The Science of Lasting
Happiness The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps
getting calls from her Toyota, Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is
excited by the news：she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky
wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand
that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. Two weeks later, in
late January, the 40-year-old Lyubomirsky, who smiles often and seems to
approach life with zest and good humor, reports that she is "totally loving the
Prius". But will the feeling wear off soon after the new-car smell, or will it
last, making a naturally happy person even more so The Possibility of
Lasting Happiness An experimental psychologist investigating
the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than
most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune
that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of
happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptatiou" (享乐适应)comes from a
1970s study of lottery winners, who ended up no happier than nonwinners a year.
after their windfall (意外横财). Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even
changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health
and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that,
but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each
person’s happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone
makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness
seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline. "There’s been a tension in the
field, "explains Lyubomirsky’s main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon
of the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Some people were assuming you can
affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all
this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come
down." The Happiness Pie Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and
another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San
Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what
determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice
is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people’s differences in
happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent "Because nobody had put it
together before, that’s unexplained," Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that
when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be
"intentional activity", mental and behavioral strategies to counteract
adaptation’s downward pull. Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in
hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In
theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep
athletes’ weight below their genetic set points. But before Lyubomirsky began,
there was "a huge vacuum of research on how to increase happiness", she says.
The lottery study in particular "made people shy away from interventions",
explains eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman,
the father of positive psychology and a mentor to Lyubomirsky. When science had
scrutinized (细察) happiness at all, it was mainly through correlational studies,
which cannot tell what came first--the happiness or what it is linked to--let
alone determine the cause and effect. Finding out that individuals with strong
social ties are more satisfied with their lives than loners, for example, begs
the question of whether friends make us happier or whether happy people are
simply like lier to seek and attract friends. Lyubemirsky’s
Research Lyubomirsky began studying happiness as a graduate
student in 1989 after an intriguing conversation with her adviser, Stanford
University psychologist Lee D. Ross, who told her about a remarkably happy
friend who had lost both parents to the Holocaust(大屠杀). Ross explains it this
way, "For this person, the meaning of the Holocaust was that it was
inappropriate to be unhappy about trivial things--and that one should strive to
find joy in life and human relationships." Psychologists have long known that
different people can see and think about the same events in different ways, but
they had done little research on how these interpretations affect
well-being. So Lyubomirsky had to lay some groundwork before she
could go into the lab. Back then, happiness was "a fuzzy, unscientific topic",
she says, and although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid,
reliable and precise readings of someone’s happiness from session to session,
Lyubomirsky has brought scientific strictness to the emerging field. From her
firm belief that it is each person’s self-reported happiness that matters, she
developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale. Lyubomirsky’s working
definition of happiness--"a joyful, contented life"--gets at both the feelings
and judgments necessary for overall happiness. To this day, she rarely sees her
studies’ participants; they do most exercises out in the real world and answer
detailed questionnaires on the computer, often from home. To assess subjects’
efforts and honesty, she uses several crosschecks, such as timing them as they
complete the questionnaires. The research needed to answer
questions about lasting happiness is costly, because studies need to follow a
sizable group of people over a long time. Two and a half years ago Lyubomirsky
and Sheldon received a five-year, $1million grant from the National Institute of
Mental Health to do just that. Investigators have no shortage of possible
strategies to test, with happiness advice coming "from the Buddha to Tony
Robbins", as Seligman puts it. So Lyubomirsky started with three promising
strategies: kindness, gratitude and optimism--all of which past research had
linked with happiness. Her aim is not merely to confirm the
strategies’ effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For
example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one
study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy
than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky
therefore confirmed her hunch (预感)that timing is important. So is variety, it
turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their
good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky
is also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you
happier "I’m a basic researcher, not an applied researcher, so I’m interested
not so much in the strategies but in how they work and what goes on behind the
scenes," she explains. Initial results with the interventions
have been promising, but sustaining them is tough. Months after a study is over,
the people who have stopped the exercises show a drop in happiness. Like a drug
or a diet, the exercises work only if you stick with them. Instilling habits is
crucial. Another key: "fit", or how well the exercise matches the person. If
sitting down to imagine your best possible self (an optimism exercise) feels
contrived, you will be less likely to do it. The biggest factor may be getting
over the idea that happiness is fixed-and realizing that sustained effort can
boost it. "A lot of people don’t apply the notion of effort to their emotional
lives," Lyubomirsky declares, "but the effort it takes is enormous." Because little research had been done on the explanation of happiness, before going into the lab, Lyubomir-sky had done some ______.