I met Barbara and Daphne about ten years ago when they visited my research unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London and we appeared on a TV programme together. They were then in their sixties, having been adopted by different families soon after birth. They became part of the famous Minnesota study of adopted twins that had been reared apart. Barbara and Daphne’s mother was a Finnish au-pair who put the girls up for adoption after giving birth to them in London’s Hammersmith Hospital in 1939. As a single home couldn’t be found for them they were separated. The fact of their adoption was kept a strict secret in both families until the girls started work and needed official birth records.
Daphne was adopted by a metallurgist and his wife in Luton. She went horse-riding and had piano and ballet lessons. Barbara was adopted by a park attendant and his second wife in West Kensington in London, who both died by the time she was a teenager, and was then raised by a strict aunt. Both twins recall being generally happy in their childhoods despite the different surroundings. They were reunited in 1979, when Barbara found out first that their mother had committed suicide, aged just 24, soon after returning to Finland, and then that their mother had also been adopted – her father was a Russian.
‘I met Daphne at London’s King’s Cross station,’ says Barbara. ‘We didn’t hug and we didn’t kiss. There was no need. It was like meeting an old friend. We just walked off chatting together. The funny thing is we were both wearing a beige dress and brown jacket.’ It was the first of several coincidences they discovered as they caught up with each other’s lives. These included leaving school at 14, having blue wedding themes, having three or more kids and one miscarriage, liking cool black coffee, Marmite, and making the same silly spelling mistakes in tests such as ‘the cas [instead of cat] sat on the mat’. They also shared a dislike for answering questionnaires. After answering 15,000 questions for the Minnesota study they vowed never to fill in any more, despite my attempts to persuade them, but luckily they were more than happy to chat.
They had both been raised by rather dour adopted families without much tradition of jokes or humour. ‘Neither of us felt we really belonged before we met each other – we had never met anyone who laughed as easily as we did,’ Barbara said. ‘We now know we have a similar sense of humour but don’t particularly like slapstick comedy and are both useless at remembering or telling jokes. We do feel sorry for anyone going out with us, as we don’t stop talking and laughing.’
Happiness, or contentedness, is not easily measured or defined, yet we are obsessed with trying to understand how to achieve it. There are over 12,000 books in English on Amazon with ‘happiness’ in the title, most of them claiming they can let you into the secret of how to attain it – if you can afford the cover price. In the same vein, ‘the happiness gene’ keeps popping up in the media, with multiple claims to have located it in the last five years, though mostly these are just rehashed stories. There is no single gene that controls happiness, but if there was, Barbara and Daphne, ‘the giggle twins’, would both have it.
Laughing is part, more or less, of all of our personalities. It is a very basic human reflex that may be related to language and starts as early as 17 weeks of age – according to laugh experts (gelotologists). The ‘giggle twins’ appear to have inherited an inherent low threshold for laughter as well as an outward expression of happiness that couldn’t be dampened by their adopted families.1
Studies of 29 other twin pairs reared apart have shown that the particular way they smile to positive emotions is genetically influenced. But strangely the way they grimace at bad news or negative images is not.2 This suggests that smiling and laughter has its own private brain network and may be more important in our development and evolution than we thought. Detecting angry or sad faces may still be important, and perhaps as it is more crucial to our survival it is not as variable.3
Happiness, like humour, is a part of our personalities that is very difficult to define. I was raised listening to my father’s witty quips and self-mocking irony, and according to friends have inherited some of his traits. I find my son has also inherited a similar style and even when still young could entertain a crowd. But is this a genetic effect or more the result of myself (and then my son) being exposed to the equivalent of thousands of hours of badly performed Woody Allen and Groucho Marx-type gags? Although it has proved impossible to get funds for, and makes most of my colleagues question my sanity, I have been trying over the last 15 years to find the secret of ‘humour’ through my research with twins.
To test the ability of hundreds of twins to tell and laugh at jokes and to record them accurately is a tough job and, like many attempts to measure personality traits, tends to produce large errors that mask any genetic component. I had thought of hiring a comedy club with a twin ‘open mike’ night and twin judges, but there were a few technical issues to solve. First, having to get twins independently to choose the gags; then telling the same jokes separately while the other twin was in a soundproof booth; and finally having the separate twin judges marking reliably without conferring. We also had to mix them around so they didn’t get bored of hearing the same jokes repeated by the second twin. I realised this would have been either a glorious disaster or a hit daytime TV show. Sadly we shall never know.
Back in the real world, the first experiment we tried was to look at humour appreciation using visual cartoons and a questionnaire with a ten-point scale. A score of 10 was rated ‘one of the funniest jokes I have ever encountered’; a score of 1 was ‘not worth the paper it was written on’. As we had to use novel material (for the twins), we picked some of the older, less well known of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons. We selected five in the end that got the most variable response from my team. For a study exploring genetic differences between people there is no point in picking jokes that either everyone or nobody finds funny. It was the differences between people – in science-speak, the variation – that we were most interested in.
We looked at 127 female twin pairs aged between 40 and 50. Overall their ratings for the jokes were not high: most didn’t like them. For example, for the hare and tortoise joke (which I liked) they scored on average 4/10 and the identical twins had only a 40 per cent agreement in scores compared with 60 per cent in the non-identicals. When we looked at all five jokes, both types of twin had similar levels of agreement, so our conclusion was that genetic influences were not a major factor. This means that unlike most other traits – and surprisingly to us – it appeared that cartoon appreciation is mainly due to environmental (meaning social, cultural and lifestyle-related) effects.
Another possible reason for our unexpected result was that humour is not an easy trait to pin down experimentally. It could be that we had picked a style of comedy that was just too quirky to study. For those who don’t know them, Gary Larson’s cartoons are full of paranoia, irony and nature and often have a dark or black humour behind them, such as the hare and tortoise being squashed by a truck, or the deer with a birthmark shaped like a target on his chest, or the kid pushing the Midvale School for the Gifted door with a sign that says pull. Although Larson has fans worldwide and has sold over 45 million books, many people fail to be amused. It could be that for this particular humour style culture really was crucial.
The press picked up on this story in a number of different ways, my favourite being the UK’s Daily Star, a cheap popular tabloid that has lots of sport and semi-naked ladies but is famous for its catchy headlines and xenophobia. They claimed an ‘exclusive’ interview with me on page 3 – next to a comely naked lady – with the headline ‘Why Brits get Fritz in Fits’. Underneath was a brief explanation that we (the boffins) had found the magic cultural ingredient of British humour – and how this meant we clearly had a better sense of humour than the Germans. A masterful, if erroneous, interpretation of the data.
Although I believed our data was correct, I could not overcome some lingering doubts over our conclusions. Perhaps it was our choice of wacky humour or cartoons that was not representative. All aspects of life that can be measured can be studied scientifically, even jokes. Hans Eysenck, a famous pioneering British behavioural psychologist and student of Cyril Burt, also studied humour in the dark days of 1942, and came up with the now accepted concept that every joke has three possible elements.4 First, the cognitive aspect: this is the punchline, the ‘get it’ part, the unexpected surprise twists that make people laugh. The second is the conative aspect – the feeling of superiority at another’s misfortune (e.g. what do you call a man with no arms and no legs in a water barrel? … Bob). The third is the orective – the sexual innuendo or dirty joke. The best and most successful jokes have all three elements.
The original cartoons that we chose for our first study may have focused too much on the first aspect, the punchline. So we decided to repeat our experiments using a wider variety of jokes, including some the twins had to read out loud to themselves as well as some smutty and misfortune jokes. Our results were not clear-cut. The responses to some jokes did have a clear genetic component but those to other quite similar jokes did not, and were clearly cultural. We tried hard, but still couldn’t tease out any consistent patterns in the three joke categories. The secret of the perfect joke seemed to be just beyond our grasp.
A few years later another group of intrepid Canadian joke researchers approached us to carry on our work and answer the question the humour world was waiting for. Importantly, they had funding. They believed that an individual’s responses to jokes and humour were too difficult to assess, so instead they used an overall self-rating of humour. Most people when asked a simple question will respond that they have a good or better-than-average sense of humour, so they had to use a more detailed set of questions in a larger number of twins, breaking humour down into four styles and 32 statements.5
Two styles of humour were potentially positive assets: feeling part of a group (‘I laugh and joke a lot with my friends’) and self-enhancing humour (‘If I am feeling depressed, I can usually cheer myself up with humour’). Two were negative: aggressive (‘If I don’t like someone, I often use humour or teasing to put them down’) and self-defeating (‘I let people laugh at me or make fun at my expense more than I should’). Using 4,000 UK twins, it turned out that all the four styles of humour were twice as similar in identical as in non-identical twins (meaning that identical twins were twice as likely to score the same in each category as non-identical twins), with an estimated heritability of 40 per cent, showing a genetic component but no clear effect of family environment.
The Canadians simultaneously performed the same study using over 300 US pairs from the Twinsburg annual twin festival in Ohio. This brought surprisingly different results. While both countries agreed on positive humour styles being similarly genetic and environmental, in Americans (unlike the Brits) no hard-wired genetic influences were seen for the negative humour styles. In the US twins these negative humour styles were subsequently associated with a lack of mental toughness.6 Recent study has shown that Australian twins resemble Brits in humour styles and are also different to Americans. This is a good example of how genetic influences (heritability) can vary between populations. So could evolutionary gene differences or variations explain the greater use and acceptance of sarcasm and self-deprecating humour in weak-willed wimpy Britons? This is improbable, whereas a much greater exposure to ‘black’ self-deprecating humour over many years and generations seems more likely.
TV shows from the UK such as Blackadder and Little Britain are famous for their black dark humour. In the TV show The Office the unpleasantness of the show’s hero, David Brent, had to be toned down for American audiences in the stateside version. So it appears that while most of us have a sense of humour that is both culturally and genetically determined, the ways in which we use or misuse humour are much more variable across countries and cultures, showing that perhaps the Daily Star reporter had correctly worked it all out ten years before: Germans just don’t have the same sense of humour as the Brits.
‘Overall would you regard yourself as happier and more content than the average person?’ Despite life traumas and bad times, over 85 per cent of us rate ourselves as above average in happiness compared to others. This is odd, since clearly most of us can’t be above average. It suggests that personal optimism and confidence in the future is another hard-wired human trait. Surveys like a UK MORI 2007 poll show that we believe that improving the following five factors will make us happier: health, family, friends, travel and wealth. But what drives us to believe in these factors without much evidence they are true? Is for example the search for material wealth a natural instinct, or something that recent cultural and advertising trends have fostered in us?
In 1972 the average male was exposed annually to only around two hundred advertisements. Forty years later this had risen to well over three thousand7 – so many that it is hard to recognise or remember them. Over the last 50 years of advertising the message has remained: ‘Buy our product and it will make you happier, more attractive and more successful.’ As Don Draper, the protagonist in the TV series Mad Men, set in a 1960s advertising agency, memorably puts it: ‘Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car …’ Most experts agree that materialism in society has increased, but was this human instinct always there? The study of 480 US and Canadian adult twins showed that while happiness was consistent with previous studies as being 46 per cent heritable and 52 per cent environmental, materialism was not at all hard-wired.8 It was not genetic but was entirely influenced by family and the outside environment. So we can blame Don Draper and the Mad Men – not our genes – for this more recent human attribute.
Contrary to our materialistic views, obtaining more money doesn’t actually make you happier unless you are very poor. While moving from being poor to average does have a large impact on people’s lives, moving from middle- to high-income ranges delivers no significant increase in happiness. Similarly marriage has only a marginal effect on somebody’s overall happiness (and it wears off quickly). Health does seem to be important, but only as you get past 65. Summarising the many surveys of what makes people happy, some unlikely candidates emerge: having a higher degree, being involved in religious activities, and gardening.9 So even pulling a few weeds up helps us somehow find happiness, as we get dirty and back to our roots – ideally also thinking about God and how much fun it was being a lazy student.
Across cultures, people rate subjective well-being as the most important element of their life and even more important than material success.10 In the regular global happiness surveys so beloved by the media, some countries consistently top the polls.11 In a Gallup world happiness survey of 2011, Nigeria actually came top, followed by Afghanistan and many Latin American countries, with the ex-communist countries Russia and Romania the unhappiest, and the US and UK slightly higher.12 In a more detailed study of 15 European countries the winner was Denmark – the UK scored a mediocre ninth. The most miserable complainers were those living in the sunny south – Greece, Portugal and Italy – and that was before the Euro Crisis. What is so special about the Danes? Not that they have the best weather, jobs or the most money – they don’t. It’s that they have good social cohesion and the lowest expectations. Similarly in a 2009 US National survey Louisiana (pre-Hurricane) came top and over-expectant New Yorkers came bottom. It appears the less you wish for (and the less you strive for happiness) the happier you are likely to be – suggesting that wild over-optimism doesn’t always lead to happiness.
Daniel and Simon are identical twins who led a normal, fairly happy childhood, although their parents divorced when they were teenagers. Simon was always taller, more competitive and slightly better at sports and schoolwork than Daniel. Both twins liked the outdoor and sporty life, enjoying rugby as well as building and DIY. They also remember constantly fighting as boys. They both joined the police force and while Simon stayed and did well, Dan couldn’t stand the paperwork and rigidity of the system and went to work on a farm, which he loved. Both twins married and had children and saw each other every few months. Then their lives diverged along very different paths.
When he was 23, Dan was loading hay onto a lorry when he was hit by a 50-kilo bale thrown by another worker. It broke his spine and pelvis in several places. He was in hospital for a year, and it took five years and many operations before he could walk again. He lost his job, his wife walked out on him and he lost contact with his family. His pain has never disappeared completely and he can’t run or sit or stand for any length of time. He hasn’t had a steady job since and knows he can never play sports again. Understandably he has had spells of depression.
His brother Simon meanwhile rose to become a successful detective in the police. He had a traditional family life and was very content. I spoke to them when they were 55 and asked whether they would have swapped lives. Dan said emphatically: ‘No – although I went through a bad patch, I am happy the way things turned out. Although often poor and living on meagre benefits, it allowed me the freedom to travel and see the world. I spent most of the last twenty years in Africa and Asia doing mostly voluntary work with people much worse off than me.’ He also met his new wife in Tanzania, and they have bought a 250-acre farm there together, where he hopes to spend the rest of his life.
His successful brother Simon has the nice car, large detached house, golf club, police pension and material success. ‘I think my brother and I are so different in personality and lifestyle that we must be non-identical. We really have nothing in common.’ However the DNA confirmed their status as clones. ‘Although I certainly wouldn’t swap lives with Daniel, I do sometimes envy his lack of responsibility and freedom.’
David Lykken and colleagues from Minnesota looked at over 2,700 middle-aged US twins and used a wide range of self-rating statements to measure happiness, such as ‘I am just naturally cheerful’ and ‘My future looks very bright to me’. Results were similar even in a subgroup raised apart and show a heritability of between 40 and 50 per cent. However, happiness is also a transient state of mind that changes with both time and circumstance, so a single snapshot may be meaningless. What the clever Minnesota researchers did was to measure happiness at two time points about eight years apart.13 This showed that identical twins strongly agreed across time, so about 80 per cent of long-term happiness is genetically controlled – more than at any single point in time. This presumably explains why lottery winners don’t usually experience a long-term change in their happiness rating.
So while genes give us set-points for levels of contentment within which we work over our lives – rather like a thermostat – at any given point in time non-genetic factors (i.e. family and social support) are just as important. However, contentment or happiness is just a figment of our imagination and personality. According to behavioural geneticists they are not specific or independent factors but just a composite of our personalities.14 They can be predicted from studying the so-called ‘Big Five’ personality features: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which are themselves around 50 per cent genetic and 50 per cent environmental. Happy people generally have low scores for neuroticism, high scores for extroversion and conscientiousness, with increased openness and agreeableness scores helping a bit. Although happiness is elusive, it is still easier to ask how someone is feeling than to enquire about their neuroticism/agreeableness index. Luckily for authors of happiness books, the secret of what makes us regularly happy still remains unexplained.
An important aspect of happiness is how we perceive the future – we differ in our optimism and pessimism. But, as with happiness, humans tend to overrate their own abilities: for example 85 per cent of people rate themselves as having above-average ‘people skills’ and 25 per cent rate themselves as exceptional – in the top 1 per cent. Over 90 per cent of us also believe we are above-average drivers, and these false assessments don’t diminish with age.15 Optimism and overrating our true abilities appears to be a common trait across cultures and part of being human. So is optimism a learned behaviour or genetic? A large Australian–Swedish twin study found (like previous studies)16 a 40 per cent heritability for optimism in females with only a small – 10 per cent – effect in males, suggesting that men may be more easily influenced by outside factors.
Is it always good to be optimistic? Over 83 studies have been performed exploring how optimism influences health.17 Most studies show that there is generally a slight (20 per cent) advantage to being optimistic in life when dealing with the after-effects of major life events or illnesses, such as bereavement, cancer or heart attacks.18 Pessimism has, as expected, the opposite effect. But sometimes you can be too optimistic. Extreme optimists who guessed they would live 20 years more than national averages were compared with moderate optimists (the majority) who overestimated by a few years and pessimists who thought they would die early. The study found that the moderate optimists worked hard, saved well and smoked less, compared with the extreme overconfident optimists who worked less, saved less and smoked more.19
One of the longest longitudinal social studies, which are often more reliable, is called the Terman Study, named after the child psychologist who selected and tested 1,500 gifted high-IQ ten-year-old Californian children in 1921. Terman and his successors followed them all their lives, at first to see whether these high IQ kids would become remarkable adults, and later to record when and how they died.20
Of all the traits, conscientiousness best predicted longevity. But what was interesting was that the extreme optimists, particularly the men, died off earlier. Extreme optimists tend to be overconfident: because they never contemplate the consequences of failure, they are likely to take more risks, such as driving too fast, not getting medical check-ups, smoking, and not bothering to take medications. So could having a less rosy view on life sometimes be helpful?
Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale was no wimp. As an officer in the United States Navy, he was awarded 26 personal combat medals, including the Medal of Honor and four Silver Stars. This made him one of the most highly decorated officers in US history and the highest-ranking naval officer held as a prisoner of the Vietnam War. While on a mission over North Vietnam in September 1965, he was taken captive and held as a POW. He remained in the Hoa Lo prison for seven years. There he was routinely tortured and beaten and mostly kept in solitary confinement. Sleep was difficult. His cell measured 3 square metres. A light bulb burned above him 24 hours a day and he was locked for 12 hours a day in leg irons.
When informed by his captors that he was to be paraded in public for propaganda, he told them that he would not allow this and so cut his scalp with a razor to disfigure himself. When they covered his wounded head with a hat, he beat himself with a stool until his face was so bloody and swollen he was unrecognisable, and so not much use for propaganda.
Stockdale survived for seven years.
When asked what his coping strategy was Stockdale replied: ‘I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.’21 When asked about fellow prisoners who didn’t make it, Stockdale replied: ‘Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said: “We’re going to be out by Christmas.” And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say: “We’re going to be out by Easter.” And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
‘This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality whatever they might be.’
Stockdale was by no means a pessimist, or he would have given up, but he clearly had a more realistic mild optimism that helped him survive.
Although humans have a clear inbuilt optimism bias there is a wide range of states that, being partly inherited, can be either useful or fatal in some scenarios. As the American writer William Arthur Ward put it succinctly: ‘The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.’
Peter and Nigel were 42-year-old identical twins who were about to celebrate their joint birthday together with their family. But Peter hadn’t answered the phone for two days and his family were beginning to worry. Eventually Nigel was woken by a late-night phone call: ‘I’m sorry, we’ve found him.’ Peter had hanged himself in his bedroom. The twins’ birthday was spent going over funeral arrangements and working out how to disguise the rope marks around his neck. Peter had committed suicide after struggling with depression and alcohol for several years following his divorce. Both brothers always knew they had a tendency to depression which came from their mother’s (Irish) side of the family, where several uncles had met the same end.
‘Why him and not me?’ Nigel asked. ‘I should have done more. Yes, he was gloomy but I thought – like before – he would get through it. Sometimes I’d ring and he’d sound like his old self. Other times he was just full of negative thoughts and low self-esteem.’
So with the odds against him, why had Nigel so far avoided the depression that plagued his brother? Both brothers had the same genes and same family background. Their environments were similar but, crucially, not equal. Both tended to be moody and sometimes melancholy and had married around ten years before, but Peter’s marriage subsequently fell apart – something he never quite recovered from. Nigel has taken the death of his brother badly and one year on still feels guilty, but he has not yet become clinically depressed and feels cautiously confident about his own future.
Ireland has for several generations had one of the highest rates of depression and suicide in the world, but it is not yet clear if genes or the Irish environment (weather and alcohol) are to blame.22 Although finding causal genes even with large studies has not been easy,23 both depression and suicide have a clear genetic component equating to about 40 to 50 per cent heritability.24 And yet over half of identical twins with a depressed sibling are on average free of depression, so environment triggers are evidently also crucial. In the case of Peter and Nigel a stressful divorce may have been the factor that tipped the balance. Both twins are likely to have inherited a suite of genes that very slightly altered their brain chemistry, making them more susceptible to a rapid loss of optimism under stress. Dual twin suicides are not that uncommon.
Several large studies starting in the 1990s of a candidate gene (one that scientists suspect of being involved) have shown promise. They found that people carrying two copies (one from each parent) of a gene variant controlling transport of the key brain neurotransmitter serotonin (also known as 5-HTT) have twice the risk of major depressive episodes. However, as my colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry found out, this seems only to hold true if they also suffer a major life crisis.25 Since then, more than 55 other studies have attempted to copy the result and most (but not all) have succeeded – some in monkeys and rodents.26 Others have used brain imaging to show that the anxiety and fear centre (the amygdala) lights up differently in those with this gene variant when stressed. Several studies implicated major stressful events, particularly childhood maltreatment and the response to serious medical illnesses.27
So if we are lucky we will have the right mix of genes so that our natural human optimism prevails and we will survive the many knocks and setbacks of life – illness, bereavement, disease. However, with the wrong combinations of genes plus the wrong circumstances, the natural protection is lost and the brain chemicals acting on our anxiety (amygdala) and emotional centres (rostral anterior cingulate gyrus) conspire to project a pessimistic, or some say a more realistic, view of the future.
However, there is a more intriguing possibility, which is that epigenetics is likely to play a role in this process. Evidence shows that life stresses may influence us by acting epigenetically on the genes. A study of young macaque monkeys showed that in those that had the key 5-HTT gene variant it was methylated and so inactivated when they were stressed. Monkeys with a different genetic make-up have a different stress response.28 Other studies suggest that in humans, having a version of the gene alters your tendency to see the world through rose-tinted spectacles. The protective form of the gene lets you filter out or ignore negative images or thoughts, so protecting you from bad news.29 This presents the possibility that in the future, when faced with a messy divorce, rather than resort to Prozac or gin and tonics we could take specific highly tailored chemicals to epigenetically steady our sensitive genes until the crisis has passed.
Even environmentalist sceptics agree nowadays that many traits are to some extent heritable; out of hundreds of traits, we have found only a handful that are not. However we humans just don’t like to be told that anything about us is predetermined. There is now some research evidence to suggest that telling people that their lives are in some way pre-ordained may actually be harmful and limiting.
The New York psychologist Carol Dweck has been looking at the powerful effect of mindsets. She took a group of ten-year-old schoolkids and tested them individually with the same simple puzzle. She then divided the class randomly, regardless of their real scores, into two groups and told individual students from one group that they had done well ‘because they clearly had talent’. The other group were told they had done well ‘because they had worked hard’. The groups were then asked if they wanted to take a harder test or retake the same test. The ‘talented’ group preferred to retake the same test; most of the ‘hard workers’ accepted the challenge to do a harder one. When both groups were tested on the new harder puzzle, the ‘hard workers’ beat the ‘talented’ group, and yet there was no academic or IQ difference between them – other than their mindset.30
This study showed the power of positive labelling to actually do harm: the talented group suddenly felt they were now failures. Negative labelling can be even worse. Tests have shown that even completing a simple check box at the top of a test indicating race or sex can lower subsequent test scores.31 Not all of us are affected equally by these labels. Dweck has divided people into two broad mindset categories on the basis of answering a few simple questions. You can test your own mindset by looking at the extent to which you agree or disagree with these statements:
1. Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
2. You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
If you mostly agree rather than disagree with both statements then you are more likely to have a ‘fixed’ mindset. If you mostly disagree, you are more likely to have a ‘growth’ mindset. According to Dweck, fixed mindsets react badly to positive or negative labelling and have a fear of failure, whereas growth mindsets have a more pragmatic approach and will continue to take risks to expand their potential.
In the US in the 1960s kids were frequently lined up in class by their IQ scores, often with long-lasting adverse effects on both ends of the spectrum. As we enter the modern world of gene testing and potential genetic determinism, are we going to repeat the mistakes of the IQ test? While our personality genes make us more or less susceptible to having a fixed mindset or to being over-optimistic, this doesn’t mean they can’t change.
Most of us will perform better in exams if confidently told after a poor performance: ‘You can definitely change and improve next time’, rather than: ‘Try to do your best, but don’t worry, as you may have already reached your genetic potential.’ So even if in the future your genetic make-up would be a rough guide to future performance, it would be counterproductive in terms of personal development to label anyone genetically talented. Positive Psychotherapy Intervention (using bio-feedback) pioneered by Marty Seligman has been used to alter mindsets in some people. Pessimists can become slightly more optimistic and improve their resilience and outlook on life, as well as reducing depression and improving their ability to withstand or recover from disease.32 Although the approach has its sceptics, the US army has invested heavily in it and in 2009 gave $31 million to Seligman’s team for their CSF (comprehensive soldier fitness) training programme to help fight depression, and improve mental toughness during trauma. Other cheaper self-help cognitive therapies are also increasingly popular. One example is www.moodscope.com, which is a free service that allows you to track your daily mood and assess your ups and downs.
An ancient approach to changing our emotional responses is meditation. Elite meditating Buddhist monks, after performing thousands of hours of meditation, can greatly alter their gamma brain activity.33 Brain scans show amateur meditators can also structurally alter some brain areas like the hippocampus, affected in depression, after only eight weeks of meditating for 30 minutes per day.34 All this points to the amazing flexibility, adaptability and neuro-plasticity of the human brain, which, with our rigid mindsets, we often ignore.
Another practical way to make yourself happier is to avoid the Victor Meldrews and move next door to happy neighbours. James Fowler studied 5,000 New Englanders over 20 years and plotted their changes in happiness against their social networks.35 Happy and miserable people clustered together in ways that couldn’t be explained by genes and families. This isn’t just happy people avoiding grumpy people: the study suggested that happiness spreads like a virus. If you have just a single friend living within a mile who was sad and became happy, your chances of happiness increased by a quarter, and by more if they moved even closer. The effect was greatest for same-sex friends and extended to friends of friends of friends – the so-called three degrees of separation. The effect was most profound when you were at the epicentre of a happiness cluster and if your next-door neighbour was happy. Perhaps estate agents should now start providing neighbourhood happiness scores to raise property prices.
So while it is clear that genes are important for many facets of our lives, including happiness, all the evidence suggests that they no longer look like the dominant factor. We all have inherited sets of genes regulating optimism and pessimism, and they vary between us. However, we now know that both genes and their related mindsets, which we thought to be hard-wired, can be modified and reset along with the traits and personalities that define us as individuals.
In the next chapters we will learn more details of how and when these epigenetic modifications occur. As we will see, this also raises the possibility that you can pass on your acquired optimism or happiness to your children. But can you also pick up a new skill or talent and pass that to your kids?