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About this talk
Cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff looks at happiness -- the ways we try to achieve and increase it, the way it's untethered to our real circumstances, and its surprising effect on our bodies.
About Nancy Etcoff
Nancy Etcoff is part of a new vanguard of cognitive researchers asking: What makes us happy? Why do we like beautiful things? And how on earth did we evolve that way? Full bio and more links
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We are wired to pursue happiness, not only to enjoy it, but to want more and more of it. So given that that's true, how good are we at increasing our happiness? Well, we certainly try. If you look on the Amazon site, there are over 2,000 titles with advice on the seven habits, the nine choices, the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness. There are so many books on it.
Now, another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves. And so there is over 120 million prescriptions out there right now for anti-depressants. Prozac was really the first absolutely blockbuster drug of the new psychopharmacology. It's really the avatar of the new psychopharmacology. It was clean, efficient, there was no high. There was really no danger. It had no street value.
And then we have, of course, the last way of increasing happiness for some. In 1995, illegal drugs were a 400 billion dollar business, representing eight percent of world trade, roughly the same as gas and oil. If all else fails, people just want to get obliterated.
So far these routes to happiness haven't really increased happiness very much. I don't have to speak for these cartoons; they kind of say what's going on here. Basically the happiness from a pill stays with the pill. Anyone who goes off an anti-depressant or other medication immediately tends to relapse. And then of course, the other self-help books you see.
One problem that's happening now is, although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Despite that we are in a world with so much more material wealth, much safer, better health, and all kinds of pharmaceuticals and treatments for mental illness, we're still seeing rises in depression and anxiety. Some people say this is because we have better diagnosis, and more people are being found out. It isn't just that. We're seeing it all over the world. In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides. There is a rash of suicide in China. And the World Health Organization predicts that, by 2020, depression will be the second largest cause of disability-related years lost, after ischemic heart disease.
Happiness stays the same as ever. Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world, we find that more people are happy than not. And so these -- I just took these random charts from Britain -- this one is from the Unites States. And we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy, the majority. But this does not follow any of the usual trends. For example, these two show great growth in income, absolutely flat happiness curves. So more money doesn't seem to be doing anything to increase happiness level.
Well, my field, the field of psychology, hasn't done a whole lot to help us move forward in understanding human happiness. In part, we have the legacy of Freud, who was a pessimist, who said that pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest, is propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality. He said, "One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation." So the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy was really what Freud called ordinary misery. (Laughter)
It in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system. Which is that we have both a positive and a negative system. And our negative system is extremely sensitive. It is our sentinel. It is there to protect us against danger. So for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet, and reacting adversely to the taste of something bitter. Yet we are much more sensitive to the bitter than the sweet. We can detect the bitter at one part per two million. We can detect the sweet at one part per 200. We also find the people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. People are very loss-averse. I also have up here the marriage formula. This is by a psychologist named John Gottman, in Seattle, who does work with couples, in couples therapy. And he finds that the formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. (Laughter) And that's how powerful the one negative is. Especially expressions of contempt or disgust, well you really need a lot of positives to upset that.
I also put in here the stress response. We're wired for dangers that are immediate, that are physical, that are imminent, and so our body goes into an incredible reaction where androgynous opioids come in. They are there to douse pain. Our blood vessels constrict so we won't bleed. Our heart pumps to get muscles to our legs. Now all of these things are fine, if we're confronting a saber-toothed tiger. But if someone is giving a violin recital, or arguing with their spouse, we have a system that is really ancient, and really there for physical danger. And so over time, this becomes a stress response, which has enormous effects on the body. Cortisol floods the brain. It destroys hippocampal cells and memory. And it can lead to all kinds of health problems. But, unfortunately, we need this system in part. If we were only governed by pleasure we would not survive.
As I said, we really have two command posts. Emotions are short-lived intense responses to challenge and to opportunity. And each one of them allows us to click into alternate selves that tune in, turn on, drop out thoughts, perceptions, feelings and memories. We tend to think of emotions as just feelings. But in fact emotions are an all-systems alert that change what we remember, what kind of decisions we make, and how we perceive things.
So let me go forward to the new science of happiness. We've come away from the Freudian gloom. And people are now actively studying this. And one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints of a single continuum. The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable, you get happier. And that isn't true. When you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation. And it's been missing. It's been missing from psychotherapy. So when people's symptoms go away, they tend to recur. Because there isn't a sense of the other half, of what pleasure, happiness, compassion, gratitude, what are the positive emotions. And of course we know this intuitively, that happiness is not just the absence of misery. But somehow it was not put forward until very recently, seeing these as two parallel systems. So that the body can both look for opportunity and also protect itself from danger, at the same time. And they sort of two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems.
People have also wanted to deconstruct. We use this word "happy" and it's this very large umbrella of a term. And it can be deconstructed into -- this is one recent suggestion -- the sensory pleasures, amusement, contentment, relief, excitement, wonder, awe, ecstasy -- from the carnal to the spiritual -- elevation, gratitude, compassion. These are from Paul Eckman's recent work. And then three emotions for which there are no English words. Fiero, which is the pride in accomplishment of a challenge. Schadenfreude, which is happiness in another's misfortune, a malicious pleasure. And naches, for all people who know this word, is a pride and joy in one's children. Absent from this list, and absent from any discussions of happiness are happiness in another's happiness. We don't seem to have a word for that. And I find that most distressing.
We are very sensitive to the negative, but it is in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity offset. That is, most people are above the average in happiness. Although we're very sensitive to the negative, we start out a little above the average in positivity. We're also born pleasure-seekers. As I said, babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter. They love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones. They like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces. They like to listen to consonant melodies instead of dissonant melodies. Babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures. People are also born with different temperaments. And so they say we have this approach and avoidance system. And some people have a primed-up approach system. And some people have a primed-up avoidance system. So here we have an example of someone, you know, born with an avoidance system.
There's a lot of talk now, in the science of happiness about is it all genes? And there was once a statement made by a psychologist that said that 80 percent of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes. And it's as difficult to become happier as it is to become taller. That's nonsense. There is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes, about 50 percent. But there is still that 50 percent that is unaccounted for. And even something such as intelligence, height, all kinds of things that have genetic -- predetermined -- also can increase quite a bit. So that doesn't limit us to the happiness we now have.
Let's just go into the brain for a moment, and see where does happiness arise from in evolution. We have basically at least two systems here. And they both are very ancient. One is the reward system. And that is fed by the chemical dopamine. And it starts in the ventral tegmental area. it goes to the nucleus accumbens, all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, where decisions are made, high level. This was originally seen as a system that was the pleasure system of the brain.
In the 1950s Olds and Milner put electrodes into the brain of a rat. And the rat would just keep pressing that bar thousands and thousands and thousands of times. It wouldn't eat. It wouldn't sleep. It wouldn't have sex. It wouldn't do anything but press this bar. So they assumed, well, it must really -- this must be, you know, the brain's orgasmatron. It turned out that it wasn't. That is really is a system of motivation, a system of wanting. It's a part of the brain that says, "I need this to survive." It gives objects what's called incentive salience. It makes something look so attractive that you just have to go after it.
That's something different from the system that is the pleasure system. Which simply says, "I like this. This feels good. This sounds good. I'm enjoying this. I feel safe. I feel warm. I feel good." The pleasure system, as you see, which is the internal opiates, there is a hormone oxytocin, is widely spread throughout the brain. But the dopamine system, the wanting system, is much more centralized to this area, the pleasure pathway.
The other thing about positive emotions is that they have a universal signal. And we see here the smile. And the universal signal is not just raising the corner of the lips into the zygomatic major. It's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye, the orbicularis oculi. And can anyone tell which one is the fake and the real smile on top here? Yes. Yes, it's B. This was originally done by the neurologist Duchenne in the 19th century. He had a man who was insensitive to pain. He stimulated every muscle on his face. He noticed that when he just raised his lips, he was grinning, but he didn't look happy. And since then people have looked at this expression and find that this seems to be the mark of true happiness. So you see, even 10-month-old babies, when they see their mother, will show this particular kind of smile. Extroverts use it more than introverts. People who are relieved of depression show it more after than before. So if you want to unmask a true look of happiness, you will look for this expression.
I also want to make the point that our pleasures are really ancient. And we learn, of course, many many pleasures. But many of them are biased. And one of them, of course, is biophilia. That we have a response to the natural world that's very profound. We have a response to human beauty. More people in the United States attend zoos than they do all of the national sporting events. People love to be part of the natural world. And this is very much a part of us. There were very interesting studies done on people recovering from surgery, who found that people who faced -- this was published in science -- people who faced a brick wall, versus people who looked out on trees and nature, the people who looked out on the brick wall were in the hospital longer, needed more medication, and had more medical complications. There is something very restorative about nature, and it's part of how we are tuned.
Now the interesting thing about emotions is that they are contagious. The shared manifold of subjectivity. I put those up there, animal world. And humans particularly so. We're very imitative creatures. And we imitate from almost the second we are born. Here is a three-week-old baby. And if you stick your tongue out at this baby, the baby will do the same. And will open its mouth. So most of our pleasures are incredibly social.
We are social beings from the beginning. And even studies of cooperation show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain. One problem that psychology has had is instead of looking at this intersubjectivity, or the importance of the social brain, to humans who come into the world helpless and need each other tremendously, is that they focus instead on the self. and self-esteem, and not self other, is sort of "me," not "we." And I think this has been a really tremendous problem. It goes against our biology and nature. It hasn't made us any happier at all.
Because when you think about it, people are happiest when in flow, when they're absorbed in something out in the world, when they're with other people, when they're active, engaged in sports, focusing on a loved one, learning, having sex, whatever. They're not sitting in front of the mirror trying to figure themselves out, or thinking about themselves. These are not the periods when you feel happiest. And I think the self-esteem movement has made it more difficult for people to be happy.
The other thing is, that a piece of evidence is, is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide, what you find there, and it's quite interesting, is use of the first person singular, "I, me, mine," not "we" and "us." And the letters are less hopeless than they are really alone. And being alone is very unnatural to the human. There is a profound need to belong. So self-focused attention brings mood down.
But there are ways in which our evolutionary history can really trip us up. Because, for example, the genes don't care whether we're happy. They care that we replicate, that we pass our genes on. They don't care whether we're happy when we do so. They'll give the bait of pleasure and lust. So for example we have three systems that underly reproduction, because it's so important. There's lust, which is just wanting to have sex. And that's really mediated by the sex hormones: testosterone, estrogen. Romantic attraction, that gets into the desire system. And that's dopamine-fed. And that's, "I must have this one person." There's attachment, which is oxytocin, and the opiate that says, this is a long-term bond. See the problem is that, as humans, these three can separate. So a person can be in a long term attachment, become romantically infatuated with someone else, and want to have sex with a third person, which can cause a lot of human unhappiness.
The other way in which our genes can sometimes lead us astray is in social status. We are very acutely aware of our social status, and always seek to further and increase it. Now in the animal world, there is only one way to increase status. And that is dominance. You know, "I seize command by physical prowess. And I keep it by beating my chest, and you make submissive gestures." Now, the human has a whole other way to rise to the top. And that is a prestige route, which is freely conferred. Someone has expertise and knowledge, and knows how to do things. And we give that person status. And that's clearly the way for us to create many more niches of status so that people don't have to be lower on the status hierarchy as they are in the animal world.
I'll go through these very quickly. "Can money buy happiness?" is a question that is often asked. And this one says, "Researchers say, you know, I'm not happier for being richer. But you know how much researchers make." (Laughter) Okay. Point well taken. The data isn't terribly supportive of money buying happiness. But it's not irrelevant. So if you look at questions like this, life satisfaction, you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income. You see mental distress going up with lower income. So clearly there is some effect. But the effect is relatively small compared to other effects on happiness.
And one of the problems with money -- is not really the money itself. It's not that money is the root of all evil, remember. It's "Love of money is the route of all evil." It is materialism. And what happens when people pursue money too avidly, is they forget about the real basic pleasures of life. So we have here, this couple. "Do you think the less fortunate are having better sex?" And then this kid over here is saying, "Leave me alone with my toys." So one of the things is that it really takes over. That whole dopamine, wanting system takes over and derails from any of the pleasure system.
Maslow had this idea back in the 1950s, that as people rise above their biological needs, as the world becomes safer, and we don't have to worry about basic needs being met, our biological system, whatever motivates us is being satisfied, we can rise above them, to think beyond ourselves, toward self-actualization or transcendence, and rise above the materialist.
To just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so. One is a kind of anecdotal study on people's shifts. People who underwent what is called a quantum change. They felt their life and their whole values had changed. About 50 people were studied like this. And sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, You see "wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, be respected," before the change. And much more post-materialist values after. Women had a whole different set of value shifts. But very simply, the only one that survived there was happiness. They went from "attractiveness" and "happiness" and "wealth" and "self control" to "generosity" and "forgiveness".
Now, in a world map, Ronald Inglehart at University of Michigan, has looked at value shifts across generations and within countries. And he thinks he finds a great deal of support for Maslow's notion that within countries, and within generations, so that as people grow up in a world without war and with material prosperities, their values shift from wanting a strong military and caring about economic factors to green party, women's liberation, quality of life, happiness ratings. And he sees this shift within a generation. It can change within a country such as our own. Right now where there is so much emphasis on war, people pull back to a more materialist point of view. But if you look at the countries on the far right, the self expression, those tend to be the countries with the highest happiness levels. So there is some hope for a post-material world.
I end with a few quotes. "There is only one question: How to love this world." And Rilke, "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches." First say to yourself what you would be. Then do what you have to do. Thank you. (Applause)
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