Happiness

by Ed Diener

  Individual genetic emotional set points and the potent process of adaptation can be so powerful that they are able to temper even very strong positive events. Several years ago, our friend Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, an incredibly celebrated award. In the wake of the Nobel awards ceremony in Sweden, Danny - like all Nobel laureates - received intense media attention, attractive offers for book contracts, and honorary doctoral degrees from prestigious universities around the world. It was, as you might imagine, a rush, the type of career high point all of us envy and only very few achieve. How long do you think this period of intense euphoria lasted? When we asked Danny about the duration of the emotional glow of the Nobel Prize, he confided that it was good fun for about a year, primarily because of all the social invitations, and then it was back to business as usual in his research laboratory at Princeton.

  What about adaptation to circumstances that are even better than winning the Nobel Prize? What could be better than winning the world's most prestigious award, you ask? How about recovering from cancer? In one mood-related study we conducted in Illinois, research participants completed daily mood questionnaires over the span of several months. We happened to collect happiness data from a 21year-old student, whom we will call Henry, during eighty of the most important days of his life. Henry was afflicted with Hodgkin's disease. As chance would have it, we collected happiness data from Henry while he was being treated for cancer, on the day he learned that the treatment was effective in wiping out his cancer, and in the days that followed. Picture how overjoyed you would be if you learned that your cancer was in full remission! Imagine what a profound and lifechanging event that would be. Wouldn't people after recovering from cancer have a new lease on life, a new ability to experience intensely in the moment? We show Henry's happiness data in figure 9.2.

  As you can clearly see from the figure, Henry's moods fluctuated daily, sometimes bouncing into joyous feelings and sometimes spilling into the blues. And then, almost halfway through the study, Henry received the news that his latest treatments had been successful, and that the cancer was, for all intents and purposes, gone. As you can see, and as you might expect, Henry showed a huge spike in happiness on that day, day 38. What is far more surprising is that Henry's happiness quickly dropped back to his mildly happy average. In Henry's case, adaptation was so strong that the euphoria of beating cancer lasted only a day or two! Of course, there were some happiness benefits for this lucky young man. You can see that during the remainder of the study Henry had many fewer days of sadness, so that his overall happiness average went up some. Henry's case provides an emotionally moving illustration of the power of adaptation.

  Figure 9.2 Henry's happiness

  At first glance, Henry's story can be alarming. Adaptation sounds like a helpful process, but how good can it be if it does not let us bask for a while in the glow of recovering from cancer? What function might adaptation serve if it keeps you from enjoying your Nobel Prize, your health, or your other life successes? Adaptation has a remarkable upside. Just as it acts as an emotional ceiling that keeps us from experiencing nonstop joy, it also protects us from being dragged into emotional pits. When we fall on tough times, adaptation is there like a trusted friend to make sure the negative feelings don't last forever.

  The two-directional nature of adaptation can be easily seen in the case of marriage. In one study, we were interested in how happy people are across the span of their marriages. This is a tough question to answer. We needed to gather data by the wheelbarrow, essentially asking the same people how happy they were, over and over, year after year. In this way we were able to chart people's emotional highs and lows over the course of their relationships. We could use this information to look at their happiness before they were married, when they married, a year after they were married, and years later. Fortunately, we were able to obtain exactly these kinds of data from Germany, where they had been tracking this type of information for over two decades. We obtained twenty-one years of happiness data on thousands of people, and you can see the results in figure 9.3.

  Figure 9.3 shows the life satisfaction over the years of a group who married during the study, and of another group who divorced during the study. The top line is the life satisfaction of those who got married, at year 0. The figure shows that people were, on average, pretty satisfied with their lives, but became more so in the year or two before their wedding. Perhaps they had finally found that special someone and were enjoying the flirting, infatuation, and anticipation of their new, serious relationship. Then, in the year of their marriages, the Germans had a peak in satisfaction. They had finally found their mate, and it was a time of family gatherings, intense support from friends, and celebration. Even in the year after the wedding - think of all those gifts, the honeymoon, the new apartment, the joint bank account - people still enjoyed elevated levels of satisfaction. But then, if you look at the years after their marriage in the figure, you can see that the Germans dropped to their earlier prewedding levels of satisfaction. The data provide clear evidence of adaptation. In short, falling in love and getting married pay off emotionally, but kick out dividends for only so long.

  Figure 9.3 Marriage and divorce

  You can also observe the protective side of adaptation in this figure. The bottom line shows the life satisfaction of those who divorced, again shown at year 0. You can see that the years leading up to the divorce were tough, with each successive year being accompanied by a further drop in satisfaction. This makes sense: you can probably imagine the arguing, yelling, periods of silence, frustration, and fuming. It is easy to picture the marriage growing worse by the year, with communication difficulties, and anger slowly driving the couples apart. Then, during the year of the divorce itself, the couples were at their well-being low point. Splitting up takes a heavy emotional toll, and the stress of losing a lover, moving, wrangling over custody of the children, and dividing assets can be particularly unpleasant.

  You can also see that as quickly as a year after the divorce, people's life satisfaction levels began to climb. They did not shoot quickly back up, but over the course of the years following the split, the people in the study became more and more satisfied. Perhaps they began enjoying the freedoms of singlehood, felt relieved at being out of such intense conflict, began dating and forging new lives for themselves. In short, they began to adjust. Adaptation, even to tough times, helped them to dig themselves out of an emotional hole and enjoy life again.

  Perhaps the most amazing illustration of adaptation and positive coping is among survivors of the Holocaust. Israeli psychologists studied several groups of Holocaust survivors, individuals who had undergone terrible experiences in Nazi Germany and had frequently lost some or all of their families. They found that many of the survivors had high subjective well-being. For example, many of the survivors reported high levels of positive emotions. The study was many decades after the Holocaust, and we don't know how long it took the survivors to cope and adapt. Nonetheless, many of the survivors were quite happy and obviously resilient. Rather than allowing themselves to be lifelong victims of the Nazis, they rebounded to create positive, happy lives for themselves. They should be a model of positive coping for all of us!

  Limits to Adaptation and Set Point Change

  If you have ever read a book on happiness or come across a magazine article or television show on the topic, then you may have already heard about this protective aspect of adaptation. The popular media are full of uplifting stories about cancer patients, divorcees, and other star-crossed folks who have courageously overcome misfortune to return to their former high levels of wellbeing. Take, for instance, the common yarn about people who have handicaps. According to this often-told story, people who suffer from serious spinal cord injuries - severe enough to leave them wheelchair-bound - bounce back emotionally. Not only do paraplegics adjust to their new circumstances, according to the legend, but they also adapt back to pre-accident levels of happiness within two mon
ths! Who wouldn't want to hear a comforting story like that? The rapid and complete adaptation of spinal cord injury victims is like a psychological insurance policy for the rest of us, in case we ever suffer a terrible accident.

  Unfortunately, as inspiring as the tale is, the rapid emotional recovery of spinal cord injury victims may be exaggerated in the popular imagination. There is a kernel of truth here, in that a famous study was conducted in which the researchers found that injury victims were less unhappy than expected, and that they actually scored in the positive range on a measure of pleasures of everyday life (like enjoying eating breakfast). And in another study, accident victims showed more happiness than specific negative emotions by eight weeks after injury. However, research shows there is more to adaptation than meets the eye. Just as there are some folks who adapt better than others, and there are conditions we adapt to better than others, there are limits to adaptation. There are instances to which we do not adapt completely. On the positive side, we may not adapt that much to sexual pleasure - the thousandth time can still be very good. On the negative side, loud music is a condition that is tough to adjust to, as any parent of a teenager can attest. This is why police tactical teams sometimes blare rock and roll music during hostage situations. People living in the landing paths of major airports often don't seem to completely adapt to the noise.

  One study looking at the happiness of sex workers in Detroit found that these women were extremely dissatisfied with their lives. In fact, the health issues, social stigma, drug use, violence, and other problems for women living on the street are so severe that the sex workers were among the least happy people ever studied. They probably had adapted to their terrible conditions to some extent, but they were still very dissatisfied.

  As for those inspiring cases of spinal cord injury victims who bounced back heroically, the psychologist Richard Lucas analyzed the happiness levels of individuals with disabilities in huge British and German samples, and found that not only do people take an emotional hit around the time of their severe disability, but their life satisfaction tends to stay lower than before. In fact, people with 100 percent disability, those that are severely challenged and unable to work at all, had little emotional recovery. This does not mean that disabled people are doomed to a life of misery. Certainly, many individuals who suffer through painful injuries and long periods of rehabilitation resume lives rich with meaning and rewarding relationships. In fact, for anyone who has gone to dinner with a friend with a disability or had the pleasure of watching wheelchair athletes compete, it is obvious how full their lives can be. But the statistical averages suggest that severe disability is an extreme life circumstance that is difficult to fully adapt to for the average person. People with disabilities very often reach a positive state again, although usually it is not quite as satisfying as before. Despite the widespread capacity for adjustment, adaptation is not a process that completely frees us from our circumstances.

  The idea of a limit to adaptation is important, but perhaps not as important as the recent findings about set point. Exciting new evidence suggests that the happiness set point can change! Genetically determined happiness and adaptation need not be an emotional cage from which there is no hope of escape. Increasingly, research on genetics is showing that our DNA is not akin to an inherited fate, but rather gives us a range of possibilities. For example, differences in intelligence are partly inherited, but IQ scores have gone up as schooling became universal and nutrition improved. Where happiness is concerned, there is now the prospect of increasing your inborn tendency for happiness. Of course, it is not usually possible to turn natural worriers into carefree adventurers, but small to moderate changes are certainly possible.

  Some of the fascinating new evidence for set point change comes from the huge German sample used to evaluate marital happiness, as well as thousands of British citizens studied over fourteen years. Over the course of the research, the happiness of most people remained fairly stable - their positivity would bounce up or fall down in reaction to life events, but not change much for long from its earlier levels. Despite the year-to-year fluctuations in happiness that are familiar to all of us, most folks showed a fairly consistent average level of happiness over time. However, the happiness of about onefourth of the people did change. Their levels of happiness changed significantly and substantially from the first five years to the last five years. That is, their emotional set point actually moved. Why might this be the case? What is so unique or special about this group? What might have happened in their lives that can provide us with lessons about changing our own happiness?

  Figure 9.4 Unemployment and widowhood

  Careful analyses reveal that some powerful events can change our baselines. Not only did some of the participants in the study get married and divorced over the course of the research, but some of them also lost their jobs or their spouses. You can see the data on unemployment and widowhood in figure 9.4. Look at unemployment first. No one likes to get fired from a job, and the process of unsuccessfully searching for work can be just as disheartening. As you can see in the figure, people who are about to lose their jobs experience a drop in life satisfaction. Perhaps they know that layoffs are looming on the horizon, or maybe they are aware of their own poor performance on the job. In any event, their satisfaction bottoms out at the time they lose their job.

  The unfortunate folks who lose their jobs adapt somewhat to their new circumstances, in that their happiness climbs during the postunemployment period. But the adaptation is not complete, perhaps because there is a cascade of bad events after losing one's job, such as marital discord and loss of friends. Sad to say, there was a kind of "emotional scarring," in that the people in this sample did not fully return to their preunemployment levels of happiness. Even after they found a new job and earned almost the same income as before, they were lower in life satisfaction - perhaps because of the feelings of insecurity and the blow to self-esteem they experienced from their layoff. Of course, these are broad averages, and not everyone will react to unemployment in the same way. Other factors, such as the length of unemployment, almost certainly also play a role in how adversely it will affect an individual. Regardless of individual variation, however, unemployment is one instance of an event that can actually change the happiness set point of some people.

  The case of widowhood presents another illustration of a possible change in emotional baseline. Figure 9.4 clearly shows how people's life satisfaction falls over time, presumably mirroring their spouse's declining health. Then, in the year the spouse passes away, there is a precipitous drop in happiness. This is, of course, more than understandable. We invest so much in our beloved partners that the loss can be traumatic and overwhelming. As with divorce and unemployment, the process of adaptation kicks in as the bereaved begin the slow process of learning to live life without their spouses. You can see that widows, who make up most of the sample, do grow more satisfied as times goes on, but adjustment takes a long time in the case of widowhood. Even five years later, most spouses have not completely returned to their former levels of life satisfaction. In fact, on average, it takes eight years to regain those old feelings of well-being! It is still important to recognize, however, that on average even the unemployed and widowed were in the slightly satisfied zone, about the neutral midpoint of the scale.

  Although these findings may appear to be a bit depressing, there is good news as well. For one thing, it is essential to remember that the life satisfaction scores of the unemployed and widowed are still above neutral in the satisfied zone, even though they are lower than before. Furthermore, it is important to understand that the happiness set point can be raised as well as lowered. Some of the most compelling evidence for this comes from the medical treatment of depression. For folks who suffer from the guilt, lethargy, sadness, and hopelessness of depression, it can be heartening to remember that there are a number of effective treatments.

  Several types of psychotherapy have been shown to work w
ell for many people, and, of course, there are psychopharmacological treatments. Antidepressant medication isn't big business just because of widespread marketing; the use of medications can be effective. Recent research has shown that many folks who take certain types of depression-fighting medications, such as those that affect the way that the brain processes serotonin and norepinephrine, and simultaneously receive "talking therapy" can experience long-term gains in wellbeing even after they quit taking the pills. Although every detail of the mechanisms by which antidepressants work is not known, it is possible that their use causes structural changes in neural networks and neuro-transmitter processing.

  Chronically engaging in pleasurable activities, surrounding yourself with upbeat friends, and experiencing successes at work can result in gains in your happiness baseline. As noted in chapter 3, some individuals end up happier after marriage than they were before, even after adaptation takes place. While everyone experiences the occasional tiff with a spouse or frustrating day at the office, people who regularly have successes may find that positivity begets more positivity. Initial research shows that people can become more optimistic, hardier, and even happier over time.

  New brain imaging technologies, the mapping of the human genome, and other recent advances have led to increased understanding about how genes and physiology affect our feelings, decisions, and behaviors. The case of happiness is no exception. We have progressed from ancient accounts of bodily humors and laypersons' guesses about the causes of happiness to an understanding of the complex ways in which our inborn temperaments do, and do not, affect our happiness. We now know, for instance, that our DNA does play an important role in our happiness. At the physiological level, your genetic code determines how your brain uses hormones that are vital to a positive outlook on life. We know that certain environmental factors, such as nutrition, can also affect our moods. Our findings about the happiness set point provide several fascinating insights into some of the processes that underlie happiness.