Fall 2013 Happiness Class Class Notes 2

Return to Happiness

November 5

Bryant, Chapter 8: Enhancing Savoring

• Factors Enhancing both Coping and Savoring:

• Social Support (sharing feelings with others),
• Writing about life experiences,
• Downward hedonic contrast (neg. vis.),
• Humor,
• Spirituality & Religion,
• Awareness of Fleetingness of Experience.

• Essential Pre-conditions for Savoring

• Freedom from Social and Esteem Concerns: explicated largely in terms of mindfulness...
• Present Focus: goes back to what might seem odd about mindfulness as preparatory to savoring.
• Attentional Focus

• Exercises

• Vacation in Daily Life
• Life Review -- "chaining"
• Camera Exercise

Additional Issues:

• The connection between savoring and gratitude (handout from Chapter 5 on ereserves)
• Savoring and Connoisseurship: Does Savoring require (or is it enhanced by) connoisseurship? How does that square with Epicurean simplicity?

Watkins, Chapter 9: Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being

• CS Lewis on praise: completes enjoyment.
• Focus on emotional benefits of expressing gratitude.
• Distinguishes gratitude as a practice vs. trait. Traits are relatively fixed aspects of personality.
• Wants to see if dispostion to gratitude predicts SWB. GRAT --> SWLS. Also interested in contribution of G to affective H or "state happiness".
• finding: Grateful people have positive memory bias.
• Researching the direction of causation -- p. 172ff: if it's possible to manipulate gratitude conditions and see a quasi-functional relationship on mood. Seems to have been weakly confirmed. Still possible to have bidirectional causation. Are happy people grateful or grateful people happier?
• Series of studies on emotional benefits, gratefulness as a cause p. 174ff -- "Participants in the grateful condition felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than students in both of the other comparison conditions." 174. Second study tested specific technique of downward comparison and compared it to control and "hassles" condition.

• How does gratitude contribute to happiness?

• 1: emotional boost from "gift" character of gratitude experiences.
• 2: counteracting hedonic habituation
• 3: focusing attention away from upward comparisons toward downward comparisons. might help with delayed gratification.
• 4: coping -- evidence from p. 178ff, less PTSD in grateful people.
• 5: increasing accessibility and recollection of pleasant life events -- note, this follows from memory bias studies (p. 179)
• 6: increasing actual number or positive events -- esp. through social network. social benefits.
• 7: decrease depressed mood

• Feedback loop in gratitude effects.

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Additional Issue:

• Connect "uniqueness" issue in savoring (208) with uniqueness/perfection discussion.