The characteristic style in which you interact with the world around you, including other people, is known as your personality. And your personality has a major influence on your happiness for two basic reasons: first, because it shapes your lifestyle and experiences; and second, because it affects how you perceive those experiences.
The experiences you have during the course of your life do not just randomly happen to you: they are to some extent your own creations and depend on your personality. Someone who is highly sociable, outgoing and adventurous is likely to live their life differently from someone who is shy, timid and conservative. Personality also affects how we perceive and construe our experiences. As well as having a larger number of positive experiences, happy people tend to interpret those experiences more positively. For their part, unhappy people have an unfortunate habit of interpreting objectively similar experiences in less positive ways, thereby reinforcing their doleful view of the world and prolonging their unhappiness.
Research suggests that personality has a stronger influence on the emotional elements of happiness (namely, pleasure and displeasure) than it does on the thinking element (satisfaction). Someone may have the sort of personality that makes them feel low much of the time, perhaps because they are shy and anxious. Nonetheless, they may still derive considerable satisfaction from their work and family life, leaving them reasonably happy overall. Personality traits typically remain stable over time, which helps to explain why an individual’s overall level of happiness will also tend to be moderately stable.
The characteristics of happy people
We have seen, then, that happiness is a reflection both of who we are and what happens to us. But which particular aspects of personality and circumstances make the biggest differences to happiness? Some are more important than others. As we saw in chapter 2, happiness comes in many forms, comprising different blends of pleasure, displeasure and satisfaction, and each blend can be achieved in many different ways. Nonetheless, some patterns can be discerned among the complexities. Happy people usually have most or all of the following characteristics in common.
1. Connectedness
Probably the single most important and consistent characteristic of happy people is that they are connected to other people by personal relationships. Happy children typically have secure and loving relationships with their parents, get on well with other children, and have one or more good friends. For their part, happy adults typically have one or more close relationships with a partner, relatives or friends, plus a range of shallower relationships with friends, acquaintances and colleagues.
One of the main themes of this book is that personal relationships are central to happiness; we shall be exploring this further in the next chapter. The support, confidence and emotional security that come from close personal relationships form the bedrock of happiness, especially for children. And when it comes to relationships, quality is more important than quantity. One close relationship with a partner, parent or friend may be sufficient to sustain happiness, in a way that hundreds of casual acquaintanceships rarely achieve.
To have any relationships at all, of course, a person must have some basic willingness and ability to interact with other people. The more someone is naturally drawn to the company of others, the more relationships they are likely to have and the greater their scope to form close relationships. That is one reason why socialites tend to be happier than recluses. The philosopher Bertrand Russell hit the nail on the head when he wrote that to like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness. Over the years, research has consistently found that sociable people are, on average, happier than those who find company difficult or unattractive. For example, a long-term study of everyone born in the UK in one particular week in March 1958 found that those who were more sociable during their teens were significantly happier when assessed again in their mid-thirties.
Much of the psychological research in this area has focused on a personality characteristic known as extroversion, which is essentially an indirect measure of sociability. Extroverts are friendly, outgoing, sociable, warm and active. They have a natural tendency to enjoy social situations and social activities such as parties, games and team sports.1 Numerous studies have uncovered links between extroversion and happiness throughout the lifespan, including in old age.
By the same token, shy people – those who consistently feel anxious, self-conscious and reticent in social situations – tend to score low on measures of happiness. Shyness can be a real problem, both for adults and children. On average, shy children are lonelier, have lower self-esteem and suffer from more anxiety than sociable children. Very shy adults are found to be unhappier even than people suffering from anxiety or mood disorders. Not all shy people are unhappy, however. A significant minority of ‘happy introverts’ are happy despite not being gregarious.
Sociability and happiness form a virtuous circle: sociable people become happier because they are more connected, and happiness, in turn, makes us more sociable, as we saw in the previous chapter. Happy people spend more of their time engaging with other people and have a larger number of social interactions.
2. Social and emotional competence
A second almost universal characteristic of happy people is having at least moderate levels of social and emotional competence. To be happy, you need basic social skills to form and maintain personal relationships, together with the emotional literacy to understand and deal effectively with your own feelings and other people’s.
A socially and emotionally competent adult or child can read and interpret the feelings that underlie other people’s actions and expressions. They can work out whether another person is angry, sad, jealous or afraid, and then respond appropriately. Such skills are subtle but crucial, and not everyone is richly endowed with them. Aristotle put it like this: ‘Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.’
Individuals with poor social skills are, not surprisingly, at greater risk of being socially isolated, with potentially damaging consequences for their happiness and health. Children and adults who lack emotional literacy find it hard to manage their own feelings or to understand other people’s feelings. They consequently have more problems coping with anger and aggression, among other things. Studies of school children have found that those who are poor at understanding and managing emotions are more likely to become violent. Responding aggressively may be the only tactic in their repertoire for dealing with everyday situations of conflict.
Socially and emotionally competent people are better equipped to succeed in the classroom and in the adult world of work. They tend to be better motivated, more persistent, more focused and less easily diverted by upsets or squabbles. Social and emotional competence is a stronger predictor of children’s future success than narrow measures such as exam grades. It even reduces the long-term risk of drug abuse: studies have found that teenagers with good social skills are significantly less likely to be using drugs when they are in their thirties.
3. Freedom from excessive anxiety
We saw in chapter 2 that happiness is a mixture of three basic elements: pleasure, the absence of displeasure, and satisfaction. Being prey to frequent unpleasant emotions can erode happiness. And the unpleasant emotion that probably does most to erode happiness among the largest number of people is anxiety – that nagging sense that something might go wrong. Research confirms that anxious individuals who frequently worry about themselves or their loved ones tend to be less happy. Conversely, happy people typically experience low levels of anxiety and are less inclined