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.

---

Additional Issue:

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

November 7

Diener and Diener, Happiness, Chapter 4: Happiness and Social Relationships: You Can't Do Without Them

• opening thought experiment, point.
• Major claim: Necessity of relationship to happiness.
• Strong correlation of social/happy, but what direction is the causation? High LS prior to marriage predicts satisfaction/longevity of marriage. Marriage might be enable higher sustained happiness under the right conditions (57)
• ESM study of introverts/extroverts in social/alone situations. (Alt explanations...)
• Inducing moods in test subjects alters perception/desirability/expectation of social situations.
• Duchenne smile study p. 53.
• Return to the Marriage/Happiness debate: Lucas study, note point about averages.
• Children: confirmation of earlier studies.

Csiksentmihalyi, Chapter Six, Relationships and the Quality of Life

• Concept of individual as product of social world, social world scripts transitions to adult relationship.

• samskara - Hindu codes of conduct by age. (Does social life actually produce the individual in an important sense?)

• "A relationship that leads to order in consciousness instead of psychic entropy has to meet at least two conditions.

• The first is to find some compatibility between our goals and that of the other person or persons. This is always difficult in principle, given that each participant in the interaction is bound to pursue his or her self-interest." 81

• The second condition for a successful interaction is that one be willing to invest attention in the other person's goals not an easy task either, considering that psychic energy is the most essential and scarce resource we own.

• Claims friendships don't habituate because people are always changing. If you continue to share goals and investment of energy, the pleasure never dies (until you do).

• Suspicious of relationship value of sex apart from psychological economy that normally goes with it. (Big judgement, p. 84)

• Notes some changes from traditional social life: Americans tend to be friends with their parents more -- a novel and recent change. Changes in the coupling of sociability and relationship: marriages not formerly assumed to be about friendship or social intimacy.

• Summary of good family life, read p. 88. Note the focus on the "work" families do in our lives.

• Balance of solitude and social experience. German study by Noelle-Newman on overestimation of desirability of solitude -- (related to recurring historical motif of the "blessed isle" - Rousseau)

• Discusses cities as places of historical challenge to our ability to manage difference and close interaction. Connects to globalism and contrasts to efforts to "restore" communities' traditional social bonds.

• Closes with claims about the social character of creativity and knowledge-seeking.

November 12

Haidt Chapter 9: Divinity with or without God

Elevation as a vertical axis in relationship.

• Flatland
• Major speculative hypothesis: 183: In addition to relationship and status, we perceive/experience "divinity" as a kind of "moral purity".

• But this is puzzling, given that we are also ANIMALS
• Research on disgust. Why do we experience disgust? 186. Purity opposite impulse from disgust. Disgust brings us "down".

• Psychological anthropologist Richard Shweder, U Chicago: Haidt worked with him on research in morality in India: "Shweder's research on morality in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity." 188 -- evidence on diff. distribution of these ethics by class. Note observations on research in India. Link bt. purity/divine.

• Cites approvingly: Eliade, The Sacred and Profane -- perceiving sacredness universal among humans. 189: Interesting examples: handedness, space in houses.

Elevation and Agape

• Looking for a name for the emotions that we experience when we observe morally outstanding deeds. "Elevation"
• Jefferson: Experience of aesthetic value triggers physical changes in the body and recognizable feeling of elevated sentiments.

• 196: wants to see if elevation is a kind of happiness. research with student Sara Algoe, (three conditions: doing something good for someone, saw someone tell a joke, saw extraordinary non-moral performance) results seem to separate out different responses: moral elevation vs. response to non-moral excellence like basketball player.

• initial research documents elevation as response. Unclear how moral/non-moral triggers work.

• Vagus Nerve theory -- operation of vagus nerve, relationship to oxytocin. Since oxcytocin causes bonding rather than action, this theory might explain the lack of evidence in an earlier study that elevation leads to action.

• Puzzle about moral elevation and lack of action -- in two studies no sig increase in "signing up" to volunteer after elevation.

• Lactating moms study 198 -- (answers puzzle: oxcytocin is about bonding, not acting. we've managed to make moral conduct a trigger for oxcytocin.)

• Letter from religious person distinguishing two kinds of tears in church. compassion/celebration

• Latter like agape : objectless love

Awe and Transcendence

• cites Darwin / Emerson, idea of elevation from exp of nature.

• Drugs - -entheogens. reports old experiment with mushrooms and religion.

• Emerson's "transparent eyeball" experience. Awe and transcendence of the ego. (also in flow)

• Awe: "As we traced the word "awe" back in history, we discovered that it has always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self." 202

• Emotion of awe: "Keltner and I concluded that the emotion of awe happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory, or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures." 203

• Story of Arjuna Pandava from Gita. Gets a cosmic eye. Extreme case, but Haidt implies this is a model for how we describe spiritual transformation.

• Maslow's work on peak experiences. Side note on clash about the nature of science in psychology. Maslow is considered a founder of humanistic psych.

• Mark Leary, Curse of the Self: Self as obstacle to -- mental chatter -- self as obstacle to vertical development . Read p. 207.

November 14

Gilbert, Chapter 8: Paradise Glossed

• Opening examples of people "re-narrating" horrible events in their lives, including wrongdoing and public humiliation. Asymmetry between people's estimates of misfortune (loss of ability) and estimates of people in those situations.

• "If negative events don't hit us as hard as we expect them to, then why do we expect them to?"

• Suggests that the process of creating and attending to meanings is crucial (154-155). We respond, in part, to our own representations of reality.

• Importance of context, frequency, and recency in identifying information and salience. Necker cube. Definers and self-rating study (159). importance of relative complexity of experience (over visual illusions) Kale and ice cream study, 159. thesis on 160. part of "psychological immune system" (psychological investment system). (recall the poster study.)

• We Cook the Facts (164): By selecting sampling (attending to ads for the cars we bought), by conversational practices (What's the best thing about my ability to _____? Vs. Is there anyone better than me at ____).

• Evidence that we cook the facts comes from situations in which there are symmetrical and predictable inconsistencies in a group's interpretation (sports fans 168), or studies that show that we select evidence that fits our views (169).

Gilbert, Chapter 9: Immune to Reality (Openness to Investment in Reality)

• Clever Hans

• Confabulation: People are unaware of many influences on them, but when asked will create a story or reason that provides a plausible explanation other than the actual influence. Priming studies. Negative words flashed on screen produces more negative judgements. (note about being "strangers to ourselves" -- connects with Leary, Curse of Self)

• Some evidence (174) to suggest that deliberate methods to induce good feeling fail.

• thesis on 174: not only do we cook the facts, but we need to consume them in a way that doesn't reveal the fabrication or alteration.

• Looking forward/backward: asymmetry in judgments of events when looked at prospectively and retrospectively. (read thesis 175)

• Judge/Jury Rejection study: prospectively we aren't aware that we'll more easily write off the judge's decision than the jury's. (176) -- key issue: if the explanation for the result is so obvious, why can't the test subjects anticipate it?

• great example of confabulation too.

• Regret: when we blame ourselves for outcomes we might have anticipated. A kind of "personal liability" emotion. Sometimes useful. Problem of the number of things you didn't do. (Possible explanation for research on p. 179 suggesting that we regret omissions more than commissions, though we predict that we'll regret commissions more.) follow point on p. 179.

• Psychological Immune System: triggers: very bad things more than slightly bad things. Concept of "psychological investment" in initiation rites study (181). Triggers at work in the negative feedback study (182).

Inescapability trigger:

• Claims that we experience "sunk costs" in relationships. Trade offs between changing our experience and changing our view of our experience. Photo selection satisfaction study involving "escape" and "no escape" conditions. (184). (notice prospection/retrospection assymetry)

• Speculative Theory about how we use explanations: beneficial effect of writing about trauma, simulated student study involving identified vs. unidentified admirers. Happiness buzz lasts longer on unidentified. Suggested as support for theory. Unexplained events have bigger impact. Other studies suggest explanations can get in the way of emotional impact.

November 19

McMahon, Chapter 6, "Liberalism and Its Discontents"

• Happiness in Franklin (industry, but also contentment) & the Declaration of Independence (pursuit of happiness) --

• Interesting issue of connection of happiness and property.

• Also, evidence of the way early US worked out relationship between religion and happiness. Jefferson's secularization of Christ. Locke's "reasonable christianity". Is "pursuit" language in American pol. tradition evidence of an echo of Christian or classical culture?

• "Classical Republicanism" -- ties individual happiness to civic virtue. read p. 324.
• Francis Hutcheson -- public virtue promotes private pleasure.

• Adam Smith -- relation of capitalist motive to underlying moral sense. Influence of Scottish enlightenment on our cultural experiment in US.

• Alexis de Toqueville's view of American culture (1805-1859) -- observations on American religion (its practicality and closeness to the project of happiness) and worries about the "dark side" of the relentless pursuit of pleasure and private good. Mill quotes de Toqueville approvingly, worrying about Am. "restlessness" amid abundance.

• Mill's crisis of faith in happiness (1. Can individual goals sustain our interest? 2. Can happiness be promoted directly?). Insight about the "indirectness" of the pursuit of happiness ("Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so." ). Discussion of model on happiness in On Liberty. Mostly negative, but acknowledgement of need for "experiments in living".

• Max Weber -- social theorist who analyzed the relationship between capitalism and protestant theology -- capital accumulation as a sign and partial assurance of God's blessing. Considered Franklin a case in point for extolling the virtue of denying pleasure in the name of accumulation. Many find in Weber's critique of materialism a critique of later materialist culture. Note Weber's scepticism, p. 359, about making happiness the goal of social policy.

November 21

Bok, Chapter 3, “Should Policy-Makers Use Happiness Research?”

Arguments against using happiness research in government and public policy work:

• Neutrality - there are lots of goals in life; we might want gov't to be neutral about them.
• Liberty a contender - but should it be the only goal?
• Importance of “Private Ordering” -
• Could Gov’t do it?
• Brave New World -
• Melancholy Genius Theories - productivity and creativity
• Can someone’s happiness level change? P. 52-53
• Ethical issue: Shouldn’t discount happiness of poor because they are used to it.
• Conclusion: 57 Happiness research won’t reduce policy to science, but might help us make trade-offs that raise general well-being.

Bok, Chapter 4, “Growth”

• background on growth of growth as an issue: importance, yet recentness
• Is No Growth an option?
• Growth is good theories:

• builds social bond
• funds good things
• halting growth could be a disaster

• Proposal to reduce work week. What if use of new leisure time goes to TV and other stupid things.

December 3

Carol Graham, "Happiness in Africa" 66-73

• Major Results on optimism among the poorest / among African poor.

• Explanations for results: methodological problem (note issues about measuring optimism from existing questions)

• Possible significance of findings, if validated in the future: we might be tracing a dynamic in our cultural psychology in which happiness and optimism start to operate differently, particularly at low levels of material well being.

Carol Graham, Chapters 7 and 8, "Happiness Around the World"

• Looks at cultural-level phenomena like "Social Capital," (social trust, cultural institutional relationships (inc. religion), friendships and relationships), in particular how these are valued differently in different cultures. ex. p. 191-2.

• Political variables: freedom, participation in democracy, favorable attitudes about market (note reverse causation), stable democracy.

• "virtuous circles" -- 199