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.
THREE Why does happiness matter?
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Happiness may be the supreme goal, but what seems to dominate many people’s lives on a daily basis is the quest for material success. If you are a young person grinding your way through the qualification mill of school, or an adult slogging away at a demanding job, then you might feel that the pathway to happiness and the pathway to success lead in opposite directions. To be successful, it seems, you must choose hard work over cosy pastimes like schmoozing with friends. To be happy, on the other hand, you should downshift and follow your heart. The siren of happiness beckons you to do more of what you fancy, but the taskmaster of success demands that you keep striving. For parents, this dilemma can seem to apply to their children as well. Should they be pressurising their children to study harder or should they just allow them to relax and be happy?
The encouraging steer from science is that happiness and success are not mutually exclusive, nor even in competition with one another. The supposed dichotomy between happiness and success is false. In fact, happiness and success are natural bedfellows.
Happiness breeds success. The evidence from research shows that happy people are generally more successful in material terms than unhappy people. On average, they do better in their careers and earn more money; they are also healthier and live longer. Now, you might suspect that rich, successful people are happier simply because their success and wealth make them happy. But that is not even half the story. The relationship between happiness and success works even more strongly in the other direction: in other words, happiness breeds success more than success breeds happiness.
Happiness and success are intertwined because the key personal qualities that promote success are mostly the same ones that promote happiness. Success is linked with happiness, both in school and the adult workplace, because success and happiness are built from many of the same basic ingredients. These include social and communication skills, emotional literacy, freedom from excessive anxiety, motivation, resilience, optimism, self-esteem, an ability to think clearly, wisdom and physical health. If you have these qualities in abundance you are well equipped to be both happy and successful.
Happiness starts contributing to success early in life. Numerous studies have confirmed that happier children perform better at school than less happy children, other things being equal. For example, children who feel good about themselves demonstrate greater abilities in reading, spelling and maths, and are judged by their teachers to be more popular, more cooperative and more persistent in the classroom. Happy children are also more resilient and better able to handle life’s knocks. Conversely, unhappy children typically achieve less at school and are more likely to seek relief from chemicals: unhappiness, low self-esteem and anxiety are major risk factors for drug abuse and alcoholism in young people as well