The Paradox of Happiness
1. It’s plain common sense—the most happiness you feel, the less
2. Unhappiness you experience. It’s plain common sense, but it’s not true.
3. Recent research reveals that happiness and unhappiness are not really flip
4. sides of the same emotion. They are two distinct feelings that, coexisting,
5. rise and fall independently.
6. “You’d think that the higher a person’s level of unhappiness, the lower
7.their level of happiness and vice versa ,” says Edward Diener, a University of
8. Illinois professor of psychology who has done much of the new work on
9. positive and negative emotions. But when Diener and other researchers
10. measure people’s average levels of happiness and unhappiness, they often
11. find little relationship between the two.
12. The recognition that feelings of happiness and unhappiness can
13. coexist much like love and hate in a close relationship may offer valuable
14. clues on how to lead a happier life. It suggests, for example, that changing or
15. avoiding things that make you miserable may well make you less miserable
16. but probably won’t make you any happier. That advice is backed up by an
17. extraordinary series of studies which indicate that a genetic predisposition
18. for unhappiness may run in certain families. On the other hand, researchers
19. have found, happiness doesn’t appear to be anyone’s heritage. The capacity
20. for joy is a talent you develop largely for yourself.
21. Psychologists have settled on a working definition of the feeling—
22. happiness is a sense of subjective well-being. They’ve also begun to find out
23. who’s happy, who isn’t and why. To date, the research hasn’t found a simple
24. recipe for a happy life, but it has discovered some of the actions and
25. attitudes that seem to bring people closer to that most desired of feelings.
26. In a number of studies of identical and fraternal twins, researchers
27. have examined the role genetics plays in happiness and unhappiness. The
28. work suggests that although no one is really born to be happy, sadness may
29. run in families.
30. In one University of Southern California study, psychologist Laura
31. Baker and colleagues compared 899 individuals who had taken several
32. commonly used tests for happiness and unhappiness. The men and women
33. included 105 pairs of identical and fraternal twins as well as grandparents.
34. parents and young adult offspring from more than 200 other families.
35. “Family members,” Baker reports, “resembled each other more in their
36. levels of unhappiness than in their levels of happiness.” Furthermore,
37. identical twins were much closer than fraternal twins in unhappiness, a
38. finding that implies a genetic component.
39. In a study at the University of Minnesota, twins (some raised
40. together and others who had grown up apart) were tested for a wide range
41. of personality traits. In terms of happiness-defined as the capacity to enjoy.
42. life-identical twins who were separated soon after birth were considerably
43. less alike than twins raised together. But when it came to unhappiness, the
44. twins raised apart-some without contact for as long as 64 years-were as
45.similar as those who’d grown up together.
46. Why is unhappiness less influenced by environment? When we’re
47. happy we more responsive to people and keep up connections better than
48. when we’re feeling sad.
49. This doesn’t mean, however, that some people are born to be sad and
50. that’s that. Genes may predispose one to unhappiness, but disposition can
51. be influenced by personal choice. You can increase your happiness through
52. your own actions.
53. In a series of experiments by psychologists John Reich and Alex
54. Zautra at Arizona State University, they asked students to select their
55. favorite activities from a list of everyday pleasure—things like going to a
56. movie, talking with friends and playing cards.
57. Then the researches instructed some of the subjects to increase the
58. number of favorite activities they participated in for one month (the other
59. participants in the study served as controls and did not vary their activity
60. level). Results: Those who did more of the things they enjoyed were happier
61. than those who didn’t. The conclusion, then, is that the pleasure we get from
62. Life is largely ours to control.
