Source: Adapted from Fredrickson (2002).
problem-solving experiences are all relatively enduring outcomes of joy and may contribute to personal transformation and development. This, in turn, may lead to more positive emotions. Contentment, another positive emotion, may create an urge to contemplate our life circumstances. This may lead to new and more positive ways of viewing ourselves and the world around us, and of carrying on our day-to-day lives.
Further positive emotions may arise from these new and enduring insights and practices.
Empirical evidence from clinical and laboratory studies offer substantial support for the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2002; Isen, 2000). There is good evidence that positive mood states broaden thought-action repertoires. Clinical studies of bipolar disorder show that manic and hypomanic states are associated with overinclusive thinking and that bipolar patients treated successfully with lithium show diminished creativity. In laboratory studies, a variety of methods have been found to reliably induce positive mood states for up to 15 minutes. These methods in order of effectiveness include asking participants to watch an arousing film and read an arousing story, receiving an unexpected gift (e.g. a bar of chocolate); reading positive self-statements; remembering a positive event; getting positive feedback; listening to music;
and having positive social interaction with a cheerful person (Westermann et al., 1996).
These mood induction methods have been used to show the positive effects of happiness on perception, cognition and social interaction in laboratory settings. Analogue studies show that a bias towards global visual processing and broadened attention is shown by people with positive mood states or people who receive success feedback on laboratory tasks. In contrast, people with negative mood states or people who receive failure
feedback on laboratory tasks show a bias towards local visual processing. Laboratory studies of induced positive mood show that such induced mood states lead to more creative and flexible thought and behaviour. In Frederickson’s own laboratory she has done a series of studies which lent support to the broaden-and-build theory. In one set of studies participants were shown film clips to induce positive emotions such as joy and contentment, and negative emotions such as fear and anger. After each clip participants listed as many things as they could think of that they would like to do if they had these emotions in real life. Positive emotions led to a far broader repertoire of thought-action tendencies.
Evidence from developmental and laboratory studies show that positive mood states help people build enduring personal resources. Developmental studies of securely and insecurely attached children, show that the former exhibit greater persistence, flexibility and resourcefulness in solving problems than the latter. They also show greater exploratory behaviour in novel situations and develop superior cognitive maps. Adults with secure attachment styles are more curious and open to new information than those with insecure attachment styles. Educational studies of children show that children in positive mood states learn faster. In her own laboratory Frederickson (2002) has shown that over time positive emotions and broad minded coping mutually build upon each other. Broad minded coping entails considering a wide thought-action repertoire of responses. She has also shown that after the induction of a negative mood state involving increased heart rate, people who subsequently viewed short film clips to induce a positive emotional state had a faster cardiovascular recovery rate than those who viewed film clips to induce neutral or sad mood states. There are also individual differences in people’s capacity to use positive emotions to effectively cope with stressful circumstances. People who obtain high scores on ego-resilience (Block and Kremen, 1996) show faster cardiovascular recovery following stress than those who obtain low scores and this recovery is mediated by experiencing positive emotions.
In view of this evidence which shows that positive emotions can facilitate creativity and problem solving, it is not surprising that happiness also increases work productivity.
Staw et al. (1994) in a study of over 200 workers, found that over an 18-month period happier people obtained better evaluations and higher pay than their less happy counterparts.
Longevity
Evidence from longitudinal studies shows that happiness has important effects on longevity. In a follow-back study of 180 nuns in the USA, Danner et al. (2001) found that the happiness expressed in essays that the nuns wrote as they entered the order was associated with their longevity. This was a carefully controlled study. All of the participants had similar lifestyles. They were all unmarried nuns who worked as teachers, did not smoke or drink and ate a simple balanced diet throughout their adult life. When they wrote their essays as they entered the order, they gave a biographical sketch and stated their hopes for the future, but had no idea that these essays would be used in a study of happiness and longevity. More than half a century later, the amount of positive emotions in the essays was judged by trained raters who did not know the age of the
participants. Of the happiest quarter 90 per cent lived past the age of 85 compared with only 34 per cent of the least happy quarter.
Maruuta et al. (2000) conducted a follow-back study of over 800 patients, 200 of whom had died. These patients had attended the Mayo Clinic forty years previously. As part of their intake assessment they had answered questions to show whether their outlook was optimistic or pessimistic. Forty years later, of the 200 patients who had died, the optimists showed 19 per cent greater longevity than pessimists. Thus, patients who reported that they were optimistic when they first attended the clinic, lived considerably longer than those who did not.
Ostir et al. (2000) in a longitudinal study of more than 2000 Mexican Americans over 65 years of age, found that after two years, positive emotions at the start of the study predicted who lived or died, and who showed greater functional independence or disability. After controlling for age, socioeconomic status, drug use and diseases, the happy participants were twice as likely to survive and to remain functionally independent compared with their unhappy counterparts.
From the foregoing it is clear that happiness enhances creativity, productivity and longevity. Having considered the effects of happiness, let us now turn to research on the causes of happiness and subjective well-being.
CAUSES OF HAPPINESS
Identifying factors that contribute to happiness is not a simple matter (Diener, 2000;
Diener et al., 1999). Pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure may sometimes, but not always, lead to happiness. For example, the repeated short-term pleasures of smoking cigarettes or using other drugs may lead to the long-term unhappiness associated with illness. Acts of murderous revenge, assault, rape, or theft may bring immediate satisfaction or short-term pleasure but in the long short-term they may reap social, psychological or physical consequences which lead to misery and despair. As a species we have evolved so that certain types of situations make us happy while others lead to the experience of distress.
Individual differences in happiness may be partly accounted for by differences in personality which are partially genetically determined. There is also little doubt that certain kinds of environments are conducive to happiness or to providing people with opportunities to develop the skills required to achieve happiness. There are also important lessons to be learned from evolutionary psychology about obstacles to happiness and ways that these may be circumvented (Buss, 2000). These issues will be addressed in the remainder of this chapter.
Personality traits and happiness
Trait theories of personality (elaborated in Chapter 6) argue that a limited number of dimensions may be used to characterise important aspects of behaviour and experience and that particular personality trait profiles are associated with happiness. Traits are normally distributed within the population. So, for any given trait (for example extraversion), most people show a moderate level of the trait, but a few people show extremely low or extremely high levels of the trait. Because traits are normally
distributed and because only a specific profile of traits is associated with happiness, not everyone will be able to achieve happiness.
Personality studies of happiness show that happy and unhappy people have distinctive personality profiles (Diener et al., 1999). In western cultures happy people are extraverted, optimistic and have high self-esteem and an internal locus of control. In contrast unhappy people tend to have high levels of neuroticism. Extraversion correlates about 0.7 with happiness or positive affectivity while neuroticism correlates above 0.9 with negative affectivity. Interestingly, intelligence is not related to happiness. The associations between personality traits and happiness are not universal across all cultures, an observation that will be discussed below.
There are a number of factors which offer partial explanations for the link between extraversion and happiness (Diener et al., 1999). Extraverts may have a better fit with the social environment, which requires most people to be involved in frequent social interactions. So they find themselves frequently in situations which meet their needs for socialising and thus are happier. Also there is good evidence that extraverts respond with greater happiness to stimuli designed to induce positive moods. There is also evidence that extraversion and neuroticism predispose people to experience more positive and negative events respectively. So if you have a high level of extraversion you are more likely to experience positive events and therefore experience more happiness. If you have a high level of neuroticism, you are more likely to experience more negative events and so be more unhappy.
Cultural factors partially determine the types of personality factors associated with happiness. In western individualistic cultures such as the USA, self-esteem and acting in a consistent way that is congruent with one’s personal beliefs are personality factors associated with high levels of subjective well-being. However, subjective well-being is not correlated with these factors in eastern collectivist societies. So cultural values partially determine personality traits that affect subjective well-being, probably because these traits are associated with achieving culturally valued goals (Triandis, 2000).
Genetic and environmental basis for personality traits
The weight of evidence shows that 50 per cent of the variance in major personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism may be accounted for by genetic factors (Paris, 1996; Riemann et al., 1997). The mechanisms by which genetic factors influence personality traits are complex. Probably multiple genes determine temperamental characteristics, and these interact with environmental influences in the development of personality traits. There is considerable evidence from longitudinal studies of the link between temperament and personality traits. Children with high activity levels and positive affect become extraverted, and so are more likely to be happy. Children who are highly irritable and fearful show high levels of neuroticism in later life and so are more likely to show negative affectivity (Rothbart and Ahadi, 1994).
Optimism, self-esteem and locus of control are also personality traits which correlate with happiness. The relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to the development of optimism, self-esteem and locus of control is less clear. However, there are good reasons to believe that secure attachment is an important precursor of these types of personal strengths (Thompson, 1999). Also there is good evidence that parents
who blend warmth with a moderate level of control in bringing up their children help them to develop self-esteem and an internal locus of control (Darling and Steinberg, 1993). Finally, optimistic children learn their optimism from their parents who adopt an optimistic explanatory style (Seligman, 1998).
Heritability of a happiness set-point
Professor David Lykken (1999), in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, has shown that about half of the variance in current happiness or subjective well-being (assessed by the Well-Being scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire) is due to genetic factors. However, the set-point for happiness—that is the stable point around which people’s mood varies over periods such as a decade—is about 98 per cent genetically determined. Data on which these conclusions are based are given in Table 1.5.
These data show that there are moderately high correlations