The NYT follows the economist on talking about the studies about happiness. In Happiness 101, D.T. Max talks about how some universities in the USA are offering courses on Happines and the impact it has on some of the students.
Some quotes I found enlightening:
The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure -they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill- and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. […] In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.[…] that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.
Some comments about the state of “flow”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages.
Some stunning correlation between being happy and living longer. It could be concluded that the best for your health apparently is being happy and not smoking (I would argue that there is strong correlation between those two factors too):
Being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers.
And a reference to an intriguing study about how being happier leads to more creative and broader thinking
Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” […] The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones. For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern -i.e. the triangular pattern- while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)
And then the article goes for a couple more pages about the merits and demerits of teaching such classes in colleges, who supports them and who does not. In all, a very enjoyable read, although quite long (8 A4 pages)
