The Science of Happiness

I just read an article in the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine called "The Science of Happiness". Apparently "positive psychology" is a new and fast-growing field, although some like Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness) "don't think psychology needs a movement ... probably 85% of the ideas are worthless, but that's true everywhere in science." As I was reading through the article, I marked three passages that I thought were interesting:

Environs, too, affect mood. Settings that combine “prospect and refuge,” for example, seem to support a sense of well-being. “People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves,” Etcoff explains. “That’s a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.” Other attractive features include a source of water (streams for beauty and slaking thirst), low-canopy trees (shade, protection), and animals (proof of habitability). “Humans prefer this to deserts or man-made environments,” Etcoff says. “Building windowless, nature-less, isolated offices full of cubicles ignores what people actually want. A study of patients hospitalized for gall-bladder surgery compared those whose rooms looked out on a park with those facing a brick wall. The park-view patients used less pain medication, had shorter stays, and complained less to their nurses. We ignore our nature at our own peril.”

“We evolved in a much different world, with much less choice and no sedentary people,” Etcoff continues. “We didn’t evolve for happiness, we evolved for survival and reproduction.” For this reason, we are sensitive to danger. “Pleasure and the positive-reward system is for opportunity and gain,” Etcoff explains. “And pleasure involves risk, taking a chance that can override some of your fear at that moment.”

Happiness activates the sympathetic nervous system (which stimulates the “flight or fight” response), whereas joy stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (controlling “rest and digest” functions). “We can laugh from either joy or happiness,” Vaillant said. “We weep only from grief or joy.” Happiness displaces pain, but joy embraces it: “Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy of reunion,” he asserted. “Without the pain of captivity, we don’t experience the joy of freedom.”

I've seen a couple of authors make the distinction between happiness and joy before. I've also heard authors argue that we can't appreciate what's good in our lives within having some bad stuff for contrast.

There was one other passage from Daniel Gilbert that was thought-provoking:

The reason is that humans hold fast to a number of wrong ideas about what will make them happy. Ironically, these misconceptions may be evolutionary necessities. “Imagine a species that figured out that children don’t make you happy,” says Gilbert. “We have a word for that species: extinct. There is a conspiracy between genes and culture to keep us in the dark about the real sources of happiness. If a society realized that money would not make people happy, its economy would grind to a halt.”

That last sentence is pretty interesting. If people weren't interested in making more than a bare minimum amount of money, would capitalism still be able to operate or would it fall apart?

I wonder where all this research will take us - or whether it will be a passing fad with not much to show for itself 10-20 years from now.