‘Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities,’ Aldous Huxley wrote, and I like to imagine the thought occurring to him as he sat at the wheel of his Lexus – the one with the in-car DVD player he was so excited about when he got it six months earlier. You want something because you think it’ll make you happy, and maybe it does, briefly. But then the new thing loses its shine and you revert to your earlier, less happy state. This is the ‘hedonic treadmill’, and we all seem to be trapped on it. It doesn’t just apply to material wealth, but that’s where it’s most obvious: in Britain, people are three times richer than they were in 1950, but barely any happier.9 So when I heard that a psychology professor at the University of Miami might have discovered some methods for getting off the treadmill, I had to know more.
‘The exciting idea here,’ Mike McCullough told me, ‘is that you might be able to recover some of the hedonic benefits from past events.’ At cocktail parties, I suspect, atomic physicists look down their noses at McCullough when he tells them he’s a gratitude researcher. But his experiments are rigorously scientific, and the results are startling. They show that people who keep regular ‘gratitude journals’ report fewer physical symptoms, more alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy, more sleep, more exercise and more progress towards personal goals.10 In a study by another researcher, college students were asked to make contact, just once, with someone towards whom they felt grateful. The positive effect on mood was huge at first, then tailed away, but only gradually: the difference, compared with a control group, was still detectible a month later.11
After spending some time immersing myself in this self-help business, I reached a fork-in-the-road moment: I realised I was going to have to choose between rejecting certain ideas because they sounded so corny, or accepting them because they work. Gratitude journals are at the extreme end of the cheesiness continuum, but the studies are hard to refute.12 In stepping back and objectifying your circumstances in writing, you also step, however briefly, off the hedonic treadmill. You don’t need to make it a regular habit, either. ‘I don’t keep a journal in any systematic way,’ McCullough said, ‘but I’ll be in the car, or somewhere, and something I’m grateful for will come to mind, and then, yes, I will make sure that I really enjoy it.’
If you need another defence against the charge of corniness, consider this: the findings from gratitude research don’t always imply that humans, deep down, are all that nice. Take the reported benefits of helping people in need, through volunteering or philanthropy. Isn’t this just another way of throwing into relief the advantageousness of one’s own situation, and thereby feeling gratitude for it?
I thanked McCullough, and told him I was grateful for his time. I meant it, actually, although afterwards it occurred to me that people probably say things like that to him every day, and think they’re being funny.
Is there a person on the planet who has ever been helped by being told not to worry? The slogan ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ comes originally from the Indian mystic Meher Baba, but many of us know it best as a knuckle-gnawingly annoying 1988 song by Bobby McFerrin. And it’s surely no accident that you only ever hear that song these days in war movies (Jarhead, Welcome to Sarajevo) where it’s used as a savagely ironic counterpoint to the horrors on screen. When you stop to think about it, ordering anyone to stop feeling how they’re feeling is an enormously thoughtless act, though we do it all the time – the phrase ‘Cheer up!’ being the most obvious example. The ultra-bestselling American pop psychologist Wayne Dyer calls worry a ‘useless emotion’, as if that should be enough for us to drop it. But his observation is itself useless. And, of course, wrong: there’s a good reason why we’ve evolved to be able to map out, and plan for, how bad the future might be. It’s just that sometimes it would be nice to be able to stop.
‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened,’ Mark Twain is supposed to have said. Self-help authors, echoing Twain, like to claim that our brains can’t distinguish between a real scenario and a vividly imagined one – so that, on a physical and emotional level, we respond to worries about a horrible event as if they were the horrible event. Some experimental evidence suggests this might be right: according to one recent study, it’s possible to suffer the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder from events that were hallucinated.13 One man in the study, delirious from liver disease, believed hospital staff were beating his son to death; he suffered the long-term psychological effects you’d expect if they actually had. It’s not hard to extrapolate from this to what the smaller but real effects of our everyday fearful imaginings might be.
But with ordinary worry, unlike extraordinary trauma, there’s something else to contend with – what the psychologist Edward Hallowell calls ‘the hidden pleasures of worry’. ‘One of the hidden pleasures is that worriers believe they’re not safe unless they’re worried – that the deal they make with fate is, if I torture myself by worrying, I won’t be punished with bad outcomes,’ he told me. ‘The other hidden pleasure is that contentment is too bland; worry is more stimulating. We don’t say, “She was gripped by contentment.” The good news, though, is that worriers tend to be the smartest, most creative people we’ve got. It takes a lot of imagination to dream up all these worries.’
Hallowell’s number one prescription is ‘never worry alone’. I asked why, half-expecting some complex neurological explanation. ‘It’s just a fact of human nature. We’re better in connection than in isolation.’ This works with worry, as with any area of life. ‘If you’re in a big room alone in the dark, you feel frightened,’ Hallowell said. ‘If you’re with someone else, you laugh.’
The other day, I learned of some breakthrough psychological research which proves that contributing to good causes stimulates the same parts of the brain as receiving large sums of money – only more so.14Giving to others, it turns out, really may be the key to happiness. About 35 minutes later, I ran into a ‘charity mugger’, collecting for a human rights organisation, and became consumed with a quasi-homicidal rage that only worsened as he trotted after me down the street, stoking fantasies of breaking his clipboard in two and dropping it in pieces at his feet. There seems to be a contradiction here. Some possible conclusions: a) my brain is hardwired wrongly; b) the psychology researchers screwed up; or c) there are only certain conditions under which giving makes you happy, and being bullied by an out-of-work actor with a goatee isn’t one of them.
The researchers, at America’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, scanned people’s brains while they played a computer game that gave them opportunities to win cash prizes or make donations to charity, sometimes at a cost to their own pocket, sometimes not. All these procedures lit up regions of the brain associated with the release of the ‘pleasure chemical’ dopamine – but giving large sums at a cost to oneself did so the most. (It also triggered the production of oxytocin, the ‘cuddle hormone’, which is associated with forming strong attachments.) Nor was any of this down to the givers thinking they’d get a pat on the back for being so selfless: their donations were anonymous.
Richard Dawkins has argued convincingly why this happens: what looks like altruism, he says, is a hangover from an era when we lived in communities so tiny that anyone we ran into would most likely be genetically related, or, alternatively, in a position to harm our survival if they weren’t on our side. (To witness Dawkins’s own hyper-evolved capacity for withering put-downs, watch one of the online videos in which he tries to convince creationist college students of this argument.15)
But that only hints at why it feels good to do things that benefit our genetic legacy. It doesn’t address the moral quandary. Can it be right to choose who I give to on the basis of how it makes me feel? It’s possible, in theory, that giving hundreds of pounds to my goateed haranguer would have been the most efficient way to get money to the people who needed it most, even though I’d have ended the transaction feeling annoyed. Contrastingly, giving to people sleeping rough triggers a warm inner glow – but numerous homelessness organisations advise against it. Then again, it would be nonsensical to give only when it made me feel bad to do so, wouldn’t it?
Such are the mental acrobatics, it seems, in trying to make selflessness selfishly rewarding. At least the US researchers were clear on the bigger point: giving makes you happier than getting. So, as a purely philanthropic gesture, I’m willing to receive your cheques care of this book’s publisher.
If you were organising a dinner party in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, and wanted to be sure of having someone in the mix who’d keep the conversation upbeat, you probably wouldn’t have invited Søren Kierkegaard. ‘Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it,’ wrote the Danish theologian, philosopher and notorious grumbler. In life, he observed, there are always ‘two possible situations: one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it. You will regret both’. And you’d certainly regret having invited Kierkegaard round for dinner: what a buzz-kill.
But he had a point – not so much about regret as the anticipation of it. We approach decisions, big or small, burdened by the fear that whatever choice we make, we’ll come to regret it. Sometimes this paralyses us; other times it makes us do irrational things. People who buy lottery tickets know the chance of winning is infinitesimal, but a recent study by researchers at Northumbria University shows that many keep playing out of anticipatory regret.16 If you use a regular set of numbers, it’s intolerable to imagine how you’d feel if you missed a week and those numbers came up.
Worse, we seem predisposed to anticipate regret wrongly. Faced with some fear-inducing opportunity (should you leave your job? ask that person out?), we habitually believe we’ll regret acting more than not acting, when the opposite is true. A classic approach in decision theory, a branch of economics, asks people to predict the regret felt by two investors: one who misses out on a large sum because he fails to switch his shares from company A to company B, and another who misses out on the same amount because she moves her shares away from company B to company A. Most people assume the switcher, the proactive one, will feel worse, and in certain experimental settings, with one-off decisions about hypothetical companies, that’s sometimes true. But in his book If Only, the psychologist Neal Roese argues that when it comes to real-life choices, ‘if you decide to do something and it turns out badly, it probably won’t still be haunting you a decade down the road. You’ll reframe the failure, explain it away, move on, and forget it. Not so with failures to act’.17 You’ll regret them for longer, too, because they’re ‘imaginatively boundless’: you can lose yourself for ever in the infinite possibilities of what might have been. In other words: you know that thing you’ve been wondering about doing? Do it.
And don’t worry about burning bridges, because Roese’s other counterintuitive conclusion is that irreversible decisions are regretted far less. This may be why education and career figure at the top of the list of the areas in which people (or Americans, to be precise, according to a 2005 study) harbour regret: it’s fairly easy to go back to university or change jobs. Family and finances come a little lower: it’s harder to decide, late in life, to have (or un-have) children, or to become a millionaire.18 But if you do have regrets, Roese says, don’t try to eradicate them: mild regrets serve ‘a necessary psychological purpose’, crystallising the wisdom we need to make more enriching future choices. Never regretting anything – with apologies to Edith Piaf and Robbie Williams – may ultimately be a sign of shallowness.
A few years ago, Robert Provine, who is probably the world’s leading laughter scientist, set out to discover what cracks us up. He and his researchers monitored thousands of human interactions, noting who said what, and who laughed in response. Strap on your surgical ribcage support right now, because I’m about to reveal some of the most hilarity-inducing lines: ‘I know.’ ‘I’ll see you guys later.’ ‘I see your point.’ ‘It was nice meeting you.’19 (Dry your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and we’ll continue.) ‘Most pre-laughing dialogue,’ Provine later wrote in his book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, ‘is like that of an interminable television situation comedy, scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.’
This is great news for extremely ungifted sitcom writers, but a little mystifying for everyone else. Most of us, presumably, want to laugh more than we do; after all, we spend about a third as much time laughing as people did in the 1930s, according to one ‘laughter therapist’, Carole Fawcett, and it’s commonly held – albeit without much scientific backing – that as adults we laugh vastly less than we did as children. Yet seeking out humorous people, books or TV shows wouldn’t seem to be the answer: laughter and humour, Provine’s research indicated, aren’t very closely related.
‘Laughter existed before humour,’ Provine told me, shortly before doing an impression of a chimpanzee laughing, the brilliance of which I sadly can’t convey in print. ‘It’s the ritualised sound of rough-and-tumble play.’ The sound primates have always made, in other words, when they’re socialising energetically. It’s not a response to something funny, but an instinctive bonding mechanism. Or as Provine puts it: ‘The key ingredient to laughter is another person, not a joke.’
Nowhere is this clearer than in sexual politics. Provine analysed thousands of personal ads and found that women disproportionately sought men with a good sense of humour, while men disproportionately claimed to possess one. In fact, he reckons, nobody was really talking about humour: the women wanted men who made them laugh, and the men wanted women who would laugh when they spoke. This suggests one way to diagnose the health of any given heterosexual relationship: notice how frequently the female partner laughs.
Looking at things this way also casts doubt on the notion of laughter as medicine – the ‘laugh your way to wellness’ approach pioneered by the radical American doctor Patch Adams. Perhaps the real reason that people who laugh more sometimes seem to be healthier, or to recover more rapidly from illness, is simply because they spend time with others.
‘If you want to laugh more, place yourself in situations where laughter’s more common,’ Provine said. ‘Not a comedy club, but simply spending more time with your friends.’ And can laughter make you well? He sighed. In fact, Provine argues – controversially – that there’s a slight negative correlation between a happy outlook on life and longevity, perhaps because optimism encourages risky behaviour. ‘I don’t want to come off as a total curmudgeon … but laughter makes us feel good. Our lives will be better if there’s more of it. Isn’t that enough?’
In an interview looking back on his time in power, Tony Blair once said he regretted that he’d never had the discipline to keep a diary. He was talking, one assumes, about the kind of brief daily journal that he could later have published, politician-style, in a heavily edited and legacy-burnishing form, or used as the basis for his memoirs. This is as opposed to the kind of diary celebrated in such self-help books as Journaling from the Heart, Embrace Your Life through Creative Journaling and Inner Journeying through Art-Journaling – or in the magazine Personal Journaling, which is, intolerably, a journal about journaling. It’s hard to imagine many politicians keeping this kind of diary, which calls for introspection and self-questioning. At the risk of blinding you with my unrivalled access to the inner circle of British politics, you can take it from me that No. 10 Downing Street has never subscribed to Personal Journaling magazine.
And rightly so, perhaps: you surely don’t have to be some stiff-upper-lipped British throwback from another era to find the cult of journaling a bit wallowingly self-absorbed. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find agreement on this point from Professor Jamie Pennebaker, the world’s leading scientific authority on the emotional benefits of writing things down. ‘Oh, yes, you can definitely wallow,’ said Pennebaker, an experimental psychologist at the University of Texas. ‘I’ve noticed how people who journal a lot can seem to tell the same story, over and over again.’
What’s startling, though, are the proven mood-enhancing powers of writing when it’s done in a more focused way. Pennebaker’s research shows that when people who’ve experienced trauma are asked to write about it – for 15 minutes a day for four days, no more – they show rapid improvements in wellbeing compared with those who write about something else.20 In one extraordinary experiment, by John Weinman at King’s College, London, tiny, identical skin wounds were inflicted on patients, some of whom were then asked to spend a few minutes, for a few days, writing about stressful events they’d experienced. The wounds were monitored with ultrasound, and the skin damage healed faster among those who wrote about their feelings.21
Strange things happen when people write in this way. Over several days, their language shifts from being emotional to being more thoughtful; from being dominated by ‘I’ and ‘me’ to ‘we’ and ‘us’. So it seems writing works not only as catharsis but in a practical way, too, helping us objectify problems, step out of self-absorption, and look to solutions. It isn’t a case of ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’, either: nobody else need ever see what you write for the technique to have an effect.
‘Years ago, my wife and I went through a difficult patch in our marriage,’ Pennebaker recalled. ‘We were in the midst of all sorts of ugly tension, and I just sat down and started writing. Even within the first day, it was all starting to come together. I threw away what I wrote, because I didn’t want my wife to see it.’ They’re still married.
When you don’t have children – as I don’t, thus far – one entertaining thing to do with friends who do is as follows. Wait until they’re gazing, lovestruck, into the eyes of their newborn baby, tucking their toddler into bed, or proudly watching their 21-year-old graduate. Then creep up behind them, slap down a copy of the Journal of Marriage and Family, volume 65, number 3, and triumphantly declare: ‘Ha! You may think parenthood has changed your life for the better, but, in fact, the statistical analyses contained herein, along with numerous other studies, demonstrate conclusively that having children makes people, on average, slightly less happy than before!’22 Then walk away cackling. They may never speak to you again, but that won’t matter: you will have won the argument, using Science.
Here’s the thing, though: the studies really do suggest that ‘having children does not bring joy to our lives’, as Nattavudh Powdthavee, of York University, put it in an overview of the research published in The Psychologist.23 For most people, parenthood leads to no increase, or even a decline, in satisfaction – a finding so counterintuitive that a common response is to assume the studies must be flawed. But there’s little mileage in attacking the methodology, which often involves asking thousands of people, repeatedly over years, to rate their overall satisfaction with life. Some may be bad at recalling how happy they’ve been recently; some may lie. But there’s no particular reason to think that would skew the results against parenthood. If anything, the taboo against admitting to regretting having kids may push things the other way.
What makes us so certain that parenthood will make us happy, Powdthavee argues, is the notorious ‘focusing illusion’: contemplating any major alteration in our circumstances, we overrate the effect it will have. We imagine living idyllically after making millions; in fact, sudden wealth leaves most people largely emotionally unchanged.24 Besides, the belief that children make us happy is what the psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls a ‘super-replicator’: civilisation depends on it, and those who disagree tend not to have kids, so their views don’t percolate down the generations.
More intriguing to me, though, is how many parents insist parenthood is fulfilling. Assuming they’re telling the truth, and assuming the life-satisfaction studies mentioned above aren’t bunkum, this raises mind-bending possibilities. Are fulfilment and satisfaction fundamentally different? We know fulfilment is different from pleasure, obviously: most things worth doing – child-rearing included – aren’t 24-hour fun. But the researchers weren’t asking about fun; they were asking about life satisfaction. Suppose you’re a parent whose survey responses showed you were less satisfied than when you weren’t a parent. Now suppose someone else asks you if parenthood is fulfilling, and you glow with conviction as you answer yes. Which response is the more ‘true’? I’m baffled. I have no idea. And I fear there’s only one way to find out.
Too often, our lives pass us by. In what is possibly my all-time favourite Ridiculous Psychological Experiment – and, believe me, that’s saying something – a researcher stopped people on a university campus and asked for directions. Halfway through the exchange, two accomplices, posing as workmen, barged between them, carrying a door. By the time they had gone, the researcher had been replaced by someone different. According to post-experiment interviews, a majority never noticed.25
This pervasive sense of being distracted feels like a modern affliction – a function of too much email, too many mobile phones, or the result of having relentlessly bad television as the backdrop to our lives. So it’s reassuring to find that it was a problem in 1910, too, when Arnold Bennett wrote How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, one of the most eccentric yet timelessly wise books of advice you’re ever likely to read.
Bennett’s audience was the new class of suburb-dwelling commuters: gents who travelled into town for white-collar jobs that held out the promise, for the first time since the industrial revolution, that work could be fulfilling. But it wasn’t. Instead, it led to ‘the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by’.
Bennett is a stoic. You don’t have to love your job, he says, but if you don’t, don’t let it define your life. The ‘typical man … persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as “the day”,’ and the rest as useless ‘margin’. ‘You emerge from your office. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs … like a virtuous and melancholy cloud.’
Responsibilities outside work don’t register much for Bennett – parental duties go unmentioned; housekeeping and cookery are done by servants. But his central idea echoes down the decades: cultivate your capacity to pay attention – to not let life go by in a distracted blur – and time expands. His book is full of techniques for finding a few hours a week to study music, history, public-transport systems. His point isn’t what you pay attention to; it’s that you pay attention. ‘The mental faculties … do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.’
It’s easy to misinterpret advice like this as the barking of a drill sergeant who wants you to cram more achievements into your day. But Bennett’s insight is that zoning out is tiring, not relaxing; half-hearted semi-focusing causes life to feel like an exhausting blur. He was born in 1867, and died in 1931, so he never had to confront reality TV-watching, or mindless web-surfing – the things we do (or half-do) today to relax, but that leave us curiously drained. One suspects he wouldn’t have been a fan.
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’ wrote the nineteenth-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau, describing his two-year exile to Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. He wanted, he said, ‘to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach’. It slightly spoils Thoreau’s lovely book, Walden, when you visit the pond and find it’s just a short hike from the nearest town, or when you learn – though he never mentions it – that he had someone to do his laundry. And all on a private income: bloody trustafarians. Yet his point stands: there’s something fundamental, something transformative, about spending time in wild nature.
This may seem so obvious that there’s no reason to say anything more about it, and self-help authors rarely do: when you’ve got several hundred pages to fill, innovative methods for achieving happiness are more appealing than a simple instruction to put down the book and hit the road in search of somewhere where the sky is bigger. But the question of why nature makes us feel better turns out to have puzzled psychologists for years.
‘The wilderness inspires feelings of awe … one’s intimate contact with this environment leads to thoughts about spiritual meanings and eternal processes,’ ventures one philosophical investigation of ‘wilderness effects’.26 Polls over the years have shown that 82 per cent of us have ‘experienced the beauty of nature in a deeply moving way’; 45 per cent report an ‘intense spiritual experience’ in such settings.27 These are surprising numbers, given that we’re generally held, ever since the industrial revolution, to be rushed off our feet and out of touch with our emotions. Wilderness experiences seem to slice through all that. I can tell you, for example, about an encounter with a herd of deer, on Skye, on a late-autumn afternoon not long ago, and you’ll know how I felt even if you’ve never been near the place.
But why? One part of the reason for this near-universal response seems to be about control. We spend our lives swinging back and forth between believing we have more control over the world than we do, and feeling, just as wrongly, that we have none. The former delusion is the root of much stress: why would you bother feeling stressed if you truly knew how little you controlled your future, or others’ behaviour? The latter is linked to depression, as the researcher Martin Seligman has demonstrated: he calls it ‘learned helplessness’.28
Nature seems to reset this wild pendulum, restoring realistic balance. On one hand, elemental landscapes drive home how tiny we are, and how powerless. On the other, any encounter with nature, even a two-mile stroll, requires self-reliance and demands that you take responsibility for what you can control: you have to not get lost, not fall off cliffs. Even a pot plant on your desk – a wilderness in miniature – requires careful tending (which you can control) but might die (which you can’t control). Psychologists refer to this realistic sense of our own powers, combined with some other useful qualities, as ‘hardiness’. That seems a worthwhile state to aspire to – and if the prescription is spending more time amid mountains, moors and oceans, who would decline the treatment?
Among the most obvious portents of the impending collapse of western civilisation is the fact that you can now buy something called Chicken Soup for the Chocolate Lover’s Soul, which is available as a gift box containing a book – part of the dispiritingly unstoppable Chicken Soup for the Soul series – and a bar of chocolate. There’s also Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover’s Soul, which comes with a corkscrew, and Chicken Soup for the Tea Lover’s Soul, which features, confusingly, tea-flavoured chocolate. Apparently, the temptation to take a successful brand and spin it into ever more absurd cash-generating niches was irresistible. The logical conclusion is surely Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup Lover’s Soul, which will come with some chicken soup; at this point, earthquakes will consume London and New York, and God will burst into tears.
So it’s to the credit of Richard Carlson, who died in 2006 aged 45, that after writing Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff, he published around 20 spin-offs (Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work, and suchlike) without once entering the realm of self-parody. Like Chicken Soup, the Don’t Sweat books sold prodigiously. Unlike them, however, they’re full of calm good sense, anchored in Carlson’s understanding that stress obeys an ironic principle: when really big crises occur, people often find inner strength; it’s the little things that drive us crazy. Deep down, we know we can’t escape bereavement, and maybe illness or divorce, but we think we shouldn’t have to deal with queues or irritating colleagues.
Carlson’s suggestions aren’t complex. They include ‘make peace with imperfection’, ‘nurture a plant’, ‘choose being kind over being right’ and ‘allow yourself to be bored … [if you] don’t fight it, the feelings of boredom will be replaced by feelings of peace’. He doesn’t claim his insights are new. But that modesty is central to his message: we don’t need new information on how to be happy anywhere near as much as we need a dose of perspective.
Advice on how to get more done, feel better, find a soulmate, etcetera, can be useful, but it subtly reinforces the notion that achieving such goals is overwhelmingly important, which fuels stress. Sometimes it’s more helpful to be jolted into remembering that we’d be OK without those things, and that most things we worry about seem absurd a few weeks later. There’s a sort of serenity, too, in realising that even the greatest calamities won’t mean much in 100 years. That jolt can come from a good self-help book, which puts you in the author’s shoes, and gets you out of your head. But it also can come from travel, or writing down problems: anything that puts you in a third-person relationship to yourself. It isn’t really ‘all small stuff’, as Carlson acknowledged, but there’s always a perspective from which even the biggest stuff is, in some sense, handleable. The challenge is to keep making that shift in vantage point, rather than staying locked in position, forever seeking sources of comfort to deaden the negative feelings, marinating in Chicken Soup.
On the subject of anger, I have a self-serving theory, which is that my quickness to become furious about petty matters – chiefly, the price of train tickets and the strange way that any street I move to instantly becomes the site of major construction works – is actually a good thing. After all, doesn’t it show that I’m fortunate enough not to harbour far deeper, more destructive rages against my parents, or bullies from childhood, or society in general? I realise there’s an alternative interpretation, which is that I’m just an irritable curmudgeon. But that isn’t half so consoling whenever I find my fists involuntarily clenching as I hear some train company representative tell me I could have paid a reasonable price for my ticket if only I’d booked it two years in advance.
What one should do on such occasions, self-help authors have always claimed, is find a harmless way to vent. ‘Punch a pillow – or a punching-bag,’ writes John Lee in his book on anger, Facing the Fire. ‘Punch with all the frenzy you can. If you are angry at a particular person, imagine his or her face on the pillow or punching-bag … You will be doing violence to a pillow or punching-bag so that you can stop doing violence to yourself by holding in poisonous anger and hatred.’ This is the ‘catharsis hypothesis’ – the idea that it’s better out than in – and in the world of pop psychology it has the status of an article of faith. It gets applied to worry, too, which explains ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’. But the real problem, it turns out, is with the hypothesis itself. (Also: who actually owns a punching-bag?)
We’re so accustomed to thinking of our emotions using the metaphor of a pressure-cooker, or a bottle with a cork in it, that we’re barely aware we’re doing it. According to this ‘hydraulic metaphor’, emotion ‘builds up inside an individual, similar to hydraulic pressure in a closed environment’, the anger researcher Brad Bushman says, paraphrasing the received wisdom that his work sets out to challenge. ‘If people do not let their anger out, but try to keep it bottled up inside, it will eventually cause them to explode in an aggressive rage.’
But Bushman’s experiments indicate that venting actually makes things worse.29 So do some others. In one classic study, participants were insulted, then some were asked to hammer nails into wood for several minutes. Subsequently, given the chance to criticise the person who’d insulted them, the nail-pounders were significantly more hostile.30 Maybe the hammering provided some physiological relief, but their underlying anger had been stoked. Rather than punch a pillow, Bushman recommends doing something incompatible with anger, such as reading or listening to music. That won’t address the cause of the anger, but it will leave you in a better frame of mind to do so.
Likewise, a recent study focusing on teenage girls concluded that the obsessive discussion of worries – ‘co-rumination’ – often exacerbated negative emotions: a problem shared isn’t always a problem halved.31 This isn’t an argument for bottling things up: talking, obviously, is a crucial way of finding solutions to problems. But it may be an argument for realising that we’re much more complex than bottles.
If you try to rob a bank in Seattle in the near future – I’m not suggesting you test this out; just take it on trust – you could be in for a surprise. Bank robbers, of course, do everything they can to try to avoid surprises. (‘What I love about this job is its unpredictability – you never know what’s going to happen!’ is one of the things you never hear bank robbers say.) But the surprises they are worried about are things like the sudden appearance of police officers, or quick-witted customers trying to tackle them to the ground. The really surprising thing about the FBI’s innovative Safecatch system, in operation in Seattle, is that it involves training bank employees to terrify robbers by smiling at them.
‘If you’re a legitimate customer, you think, “This is the friendliest person I’ve met in my life.” If you’re a bad guy, it scares the lights out of you,’ one bank executive told the Associated Press. Bank robberies almost halved, year-on-year, after the scheme became widespread. Smiling pierces the anonymity thieves cultivate, creating precisely the connection they’re desperate to avoid. You didn’t think the grinning ‘greeters’ in the doorways of big American shops (and, increasingly, British ones) were really there to make you feel welcome, did you?
Of course, a smile produced in the high-stress context of a bank robbery is going to be a fake one. But that doesn’t necessarily spoil the effect. As part of his research into the bodily signs of lying and deception, the psychologist Richard Wiseman revealed how bad we are at telling real smiles, which involve the eye muscles, from fake ones, which use only the mouth.32 There’s something else researchers keep confirming, though – an utterly strange phenomenon which accords with none of our beliefs about how emotions operate: fake smiling even works on ourselves.
In one landmark study, German students were called into a lab and told they would be helping to test different ways for paraplegic people to hold pens. Some were asked to hold a pen between their teeth – an action that produces an involuntary smile. Others were asked to hold it with their lips, which induces a frown. Soon after, they were shown a cartoon and asked to rate how funny they found it. The teeth-holders were unequivocally more amused.33
You can, of course, experience this effect for yourself. Take a few deep breaths and notice your mood. Then pull your lips into an exaggerated smile and hold it for three or four seconds. You should notice an elevation in your mood. Alternatively, perhaps you notice that the person sitting beside you on the bus is starting to look unsettled, and wondering again why it’s always them who ends up next to the weird, grinning passenger.
This is the problem with psychology experiments: do them in universities and people give you research funding; do them on public transport and all they give you is funny looks.
Stress was invented in 1936, when the Hungarian biologist Hans Selye defined it as ‘the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change’. So while it would be unfair to blame Selye for the fact that modern life is so stressful, he does deserve some blame for the epidemic of articles about the ‘stress epidemic’ – have you noticed how reading them stresses you out? – and for books such as Stress-Free in 30 Days, Stressproof Your Life, or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Stress. (There’s another book in that series, incidentally, called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem: is that the most self-defeating self-help title ever?) In later life, Selye recanted: his English had been poor, he said, and he hadn’t meant to use the word ‘stress’ at all. What he meant was something more like ‘strain’.34
The distinction matters. Because of how we use the word ‘stress’ colloquially – and how physicists use it, too – it brings to mind an external force: it implies that the problem is whatever things (stressors) are pressing on us from outside. ‘Strain’ is more faithful to Selye’s intended meaning, which is that the problem lies in how we respond to those forces.
There’s a certain comfort in thinking of stress as an external thing: it implies it’s beyond your control, and so not your responsibility. It lets you feel busy, and may evoke sympathy; it relieves you of the obligation to change. But it also implies that the answer to reducing stress lies in avoiding that external thing. There’s short-term relief in fleeing a stressful situation for a calm and peaceful one, but if the problem is really how we respond to ‘stressful’ situations, that won’t leave us better off next time. We’re assailed by lifestyle suggestions promising stress reduction: blissful holidays, say, or downshifting to the country. But if you’re using them to avoid things that trigger your negative responses, mightn’t it be wiser to work on your responses instead?
That’s the question motivating the study of what psychologists call ‘resilience’, the characteristics that cause some to thrive amid what others think of as intolerable stress. Amanda Ripley’s book, The Unthinkable, examines who survives when faced with natural disasters or terrorism, and who doesn’t. It’s largely a matter of beliefs: survivors are those who think they have some control over external circumstances, and who see how even a negative experience might lead to growth. Overconfident people, who overestimate their powers, do particularly well.
Changing your beliefs is no mean feat. But just knowing that that’s where stress is really located is a good start. That’s not an argument for putting up with an insane job, relationship or other circumstance. But it offers the possibility of making a choice – not getting submerged by stress, nor fleeing what triggers it, but doing what the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön calls ‘learning to stay’.
One reason it’s hard to study emotions is that it’s tricky to recreate them in a lab. Ever since university ethics committees started getting sniffy about inflicting psychological damage on members of the public, it’s been bad form to induce, say, sadness by tricking people into believing a relative has died; researchers play gloomy music instead. (To induce happiness, they lamely hand out free coffee mugs, or £5 notes.) But embarrassment is an exception: it’s easy to embarrass people, within ethics guidelines, by asking them to suck a dummy, or sing along to cheesy music, or by wiring a pyramid of toilet rolls in a supermarket so it collapses when someone passes, some of which experimenters have actually done.35
Yet none of their work has dispelled the fundamental weirdness of embarrassment. It’s an emotion concerned with mere social niceties, yet it’s often overpowering. Memories of mortification persist for decades; studies have found we’ll go to dangerous lengths to avoid it, skipping medical checkups, having unsafe sex rather than buying condoms, even hesitating to save people from drowning for fear of misjudging the situation.36 People ‘underestimate how much they will allow the threat of embarrassment to govern their own future choices’, argues the psychologist Christine Harris. ‘We tend to make choices that maintain a veneer of smooth social interaction’, even when they’re hugely risky.37
Embarrassment, it was originally assumed, was a response to breaking social rules. (Condom-buying and medical checkups don’t break rules, but may feel like they do.) But then more and more research started to suggest that rule-breaking wasn’t required. Just being the centre of attention, or being praised, was enough; people even got embarrassed by things happening to others.38 The discovery of ‘empathic embarrassment’ caused a stir, but to us acute sufferers, it’s old news: we leap to change channels when Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat makes people look stupid, even when they’re racists who deserve it; at weddings, we cringe pre-emptively during speeches, even if they’re good. (This makes reading embarrassment research difficult. I felt for the thief, pleading not guilty and representing himself, who asked a witness: ‘Did you get a good look at my face when I took your purse?’)
Why might an emotion largely associated with etiquette breaches be so overwhelming? In his book Born to Be Good, the scholar Dacher Keltner makes a powerful case that embarrassment is evolution’s answer to the ‘commitment problem’: it’s in everyone’s interests to collaborate for long-term gain, but how do you weed out the conmen who want to take advantage? Perhaps because they’re unembarrassable. Embarrassment – signalled by facial microexpressions that can’t be faked and that are remarkably consistent across cultures – ‘reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us together’. In the moment you realise you’ve come to the restaurant without your wallet, your eyes shoot down, your head tilts, a smile flickers. These are ‘the most potent nonverbal clues we have to an individual’s commitment to the moral order,’ Keltner explains. It’s little solace, but your blushes keep society functioning.
The word ‘awesome’, it’s fair to say, has become devalued through overuse. In 2008, I was sitting in the press section at a political event when a young official approached and said if I didn’t mind switching seats, ‘that would be awesome’. (This was in the United States, admittedly, where the overuse is more extreme than elsewhere.) I switched. ‘That’s awesome,’ he responded. I overheard him use the word several more times. I realise it’s possible he was an endearingly unjaded chap, perpetually astonished by the human capacity for doing things such as moving from one chair to another. But I doubt it.
Real awe is harder to come by. Most of us lead ‘awe-deficient’ lives, according to the neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, who died in 2007 and who argued that awe should be considered ‘the eleventh emotion’, in addition to the ten commonly recognised by researchers. If we don’t realise we lack awe, perhaps that’s because we understand it so little: even Pearsall struggled to define its strange mix of fascination and fright, which can be invoked by a landscape or a newborn baby, but also by a natural disaster or a cancer diagnosis. ‘The best description I’ve been able to give it so far is that – no matter how good or bad our brain considers whatever is happening to be – it is feeling more completely alive than we thought possible before we were in awe,’ he writes in his final book, Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion, which begins with the story of the near-death, in infancy, of his son. He’d never been unhappier than while waiting to learn if his son would survive, he said. But, ‘at the same time, I have never felt such profound awe’.
The centrepiece of Pearsall’s research was the ‘Study of the Awe-Inspired’, a mammoth investigation of people who felt awe regularly. Living a more awe-filled life, Pearsall concluded, wasn’t about seeking happiness, but about feeling more intensely – higher highs, but also lower lows. ‘If you want to be happy all the time, awe is not for you,’ he observes. ‘It’s too upsetting and causes too much uncertainty.’ Being that alive – that immersed in experience – is exposing; it involves not ‘closure’ but what he calls ‘open-ture’. (Excessive happiness actually works against the state of growth and engagement psychologists call ‘flourishing’: the bizarrely precise conclusion of the researcher Barbara Fredrickson is that the healthiest ratio of happy to sad feelings is 2.9:1.39 Sure enough, Pearsall found that those closest to that point reported the most awe.)
His book has a terrible twist. After Pearsall submitted the manuscript, he recounts in an epilogue, his son committed suicide, aged 35. Pearsall and his wife discovered the body. ‘I am now writing in one of the most intense, deep, painful aspects of awe … I know there won’t be “closure” or “getting past” what’s happened,’ he writes. ‘If I can stay in awe of what’s happening, I won’t expect answers. I don’t want there to be [any] … I want to yearn, grieve, and cry for our son for the rest of my life.’
And then, arrestingly, this phrase, which taken out of context might seem baffling: ‘I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt.’
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig’s nameless narrator, travelling with his son, pulls up at Crater Lake in Oregon, a natural wonder of vivid blue water surrounded by sheer cliffs. The US National Park Service calls it ‘a place of immeasurable beauty’, but the narrator is underwhelmed: ‘[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, “Well, there it is”, just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks, too … You point to something as having Quality, and the Quality tends to go away.’
I thought of that recently while in the Arctic, researching a magazine article. The trip was endlessly inspiring, with one exception: the northern lights. They’d been so hyped that by the time I was woken in the early hours and told to come outside and marvel, the moment was already spoiled. I was too busy monitoring my own amazement levels and finding them wanting. The northern lights: well, there they were.
The annoying thing about positive emotions – happiness, wonder, love – is that when you pressure yourself into trying to feel them, you can’t. When the pressure comes from others, it’s worse, which is surely part of the reason for the revulsion many employees feel in the face of desperate corporate efforts to ‘make work fun’. One of the most popular business books on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years has been Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results, purportedly based on the high spirits of salespeople at Seattle’s fish market, who fling fish through the air to each other as they work. Several major US firms have ‘adopted the Fish! philosophy’: employees are rewarded with ‘fish cards’ when they show the right attitude, and the very best workers get a soft toy fish called Pete the Perch thrown at them by colleagues. (‘Play!’ is one of four Fish! principles, because, in the words of one Fish! worksheet, ‘everyone can benefit from a little lightening up during the day’.) Every time I think about Pete the Perch, something inside me dies. Has none of these fun-fixated managers ever watched The Office?
These attempts to induce good feelings through top-down effort are self-defeating, whether they’re imposed on workers by management or imposed on yourself by your rational brain. There’s something in the definition of happiness that requires that it arise freely; you can provide the right environment for it, but can’t force the matter. Otherwise you (or those you manage) get caught in the psychological trap known as the double bind – the unspoken demand whereby, in the words of the philosopher Alan Watts, ‘you are required to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily’.
Enforced happiness is no happiness at all, even if the person doing the enforcing is you. Anyone who’s ever gone on holiday with a grim-faced determination to Have a Relaxing Time knows this all too well: deciding to make yourself relax isn’t going to help you relax – just like adding an exclamation mark to the title of your book isn’t necessarily going to help make it fun. (There are some exceptions.)
Not long ago, the British Psychological Society asked some of the world’s leading psychologists a rather personal question: having spent so much time trying to understand people, what was the one nagging thing they still didn’t understand about themselves? One respondent was Norbert Schwarz, whose many contributions to the field include the finding that gloomy weather can make your whole life look bad. The incidental feeling that it induces colours your entire outlook, at least until you become aware that this is what’s happening, whereupon the effect vanishes. ‘You’d think I’d learned that lesson, and now know how to deal with gloomy skies,’ Schwarz told the BPS ruefully. ‘I don’t. They still get me …Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur?’
We can surely all empathise. I think of myself as generally happy, but every so often I’m struck by a fleeting mood of unhappiness or anxiety that quickly escalates. On a really bad day, I may spend hours stuck in angst-ridden maunderings, wondering if I need to make major changes in my life. It’s usually then that I realise I’ve forgotten to eat lunch. One tuna sandwich later, the mood is gone. And yet, ‘Am I hungry?’ is never my first response to feeling bad: my brain, apparently, would prefer to distress itself with reflections on the ultimate meaninglessness of human existence than to direct my body to a nearby sandwich shop.
There are two frustrating aspects to this. The first, as Schwarz points out, is the forgetting: knowing there’s a simple fix doesn’t mean you’ll remember it when you need to. The other is the extraordinary power of these transient states: though in truth they might signify nothing more than moderate hunger, or the fact that it’s overcast, they condition how you feel about everything. In a study entitled ‘After the Movies’, some crafty Australian researchers grilled people leaving the cinema about their views on politics and morality; they discovered that those leaving happy films were optimistic and lenient, while those leaving aggressive or sad ones were far more pessimistic and strict.40 (They tried to control for the fact that different kinds of people might choose different kinds of movies in the first place.) Alcoholics Anonymous, meanwhile, urges its adherents to memorise the acronym ‘halt’, for ‘never too hungry, never too angry, never too lonely, never too tired’, as a caution against the minor, everyday factors that can lead to dark moods, and thence to full-blown relapse.
‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.’ The implications of all this, if you think too hard about it, grow dizzying: how many wars have been started, rather than averted at the last minute, because someone was underslept? How many marriage proposals accepted because it was sunny, or because the view from the observation deck was so dramatic? How many momentous decisions taken, how many life-courses altered, for want of a tuna sandwich?
‘I remember the year eye contact stopped,’ one man recalls in Loneliness, a book by the psychologist and neuroscientist John Cacioppo. ‘It wasn’t some big demographic shift. People just seemed to give up on relating to each other. Now this town is one of the loneliest places on earth.’ That was in California. British people might protest that eye contact, which we’ve never been keen on, isn’t a good indicator of connectedness. But loneliness is ubiquitous in the western world, and research suggests it’s more than a bad feeling: lonely people get ill more, die sooner and do intellectual tasks less well.41 One recent study found they even feel, literally, colder.42
The harsh irony, Cacioppo writes, is that loneliness renders us worse at forging the bonds that might relieve it. Hunger impels us to eat, and tiredness to sleep, but loneliness, which is a fear-based response to isolation, triggers hyper-alertness to further social dangers: we become less welcoming of friendly overtures. And as dieters fixate on food, loneliness prompts a fixation on the self, making things worse – one reason why volunteering promotes happiness (it’s a distraction), and why books on making yourself more popular won’t alleviate loneliness, even if they make you more popular.
The trouble is partly that we don’t understand what loneliness is. When feeling it, we conclude we’re dislikeable, lacking social skills or surrounded by unfriendly people. In fact, Cacioppo says, our genes and upbringing give us unique personal levels of vulnerability to the effects of isolation; we each have a different threshold for the connectedness we need in order to stay healthy. It works like a thermostat: much as physical pain serves as a warning, loneliness signals that we’ve fallen below our requirements. But we’re terrible at reading our thermostats, so we flee claustrophobic towns for the big city, then regret it, or leave stifling jobs for self-employment, only to find that office life fulfilled a function we’d never realised. (It’s also why every few years, craving solitude, I book a week’s solo hiking in Scotland, only to discover that my tolerance for my own company lasts exactly three days.)
This solves a long-standing mystery of loneliness research: except at the extremes, people who report more loneliness don’t have fewer friends; they don’t spend more time alone; they’re not less socially adept.43 That seems bizarre – unless the reason for their loneliness is that they simply require more connection than others. A happy implication of Cacioppo’s work is that loneliness needn’t mean something’s wrong with your social skills, just that you need a connectedness top-up. Deep friendships are best, but even a conversation at the shops helps. Feeling lonely from time to time ‘is like feeling hungry or thirsty from time to time,’ he writes. ‘It is part of being human. The trick is to heed these signals in ways that bring long-term satisfaction.’
Jean-Paul Sartre, one imagines, would find this view lacking: it means that alleviating the feeling of being alone in the universe is no longer an existential challenge, but mere life-management, like exercising or drinking enough water. Still, I prefer the non-existential version.
The Danish word hygge (pronounced, very approximately, ‘hooga’) means something like ‘cosiness’, but with undertones of ‘camaraderie’ and ‘wellbeing’. Denmark’s tourist industry likes to suggest that it’s untranslatable and unexportable: the only way to feel it is to hop on a plane to Copenhagen.
It’s also a cherished part of the national character, which explains the uproar over a video released a while back by the tourism agency VisitDenmark – a cack-handed attempt at viral marketing in which an attractive blonde Danish woman claims to be trying to trace the father of her baby. ‘You were on vacation here in Denmark … I was on my way home, and I think you had lost your friends,’ she says. ‘We decided to go down to the water to have a drink … I don’t even remember your name …We were talking about Denmark, and the thing we have here, hygge … And I guess I decided to show you what hygge’s all about, because we went back to my house, and we ended up having sex. The next morning, when I woke up, you were gone.’ The public outrage was instantaneous. Even worse than the implication that Danish women have loose morals, it seemed, was the misinterpretation of hygge. Sex between two old friends could maybe, just about, be (to use the adjectival form) hyggelig. Impulsive, anonymous sex between strangers? Never.
Such are the perils of trying to translate the allegedly untranslatable. In fact, these days, linguists don’t have much time for the idea that truly untranslatable words really exist. (Did you know the Inuit have 17 different words for ‘tired urban myth about Inuit languages’?) But there are certainly words that aren’t easily translated, and they frequently relate to feelings. Without the slightest bit of hard evidence, I’ve got to believe this makes a concrete difference to our emotional lives: if you don’t have a readily accessible label for a feeling such as hygge, might that not help edge it out of your emotional range, or at least from the kinds of things you find time in your schedule to do? Our English talk about happiness is usually about pleasure, excitement or (occasionally) fulfilment. There are no English-language self-help books on How To Live a Hyggelig Life.
Hard-to-translate emotions aren’t always positive, of course: the Portuguese saudades refers to a particular kind of longing, and the Korean han is a form of collectively felt resentment in the face of injustice, blended with lamentation. But the sense of cosiness embodied by hygge is especially interesting because something like it occurs again and again in non-English languages: the German Gemütlichkeit is somewhat similar, as is the Dutch gezelligheid; the Czech pohoda overlaps a little, too. There is, it seems, significant demand for this kind of friendly, secure, usually home-based warmth.
I’ve never really seen the appeal of cosiness of the English variety, because it seems so passive and lazy: apparently, I’m just not the sort to enjoy dragging the duvet to the sofa, making a cup of hot chocolate and bingeing on old episodes of ER. But hygge, a Danish friend explains, ‘is a conscious activity. “Let’s go to my house and cosy” – it doesn’t make sense in English. But hygge is a verb as well as an adjective. It’s something you do.’
That’s more like it: not vegging out, but actively weaving the fabric of friendship and ease. There ought to be a word for it.
9 Mark Easton, ‘Britain’s happiness in decline’, BBC News website, May 2, 2006, accessible at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4771908.stm.
10 For a summary of Michael McCullough and Robert Emmons’s gratitude research, with references to individual journal articles, see psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons/or Robert Emmons, Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). See also note 1.
11 Martin Seligman et al, ‘Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions’, American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410–421.
12 See, for example, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, ‘Counting blessings versus burdens: an experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2003): 377–389.
13 Andrea diMartini et al, ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder caused by hallucinations and delusions experienced in delirium’, Psychosomatics 48 (2007): 436–439.
14 Jorge Moll et al, ‘Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 15623–15628.
15 Footage of Dawkins taking questions from creationist students, including a discussion of altruism, is at video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8033327978006186584#.
16 Sandy Wolfson and Pamela Briggs, ‘Locked into gambling: anticipatory regret as a motivator for playing the National Lottery’, Journal of Gambling Studies 18 (2002): 1–17.
17 Roese’s research is discussed in Neal Roese, If Only (New York: Broadway, 2005). For further evidence that inaction is regretted more than action, see Marcel Zeelenberg et al, ‘The inaction effect in the psychology of regret’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 (2002): 314–327. Several earlier studies reached an opposite conclusion, but Zeelenberg et al suggest this may be because they studied isolated, one-off decisions in artificial experimental settings.
18 Neal Roese and Amy Summerville, ‘What we regret most … and why’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 1273–1285.
19 Robert Provine’s research on laugh-trigger phrases, the link between laughter and humour, and the role of laughter in personal advertisements is detailed in his book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000).
20 James Pennebaker and Sandra Beall, ‘Confronting a traumatic event: towards an understanding of inhibition and disease’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95 (1986): 274–281.
21 John Weinman et al, ‘Enhanced wound healing after an emotional disclosure intervention’, British Journal of Health Psychology 13 (2008): 95–102.
22 If you’re part of a married couple, anyway. The paper in question is Jean Twenge et al, ‘Parenthood and marital satisfaction: a meta-analytic review’, Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (2003): 574–583.
23 Nattavudh Powdthavee, ‘Think having children will make you happy?’, The Psychologist 22 (2009): 308–310.
24 Philip Brickman et al, ‘Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1978): 917–927.
25 Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, ‘Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5 (1998): 644–649.
26 Scott Taylor, ‘An exploration of wilderness effects: a phenomeno-logical inquiry’, online at www.c-zone.net/taylors.
27 These findings are from Robert Wuthnow, ‘Peak experiences: some empirical tests’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 18 (1978): 59–75 and Andrew Greeley, Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (New York: Prentice Hall, 1974): 141.
28 See Martin Seligman, Helplessness (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).
29 For example, Brad Bushman, ‘Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 724–731.
30 R.H. Hornberger, ‘The differential reduction of aggressive responses as a function of interpolated activities’, American Psychologist, 14 (1959): 354.
31 Lisa Starr and Joanne Davila, ‘Clarifying co-rumination: associations with internalizing symptoms and romantic involvement among adolescent girls’, Journal of Adolescence 32 (2009): 19–37.
32 Richard Wiseman summarised his findings, based on surveys conducted at a science festival, in ‘The truth about lying and laughing’, The Guardian, 21 April 2007, at www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/21/weekendmagazine.
33 F. Strack et al, ‘Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 768–777.
34 The story of Hans Selye, stress and strain is summarised at the website of the American Institute of Stress, www.stress.org/hans.htm.
35 Bert Brown, ‘Face-saving following experimentally induced embarrassment’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 6 (1970): 255–271.
36 Christine Harris, ‘Embarrassment: a form of social pain’, American Scientist 94 (2006) 524–533.
37 Ibid.
38 Much of the research on embarrassment involved Rowland Miller, and is discussed in his book Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).
39 Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada, ‘Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing’, American Psychologist, 60 (2005): 678–686; and Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (New York: Crown, 2009).
40 J.P. Forgas and S. Moylan, ‘After the movies: the effects of transient mood states on social judgments’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13 (1987): 478–489.
41 These findings are discussed throughout John Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
42 C.-B. Zhong and G.L. Leonardelli,‘Cold and lonely: does social exclusion literally feel cold?’, Psychological Science 19 (2008): 838–842.
43 Cacioppo, op. cit. (See note 41).