):

"I don't believe animals are moral in the sense we humans are – with a well developed and reasoned sense of right and wrong – rather that human morality incorporates a set of psychological tendencies and capacities such as empathy, reciprocity, a desire for cooperation and harmony that are older than our species. Human morality was not formed from scratch, but grew out of our primate psychology. Primate psychology has ancient roots, and I agree that other animals show many of the same tendencies and have an intense sociality."

Added Author Bloom, as quoted in the CNN piece:

“. . . if you realize kids come in a world with their own beliefs and judgments and propensities and expectations, it gives you more respect for them, and it also helps you parent them, helps you know how to make them into more moral people."

Bloom urges us to use our ability to reason to resolve moral dilemmas (e.g., slavery), and to use our imagination, compassion and capacity for rational thought to “transcend the primitive sense of morality that we’re born with,” according to Yale News.  

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