The Science and Practice of Happiness Across the Lifespan - Frank B. Roehr Memorial Lecture

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Sonja Lyubomirsky his professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside originally from Russia she graduated laude from Harvard and then completed PhD in social personality psychology from Stanford the majority of a research career has focused on studies of human happiness her research addresses three main questions what makes people happy is happiness a good thing and how can we make people even happier her first book that was published in 2008 was titled the howl of happiness a scientific approach to getting the life you want it is published by the penguin press it has been translated into 22 languages and published in more than 30 countries she has appeared on number of TV shows radio shows feature documentaries and her work has been written up in numerous magazines newspapers all over the world North America South America Europe Asia the Middle East just recently last year she published another book that is titled the myths of happiness what should make us so happy what doesn't and what should not make you happy but does her teaching and mentoring of stones have been well recognized and she has received both Faculty of the Year award and faculty mentor of the Year award and her research has been supported by John Templeton Foundation science of generosity grant or Templeton positive psychology fries and last but not least a million dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health so please give me a hand in welcoming her to the world so I'm going to talk about my research on happiness these are my collaborators my graduate students and colleagues I do my research with so I do work on happiness and you know I'm not an ageing researcher but I wholeheartedly believe that everything that I'm going to tell you about today is relevant to all age groups across the lifespan and relevant to aging I can't promise that I'm going to make you all happier but I'm going to arm you with lots of information so who today would like to be happier how many would like to be happier okay and how many wish that their kids spouses friends co-workers were happier yeah I'll raise my hand too you know during World War two aviation experts deployed a lot of resources and energies into studying military planes that went down and one day somebody asked why don't we study the planes that stay up in the air and I think this is an apt metaphor for the work that my colleagues and I do in the this field called positive psychology we study why happy people are happy why successful people are successful and why healthy people are healthy this is the how of happiness book that I'll be talking a lot about it because a lot of the content is from that book how important is happiness to people I would argue that most of us want to be happy we might use different language to describe you know happiness define it differently but I believe that almost everything that we do in our lives is sort of aimed at becoming happier and American especially you know happiness is embedded in our Declaration of Independence you know there's some people might argue there's sort of an obsession with happiness in the United States so researchers actually have gone around the world and they ask people what are your top goals in life instead of on a scale from one to seven how important is happiness to you so here data for a few countries oh I haven't I'm only showing us right now and so you see people in United States rate happiness you know very important right almost a seven which is the highest rating you can give so and you might argue that people in other countries might have different you know Prescriptives different norms about the pursuit of happiness it may be considered in Asian cultures for example it may be considered arrogant or selfish to be sort of pursuing happiness for yourself so you might might predict that there might be cultural differences we'll talk about culture also in this in this lecture but here are the data from the other countries it looks like all around the world people say that the happiness is important to them I should mention by the way there are some significant differences here so for example the Germans rate happiness is significantly less important it's still very high but it's less important than some of the other countries so I do believe that happiness is a near universal goal and I come from Russia where you know people talk about the importance of suffering so you know suffering is important to build character and maybe gain salvation in the next life and so there's not not very much of a pursuit of happiness there I'm not sure if you saw that in the Olympics but if you walk down the street in Moscow you won't see too many smiles but if you ask parents in Russia what do you want most for your children they'll say I want my children to be happy so I think you have to kind of ask the question the right way ok so happy a lot of people want to be happy but is happiness a worthwhile goal I mean is it is is it is it more than just feeling good are there benefits to being happy is it a good thing well I have tried to answer that question my colleagues and I did a what's called a meta-analysis which is a study of studies we looked at 225 studies of happiness and these studies had over 275 thousand participants and what we found is that happiness is more than just sort of a feeling a good feeling that happy people enjoy many advantages and many benefits so we found that happy people are more productive at work and more creative we found that happier people make more money they have better jobs more flexible jobs they're better leaders and negotiators happier people are more likely to marry they are less likely to get divorced they have more friends and they're healthier we're going to by the way we're going to get back to some of these findings in more detail happy people even live longer and you know there's some there's a stereotype that people who are happy are kind of selfish and self focused self-centered but actually research shows that the happier you are the more other focused you are I mean one one interpretation is that you know when you're sad or depressed it's it's adaptive for you to focus on yourself and try to figure out if there's a problem right sadness is a signal that there's a problem that you have to attend to and happy people in a sense have the luxury to focus outward and to help other people and how people are more resilient they cope better with stress and trauma now the causal direction of course goes both ways so for example happier people are more likely to get married but also marriage makes people happy and the studies that I that are listed there are both correlational studies they're longitudinal studies studies that look people look at people over time and also experimental studies that try to induce happiness temporarily to see what happens as an example when you look at marriage one of my favorite studies looked at people's yearbook photos okay go back think back to your you know college yearbooks okay and you know we all I think most of us had photos and most people smile and they're your photos now there are two kinds of smiles there are genuine smiles which are called Duchenne smiles and then there's sort of those fake you know insincere smiles right so it's very hard to fake a genuine smile because it's not just about them the mouth is about the eyes right you know you can tell someone's smiling by looking at their eyes I mean actors can do it some people can do it but most of us can't fake it and so researchers looked at these photos these are all women this was a Mills College and I'm not sure if that's co-ed now but it was is it it's not it's still women's college okay so women's college it's all women subjects looking at whether their yearbook photos showed genuine smiles and the idea was that if you have genuine smiles in your photos you're more likely to be happy okay and there's a correlation so women who are more likely to smile genuinely at age 21 were more likely to get married by age 27 and had more fulfilling more satisfying marriages at age 52 it's not amazing so you could predict the quality of your marriage decades later from your yearbook photo I mean that's just one of many really really cool studies that are done in my field okay so let's let's go into more detail in some of this research so I want to talk about health health physical health is incredibly important of course especially as you get older and so it turns out that happy people are healthier there are lot of longitudinal studies so imagine that I give everyone here a questionnaire and I measure your happiness by asking you how happy you are that's that's generally the way that we measure happiness no one else knows how happy you are but you I mean I can also you know see if you're smiling things like that or ask your spouse or friends if you're happy but that's not as you know they might get it wrong right so I might measure all of your happiness and let's say then I go back and I contact all of you in five years ten years twenty years thirty years and then I see how healthy are you are you still alive to sort of see if there's a connection between happiness today in your health later on so there are a lot of lunch studies so here are some examples of studies in this area so people who are happy at one point in time have been found to have a lower incidence of strokes six years later and this is found especially in men and lower incidence of coronary heart disease or ischemic heart disease ten and fifteen years later if you have coronary heart disease you're more likely to survive it up to eleven years later if you're happy today if you have lung cancer you're more likely to survive it three years later you're less likely to be on disability if eleven years later if you're happy today this is a really intriguing you're less likely to die in a car accident if you're happy why do you think that is that's not the immune system right maybe maybe happier people are more likely to wear seatbelts Focusrite in fact some people said it's upset to me so if you're unhappy maybe you have road rage or you're under stress you're not focusing on the road as much babe sorry what less alcohol abuse that's right and then you said happy people maybe walk more I should has a good one maybe they drive less I mean that would explain that finding groups I've never heard that one so no it's really good it's not it's not wacky at all and then happy people are less likely to die of all causes they live longer so I think really really cool and interesting research let me explore one mechanism that someone mentioned which is strong immune system and this is one of my favorite studies some of you might have heard of this study it's called the cold virus study so in this study there are healthy volunteers and they completed a measure of happiness and then they were administered the cold virus into their nose so you know like when you travel when you're an airplane there's viruses in the air in the airplane and some people like always get sick when they travel some people don't or maybe sometimes you get sick sometimes you don't why is that alright so maybe part of the answer could be your immune system so the idea is that every single person in the study was exposed to the cold virus and the question was who's going to actually get sick right once you because you don't always get sick after being exposed to the cold virus so the researchers followed these participants they actually quarantined them they put them up in a hotel I think was more like a motel for five days and they monitored them for a month and they measured you know did they their symptoms their host resistance to the common cold mucus levels you know how often they cough etcetera and what they found was that happier volunteers were less likely to develop a cold you know arguing that perhaps happier people have stronger immune systems now this is not an experiment but they did try to control for things like age and ethnicity and body mass index so so wasn't the case that the happier people just happen to be thinner or younger you know and interestingly unhappiness was not related who got a cold it was only happiness that was related so anyway this suggests and there's some other studies like this there's a more recent study that was done that gave people the Hep B hepatitis B vaccination and they found that happier people had a stronger immune response stronger protective response to the vaccination than people who are less happy so again evidence that there's a stronger immune system okay so let's get move on to another area of life work right work is really important we spend many many hours of our lives working so research shows that happier people are more productive and more creative so let me sort of tell you about those studies a little bit so here's an example of a study that was done at a government agency in California and these are mostly men age average of 45 years old and so what the researchers did is they came into this workplace and they measured how happy everyone was and then they came back three and a half years later and then they had the managers rate every employee on different dimensions or you had a question right waits oh sorry I'm so and I mentioned this briefly but I should have spent a little bit more time on it so as I meant happiness is something that we there's no happiness thermometer so you have to ask people how happy you are so so there are lots of valid validated measures scales of happiness so you ask people how happy are you in general on a scale from one to seven how satisfied with your life how often do you experience positive emotions negative emotions to their self-report scales that researchers use and it's really the only way to measure happiness but there's lots of evidence that the they're valid and reliable measures okay so the researchers measured happiness then they came back three and a half years later and they asked the department heads and managers to rate the employees on sort of how often do they offer good ideas at work do they have high goals for their performance do they pay attention when you're talking to them and do they work well on teams independently with others and what the researchers found is that happier employees three years earlier three years ago were rated as higher sort of on all these dimensions they were sort of more effective at work they're more productive at work so I would argue take the twenty five happiest people sitting in this room and in three years you would be the most effective productive workers or whatever you're doing so so lots of studies that show the same finding this is just one example ok so some other researchers to use a different approach to this to sort of studying happiness and they try to manipulate happiness in the laboratory so this study was done with medical doctors these were all internists and they gave them candy and chocolate now they excluded people who are on diets right because giving them chocolate might actually make them less happy and they the chocolate they were given a gift of chocolate and candy but they weren't allowed to eat it just yet right because they didn't want sort of the effects of the eating the physiological process of eating again these are all doctors they gave them this gift of chocolate and candy so they there got happier and there's also a comparison group though people who are sort of in a neutral condition and then they had them take a test of creativity okay so there's a lot different ways of testing creativity so this is a very common one called the remote associates test and so you're given three words there's lots of these items this is one and you're supposed to come up with a fourth word that relates to these three words any ideas anyone any what night that's right night club nightgown nightmare you see that yeah once you see you're like yeah of course so it's one test of create popular test of creativity and as I said there's lots of these items and the idea is that if you're quick and good at doing these items you're more you're you sort of show more flexible thinking more creative thinking and what they found was these doctors the Dada the ones who were given the candy who were put in a happier mood did better on this test they were more creative so it's kind of amazing we also know that happier people have more friends and social support I mentioned that there instead of being self centered they're actually more other centered and more philanthropic so in my lab with my students we actually wonder if you know if happier people are more helpful what if you asked sort of the average person to be more helpful would they become happier so we did a study with kids and so this was study was done in Vancouver that's a picture of in Coover very pretty and we went to the Vancouver School District and went in 19 different classrooms in 11 middle schools and the study was done with 4th 5th and 6th grade students these are just information about the study and then here was our design so we had in 10 classrooms we asked the students to do acts of kindness so for four weeks they did three acts of kindness a week so so I know if sure some of you have you know children or grandchildren you know you just ask these kids do three acts of kindness something that you don't normally do every week for four weeks and then we had a control group a comparison group and the comparison group just told that they went to three places they told us where they went so the compares group we wanted them to do something but it wasn't acts of kindness so we had so three three times for 12 acts of kindness total plus they went to different locations so here's an example of what these students actually wrote so here's a one of the kids in the acts of kindness case so he vacuumed the floor clean the dining table noticed that the spelling of Canadians are no better is no better than spelling of us students and hugging my mom when she's stressed by her job that's cute so and and a lot of them were like this I was really great to read and most of them were done in the home okay and here's a student who wrote down where they went that week so they went to the Richmond shopping center Center spelled the Canadian way track and swimming Hillcrest okay so three places they went so this was the neutral group and so what we found was okay so then we measured happiness but we also were interested in whether this manipulative intervention influenced what we call peer acceptance which is basically popularity so we had all the students nominate everyone in their class as sort of who would you want to be in activities with who would you want to play with and this is a standard measure of peer acceptance and what we found and it's kind of amazing that the students who did acts of kindness not only did they get happier but they were more likely to be nominated by other students in their classes as someone that they want to play with do activities with so this is a histogram so these are changes in nominations from before to after the study was over so so the kids who did acts of kindness even when those acts of kindness were at home became more popular with their peers in the classroom so I think something I think it's kind of an amazing finding something rubbed off on them you know when they came back into the classroom maybe they just were happy or more self-confident or more optimistic or something like that so that's an example of one of our studies okay so we know okay so we know that happiness is an important goal to people around the world we know that it's a worthwhile goal right happiness is associated with lots of advantages and benefits in life but unfortunately I think that a lot of us have the wrong idea of what will make us happy and maybe they're also the wrong idea of what we think will make us really unhappy and so my latest book the myths of happiness is about that it's sort of about misconceptions that people have about what they'll what will make them happy it will make them unhappy so I'm going to explore that for a little bit okay so the happiness myth that I discuss in the book are things like I'll only be happy when I get married I'll only be happy when I have kids when I find the right job when I strike it rich or I can't ever be happy if I'm divorced if I'm single I don't find a partner if I don't have a lot of money my dreams don't have come true if I'm gotten sick and when I'm old a lot of people dread being getting older especially with unfulfilled dreams so we're going to talk about all of these things now I'm not now these are all happiness myths now I'm not saying that we should all get divorced and squander our money right but we have to kind of I guess understand what what research has shown truly makes people happy and what what it shows does not make people happy so let me start with divorce okay so I'm going to show you some data from a very large study that follow people across many years and in this case this is about 12 15 years before and after major life events okay so these were thousands of people by the way these data that I'm presenting our four women but the data from went for men are almost identical I just didn't want to give you a lot of graphs so years 0 so this is a this is happiness across time ok and 0 is the baseline and years 0 is the year that something happens ok in this case this is divorce so these people are all getting divorced now they don't know they're getting divorced because the study starts four years before they get divorced okay got it so here's the here's their happiness for us before by the way whatever you see an asterisk that means that their happiness is either dipped significantly below their baseline or it's increased significantly above their baseline so you see the lowest point is what is that two years before the divorce does that make sense that's kind of like the low point it's two years not Year Zero by that time maybe like the worst is over okay look at that so at year four it takes four years a year four people are already significantly above their baseline and year five as well now I should I should the caveat is the baseline is whatever is kind of before here and it could have been already a little bit depressed right so maybe four years people were unhappy we're not sure about that because we only had captured them four or five years before here the same kind of data for people who are laid off at work okay so here's happiness zr0 is the year of the layoff you see a year before maybe things are happening right maybe the economy is not doing well maybe you know that layoffs are coming right and you're in your company so you're so negative one and year zero those are the lowest years by year four I guess that is three four you're already a lot happier now a lot of people are reemployed at this point we don't know from this data okay so now here's widowhood now these are people and there's 60 70's 80's and 90's who have been widowed and happiness dips tremendously not surprisingly so you have on again negative one the year before you already have a dip you know pretty obvious the the the spouse is probably already ill and maybe they're taking care of them Year Zero is the worst and then year one you're still way below and it takes five years before people are kind of above their baseline again this is an average and actually it's interesting to look at individual differences because in this study it was found that some people you know dip in happiness after their spouse and then they never recover so on average people recover some people though never recover and then interestingly there were a subset of people who got a lot happier after the after the death and probably you know well my guess is that maybe they had made you know really major stress can giving responsibilities so so yeah there are individual differences and that's actually what make it makes makes this so interesting so you know basically what I what I want to conclude from from these studies is that people are so resilient we think if I lose my spouse if I get laid off if I get divorced you know I'll be unhappy forever it's hard to sort of see beyond that unhappiness and it turns out that on average people bounce back incredibly well not from everything but from many things and so that's sort of the one of the main take-home points is that almost nothing is as misery inducing as we think it is there's a study that was done with women survivors of breast cancer and this is amazing two-thirds of the women breast cancer survivors say that the cancer made a positive change in their life that it was a wake-up call that it sort of made them realize that life is precious gave them a new appreciation for life made them realize what their true priorities are maybe they want to be an artist or a writer or teacher maybe you know whatever it was maybe it's family over work or work over family a lot of people say a lot of people who have experienced adversity like losing a job or becoming ill they say that they realize that they have strengths that they didn't know they had they might maybe it's courage maybe it's humility maybe it's just the ability to get through the day and a lot of people also say that they learn who their true friends are after adversity so it's kind of amazing again like people are so resilient and so positive so I think and I'm going to continue talk about these myths so I think a lot of these sort of our myths that you know if I get divorced I'll be forever unhappy if I'm single okay so it turns out that people who are single all their lives are just as happy as people who are married and especially women who have been single all their lives this is kind of amazing they have an average of about a dozen lifelong friendships really really close friendships so those of you who are married or have children you know how many of you can say I have 12 you know really really really close friends with whom I keep in touch with you know a lot so being single is not a recipe for for misery money I have a whole chapter in my book about how you know you can spend money in ways they can make you happy so money does make people happy sort of depends how you spend it on Aging okay let me talk about aging a lot of people think that I don't want to be old because I'm going to be unhappy but it turns out that older people are us happy or happier the younger people now there's some inconsistency in the evidence there's lots of studies but this I'm going to show you what I think is the pattern from most studies so this is this is happiness or life satisfaction which is a part of happiness over the course of the lifespan so this is starting from age 40 to 85 and so this shows what most studies show which is that happiness increases sort of over the life course as you can see from 40 to 50 to 60 and it tends to kind of peak sometimes it's 65 or late 60s or 70s 70 that's where it Peaks and then it starts decreasing again there's research that suggests that older people in a sense are emotionally wiser it's like they know what makes them happy and they know what makes them unhappy and so they stay away from situations that make them unhappy or people who make them unhappy so younger people are more take more risks and so there's lots of good things about risks but there's also some costs which is that you might it might make you unhappy so there are really very few gender differences in happiness and across age the biggest one is and this is not going to surprise anyone so women are kind of like this in happiness all right they go up and down and men are kind of like this right so women are much more volatile more labile and women are more likely to be really happy but they're also more likely to be depressed so there's a big gender difference of depression clinical depression clinical anxiety on the other hand when men are more likely to have substance abuse disorders and other things so so basically the way I see it is women have higher highs and lower lows but on average if you compare to men there's no difference okay so getting back sort of to the take-home points people are remarkably resilient they get used to or adapt to adversity but this resilience has a sort of dark side okay and that the reason I call it a dark side is that we're we're really good at adapting to the negative things in life but we're also really good at adapting to the positive side of life - and this is called hedonic adaptation so it's sort of good to get used to the fact that let's say you have to move let's say sometimes sometimes you have to downsize right you move from maybe maybe the economy has a downturn and you downsize from a larger home to a smaller home that's really hard at first but then you get used to it my brother actually had to downsize and he said it was just and he had three kids they walked into this new apartment and just like oh my god you know how can we all fit into this little space like six months to a year later they were so happy there they're like why do we ever have a house it was so hard to take care of this is great so you get used to downsizing the same thing happens when you move into a bigger home anyone here moved into a bigger home from a smaller home I bet a lot of people have at first it's really great and then you just get used to it okay so let's talk about adaptation to positive things okay so here's marriage okay so same study follow people from before they got married too after a year before the wedding you're already happier than normal right maybe you're engaged or you're in a great new relationship the year of the wedding that's year zero you're you're at their peak how long does it take to adapt to marriage not not long right again on average so there are some people who get married and they go up and then they stay at that increased level of happiness forever is that amazing how do they do that that's what researchers are interested in what are they doing differently some people in this data set go right down right after the wedding they get unhappy so I don't know what's going on there so that's you think oh I'll be happy when I get married actually research shows yeah you'll be happy for two years now there's there's other kind of I should say there's caveat so for example it turns out that happier people as we actually already said happier people are more likely to get married in the first place so that's that's a caveat okay so take-home points there's no magic formula for happiness and there's no sure course towards misery and so we need to understand that sort of life's turning points the decision to get married or divorced just to stay single or not to take a new job doesn't have to be a crisis and then we have to know that when we're less excited about a job or a relationship or a house that that's just natural that is hedonic adaptation that's a normal part of life because failing to grasp these myths might lead people to feel like there's something wrong with me so if I'm if I'm not as excited about my marriage two years into it or five ten years into it I think maybe there's something wrong with me maybe there's something wrong with my spouse and so we might jettison perfectly good relationships or jobs or cars or whatever because we don't realize the power of hedonic adaptation we all know people who kind of go from one job to another right because the moment the thrill fades they're looking for another job same thing with relationships right we know people who do that with relationships as well so that's just something that we have to keep in mind mean that we should never you know change jobs or relationships but we just have to kind of do it with open eyes and so how do you keep the excitement alive right hedonic adaptation is again very powerful well one of the keys is appreciation is and I'm going to talk about this later basically gratitude to try to appreciate what you have that is the biggest kind of strategy to prevent you from from taking things for granted and then variety novelty and surprise are kind of the keys to keeping that excitement alive now that's hard to do and so it's one reason that actually jobs and relationships that have a lot of novelty and variety and surprises in them at least the positive kind you don't adapt to as well right if you have a job that's really dynamic and it allows you to grow as a person and travel and meet new people and learn new things you know you're not going to adapt to that kind of job as quickly so in any way that you can introduce challenge growth novelty variety surprise into your life so what about children okay let's so let's talk about children a year before you have you have your first child you're already happier than you were before now you're not pregnant yet right so your or your spouse your partner is not pregnant because it's a year but you know maybe you're you've decided you're going to have a baby or you're in a new relationship and then your happiness dips below the baseline and then kind of goes back to what it was before so I should say that I don't think this is really shocking to anyone but I think year three and four what's probably happening during those years you're probably having another child likely right many many people maybe as the average have another child like two to three years after the first one there's been a lot of discussions in the media about whether you know the children make people happy are our parents happy year or less how are their parents miserable relative to people who don't have kids so that's something that I've gotten interested in and one of my students and I have a couple of papers on this topic and so my questions and I basically wrote this paper where we summarized all the research literature kind of our parents happier than people who don't have kids and that the answer is that it depends of course it depends you can't just kind of lump all parents and all people who don't have children and what we found these are sort of our main conclusions that parents are happier than people who don't have kids if they're middle-aged or old okay so so if you're a parent and you're middle-aged or old you're happier than people who are your age who don't have children if now and if you're a young parent you're you're less happy than your peers with children that's I think that's not surprising not only are you more mature and you have sort of more resources when you're older but also of course age is related to the age of the child right so most people who are old don't have you know very young children and the younger the child the harder right day-to-day life is and this is this is sort of reflected in this finding that you're you're happier as a parent if your kids are either in middle childhood or grown okay I'm going to ask you a question about not about happiness in general but about marital satisfaction or happiness in your marriage okay so when you think about the life course of a marriage you know you have sort of the honeymoon phase you first meet you have the phase where assuming you have children you have children sort of they're very very young under five you have kind of the middle child age then you have sort of when you have kids or teenagers and then you have the empty nest that kids have flown the nest right so in terms of marital satisfaction what do you think is the happiest time for a marriage it's kind of amazing right this is that that that's right it's the empty nest I've never had an audience get it right and you all said the same thing it's the emptiness right because I think maybe many of you have experienced the empty nest and the NZ this is not necessarily for overall happiness but happiness in a marriage empty nest what do you think is a second happiest time in a marriage okay so that's that's right it's exactly right it's the honeymoon period what do you think is the least happy time in a marriage teenagers you guys are amazing I've never had this experience where you guided all right people say who so people Pete most people say that it's when your kids are really little that's when you're the least happy but that's not true it's when they're teenagers that's the hardest for the marriage and the second hardest is when they're under five so I have two teenagers and two under five so but we're doing good though we're doing good okay so um they are married so married parents it's good to if you're married you're happier as a parent then people that married people who don't have kids as opposed to if you're single a single parent that's not surprising if your fault okay so fathers fathers are happier than men without children and mothers are about as happy as women who don't have children but and there's various explanations for that some people think well the burden of parenthood falls on on women maybe that's why but actually in data that I have looked at it turns out that men who don't have kids are particularly unhappy so they're kind of depressing this the children live with them so if you're a noncustodial parent like if you're divorced and you don't have custody of your kids you're particularly unhappy if you have kids who are biological or adopt adopted you're happier than people who don't have kids step parents don't tend to be very happy step parents and and your children are relatively trouble-free that's kind of obvious right because I put the relatively there because there are no trouble-free children right but in all of the research overall no matter what kind of parent you are no matter what category parent you are parents tend to report that they have more meaning in life than people who don't have children so doesn't mean that you can't get meaning from other things aside from for children but that's the finding okay so we've talked about you know the important if it's of happiness sort of misconceptions that people have about happiness so what about so can we actually become happier is it possible to become happier and if it's possible can we sort of sustain that that's kind of like the million dollar question right that's what you all want to know or some of you want to know well the self-help books books stores bookshelves I don't know how many people go to bookstores but where book either real bookstores or virtual bookstores they're full of self-help books okay and a lot of them are about happiness I'm going to show you a few examples so here's an example of a best-seller it's called happiness is free and it's easier than you think now interestingly the kind of the conclusion of my research is that happiness is harder than you think not easier but you know it's you can't sell books sort of when you call them like happiness is really hard right so right people want people in it and it's interesting cuz I'm often interviewed by media and especially the women's magazines tend to ask me questions like okay I want five or I want ten five-minute happiness strategies five-minute happiness strategies I'm like well I don't have any five-minute how can you become happier in five minutes so you could sort of argue this is the American Way right like we want quick and easy you know what's the secret to happiness you can be happy no matter what happy for no reason and my favorite book you can be the wife of a happy husband I know so thank you for noticing that this is a terrible book okay I usually don't judge books I'm very positive but this is like a real retro book like maybe it wasn't retro because it was written in 77 so basically argues that women should be submissive and kind of do what their husbands want that's how you become a wife of a happy husband okay so for a long time researchers were actually pessimistic about whether you can become happier I mean so they're all these books out there and they say you can be happy really easily most of the books are not based on any evidence they're just someone's opinion or anecdotal kind of evidence so um so we kind of looked at the research and so scientists have thought well maybe people can't become happier so so they're here three reasons to be pessimistic so one you know there's genetic influences on happiness so those of you have more than one child you know some some of your kids are happier than others right it's like you feel like you you don't treat them differently they reason to say they're raised in the same household but they're like these incredibly strong genetic differences that are evident at birth and so there there are there are strong genetic influences on happiness there's research that's conducted in a field called behavior genetics and what researchers do is they compare how similar are identical twins in their happiness level so remember identical twins share 100% of their DNA and then they compare how similar are fraternal twins fraternal twins share 50% of the DNA they're basically like sub they're just like siblings two siblings and it turns out that identical twins are much more similar in their happiness right so if your identical twin either you're both really happy you're both really unhappy fraternal twins are much less similar so these data suggest that there's a strong heritability component to happiness okay so if that's the case then how can we become happier right isn't it isn't it true that you only have it or you don't right now I don't think that's true but I'm kind of being devil's advocate right in right now now now there's also evidence that happiness is a trait it's part of our personality and personality is something that doesn't change very much over time going back to those yearbooks those college yearbooks or high school yearbooks remember the happiest people I don't mean happy because they I don't know where for a reason like because something good happen to them but they just were sort of happy naturally think of the happiest people in your high school class if you saw them today they would probably still be the happiest sort of in the group so the rank the ranks are relatively maintained the same and so happiness is a sort of a light it's stable over the life court ends to be fairly stable so if that's the case of happiness as part of your personality then how can you change it right isn't it hard to change your personality and then finally we've already been talking about hedonic adaptation we adapt to almost all things positive that happened to us right remember marriage children you know buying a new house getting a raise in salary winning the lottery research shows that people win the lottery adapt to winning the lottery so if we adapt to anything positive then how can we ever become happier all right so these are all sort of reasons that we should be pessimistic about the pursuit of happiness now I wouldn't be here if I really bought sort of into all of these concerns and so my argument and I'm just going to kind of summarize it in one one paragraph is that despite the finding that our happiness is partially genetically determined and despite the finding there are life situations actually don't influence our happiness as much as we think they will because of hedonic adaptation still I argue a very large part of happiness is under our control sort of as is under our power to change increase or decrease by the ways that we think and by the ways that we behave this is a pie chart that is very simplistic so I don't want you to take it too seriously these numbers come from a lot of studies they're estimates and averages from many past societies but essentially what we argue is when we ask the question what determines happiness about 50% of individual differences in how Nizar explained by genetics now 50% is not a hundred percent about 10% are explained by life circumstances now a lot of people are shocked to see that right because they think if only I were richer I'd be happier right if only I could change my life circumstance some way I'll be happier now I should say that if you're in a really bad situation if you're poor and you don't have your if you don't have healthcare you don't have safety you don't have a shelter then of course more money is going to make you happier if you're going to be in an abusive relationship then of course getting out of that relationship is going to make you happier but once you're sort of comfortable if you're sort of okay then improving your life circumstances even more it's not going to make as much of a difference as you think it well and so this leaves 40% for what I call intentional activities these are things that we can all do to increase our happiness or decrease it but most people want to increase it okay so what are the things that we can do there are like a hundred things we can do to become happier you're not going to nothing this is not going to shock anyone expressing gratitude and appreciation has been found to make people happier doing acts of kindness trying to be more forgiving being more optimist investing in our relationships practicing our religion if we have a religion meditating exercising so my first book the health happiness has a chapter essentially a chapter or a section for all for each of these strategies it goes through what they are what's the evidence behind them how can you implement them so these are all things that we can do to become happier so what I do in my research is I basically test these strategies to see if they really work okay so what I do are called interventions so an intervention is basically an experiment in which people are prompted to change themselves in some positive way and what I do are essentially like they're kind of like clinical trials you know in clinical trials researchers test say the efficacy of a new drug or a new medical treatment and they also test things like dosage you know how much how much of the treatment should the person get how often and I also look at things like dosage and you know how often you should you know count your blessings and things like that okay so here are some examples of happiness interventions we've conducted over the course of one to three months we have volunteers or participants come into our studies and we ask them do it like I already showed you the kids remember the Vancouver students we ask them to do acts of kindness on a regular basis or write gratitude letters or fern their most important values and then we follow them across time we measure their happiness usually before in the middle after you know usually there's a follow-up to see if what they're doing is making them happier and then mylabs focus is not only and sort of do these things make people happy but why and how sort of what are the factors that underlie sort of the success of why is it that trying to be more grateful makes people happier so I'm going to show you some examples really quick of the studies that I've done and you could kind of try to practice as yourself if you want okay so we did a study where we asked people to count their blessings now you all know what that is right kind of keeping a gratitude journal where you write down what you're grateful for so here in the instructions we use there are many things in our lives that we might be grateful about think over the events of the past week and write down up to five things that you're grateful for now this study was six weeks long so every week you do this and we had different conditions we had a control group but we also had a group you either did this once a week like every Sunday night you write down what you're grateful for or three times a week Tuesday Thursday and Sunday you write down what you're grateful for and when we found was kind of interesting we found that okay so this is a histogram and it shows changes in gratitude and changes in happiness from before to after the six-week intervention so if you see the bar going up that means that people are getting happier so you can first look at gratitude people became more grateful when they counted their blessings once a week do you see that so the control group is in green and it's not changing in gratitude but the people who try to be grateful three times a week they did not get grateful interesting okay and then the same thing and then for changes in happiness the control group actually got less happy we could talk about that later why that happened but you see if you try if you count your blessings once a week you got happier three times a week you didn't why do you think that is yeah I said it's interesting so someone said a chore and I think that's true that if you kind of do something too much and this is the dosage right you have to have the right dosage if you do if you give too much dosage it's going to looses lose its meaning or freshness and then it could be that if you try to count your blessings too much you sort of can't you can't come up with things to be grateful for right and they could backfire in fact one study I really like was done in cotton colleges universities and they asked students after taking a course they said list 20 things that you liked about your professor okay that's a lot right a too many or they asked list five things you liked about your professor who liked the professor more overall the ones who list five things right because it wasn't was it 20 things right they couldn't come up with 20 things so they could have concluded oh I must not like that professor so much so maybe the same thing with counting blessings okay so this was this was a demonstration of the importance of dosage so these are this is a list of sort of factors that I'm studying that are important to keep in mind kind of how to implement positive activities in the most optimal way so dosage is critical okay now what about fit my argument is that it's important to choose the strategy that's this right for you now when sometimes when I talk about counting blessings people kind of roll their eyes they're like ah count 11 they they just find it so trite and kind of hokey to count your blessings and so I would say that the fit is not good so don't do that right if it doesn't feel natural to you if you know if you don't enjoy theirs you have to choose the strategy that works best kind of like if you exercise you know some people like running some people like swimming you know some people like dancing whatever you choose the exercise that you like the best so there's different kinds of fit and so one way that I've studied this question is I have a there's an iPhone app that's based on my first the health happiness is called live happy and just full disclosure is I don't make any money from this app maybe I should but I don't so and what it does is it gives it has eight different happiness activities these are screenshots that people can use they can use their phones to engage in these activities right so things like keeping gratitude journal that's the bottom that's top left setting goals what my favorite is this one the bottom left which is the savoring album and there you use your phone to you can take a picture of something someone you love or something beautiful and you write about it or you can go into your photos your photo album and choose a photo so here's a picture of me on vacation with my daughter you know and how great that was so you sort of savor your positive experiences so anyway people can use their phones to engage in these eight different positive activities and I asked them how happy are you and I asked them how do you feel natural doing this do you enjoy doing this so there's a measure of fit and what I find is the more that the activity fits your personality the more you do it and the more you do it the happier you get so here's a chart that sort of shows fit with different activities on average so most people their favorite activity was it's called the best possible self I'll tell you about that in a second that's when you imagine like all your dreams coming true in the future and then this is the the in green is sort of the key finding the higher the fit with a particular activity the more likely users tried that activity and the more they benefited from that activity so fit is really important now and here's a study that showed the importance of motivation so here's a study where I had people either try to be more grateful or optimistic and that I had people who are who wanted to become happier they were motivate to become happy or people who were not motivated and so I found the red bars are the motivated people and the green bars are the non motivated people and I found that this is after an eight-week intervention the more motivated you are sort of the more you benefit so again that seems kind of obvious but often scientists have to kind of test obvious hypotheses so if you're really motivated to be happy you put more effort into it you're more serious about it right you take it seriously okay so person activity fit and motivation are important now what about social support I am a runner and I'm much better at running when I have a friend sort of a buddy who does it with me and I we run in early in the mornings and so on and so I know if she's going to be there at like 7:00 or 6:45 in the morning you know I get up right like I don't want to turn the alarm off and go back to sleep because I know she's going to wait for me and I'm sure I have the same effect on her so I think social support sort of having a buddy to do this with or just or just having family or even a culture that kind of supports your goals is important so here's a study where we ask people to to do this best possible self activity okay so all of you you can do this try to do this so imagine in five years you are exactly where you want to be you're sort of your best possible self in terms of your health in terms of your relationships your work hobbies whatever at anything and that's that's called the best possible self and that basically that's a way to practice your optimistic muscles so try to be more positive about the future the red bar is people got happier when they try to be more optimistic the control group they got a little bit less happy but when they had social support when they had sort of peers they were they were kind of supporting them endorsing their goals they got even more happy right so basically you get more out of it when you have social support when you have friends buddies peers as help you so that's just the importance of social support now this is one of the most interesting things I want to talk about which is culture okay so remember we talked a little bit about culture about how there are cultural differences in the pursuit of happiness and some cultures maybe aren't really like not like the u.s. they're not really as sort of they don't endorse the pursuit of happiness as much so we did a study in in South Korea with students so we had two different samples of students we had students from Seoul National University and students from UC Riverside where I am a professor and then we had two groups either students rode gratitude letters or they did acts of kindness and this is what we found so interesting okay so look at the American students first so they got happier over time when they practice gratitude that's that whatever teal I don't know what color that is the teal line and when they did acts of kindness they got happier that's the red line okay so this is the American students so that's what you would expect and look now I'm going to show you the Korean students season interesting when they practice kindness they got a little happier but when they practice gratitude they got less happy okay and this is actually I think an example of culture activity fit now I would be interested in your in your ideas or questions what people have told me are our ideas are that gratitude is can be kind of a can involve mixed emotions in Korea and maybe other Asian cultures such that when you express gratitude you might feel gratitude but you also might feel indebtedness right because you're sort of thinking about these are people the people who wrote gratitude letters to someone in their life who they're who was kind to them you might feel some indebtedness maybe you might feel some guilt so there's sort of not it's not all positive so that's that's our idea but we're exploring that I think that's really interesting and then here's another interesting finding from the same study that's so that's the importance of culture but let's look at effort okay so the same study in American students the more effort they put in the happier they got right that makes sense so the red line is high effort right so they got a lot happier Green Line medium effort they got happier low effort no difference right and that is that makes sense right if you don't put the effort into it you're not going to get happier now look at Koreans still you have the the effort difference but it's much smaller so it mattered less how much effort there was so anyway so that that shows the importance of effort okay so the inclusion of our research is that happiness takes work remember happiness is harder than you think rather than happiness is easier than you think it takes effort it takes motivation it takes commitment so in terms of in we're sort of doing lots of more studies what are we doing next we're doing lots more positive interventions we're trying to understand how they work why is it that doing acts of kindness makes you happier we're looking we're looking at age a little bit so in what's interesting is we have yet to find a study that showed us any kind of age differences right basically these kinds of positivity and I think you'll agree with me they matter at all ages right and so for example we've done some studies with teenagers who you think like try to make teenagers more grateful right you think they're like the least grateful parts of our population but they some Oh many of them loved writing gratitude letters and it's like that what they told us is that they realize that they're ungrateful that they're not grateful enough and they needed to be more grateful so that was really neat so we did we just finished a study oh you know okay let me talk about depression for a second so so yeah so age doesn't seem to matter and it's I mean it matters sort of in how you do the strategies and maybe how they work but not but they work across the lifespan now people who get depressed at all ages actually interestingly this is the kind of amazing what was it in 1950 the age of onset for clinical depression was 29 years old and today it's 14 and a half 14 and a half but there's depression as a problem at all ages I hope I got that right as that was from a study that I just read about so can we alleviate depressive symptoms with these positive interventions now I'm not arguing that people should forego mental health treatment if they're depressed but can we sort of supplement mental health treatment maybe medication with these interventions so the question is would depressed individuals benefit more from our interventions maybe because they have more room to improve this is called the floor effect right they have more room to approve and they're more motivated or would they benefit less because you know depress if you're depressed sometimes you can hardly get off the couch or the bed right so it's hard for you to do anything what do you think which one which one do you think it is or both more thing could be more the truth I don't know the answer to that question because some studies show one way some studies show the other way we did one study with depressed college students and we had them write gratitude letters and they got more depressed I mean not like really depressed but they they you know there was a little bit of slight negative effect and we think from talking to them they felt guilty they felt like they couldn't think of anyone who to be grateful for or they felt like oh I should have reciprocated and I never did they felt like a failure so like you know like when you're really depressed thinking about anything can make you more duper you can kind of have a negative perspective on anything other studies that are much simpler like asking people just think of one good thing that happened today anything like the Sun came out then that that is helpful so so I think we have to really work hard at developing sort of activities that might be fitting for someone's depressed or anxious or you know whatever has an eating disorder has an addiction you know different kinds of popular populations might benefit different with different strategies we also are doing a really exciting study or just finished doing a really exciting study with actually I have to fix that 750 16 year olds in the UK and these are all twins so we have 750 twins and we're looking at whether there are genetic versus environmental influences on who benefits from an intervention who doesn't so sometimes you ask people all right go do acts of kindness and people get a lot happier but some people don't get much happier and so what are their genetic influences on that and we are finding right now a genetic influence on the extent to which people sort of stay happy even after the intervention is over and then very exciting where you know I mentioned how you have to measure happiness by asking people are they happy and I think that's really important to do that but we also want to look at behavior sort of look at sort of more kind of unobtrusive measures and less biased measures and so lately we've been doing studies where we have people wear this badge around their necks called a sociometric badge and the badge has sort of a technology inside of it it can measure how much you move kind of like you know if you're if you move your iPad screen or I phone screen you know how it changes orientation so the same kind of technology it's an accelerometer can measure your what's called behavioral rhythm how much you move and also the badges cents each other so if you're all wearing badges I can see I can tell like who's talking to whom and how much time you spend in social interaction so we did a study in Japan in Tokyo and we asked people for six weeks to write down three things that went well this week at work okay so very simple intervention you could all try to do this write down once a week three things that went well it could be at work it could be at home and the control group wrote three things three tasks that they accomplished that week okay and what we found was the experimental group is in green it's kind of weird okay so people who were in the experimental group who wrote down three things that went well at work they were most energetic earlier in the day so you see that's 4:00 p.m. they kind of peaked earlier in the day at 4:00 p.m. versus at like 5:00 p.m. and when they arrived to work changes an initial rhythm this is how energetic and how much they moved when they came to work they had more energy in the mornings so we're not even sure what that means yet but we're but we think it's cool to kind of look at actual behavior and our interventions changing people's behavior they actually chained how much people are moving throughout the day so and I think this would be a cool actually a really nice and effective sort of positive activity for everyone sort of consider every week three things that went well that week very simple and now and by the way they got happier they and they were more connected to other people okay so the conclusion of my research as I said is happiness takes work that it is possible to become happier one person at a time but it's not easy you have to put effort into it and it has so many benefits right so not only will you feel better you'll be but there's all these advantages to happiness you'll be healthier more productive more creative a better leader a better parent so I always like to end my talks with a quote from Aristotle because it nicely captures sort of the gist of my research which is that happiness depends upon ourselves thank so I'm happy to take lots of questions yes thank you very much so the first part of the question was about and my concern that that what I'm sort of saying is prescriptive it's like I'm telling people what to do and I am concerned about that actually so what I try really hard is to tell people what the research shows so I I mean I have said oh you should all try this so maybe I shouldn't say that well because what I try to do is say the research shows that writing letters of gratitude makes people happier and so what I want to do is that you all can kind of hear that and then you can draw your own conclusion right that you some of you might say okay well I'm going to try that too I also try to make it clear this is not going to work for everyone because fit is really important you have to kind of find the right fit and dosage is important all these other factors as well and the in terms of poetry okay I'm glad you brought that up because research also shows that B there's really three things that are associated with happiness and this is a correlation one is connectedness right connecting with other people another is contributing to the world basically helping others and the third is personal growth and that is really anything that kind of helps you kind of grow as a person learn new things and experience sort of new things and I would put poetry in the personal growth category if that is something that doesn't mean that you read it because you want to grow but it's something that that helps you it sort of makes your life richer and so and so I would I think it's great we should add that to our toolkit of experiences that can be associated with happiness for some people right for some other people it could be art or it could be speaking a new language or you know traveling to different cultures and for some people it's going to be poetry thank you wow these are really amazing questions so I'm sorry I do usually have some slides with the definition of happiness I think I just made a decision I couldn't fit everything in so that was probably not wise to leave out the definition so there's a lot of debate about two types of happiness and one is called eudaimonic and one is called hedonic so one happiness is really more about feeling good and feeling satisfied and experiencing positive emotions and that's really more what I study and the other type eudaimonic well-being which is really what Aristotle was talking about is more related to sort of meaning and engagement kind of living kind of a full life flourishing and actually we could go for out we can sort of talk for hours about we can't really resolve the debate here but I really feel strongly that those two kinds of happiness are so intertwined people and there's lots of research to show this to people who have meaning are happier happier people have more meaning and all of that so they almost always go together and when you try to disentangle them it actually is very difficult because happiness without meaning is I guess it would be like pure pleasure or hedonism but I wouldn't call that happiness and then meaning without happiness maybe that would be like Mother Teresa you know we found out after she died that she actually was really unhappy so if you're you're doing good but you're not happy doing it maybe that's that's but I don't even so anyway so I don't I think in most cases they go together so but yeah I should have I'm sorry I should have gone more into that because that's kind of that's the starting point right for this talk so you're next but then I was I'm going to go to this sorry you were next Yeah right right so that's a great question so he asked about whether people sort of lie if they if I asked how happy they are so this is called the social desirability bias right so it's socially desirable at least at our culture to be happy and there is I think there is something to that but there's been also lots and lots of research that just tried to develop measures of happiness that are unbiased and it turns out there's a very small proportion of participants will actually either lie or are kind of in denial I think there may be some people very rare individuals who don't really know how happy they are most of us know whether we're happy or not and also the way that we do our studies they're totally anonymous and some time off today's with pencil and paper and then we switch to doing them on a computer and with interestingly you have you have fewer social desirability bias on the computer for some reason people I don't know when it's when they're typing on a screen they are more honest which I'm not sure why I'm sure someone does research on that anyway but those are really good questions and lots of research has been done to try to address that because that's a very important issue right if we have to be able to be confident that when people are saying that they're happy they really are happy I'm going to sorry I'm going to go to that gentleman yes yeah I know I have to say um I once okay I've never done laughter yoga so I have heard of this and there definitely are physiological effects of laughing and smiling too so it turns out that if you smile sort of there's feedback into your brain that makes you feel a little bit happier even when you're faking it now I once was on a radio show and part of the show was everyone laughs okay so it wasn't yoga it was just laughing and they said okay you're gonna be on the show and you have to do this you have to laugh and I thought oh my god I don't want to do this I just thought it was so silly and so hokey right well like I have to do it and so and you know people start laughing I don't know how you start you just have to kind of fake it or maybe you think of something funny and so I joined in and it was amazing I mean it really liked us first you laugh and then you think it's so ridiculous that I'm laughing that you actually are laughing at the fact that you're laughing and you're laughing at other people right because you're like oh they're so silly and then you really are laughing for real and yeah it was I mean it made me really happy so I have to say I was such a skeptic but I did and I haven't really done it since then so I should probably do it more but yeah yeah okay someone in the middle yeah you and then you yeah yeah and you know what that's I don't know about the percentages but you know what's interesting is as you age your most kind of common emotional expressions sort of get imprinted right and your face so like the your the lines on your face if you smile a lot you have smile lines and so actually when you look at older people you can kind of tell what their personality is a little bit more than younger people and so that so there's a little bit of research on that right so and in another study that I thought was so cool is Botox could actually there's some small studies that have shown that Botox can sometimes relieve depression because the frown lines kind of getting back to that facial feedback can make you first of all feel unhappy and also of course other people if you look like you're frowning all the time people are going to react more negatively to you right then if you smile and so so there's sort of social consequences as well if so so emotional facial expressions are really important and there's a whole field it's not my field but there's a whole field on facial expressions if you're interested ok sorry I had yeah right right no thank you for that I'll kind of repeat a little bit on when I'm when I talk about resilience and how people are so good at coping with adversity and they often will come out of the adversity even stronger and happier than they were before which is a little bit counterintuitive but I do want to kind of reiterate that when I talk about happiness I'm not talking about people who are like smiling and cheerful and kind of jumping for joy I mean happiness is very internal and the happiest people you may not even realize sort of who's I mean they're kind of I don't know I guess they have a sense of like contentment or tranquility that might be evident but I'm not so I'm not talking about kind of and then that good and then happy people are not ones necessarily who are always experiencing all the kinds of good events right so you know if you live long enough right you're going to live through lots of ups and downs yeah so you're talking about expression of happiness yeah so there's lots of studies that just look at the surveys of people across the world where they ask people how happy they are and and in fact you if you you might have seen these like in the newspaper there's lots of surveys and they always show that like the Scandinavian countries come up on top you know they report being the happiest and in the countries that are the poorest or they have the most kind of conflict uncertainty sort of political instability economic instability those tend to be the unleased happy there's not really that much more I mean so a lot of it is just on sort of reports of happiness is that we're talking about and then we can sort of talk about why you know the Danish often are found to be the happiest country and one article I read actually found that Danish people had somewhat lower expectations so that could have been responsible for that because we talked about I should I haven't really talked about this but we you know when you adapt to positive things one reason you adapt is that you your expectations or your aspirations rise right looks like you move into a new house and suddenly you want an even bigger house right you get more money you want even more money so so keeping your expectations sort of not from not rising too much not escalating is important you know you and then there's a lady in the back yet you'll be next you know a lot of cities in fact the city of Santa Monica where I live is now got a grant to kind of increase wellness in in the city some they haven't they haven't decided what they're going to do yet they're the first the first thing you need to do is measure happiness measure well-being before you can kind of do anything but a lot of cities and countries now are becoming interested in at least measuring well-being right because we've always measured economic indicators right and so psychologists now argue okay well you know why are we measuring these economic indicators if not because we think that they're related to happiness right I mean why why do we care about money if I mean if we think it's related to some good things that like eventually are related to well-being so the first the first step is to measure it right because then once you start measuring it so that's one goal of some policymakers is to measure it and then that's that's we're sort of starting that step we haven't really gotten to the step of actually major interventions we're not there yet but yeah but I'd be interested yeah right right okay great question so this is a question about brain the brain well I'm not a neuroscientist but and there's not a lot of work with imaging and Happiness but it's sort of beginning to be done so for example researchers found that there are sort of circuits in the brain that are sensitive to reward and so and so researchers are now studying those one of the I think one of the lines of research that I think is most relevant actually is not on imaging it's a researcher at University of wisconsin-madison who does EEG with with it with participants and what he found is that what he has been finding is that people who are happier have more activity on the left side of their frontal cortex than on the right so there's an asymmetry and if you have a bigger asymmetry left versus right that's associated with happiness and he did a actually a meditation intervention once where he had people learn how to meditate and measure this asymmetry before and after and after they learned to meditate they became sort of even more asymmetric so there was even more of an asymmetry left versus right so that's kind of cool so showing that learning to meditate you know in effect change the brain so so again I'm not a neuroscientist myself but there's more and more work actually in every field economics neuroscience sociology and of course psychology developmental that is that is studying happiness so so I'm really looking forward to kind of the next 10 20 years and what people are going to find any effect of food specifically chocolate and beer you know food does make people happy and but temporarily right so one one thing I haven't really talked about is that there's certain things that are kind of self reinforcing and other things that are transient and some other things that can make us happy but can have costs right so obviously if you have too much chocolate or too much beer you'll be happy in the moment but it's going to have cost that will make you unhappy in the long term but there are other things that make you happy that are kind of self reinforcing and self sustaining so doing acts of kindness for example have all kinds of social consequences that can make you happy sort of in the long term as opposed to short term but in the short term certainly food makes you happy but I don't know any research of like particular certain kinds more than others but we I just need to know what time it is okay well thank you so much thank you you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 43,073

Rating: 4.7142859 out of 5

Keywords: happiness, habits, habituation, normalcy, joy, mind body connection

Id: MDTi2_PHiiM

Length: 85min 25sec (5125 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 04 2014