EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Thank you for joining us
on this live video Q&A for Greater Good Science Center's
the Science of Happiness course for the fall of 2017.
This is going to be a wonderful conversation between myself--
I am Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director at the Greater
Good and also a co-instructor for the Science of Happiness
course--
and three other very special guests.
One of them is Beverly Rivera, who
is a three-time community teaching
assistant for the course.
She joins us from Alaska.
We have Christine Cashman, who is a community teaching
assistant from this session and is
taking the time to join us and participate
in the conversation.
And then finally, our special guest,
Iris Mauss, who is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.
Iris has a celebrated academic career, contributing
to our general understanding of human emotional experience
and resilience and mental well-being and health,
and has published hundreds of articles in this space,
has mentored very promising young students
in this space for 10 years, many who
have moved on to have positions at top-tier prestigious
universities.
She speaks all over the world.
This year, she spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
and she's also just a really delightful person
to interact with and contributes in really important ways
to the Greater Good Science Center and to UC Berkeley So
Iris, it's such a joy to have you.
Thank you for taking the time to participate
in the Science of Happiness with us.
IRIS MAUSS: It's lovely to be here.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Excellent.
All right.
Well, I'm just going to dive right in.
We've got a ton of questions for us
from students from all over the world in the edX platform
that I compiled into a list.
And we're going to do our best to address as many as we can.
And the first one, which was really popular,
had to do with really wondering about what happiness is.
In other words, is happiness a state or a characteristic,
or is it a process?
Is it some kind of phenomenon that we pursue or approach
over the lifespan?
Specifically, what is the pursuit of happiness,
and does it take work?
And how do we motivate ourselves to do it?
And why is it so difficult?
So I know there's a lot in there, Iris.
And I don't mean to overwhelm you with lots
of different things at once.
But how would you respond to that series of questions?
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah, so that is a whole bunch of questions
all rolled into one, and I'll try to get at least some
of them.
And I think the first question you
asked is really foundation to understanding
the second set of questions.
That's the question of what happiness is.
And I understand that you have come
to some understanding in the first week of the course of how
you want to operationalize or define happiness
as people, of course, across the millenia
have debated hotly about what happiness is.
And I think there are many different defensible
understandings of it.
And I happen to like the definition or conceptualization
that you take in this course of understanding happiness
not so much as just an emotional momentary hedonic state
but as a larger way of leading your life that
feels right, that feels good.
And of course, there's a hedonic aspect to that.
It feels good the way I lead my life,
but that's not the whole story.
So I think that if we understand happiness in that way,
we can then ask, how can we pursue it?
And that, I think, is the question, perhaps,
in not just the course but in all
of psychology and philosophy.
How do people get to a state of happiness?
And we'll tackle it in five minutes.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah, yeah.
[LAUGHS]
IRIS MAUSS: But I hope to at least offer
some ways to approach that question
and understand that question and further discuss it.
And I think that if we ask, how can we pursue happiness?
Is that even possible?
I think a lot of research suggests that--
say research by Barbara Frederickson who you'll
hear of, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Kristen Lee and others
suggest that yes, humans are able to transform
their lives from a less happy state to a more happy state.
And that's a really basic statement,
but I think it's fundamental, meaning
that there's hope for all of us to increase happiness.
And but I think that when a person asks,
why does it seem so difficult?
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah, and how do we
keep our motivation up?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And why do we get it wrong?
IRIS MAUSS: Why does it seem so hard?
And I think that while some of the psychological research I
mentioned is hopeful, some other research also
suggests that there are--
it's not that easy.
And there are many different pitfalls.
And you have to be careful about how you pursue it,
lest you don't achieve it or you even
end up with less happiness and more unhappiness.
There's a quote that I like by Eric Hoffer that
goes like, "The search for happiness
is one of the chief sources of unhappiness."
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
IRIS MAUSS: And so I think that's also true,
because there are--
you have to get it just right.
There's a question of dosage.
There's a question of the type of happiness activities.
There's a question of fitting that happiness activity
to the kind of person you are, fitting it
to the kind of context you're in.
And I also think that you don't want to be too individualistic.
I think a lot of our approaches to trying
to make ourselves and others happy
are very much focused on the person
and almost put too much onus on the individual,
ignoring that many people are in circumstances that simply don't
allow them to go about these happiness-inducing activities.
So just right from the get go, I want
to position this a little bit in the larger in thinking about
not just individuals, but thinking about them
in the larger context, and thinking
about how we don't need just individual approaches,
but structural and systemic approaches when
we want to help a greater number of people be happier.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
That's absolutely critical and probably one of the--
well, I'll ask you that question.
It seems like that's one of the younger
aspects of happiness science.
And we understand, as you articulated,
quite a bit about what we can do in our own lives
and in our own minds and how we can engage
in certain activities or exercises or behaviors day in
and day out that might change our own happiness.
But in order to shift happiness at a broader level,
at a population level, there are some other opportunities
that were--
I feel like we're just learning about,
with things like the World Happiness Report
and other efforts to understand the systemic and structural
aspects of human happiness.
Of course, as you know, in the class,
we spend a lot of time trying to emphasize
the interpersonal relational aspects of human happiness.
And we'll talk about that more in this conversation.
So I'll dig in a little bit deeper about, perhaps,
one of the pitfalls that I think many of us
are susceptible to in thinking about how to pursue happiness.
And this is partly, in my view, a result of popular media
and the kinds of stories that we hear from advertisers
about what produces happiness or what's most
likely to foster happiness.
And that is this notion that somehow happiness
means never feeling bad.
Happiness means never having any negative emotions, like anger,
anxiety, or sadness.
What do you think about the importance or the role-- what's
the role that negative emotions, like anger, anxiety,
and sadness play in human happiness?
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah, so I love that question.
And for a while, my old research just
focused on positive emotions.
When I tried to understand how people pursue happiness,
I looked at, essentially, people pursuing positive emotions
to too strong of a degree and how that could backfire.
But over time, that has shifted.
And I completely agree with you, because it
seemed to be the case that more and more, we found that
actually, in happiness, it really
matters how we relate to your own negative emotions.
So negative emotions really come to the fore.
And what we and others have found
is that, real interestingly, that mindset of being afraid of
or pushing wall or avoiding negative emotions,
like sadness, anger, anxiety, is actually associated
with greater unhappiness.
And there seems to be even something paradoxical
about that in that we and others have found
that people who accept their negative emotions
are actually more likely to feel better momentarily
and also to say that they have a happy life in the longer term.
And what we think is going on is that for one,
if you accept your negative feelings,
it helps you to cycle through them,
to work through them more quickly, paradoxically.
The moment you say, "I'm feeling bad and that's OK.
I don't have to do anything about that,"
it allows the rest of your mind to disengage
from that negative state a little bit.
But I think the other piece is that to feel happiness
in this bigger sense, and which you would find it
in this class, I think you have to integrate
not just positive feelings but also
momentary negative emotions.
There's some really interesting recent research
by Jordi Quoidbach and June Gruber on the notion of emotion
diversity.
and what they found is that the happiest people are
those who don't experience just positive emotions,
but actually it's those who experience
a wide range of emotions, including negative ones.
So I think that to the degree that we see those messages
in the media of just, oh, we all want to be laughing all
the time to be happy and to have a good life, I think that's--
you're exactly right.
The research suggests that that's actually not
the right way to go about it.
And maybe it's even counterproductive.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: So one of the other pieces
that Dacher and I introduce in the course,
and I'll just reiterate here, is the social function
of these, what some might call, negative states,
but some might call difficult states.
Expressions of sadness, inherently, invite or attract
trusting, supportive, other people
to approach you and give you support.
And having that sense of social support and trust
is very, very important to your happiness.
Experiences of anger are unavoidable consequences
of change.
There's always going to be somebody who doesn't
want a change to happen.
Yet, humans are constantly evolving their technology,
their lifestyles, their civilizations
in ways that are debatable.
And so anger is part of that conflictual experience,
and using anger to advocate for justice
or to address something that feels unfair
is a really important emotional signal
that has a social consequence.
And there's plenty of interesting research on stress.
Chronic stress, not such a good thing for happiness;
adaptive stress in response to real threats,
to moments of profound challenge--
a really important part of how to function in the world
and actually contributing to happiness in meaningful ways.
So we do that.
Now, Beverly, I realize we kind of covered a question
that I know you wanted to ask about
whether it was valuable or helpful to be able to,
or to be good at, stifling negative emotions.
Since we kind of dealt with that,
I think Iris's answer really suggests that actually it
does not help happiness, I'll add
that it also makes your cardiovascular system not
work as well.
It suppresses your immune system to chronically hold down
or stifle these negative states, so not a good thing.
But the next question, I think, is
relevant and a good follow-up.
And so Beverly, do you want to go ahead and start that one?
BEVERLY RIVARD: Sure.
I think I'll just lead into that with a comment
from the last question on negative emotions,
because they're connected.
One of the people who wrote in asking about,
is it valuable to cycle or avoid negative emotions, mentioned
the idea of emotion regulation and managing behaviors related
to negative emotions, which happens a lot in schools.
And so this mom was wondering, is it
helpful to have these kind of programs in school
that are trying to program out these negative emotions,
or at least help kids find ways so that they're not
experiencing them and therefore not creating behavior problems?
So that's still left over from last question.
But leading into, how do we help other people
to cultivate happiness?
So whether that's our children or in the work place
or with the people that we come in contact
with in the community, how did we
become authentic enough and maybe happy enough ourselves,
or stable enough in our happiness,
to really help other people to cultivate happiness
in their lives?
IRIS MAUSS: All right.
So I think the two pieces are connected.
I mean, you know, if you question
how do we help children regulate their negative emotions
and then [? meet ?] other people more generally?
And I think it's a great point that you're raising.
In the previous question, we talked
all about how great negative emotions are.
Of course, we're not saying, oh, you
should be raging all the time.
It's been understood, since a long time ago,
that it's not just all emotions are good.
As Aristotle said, it's very easy to be angry,
but what's difficult and what's important is
to be angry to the right degree with the right person
in the right context and with the right purpose.
And so I just wanted to highlight that we're not
saying, oh, you should just let your negative emotions hang
out, go all over the place.
And especially in regard to children,
I think children have difficulty very clearly regulating
their emotions, including negative ones.
And we do need to--
we can't just give them the message, it's good to be angry.
But I think what's interesting-- again,
it goes back to that paradox of teaching children that
their negative emotions are OK actually has a way of--
to also help them become better emotion regulators.
And what I talked about earlier, this finding that acceptance--
emotional acceptance helps people themselves
with their emotions.
We, and others, have found that it also
helps when we relate to our own children.
So for example, my graduate student
asked parents of young children to what degree
they believe that young children can control their emotions.
And there are some parents who very realistically said, no,
they can't.
They're three-year-old children, and so I
have the expectation that my child will
have negative emotions.
And I'll work with that.
But some parents believe that three-year-old children have
the capacity to regulate their negative emotions,
[? erraneously ?] so, and those parents, actually,
were the ones who responded with--
in more punitive and less supportive
ways to their children's negative emotions.
And we believe that that might actually
set in motion a vicious cycle.
Because in turn, that will not support
the development of healthy emotion regulation in children.
So I wanted to comment briefly on this idea of,
how do we help children regulate their negative emotions?
And somewhat paradoxically, it comes back to that idea
that if we accept them, these negative emotions, that
might help enhance regulation.
And so you also asked more generally,
how can we help those around us become happier, regulate
their emotions?
And I think that's a really, really interesting question.
And one piece in there that I find interesting,
or particularly interesting, is that I
think we've all encountered people who have
tried to help us be happier.
Say something really bad happened, and someone will--
our really dear friend will come along
and say, oh, it's not that bad, just cheer up,
something along those lines.
And so what happens is that that actually doesn't help us.
It might actually make us feel more isolated,
feel invalidated, feel more sad.
So when we said earlier, it's really hard
to help ourselves feel happier, I
think it's even harder to help other people feel happier.
BEVERLY RIVARD: I do too.
It's so true.
IRIS MAUSS: You agree with that?
BEVERLY RIVARD: Uh-huh.
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah, and so the research, I think,
says that we would have to go about it in a really
indirect, sneaky way.
What seems to be one of the themes in this research
is that the less the other person notices that you're
trying to make them happier, the better it'll
work, so this invisible idea, invisible social support,
or invisible help.
BEVERLY RIVARD: So is it more like being
a role model for happiness then, like presenting it
so that people can witnesses it do you think?
IRIS MAUSS: [LAUGHS] I don't know.
That's a really interesting question.
I don't know.
I'm drawing a blank on the research on that.
It might be an unexplored question.
And I guess you could hypothesize about it,
given what I just said.
Perhaps that's actually a really good way of going about it,
because it is invisible.
You're not directly, hand-fistedly telling
your friend just to cheer up.
But I also wonder because I think that one of the key
things that we know from emerging research
on interpersonal emotion regulation by Jamil Zaki
and Oliver John here at Berkeley, is that again,
it's-- one big piece is this idea of feeling seen
and feeling accepted.
And so maybe we're back to the idea
of accepting a diversity of experiences
and that accepting my friend's negative emotions,
her distress, might actually be the best route to helping
her feel happier compared to just trying
to combat the negative.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: So it sounds like the same principles
that we can apply to ourselves around our negative emotions,
which is embrace them, understand the value that they
present to us in our decision matrix
or social interactions moving forward,
use that in a fairly graceful and short-lived way.
We don't want to ruminate and escalate
and spiral in these negative emotional states
for lengthy periods.
That's obviously not healthy.
And again, that's the same kind of approach
that works with others.
We shouldn't go to others and try
to encourage them to stifle their negative experiences
or to somehow invalidate them by being trying
to solve it really quick.
The quick fix, it's another popular message.
Let's just fix this right now by just pretending
it didn't even happen and put something on top that we like.
Actually, there's something valuable about the signal that
comes from these negative emotions.
And as a supportive person, it is
more productive to acknowledge and honor
that than to just try to twist it
into a different kind of experience.
So that's so interesting.
So the next question is related, and I wonder
how you think about this--
expectations.
And it's related, because sometimes, we
do walk around expecting to have our needs met quickly,
to experience positive states, to walk around in a cheerful
and everybody likes us kind of way.
And I wonder what you think about--
I guess maybe it's not going to be a hard one to answer.
What do expectations, what role do they play in happiness?
IRIS MAUSS: Actually, it's a lot trickier
to answer than one might think.
I think that it--
because when I went into this line of research,
I thought that more expectations are just
going to be straight up bad, because the more you expect,
the more likely you're going to be disappointed.
And that's just incompatible with feeling happy.
If you're disappointed, you can't, at the same time,
be happy.
But it turns out that if you look carefully,
that really seems to be only the case at the most extremes.
And so if you, as you described, expect to be happy all the time
and to a really high degree, that seems to backfire,
if you will, and actually make you more discontent.
So you want to avoid that.
But we don't want to then say, don't expect to be-- have
no expectations, which is what some philosophies would
prescribe.
And at least the empirical research
in North American participants suggests that that
doesn't seem to quite fit.
So some expectation, some modest and context-specific and
context-sensitive pursuit of happiness and expectation
for happiness is actually OK, because it generates
people doing the right things.
At least, that's the thinking.
So I think you either have read or will read Lahnna Catalino's
"Prioritizing Happiness" paper, and I
think that's a nice example of exactly that process, where
if you expect happiness to come about
from some smart, well-thought-through daily
activities, and if you don't expect
life-shattering, earth-shattering happiness.
But something modest, realistic expectation, that
seems to be good for people.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Oh, that's so helpful.
IRIS MAUSS: Well, yeah.
Sorry it wasn't quite as--
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: No, it made a lot of sense to me,
and I'm really glad you brought that clarity to it.
And we will actually, also, talk about mental habits and goals
that relate to happiness a little bit later in the course,
so we can all look forward to that.
But your explanation was wildly helpful in laying out
that space of complexity where often, the case seems
to be that most things have some middle-road functionality
that's adaptive.
And an extreme in one direction, expecting
to be happy all the time and everything
to work perfectly well, is probably
going to get in the way.
Or having the opposite kind of expectation
where nothing's ever going to work,
and you're always going to be a failure,
can really get in the way.
And having a healthy level of expectation that is realistic
and can actually be part of your goals
that drive a pursuit, a healthy pursuit of happiness.
You brought up the idea of culture.
So Christine, I was wondering if you
felt like bringing up question number 10
that we have on our list.
Christine?
CHRISTINE CASHMAN: Sure.
What is the state of knowledge about culture and happiness,
and how well does this science represent
different cultural perspectives?
IRIS MAUSS: That's a big question.
[LAUGHTER]
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Well, feel
free to just answer the parts that really align
with the studies that you've done
or that you've been involved in or that
are in your comfort zone.
It's a huge question, and this happens all the time.
But we'll just share as much as we know.
IRIS MAUSS: It's a really great question,
and I think it's incredibly important.
And we started to touch on it implicitly
in the previous answer, where I qualified
my answer by saying that, "at least in North American
participants."
So the first answer to your question
is that it's a great question.
And we should never assume that what we find it
in, say, young North American women
will apply to other contexts.
So it's really important for us to constantly ask
that question, what role does culture play,
especially when we are talking about something
that's as strongly culturally embedded as happiness.
And it goes back to the very beginning of this conversation
where we said, oh, wait, there's many different understandings
of happiness.
And cultures, of course, vary vastly
in how they understand happiness.
And then by extension, the best ways to pursue happiness
are gonna vary vastly across different cultures.
And I want to just emphasize that I'm talking about culture
in the broad sense, not just, say, Asians versus Europeans,
but really even within countries.
So socioeconomic status is a way of basically
being a different sociocultural context.
Gender can be thought of as a cultural variable.
And age can be thought of as a cultural variable in the sense
that our ideas and practices vary along
the lines of those factors.
So to, then, address your question, there's a couple of--
I think that the research on happiness
has not done nearly as exhaustive a job
at understanding how culture and happiness relate
to one another.
There's a few lines of research that I can think
of that would be relevant.
So one line of research is by Shige Oishi
at the University of Virginia.
And he's done these incredibly interesting analyses,
historical analyses, of how different cultures
across history have defined happiness.
And one of the really interesting things he's found
is that the understanding that you have individual
over your own happiness is a relatively specific
and relatively recent understanding in, essentially,
North American context.
Many other cultures understand happiness
as something that's unbidden.
If you're lucky, you have it.
But you certainly, in those cultures,
wouldn't set out to make yourself happier,
and you wouldn't be held accountable for being unhappy.
That's the flip side of it.
So that's one really interesting line of research
with huge implications for our understanding and pursuit
of happiness.
And then another line of research
is by Jeanne Tsai at Stanford University.
And she and her lab have documented
that different people understand this emotional ingredient
of happiness in different ways.
Where European-Americans tend to think
of that emotional piece as a more,
what Jeanne Tsai calls high arousal state.
So we think that the best thing is to be excited, enthusiastic,
and so forth.
But when you go to, say, East Asia
or even ask Asian-Americans who reside in the US,
they have a different understanding
of what the ideal emotion is that is
most conducive to happiness.
They think of it more as a low arousal state,
as something more like contentment and calm.
And so understanding that really basic individual
and cultural difference, again, has big implications
for how we pursue happiness and how we understand
the influence of culture on it.
Did that answer your question?
CHRISTINE CASHMAN: Yes.
I think that's great.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah.
One other space where the opportunity
is remarkable for bringing more understanding to this question
has to do with an earlier topic that we touched on,
which is happiness fit.
So one thing that happens in the course, Iris,
is that each week, we encourage students
to try what we call a happiness practice.
So three good things is what they were encouraged
to try in the first week.
And this is an exercise in optimism
and really reflecting on what is positive in your day in
and day out life.
And the area that I'm thinking of
is there is, in all great likelihood,
variability in how effective or productive
these different little happiness practices, that we've
drawn from empirical studies, will be in different cultures.
I remember a study about gratitude practice working
really differently in your Western European audience
versus a more Eastern population.
And specifically that in the Korean subsample, the gratitude
practice didn't have as much of an impact.
And I believe that the interpretation
was that there was a ceiling effect, that gratitude
was really not something that they were deficient in.
Whereas in the US, we know from a couple of different sources
that we all think that we're grateful.
And we all think that our gratitude
is getting bigger and bigger.
But we think that society, as a whole,
is getting less and less grateful
and that other people are getting less and less grateful,
which basically is impossible mathematically
and statistically, and suggests, perhaps,
that we're just pretty out of practice
at making other people appreciate the fact,
or at least feel our gratitude.
We don't think anybody else is grateful because they're not
saying it to us, or they're not expressing it in our direction.
And so we're not we're not experiencing it that way.
So yeah, again, there is this happiness practice or exercise
or behavior by culture space that I'm really
excited to see more and more research reveal
some insights from.
IRIS MAUSS: Absolutely.
And I think, probably, the students of this course
can pick up on that as they try out
these exercisers, many of which have been
developed in Western contexts.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Exactly.
IRIS MAUSS: And there's an individual fit too.
So say that an introverted person might not be up for--
speaking for myself--
The random acts of kindness, I think that's great.
But--
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: It's harder.
IRIS MAUSS: --I would have to admit
that would be really difficult for me
to walk up to a stranger.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: True.
IRIS MAUSS: So I think there's an individual fit of activities
too.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Absolutely.
That question comes up every time
we run the course, the question about,
well, how does this all stuff--
how does all this stuff apply to the introvert?
And well, we're not going to get deep
into the reeds of that question.
I will direct anyone to the video Q&A that
happened a couple sessions ago with Sonja Lyubomirsky She
provides a really thoughtful answer to that question, really
based in the fact that what we think happens
is that there-- in terms of the exercises that
are interpersonal, that cultivate
or bolster your sense of trust and safety and your tendency
towards pro-social behaviors, that works just
as well for the introvert as it does for the extrovert.
And it's not a question of quantity.
It's a question of quality.
So I think a lot of times people feel
like, oh, I have to do this with 500 people, or I have to do--
meet 10 different people and be really funny
and charming and kind and generous.
Really, it's not about quantity, again.
It's really, can you engage with at least one other person,
and in some contexts, yourself in a kind and nurturing way?
So that said, Beverly, I was wondering
if you wanted to ask Iris about question number 14
if you've got in front of you since she-- it came up.
BEVERLY RIVARD: I do.
Just a second.
So this question is about aging.
It's been relevant in my life and my practice
that I've run into doctors when I'm working with elders who
say that just being depressed, for example,
is a factor of aging.
And I think that in the United States, at least,
we have a lot-- we lend a lot of credence to that of like,
oh, yes, we shouldn't get old, because then you'll
be just happy and doing nothing.
And it's not accurate at all, but it's
one of those myths, I think, of aging.
And so this question is about, how do aging and happiness
interact?
Does aging affect happiness, and how do we work with that?
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah, that's a wonderful question.
And there is, again, the beginnings of an outline
understanding how that works.
And the research that we have so far completely
agrees with your idea, that it's exact opposite
of what this doctor told you.
In fact, there's a very robust positive relationship
between aging and many different indices of happiness.
So Laura Carstensen over at Stanford University
is probably one of the main researchers in that area,
and she's even called it the positivity effect of aging,
because there is a strong positive link between getting
older and experiencing greater levels of positive emotion,
also somewhat lower levels of emotion,
and also a greater sense of well-being and happiness.
And so the big question is, how do older people do this,
and can we learn from that?
And so I think it's really unfortunate that there still
is this false understanding that when you age,
you're just going to be miserable,
because it keeps our society's openness to learning from older
people.
And I think we have a lot to learn from them in terms of,
how do they do it?
Because I think it is undeniable that as you age,
you experience more hardship.
It's just a logic.
More time on planet, you experience more bad things.
And your friends start to die.
Your friends, yourself become sick and so forth.
And so what seems to be the case is that older people are really
good--
or I should say on average, better than younger people
at, essentially, taking stressful,
bad situations and transforming them into situations the they
can be resilient to, situations that are OK,
and sometimes even experience that post-stress growth--
so taking something really difficult
and making it into something that
brings you closer to loved ones, turning it
into something that adds meaning to your life, that
adds richness to your life, perhaps
going back to the idea of emotion diversity.
And how exactly older people do this, this mental trick
of transforming bad situations into something that's
bearable and maybe take growth from it,
I think that's not really exactly understood.
But it goes back to, in part, to the ability
to regulate emotions, I think.
And one thing that we've shown is
that older people have a greater tendency
to accept negative emotions compared to younger people.
So there's acceptance again.
And they also seem to have a better capacity
at relating to other people and, perhaps,
accepting other people for who they are.
So while the quantity of relationships
decreases with age, the quality of relationships
seems to increase with age.
And so it goes back to the situated interpersonal aspects
of happiness.
And so maybe these are two elements
that older people use to achieve that greater sense of happiness
compared to younger people when controlling for differences
in life experiences.
So a big word for that is, of course, wisdom.
And so we don't know whether that
is what wisdom is, but I think that it's
one element of that big, lofty construct of--
BEVERLY RIVARD: There's a whole area of research,
like what is wisdom, and how does that relate to happiness?
Yeah.
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah.
IRIS MAUSS: Absolutely.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: That was such a useful answer
for another set of questions that I'm just
going to acknowledge.
Although, I will maybe leave it to listeners and the people who
posted it to draw the connections.
Several people, including someone from Florida,
posted this question about, how do
I maintain my pursuit of happiness
or my happiness levels in the face
of catastrophic, very crisis, serious crisis types of events?
And maybe some of the answers to that
question lie in exactly what you were just saying,
Iris, about trying to understand how the older adult
population manages their own life and their experiences that
are, inevitably, difficult and in some regards, tragic
when they lose close others.
They're still increasing-- or at least, maintaining,
and if not increasing, their happiness.
There was a fairly robust review of happiness levels
over the lifespan recently that looked at internationally
and basically showed there were ever--
the researchers measured this.
It was a U-shaped curve.
In other words, happiness at around 18 to 20
was at a certain level.
Through the 30s and 50s, it went down a little bit.
And after 50 and forward, it tended
to gradually increase back up.
And there was variance in when the increase happened
that was related to different countries
and different cultures.
And that's a very interesting and provocative
little question.
But again, do you have anything to add to what
to do when you perhaps--
and I can relate to this-- feel hopeless,
both as a result of, perhaps, a personal devastating experience
or what you're witnessing going on in the world around you?
How can we stay positive, for lack of a better expression?
IRIS MAUSS: Yeah.
So that question really resonates with me,
because I think that sometimes it almost seems callous
to talk about--
there's different way, facets of what resonates with me.
And I don't have a super clear handle on it.
But one piece, I think, is that it seems almost callous
to say to somebody or to implicitly
say to somebody who's just lost all their belongings
or lost a loved one, just try to stay positive.
And I think we just want to be very clear that's
actually not what we're saying.
And there's also an element of first-world problems here.
Like are we talking about people who have everything and then
we're trying to make them even happier?
And I think that those are really big questions
that we need to grapple with as a field.
And I think that that's not the goal of the field of happiness.
And I so love that your center is called the Greater Good
Center, not the Happiness for the Fortunate Few Center.
And so at the same time, I think we
don't want to cop out and say, as psychologists, if you are
in these really dire circumstances,
I can't help you as a psychologist.
We just need to change all of society
to prevent those dire circumstances.
Because at the end of the day, we can't.
We can't take all the pain of the painful circumstances away.
And so I think it's important to, though, keep that in mind
and really look at it and in a non-callous way,
think about how even the most dire of circumstances
might be such that even someone who's pressed from all sides
and who has every right to feel hopeless
can perhaps look at the situation in a way that
helps them gain some hope and some measure
of positivity, for lack of a better word.
And I go to Victor Frankl saying that, who just experienced
the most horrendous circumstances
and had every right in the world to give up and feel completely
hopeless, and yet who transformed
that situation for himself into one of hope and strength.
And a big part, again, I think lies in not denying
that this is horrendous, not denying the reality,
and not having unrealistic expectations.
If your house just got blown away,
you should feel devastated.
You have every right to feel devastated.
And don't put responsibility on yourself
to feel happy in that moment.
I think that goes back to the unreasonable
pursuit of happiness.
And remember, it's about reaching out to other people,
about human connection that might help you, in the longer
term, regain happiness.
Another line of research that comes to mind in that context
is by Judy Moskowitz, and she did research
on partners of people dying from AIDS.
And I always think of her research,
because again, it's the most heart-wrenching
of circumstances.
You lose your partner before their time.
And what she found is that--
and yes, there were lots of negative emotions,
of course, but also some positive ones.
And the people who experienced those positive emotions
in that horrible situation, they were
the ones who went on to be happier in the long term.
And so at first glance, you might think, oh,
that sounds horrible.
What are you talking about?
But it's positive emotions, like appreciation and love and humor
even.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah.
Thank you for that.
It reminds me also of the data that
relates humor in relationships to continued trust
and longevity in partnerships, where
even in the face of conflict, if couples can sometimes
see the humor in the moment, that can be something that
really gives them strength.
We've got about five minutes left.
And in that five minutes, I want to respond
to a real-time question.
And if science has found that the pursuit of happiness
does not lead to happiness-- which I actually don't think
is a true statement.
I don't think that's what we've been trying to say,
so maybe the answer will be just clarifying that.
The next part is, why does academia
continue to use this language?
I don't think science has found that the pursuit of happiness
is not effective.
It's simply that if you define happiness
as always feeling positive and enthusiastic
and always having your needs met and always
being cheerful and never experiencing anything difficult
or never failing, then it doesn't work.
And so we spend a lot of time very carefully,
both in the course and as scientists, trying
to define happiness in a way that is actually
valuable to people.
And again, pursuing happiness as defined
the way Iris did earlier in this hour and the way
that we do in the course is actually
very promising and potentially productive for people.
OK.
In the last four minutes, I want to invite Christine to ask--
speaking of first-world problems--
question number seven, if you could find that one.
CHRISTINE CASHMAN: Question number 7.
OK.
How can you prioritize happiness when your schedule is hectic?
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Asked by a mom, working mom,
who used to meditate, would like to do more community service,
and has trouble finding time.
IRIS MAUSS: Wow.
[LAUGHS] You don't even know how much that question resonates.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Right?
Me too.
IRIS MAUSS: I wish I had the answer to that.
One answer is that, and I think that perhaps Sonja Lyubomirsky
talks talked about that, that you don't have to do-- you
said this earlier, Emiliana, as well.
You don't have to do huge--
you don't have to give huge chunks of your time.
You don't have to do an hour-long meditation every day
to get some good outcomes.
And so I think that if we are--
if our life is such that we simply
can not do anything more, we have
to work with what we've got.
And the research does suggest that even relatively simple,
relatively small daily practices can help us feel happier.
But I realize that sometimes, our lives are
such that even that impossible.
So I think we've got to be realistic
at the end of the day, saying, maybe that's OK.
Maybe we just have a few years in our lives
where we were not happy, and maybe that should be OK.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Yeah.
No, I love that, and I also love the suggestion
that we don't have to carve out, again,
huge, very different approach to our day in and day out life
to gradually ratchet up the strengths
that we know are tied to happiness.
Sometimes, it's as simple as really noticing whether you're
paying attention to what you're doing
in the moment versus ruminating about some prior experience
or imagining some future thing that is not relevant to what's
happening right now.
We'll talk a lot more about that kind of awareness in week five
on mindfulness.
Sometimes, it's just taking a deep, cleansing breath--
cleansing being not a scientific word,
but deep being scientific--
breathing in and breathing out more slowly
than you breathe in when you do feel
that tension start to come into your shoulders or perhaps
your teeth clench about something that's frustrating
that's happening in your day in and day out life.
Often, it's about just little brief ways
that you can connect in a more trusting and generous way.
And I don't mean giving away your things
or investing money or contributing
to charity, necessarily.
I simply mean being h hearted and grateful and kind to others
when you have the choice to do so.
These little steps towards building up
what we call social capital, the trust, the connections that you
have day in and day out is very important to the building
blocks of your happiness.
So it doesn't have to be dramatic and huge.
And yes, I totally sympathize with the question
and sometimes just have to go, yup, this is busy.
Yup, this is a stressful moment for me.
And we also know scientifically that
just naming how you're feeling even
and particularly, when it's a difficult feeling,
is something that's valuable to the recovery
process in those moments.
OK, we're at five seconds.
I want to say thank you to Iris taking the time
to speak with us.
Thank you Beverly.
Thank you Christine.
Thank you for the staff here who helped
us make this video at the BerkeleyX video booth.
And thank you to all the students
wherever you are, all around the world,
for joining us and submitting your questions
to this live Q&A for the Fall of 2017 Science of Happiness
Course.
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