The surprising science of happiness - Nancy Etcoff

[Music] [Music] This is called "Hooked on a Feeling: The Pursuit of Happiness in Human Design." I put up a somewhat dour Darwin, but a very happy chimp up there. My first point is that the pursuit of happiness is obligatory. Man wishes to be happy, only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so. 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 2000 titles with advice on the seven habits, the nine choices, the ten secrets, the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness.

Now, another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves, and so there's over 120 million prescriptions out there right now for antidepressants. Prozac was really the first absolute blockbuster drug. It was clean, efficient; there was no high, there was really no danger, had no street value. In 1995, illegal drugs were a 400 million-dollar business, representing 8% of world trade, roughly the same as gas and oil.

These routes to happiness haven't really increased happiness very much. One problem that's happening now is, although the rates of happiness are about flat as the surface of the Moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Some people might 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 and homicides. There's a rash of suicide in China, and the World Health Organization predicts by the year 2020 that depression will be the second largest cause of disability.

Now, the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world, we see that about three-quarters of people will say they're at least pretty happy, but this does not follow any of the usual trends. So, for example, these two show great growth in income, but an absolutely flat happiness curve.

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 and said that the pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest, 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. And before you know it, part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system, which is that we are both a positivity and negative system, and our negative system is extremely sensitive.

So, for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet and reacting aversively to the taste of something bitter. We also find that people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. The formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks or interactions for every one negative, and that's how powerful the one negative is.

Especially expressions of contempt or disgust will really need a lot of positive to offset that. I also put in here the stress response. We are wired for dangers that are immediate, that are physical, that are imminent. And so our body goes into an incredible reaction where endorphins come in. We have a system that is really ancient and it's really different from physical danger.

Over time, this becomes the 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.

We really have to command posts; our 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 aren't all systems alert to 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 forty and gloom, and people are now actively studying this. 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 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, and gratitude 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, there's no two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems.

People have also wanted to deconstruct. We use this word 'happy,' and it's a very large umbrella of a term that includes three emotions for which there are no English words: 'Fiero,' which is pride in accomplishment of a challenge; 'Schadenfreude,' which is happiness in another's misfortune; and 'malicious pleasure.'

And now this, it's sort of pride and joy in one's children. Absent from this list and absent from any discussions of happiness is our happiness in another's happiness; we don't seem to have a word for that. We are very sensitive to the negative, but it's in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity.

We're also born pleasure seekers. Babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter. They love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones. They'd like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces. They like to listen to constant melodies instead of dissonant melodies. Babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures.

It was once stated by a psychologist that said that 80% of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes. And this is difficult to accept; to become happier is as difficult as it is to become taller. That's nonsense. There is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes, about 50%, but there is still 50% that is unaccounted for.

Let's just go into the brain for a moment and see where happiness arises from. In evolution, we have basically at least two systems here, and they both are very ancient. One is the reward system, and that's fed by the chemical dopamine. It starts in the ventral tegmental area, goes to the nucleus accumbens, and all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made.

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 of times. It wouldn't eat, it wouldn't sleep, it wouldn't have sex; it wouldn't do anything to press this bar.

So they assumed, "Well, this must really—this must be the brain's orgasmatron." It turned out that it wasn't; that it really is a system of motivation, a system of wanting. 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." The pleasure system, as you see, which operates with internal opiates, has a hormone called oxytocin that is widely spread throughout the brain. The dopamine system, the wanting system, is much more centralized.

The other thing about positive emotions is they have a universal signal. We see here the smile, and the universal signal is not just raising the corners of the lips into the zygomatic major; it's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye, the orbicularis oculi. You see, even ten-month-old babies, when they see their mother, will show this particular kind of smile.

Extroverts use it more than introverts. People who were relieved from depression show it more after than before. So if you want to unmask a true look of happiness, you will look for this expression. Our pleasures are really ancient, and we learn, of course, many pleasures. But many of them are based on one; of course, it is Biophilia that we have a response to the natural world that's very profound.

Very interesting studies have been done on people recovering from surgery who found that people who faced a brick wall versus people who looked out on trees and nature; the people who looked out the brick wall were in the hospital longer, needed more medication, and had more medical complications. There's something very restorative about nature, and it's part of how we are tuned.

Humans, particularly so, are very imitative creatures, and we imitate from almost the second we're born. Here's a three-week-old baby, and if you stick your tongue out at this baby, the baby will do the same. 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 that 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, they've instead focused on the self and self-esteem and not self-other, sort of me-not-we. I think this has been a really tremendous problem; it goes against our biology and nature, and has it 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.

The other thing is that a piece of evidence is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide, what you find there, and it's quite interesting, is the use of the first-person singular "I," "mine," not "me" and "us." And the letters are less hopeful, and they are really alone.

Being alone is very unnatural to the human, and there's a profound need to belong. 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.

So, for example, we have three systems that underlie 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; romantic attraction, that gets into the desire system, and that's dopamine-fed; and then there's attachment, which is oxytocin and the opiates that say, "This is a long-term bond."

So the problem is that as humans, these three can separate. A person can have no long-term attachment, become romantically infatuated with someone else, and have sex with a third person. 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's 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's the prestige route, which is freely conferred.

So, one 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.

The data isn't terribly supportive of money buying happiness, but it's not irrelevant. If you look at questions like life satisfaction, you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income. You see mental well-being and mental distress going up with lower income. So clearly, there's some effect; the effect is relatively small.

One of the problems with money is materialism. 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? But I'm this kid over here saying, "Leave me alone with my toys."

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, or biological systems, that whatever motivates us is being satisfied, we can rise above them to think beyond ourselves towards self-actualization or transcendence and rise above the materialist.

So, just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so. One is, people who went under what was called a quantum change; they felt their life and that whole values had changed. Sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, you see wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, and being respected before the change.

And much more post-materialist values after. Women had a whole different set of values 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.

I end with a few quotes: "There's only one question: how to love this world?" "And if your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not potent enough to call forth its riches, and say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do." Thank you.

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