Читать книгу Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood - Paul Martin - Страница 11

Throughout this book I will be referring to evidence drawn from published scientific research into the nature and causes of happiness. Some of this work is cited in the References section at the end. However, you might be wondering how scientists could possibly know all these things. After all, happiness is an essentially private experience. And if you ask someone how happy they are, can you trust their answer? Investigating happiness is not a trivial problem. Fortunately (or I could not have written this book) psychologists have devised an array of proven and reasonably reliable techniques for measuring happiness, which they have been studiously deploying for many years.

How, then, do psychologists go about measuring happiness? In most cases they do it simply by asking direct questions to suitably selected samples of people. A number of special questionnaires (or ‘scales’, as they are known in the trade) have been developed for this purpose. Some are designed specifically to assess pleasure, displeasure or satisfaction with life, while others are intended to assess happiness in the round. The simplest versions use a single question, such as ‘How satisfied are you with your life in general?’ The respondent answers on a scale of, say, one to ten. More sophisticated versions use many different questions (or ‘items’) which are designed to probe specific aspects of pleasure, displeasure or satisfaction. For example, the Oxford Happiness Inventory contains 29 different items, and for each item the respondent must select one of four statements that best describe how they have been feeling over the past several weeks – for example, ‘I do not feel happy/I feel fairly happy/I am very happy/I am incredibly happy’.

Asking people directly is not the only way of gauging their happiness. Other techniques have also been devised. These include conducting one-to-one interviews, asking partners, friends or close relatives to assess the individual’s happiness, and measuring levels of various hormones and neurotransmitter chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, cortisol and endorphins. Another widely used technique is known as experience sampling or mood sampling. In this case, the subjects carry a notebook or miniature electronic recorder around with them and make a note of their current experience, activity, mood or level of happiness at various times throughout their normal day, whenever they receive a prompt from a pager or timer.

Memory can also cast light on happiness. Studies have found that happy people find it easier than unhappy people to remember good events in their lives and to forget bad events. Unhappy people are typically faster at recalling unpleasant memories than pleasant memories. This seems to be partly because happy people actually experience more positive events than unhappy people, and partly because they are more likely to interpret any event in a positive way.

Happiness – or, rather, positive mood – can also be gauged by recording how much time people spend smiling. However, only certain types of smile indicate genuine jollity. Experiments have revealed that the so-called Duchenne smile, which involves smiling with the eyes as well as the mouth, is a true indicator of positive mood, whereas a mouth-only smile is not. The non-Duchenne smile is the contrived, have-a-nice-day smile of the fake who feels they should appear happy even when they are not. Researchers have found that people can sense whether a stranger is smiling or frowning from the sound of their voice alone, without seeing their face. In fact, you can judge whether someone is smiling just from hearing them whisper.

A good mood even has a distinctive smell. Scientists have discovered that people can judge whether someone is in a positive mood from their body odour alone. In one experiment, men and women were made to feel either cheerful or frightened by showing them funny or scary films, while their armpit odours were collected on gauze pads. A week later, the researchers presented these gauze pads to complete strangers and asked them to decide which ones had come from people in a jolly mood and which from frightened people. They were able do this – not perfectly, but well above chance levels. This ability to divine mood from smell is not as remarkable as it might seem. We humans are primates, and zoologists have known for decades that other species of primates communicate information about their emotional states, particularly fear, through smell.

One reason for placing a degree of trust in psychologists’ measurements of happiness is that these very different techniques produce results that are broadly in accord with each other. Thus, people who report feeling in a good mood and satisfied with their lives are also likely to be judged happy by their friends, to have a lot of objectively positive experiences, to smile more, to have lower levels of stress hormones in their bloodstream, and to find it easier to remember nice events. They probably smell jolly as well. Another reason for believing that measurements of happiness are meaningful is that they relate consistently to other indicators of well-being. Measures of happiness are reasonably good predictors of people’s mental health, the state of their personal relationships and family life, their success at work or in the classroom, their physical health and even how long they live. (We will be exploring these connections between happiness, health and other aspects of well-being in the next chapter.)

One day it should be possible to judge how happy someone is by analysing the patterns of electrical activity in their brain. Scientists have made some progress in this direction, but the technology is still far from mature. Techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) brain scanning have revealed that particular moods or emotions are consistently accompanied by distinctive patterns of electrical and chemical activity in various regions of the brain.¹¹ The brain activity patterns associated with happiness and sadness are quite different from one another, reinforcing the view that they are distinct mental states. A recent series of brain-scanning studies has shown that happiness is particularly associated with heightened electrical activity in an area on the left side of the brain known as the dorsal-superior region of the left prefrontal cortex. Individuals who routinely display higher levels of activity in this brain area are found to be better at regulating their emotions and faster at recovering emotionally from unpleasant experiences.

It may not be too many years before measurements of brain activity provide a new window on happiness. Meanwhile, scientists are able to assess happiness in meaningful ways, and are beginning to unravel its causes and consequences.