Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Is Great Happiness Too Much of a Good Thing?
Shankar Vedanta, Washington Post
…Lewenstein’s story is especially instructive in light of a study published this week about a paradox involving happiness. Americans report being generally happier than people from, say, Japan or Korea, but it turns out that, partly as a result, they are less likely to feel good when positive things happen and more likely to feel bad when negative things befall them.
Put another way, a hidden price of being happier on average is that you put your short-term contentment at risk, because being happy raises your expectations about being happy. When good things happen, they don’t count for much because they are what you expect. When bad things happen, you temporarily feel terrible, because you’ve gotten used to being happy.
…The study, in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offers a new twist on an old idea. Previously, psychologists such as marriage expert John Gottman said that people’s day-to-day satisfaction, whether with themselves or with their intimate relationships, was the sum of the positive and negative things that happened each day.
…Oishi’s research also provides an intriguing window into why very few people are very happy most of the time. Getting to “very happy” is like climbing an ever steeper mountain. Additional effort — positive events — doesn’t gain you much by way of altitude. Slipping backward, on the other hand, is very easy.
“Positive events in our intimate relationships lose their force over time; consider for example, the fifth time you kissed your partner versus the most recent time,” said Thomas Bradbury, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “A preponderance of positive events in a relationship might somehow be beneficial to one’s global happiness but detrimental to one’s mood or daily happiness, in the sense that having high expectations for positive events reduces the impact of each new one.”
People and couples who start out the happiest, Bradbury said, might be most vulnerable, both because it is much easier for them to slide back down the mountain than to go further up, and because being euphoric at the outset raises their expectations that they will always be happy. Actually, when you start out very happy, you have to run pretty hard just to stay where you are.
The psychologists are studying ways to help people retain their sensitivity to positive experiences. Individuals and couples who attend to everyday accomplishments, celebrate the positive and cultivate a sense of gratitude for what they have seem to have the best odds of getting off the happiness treadmill.
(1 October 2007)
Against Happiness
Annabelle Gurwitch, The Nation (web-only)
This just in: according to two new studies measuring the happiness index, women are less happy than we used to be and markedly more disgruntled than men. Speculation has been that this study confirms what most of my friends and I experience as the current state of postfeminist feminism. Between working and our responsibilities at home, not only are we trying to have it all but we find ourselves having to do it all, and we’re pissed off. True enough. But I believe the entire nature of this research is suspect and is asking the wrong question anyway. Why all this quantification of happiness? Is happiness a value that deserves so much attention and study?
What about those of us whose goal was never happiness to begin with? For the record, I hate happiness. I love melancholic novels, depressed poets and pessimistic prognosticators. I like sad songs and weepy movies. I’m a sentimental drunk. My idea of a good time is drinking a double espresso while reading Death in Venice. Venice is my idea of a rollicking-good-time town. I was never a shiny happy person, although I have been both shiny and happy at the same time (to achieve this I once performed an act that we have been informed never happens in Iran, or even in our own military for that matter). Happy meals, happy faces; don’t worry, be happy. Given the state of the world, perhaps if we had a little more worry and a little less happy, we’d be better off.
Furthermore, I don’t count “the ability to be happy” among the attributes I value–although there are many qualities I find laudable and even pleasurable.
(3 October 2007)
The reason I think “happiness studies” are important is that they consistently show how money and consumerism correlate very little with happiness. This is a powerful message in a world dominated by consumerism. -BA
On average, religious people are much happier than nonreligious ones
Original: The Ennui of Saint Teresa
Arthur C. Brooks, Opinion Journal
…Americans can be divided into three groups when it comes to religious practice. Surveys indicate that about 30% attend houses of worship at least once per week (I will call them “religious”), while about 20% are “secular”–never attending. The rest attend sometimes, but irregularly. These population dimensions have changed relatively little over the decades: Since the early 1970s, the religious group has not shrunk by more than two or three percentage points.
How do religious Americans compare to the secular when it comes to happiness? In 2004, the General Social Survey asked a sample of Americans, “Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Religious people were more than twice as likely as the secular to say they were “very happy” (43% to 21%). Meanwhile, secular people were nearly three times as likely as the religious to say they were not too happy (21% to 8%). In the same survey, religious people were more than a third more likely than the secular to say they were optimistic about the future (34% to 24%).
The happiness gap between religious and secular people is not because of money or other personal characteristics. Imagine two people who are identical in every important way–income, education, age, sex, family status, race and political views. The only difference is that the first person is religious; the second is secular. The religious person will still be 21 percentage points more likely than the secular person to say that he or she is very happy.
Researchers have found similar results in other countries, suggesting that the connection between happiness and faith probably doesn’t depend on nationality. Nor does it depend on the particular faith practiced.
…Obviously, not all religious people are happy–millions are not. Researchers in one 2006 study found that what makes some religious people unhappy is an image of God as severe, unloving or distant. The study shows that regular churchgoers who feel “very close to God” are 27% more likely to be very happy than churchgoers who do not feel very close to God.
Mr. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Who Really Cares” (Basic Books, 2006).
(30 September 2007)
I think I’d want to do some research on this topic before making up my mind. -BA
Documentary looks at traditional dance as way to fight vicious addictions
Staci Matlock, Associated Press via Indian Country
SANTA FE, N.M. – Dancing for health, for love, for life.
Those are reasons Pueblo people have danced for more than 1,000 years, and Andrew Garcia hopes to help a few more generations carry on the tradition.
For more than 30 years, he has led his family and other Ohkay Owingeh youth in the dances of his forebears as part of the Tewa Dancers and Singers from the North.
Garcia battled back from alcoholism to find comfort in the songs and dances. And he is working to pass along their message of prayer and hope to his pueblo and the rest of the world.
More than seven years ago, with permission from the Ohkay Owingeh Tribal Council, Garcia teamed with dance critic Marilyn Hunt to document traditional Tewa dances on film.
Their documentary, ”Dancing from the Heart: Journey of a Pueblo Dance Family,” was showcased recently at an Oklahoma film festival. The film has won first place at the ReelHeaART Film Festival in Toronto and was screened at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.
(3 October 2007)
Marital Spats, Taken to Heart
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times
Arguing is an inevitable part of married life. But now researchers are putting the marital spat under the microscope to see if the way you fight with your spouse can affect your health.
Recent studies show that how often couples fight or what they fight about usually doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s the nuanced interactions between men and women, and how they react to and resolve conflict, that appear to make a meaningful difference in the health of the marriage and the health of the couple.
A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.
In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk.
(2 October 2007)
