The Univ. of Michigan press release describing work from the World Values Survey based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Denmark is the happiest nation in the world and Zimbabwe the unhappiest. The United States ranks 16th on the list, immediately after New Zealand.
A number of studies have revealed a "positivity shift" with aging; whereas young adults are more likely to remember negative information than positive or neutral information, older adults may be at least as likely (or even more likely) to remember positive information compared with negative information. It has been proposed that this "positivity shift" may occur because older adults put more emphasis on emotion regulation goals than do young adults, with older adults having a greater motivation to derive emotional meaning from life and to maintain positive affect. In the service of these goals, older adults may focus their attention on things that will elicit pleasant feelings and may process positive information in a more self-referential fashion. Thus this work (slightly edited) from Kensinger and Schacter probing the issue is of interest:
Young and older adults are more likely to remember emotional information than neutral information. The authors performed a magnetic resonance imaging study examining the neural processes supporting young (ages 18–35) and older (ages 62–79) adults' successful encoding of positive, negative, and neutral objects (e.g., a sundae, a grenade, a canoe). The results revealed general preservation of the emotional memory network across the age groups. Both groups recruited the amygdala and the orbito-frontal cortex during the successful encoding of positive and negative information. Both ages also showed valence-specific recruitment: right fusiform activity was greatest during the successful encoding of negative information, whereas left prefrontal and temporal activity was greatest during the successful encoding of positive information. These valence-specific processes are consistent with behavioral evidence that negative information is processed with perceptual detail, whereas positive information is processed at a conceptual or schematic level. The only age differences in emotional memory emerged during the successful encoding of positive items: Older adults showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and along the cingulate gyrus than young adults. Because these regions often are associated with self-referential processing, these results suggest that older adults' mnemonic boost for positive information may stem from an increased tendency to process this information in relation to themselves.Figure - Regions that showed a stronger correspondence to subsequent general recognition (i.e., subsequently recognized > subsequently forgotten) for the positive items than for the neutral or negative items. Red regions showed this correspondence for both young and older adults. Green regions showed this correspondence for the older adults but not for the young adults. No regions showed this correspondence for the young adults but not the older adults, consistent with the behavioral finding that only older adults showed mnemonic enhancement for the positive items.
I pass on a brief news review by Leonie Welberg from Nature Neuroscience:
The neuropeptide oxytocin is released during childbirth, suckling, touch and orgasm, suggesting that it might have a 'pro-social' function. This idea was strengthened by a recent study in Nature (see my 2/13/06 post, or enter oxytocin inthe search box in the left column of this blog), which showed that an oxytocin nasal spray caused people playing a 'trust' game to retain their trust in a stranger who was looking after their money, even though this trust was violated on many occasions. At the same time, the oxytocin spray decreased activity in the amygdala and the caudate nucleus, brain areas that are involved in the regulation of fear and decision making, respectively.
"We now know ... what exactly is going on in the brain when oxytocin increases trust," says lead researcher Thomas Baumgartner of the University of Zürich, Switzerland. "It seems to diminish our fears." (BBC News, 21 May 2008.) As humans are typically averse to taking social risks, "...a little bit of oxytocin may facilitate carrying on relationships with others," according to Mauricio Delgado, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. (ScienceNOW, 21 May 2008.)
How people in real-life situations develop and retain trust in others is another question, however. "They certainly don't do it by spraying stuff up each other's noses," says Paul Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. (Science News, 21 May 2008.)
Nevertheless, the findings have implications for understanding mental disorders in which deficits in social behaviour are observed and "...could provide a bridge for potential clinical applications," thinks Delgado (BBC News). An oxytocin spray might help people with a social phobia or autism. "Autistic people also have a fear of social situations and have problems interacting, so it is very likely that oxytocin could help," says Baumgartner. "This hormone seems to play a very specific role in social situations so might be able to improve autism." (BBC News.)
Mechoulam and colleagues find that incensole acetate (IA), an ingredient of Boswellia resin (frankincense), stimulates a little understood brain ion channel (TRPV3) to cause anti-anxiety and antidepressive behaviors in mice. This suggest that TRPV3 channels in the brain may play a role in emotional regulation. IA has no effect on 27 other receptors, ion channels, and transport proteins in the brain. The suggests the potential for an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs.
Napier and Jost offer an interesting perspective in their article in Psychological Science. Here is an edited excerpt from their general discussion:
In three studies, using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine additional countries, we consistently found that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style (liberals becoming less satisfied with their current situation because of the deleterious effects of rumination and introspection - versus conservatives tending to prefer relatively simple, unambiguous answers to life's questions). We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality—a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals. These findings are consistent with system-justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function. The studies suggest that conservatism provides an emotional buffer against the negative hedonic impact of inequality in society.The relation between political orientation and self-reported happiness as a function of the Gini inequality index, 1974 through 2004.
Check out this review by Dwight Garner of "EVERYDAY DRINKING - The Distilled Kingsley Amis". The book deals with more than the physical manifestations of a hangover:
...What also urgently needs to be treated, he observed, is the metaphysical hangover — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that looms on the grizzled morning after...Amis recommended, among other things, a course of “hangover reading,” one that “rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim."..Thus he suggested beginning with Milton — “My own choice would tend to include the final scene of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” he wrote, “with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6” — before running through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Ambler and, finally, a poulticelike application of light comedies by P. G. Wodehouse and Peter De Vries.
The June 2008 issue of Scientific American has an article by Zak on the neurobiology of trust, and the hormone oxytocin. I've previously mentioned Zak's work, and if you enter 'oxytocin' in MindBlog's search box in the left column you will pull up numerous previous posts on oxytocin, trust, and affiliative behaviors, some of which the Zak article mentions (for example, inhaling a nasal spray containing oxytocin increases trusting behaviors). I thought I would show one graphic from the article relevant to the fact that trust is among the strongest known predictors of a country’s wealth. Nations with low levels tend to be poor. Societies with low levels are poor because the inhabitants undertake too few of the long-term investments that create jobs and raise incomes. Such investments depend on mutual trust that both sides will fulfill their contractual obligations.
From from PJH at editor's choice, Science Magazine.
Some neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, have been implicated in adjusting a person's mood. The circadian clock mechanisms, meanwhile, keep the organism's physiology tuned for appropriate responses to day or night. Hampp et al. have demonstrated how the molecular signaling pathways for circadian rhythms might intersect with the brain's establishment of general mood. They found that the promoter of the gene encoding monoamine oxidase A (Maoa), which stabilizes some aspects of mood and breaks down dopamine and serotonin, contains binding sites for several clock proteins and showed that circadian oscillation was driven by the Maoa promoter in neuroblastoma cells. Mice lacking Per2, a gene that stabilizes circadian rhythms, showed damped expression from the Maoa promoter. Observations of the Per2 mutant mice in response to an unavoidable problematic situation--taken as a proxy for despair in humans--showed correlations with disorders of mood.
Out of good 'ol Austin Texas (the original slacker capital), this foil to today's first post (see below), a great site of demotivational materials - just the antidote one needs to the happiness and corporate motivation industry. Check out the lithographs and also the article by Rob Walker.
Above, the "this glass is now half empty" cup; below right, the "GIVE UP" lithograph: "At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser."
...having what you want, wanting what you have, or both? In Rabbi Hyman Schachtel's 1954 book on "The real enjoyment of living" he proposed that "happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have." To test this idea Larsen and McKibban subject psychology undergraduates at Texas Tech Univ. in Lubbock, TX. to experiments in which they generate lists of "items that you have in your life, as well as items that you want." Both variables accounted for unique variance in happiness. (The students also completed several different standard subjective happiness questionaires.)
As suggested by Schachtel's maxim, participants who wanted what they had more than others did tended to be happier, r = .36, prep > .99 (see Figure, left panel). In addition, however, those who had more of what they wanted tended to be happier, r = .41, prep > .99 (Figure, right panel), as did those who simply had more things, r = .25, prep = .97. In contrast, the extent to which people simply wanted things was uncorrelated with happiness, r = .11.3
I recently attended the Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion (Now in its 14th year). Its topic was "Emotion, Consciousness and Psychopathology." I want to mention the talk given by A.D.(Bud) Craig, which was a real tour de force, the kind of science I feel I can integrate with my own personal experience. Its title was "How do you feel? The neurobiological basis for human awareness of feelings from the body." I have referenced Craig's work in previous posts, also check here. Here are PDFs of his two recent review articles in Trends in Cognitive Science (2005) and Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2002) which I recommend.
His view is that in our nervous systems, there is a fundamental bilateral partitioning or separation, from basic spinal cord and brain stem homeostatic systems to our highest prefrontal lobe functions, in which the right side spends energy and the left side brings it in. This reflects the relative activities of the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous systems. (enter 'parasympathetic' in the google search box in the left column to see some previous mindblog posts on autonomic regulation of chilling out versus getting excited).
The right and left insula appear to be central in processing feelings, all the way from basic (interoceptive) body sensing (posterior insula) up through subjective feelings, disgust, trust, anger, social hurt, empathic happiness, lust, pain, etc. All of these are homeostatic emotional currency that help regular body balance all the way from from blood pressure, glucose, heart rate, salt regulation, up through social self image. Here is a graphic from his 2005 article that shows the central role of the left and right anterior insula (which act as the sensory cortex of limbic system) in receiving information about body state and feeling from sympathetic and parasympathetic input and then interacting with anterior cingulate (the motor cortex of the limbic system) and frontal cortex. (click to enlarge):
Positive emotions (pleasant music, maternal emotions) correlate with enhanced left parasympathic, left anterior insula, left anterior cingulate and left frontal activation, while negative emotions (anger, fear, etc.) enhance activation of the corresponding structures on the right side.
Some very simple manipulations can stroke the relative activation of these two systems. Slowing one's breathing, as usually happens during meditation dials up the left anterior insula system, while breathing more rapidly increases anxiety and right anterior insula activity. In fact, giving instruction to a subject to breathe more slowly or more rapidly can change their emotional reaction to stimuli. In one experiment mentioned by Craig, a picture of a baby seal elicited warm nuturing emotions when breathing was slowed, but when breathing was increased, subjects were more likely to suspect the seal might attack or bite them! Experiments are now being attempted to measure whether oxytocin (the affiliative, trusting hormone) correlate with left insular activation while right insula activation correlates with cortisone (the stress hormone) release.
This sort of global description fascinates me, because it instructs us in how integrated a package we are, and how attention to some of the basement details of our daily life (such as breathing) can fundamentally alter our mood and temperament.
Some interesting observations from Tabibnia et al. They:
...examined self-reported happiness and neural responses to fair and unfair offers while controlling for monetary payoff. Compared with unfair offers of equal monetary value, fair offers led to higher happiness ratings and activation in several reward regions of the brain. Furthermore, the tendency to accept unfair proposals was associated with increased activity in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in emotion regulation, and with decreased activity in the anterior insula, which has been implicated in negative affect. This work provides evidence that fairness is hedonically valued and that tolerating unfair treatment for material gain involves a pattern of activation resembling suppression of negative affect.Figure legend - Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), ventral striatum, and amygdala activation associated with fairness preference. The illustration (a) shows the location of clusters with significantly greater activation in response to fair compared with unfair offers.
Figure legend - Brain activation associated with the tendency to accept unfair offers. The illustrations show the location of areas in (a) left anterior insula and (c) right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (right VLPFC) whose activation predicted this tendency.
Some of you might wish to check out the website of the new International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA). It's board includes Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Tal Ben-Shahar, etc. The organization seeks to promote the science and practice of positive psychology and to facilitate communication and collaboration among researchers and practitioners around the world. A first world congress is planned for June 2009 in Philadelphia.
In the Business section of the NY Times, Leonhardt points to a recent article by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that disagrees with a classic paper published by Richard Easterlin in 1974, in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction. The prevailing idea as been that once a basic level of subsistence has been reached people care more about how much they make with respect to those around them than they do about their absolute level of income. An 'aspiration treadmill' makes people continuously dissatisfied (You own an iPod, now you want an iPod touch). Better public opinion data has been obtained over the past 34 years, and the bottom line is that income does matter, money indeed tends to bring happiness, even if it doesn’t guarantee it.
If anything...absolute income seems to matter more than relative income. In the United States, about 90 percent of people in households making at least $250,000 a year called themselves “very happy” in a recent Gallup Poll. In households with income below $30,000, only 42 percent of people gave that answer. But the international polling data suggests that the under-$30,000 crowd might not be happier if they lived in a poorer country.Here is a summary graphic from Leonhardt's article (click to enlarge):
Here is yet more compelling evidence that you are what you spend your time imagining. In a recent study in PLoS ONE, Lutz, Davidson and colleagues extend their previous work on correlations between brain states and meditation to show that one particular kind of Buddhist meditation, which emphasizes empathetic and loving thoughts towards others and self, changes the brain's reactivity to emotional sounds. In experienced practitioners of the 'loving-kindness-compassion' meditation technique, such images caused larger reactions in the insular and anterior cingulate cortices than were observed in novices. Here is their abstract and one figure from the paper.
Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another's pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.
(AI) and (Ins.) stand for anterior insula and insula, respectively (z = 12 and z = 19, 15 experts and 15 novices, color codes: orange, p less than 5.10ˆ-2, yellow, p less than 2.10ˆ-2). B, C. Impulse response from rest to compassion in response to emotional sounds in AI (B) and Ins. (C). D–E. Responses in AI (D) and Ins. (E) during poor and good blocks of compassion, as verbally reported, for 12 experts (red) and 10 novices (blue).
Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans, little is known about the extent to which individual differences in cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this article, we report the results of two independently conceived and executed studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, one in Sweden and one in the United States. The results from these studies suggest that humans are endowed with genetic variation that influences the decision to invest, and to reciprocate investment, in the classic trust game. Based on these findings, we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior.
Our results are complementary to work on the neurological and hormonal substrates of behavior in the trust game and other similar social dilemma games...Enhanced oxytocin levels have been documented in subjects who received a monetary transfer that reflected an intention of trust, and later work has demonstrated that exogenously administered oxytocin increases trust. Scholars have also documented associations between cortisol and trust. These hormonal studies, therefore, indicate that further study of polymorphisms of CYP11B1, OXTR, and other genes involved in the expression and regulation of these hormones may explain part of the genetic effect on cooperation. In fact, one research team has already identified a polymorphism in the AVPR1a gene that is associated with related behavior in the dictator game.
Some support for our folk wisdom that happiness is a personal(ity) thing: Weiss et al. have used standard verbal and written questionnaires to examine personality and subjective well-being in 973 twin pairs. The written personality questionnaire used the five factor model (FFM) rating neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Numerous studies of personality have shown that genetic effects account for approximately 50% of the variance in these FFM domains. The 'happiness' measure was by a telephone interview that asked three questions: how satisfied participants were with life at the present, how much control subjects felt they had over their lives, and how satisfied they were with life overall.
They found that the genetic structure of the FFM and subjective well-being could be modeled without genetic influences specific to subjective well-being. Subjective well-being was genetically indistinct from personality traits, especially those reflecting, in part, emotional stability (low neuroticism), social and physical activity (high extraversion), and constraint (high conscientiousness). The close genetic relationship between positive personality traits and happiness traits is the mirror image of comorbidity in psychopathology. Weiss et al. suggest that their findings indicate that subjective well-being is linked to personality by common genes and that personality may form an "affective reserve" relevant to set-point maintenance and changes in set point over time.
An interesting shift in opinion on what we thought we knew about measuring happiness from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman:
Ten years ago the generally accepted position was that there is considerable hedonic adaptation to life conditions. The effects of circumstances on life satisfaction appeared surprisingly small: the rich were only slightly more satisfied with their lives than the poor, the married were happier than the unmarried but not by much, and neither age nor moderately poor health diminished life satisfaction. Evidence that people adapt — though not completely — to becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery supported the idea of a "hedonic treadmill": we move but we remain in place. The famous "Easterlin paradox" seemed to nail it down: Self-reported life satisfaction has changed very little in prosperous countries over the last fifty years, in spite of large increases in the standard of living.Then after a series of experiments thoroughly refuted this hypothesis, further problems with the original issue:
Hedonic adaptation is a troubling concept, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum. If you believe that economic growth is the key to increased well-being, the Easterlin paradox is bad news. If you are a compassionate liberal, the finding that the sick and the poor are not very miserable takes wind from your sails. And if you hope to use a measure of well-being to guide social policy you need an index that will pick up permanent effects of good policies on the happiness of the population.
...an idea that seemed to solve these difficulties: perhaps people's satisfaction with their life is not the right measure of well-being. ..happy people have high aspirations. The aspiration treadmill offered an appealing solution to the puzzles of adaptation: it suggested that measure of life satisfaction underestimate the well-being benefits of life circumstances such as income, marital status or living in California. The hope was that measures of experienced happiness would be more sensitive.
...recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.
We are more agreeable when the light is brighter: here is the abstract, and one figure, from "Exposure to bright light is associated with positive social interaction and good mood over short time periods: A naturalistic study in mildly seasonal people" published in the Journal of Psychology:
Bright light is used to treat winter depression and might also have positive effects on mood in some healthy individuals. We examined possible links between bright light exposure and social interaction using naturalistic data. For 20 days in winter and/or summer, 48 mildly seasonal healthy individuals wore a light meter at the wrist and recorded in real-time their behaviours, mood, and perceptions of others during social interactions. Possible short-term effects of bright light were examined using the number of minutes, within any given morning, afternoon or evening, that people were exposed to light exceeding 1000 lux (average: 19.6 min). Social interactions were labelled as having occurred under conditions of no, low or high bright light exposure. Independent of season, day, time, and location, participants reported less quarrelsome behaviours, more agreeable behaviours and better mood when exposed to high but not low levels of bright light. Given that the effects were seen only when exposure levels were above average, a minimum level of bright light may be necessary for its positive effects to occur. Daily exposure levels were generally low in both winter and summer. Spending more time outdoors and improving indoor lighting may help optimize everyday social behaviour and mood across seasons in people with mild seasonality.Figure - Quarrelsome behaviours (a) and agreeable behaviours (b) during time periods of no, low, or high levels of bright light exposure. Values are expressed as estimated least squares means of ipsatized frequencies, multiplied by a factor 100. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. (* Significantly different from social interactions with low bright light exposure.)
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