Understanding Happiness

A critical review of positive psychology

Mick Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317399841
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

We all want to be happy, and there are plenty of people telling us how it can be achieved. The positive psychology movement, indeed, has established happiness as a scientific concept within everyone's grasp. But is happiness really something we can actively aim for, or is it simply a by-product of how we live our lives more widely?

Dr. Mick Power, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Programmes at the National University of Singapore, provides a critical assessment of what happiness really means, and the evidence for how it can be increased. Arguing that negative emotions are as important to overall well-being as the sunnier sides of our disposition, the book examines many of the claims of the positive psychology movement, including the relationship between happiness and physical health, and argues that resilience, adaptability in the face of adversity, psychological flexibility, and a sense of generativity and creativity are far more achievable as life goals.

This is a book which will fascinate anyone interested in positive psychology, or anyone who has ever questioned the plethora of publications suggesting that blissful happiness is ten easy steps away.

1Happiness

An overview

DOI: 10.4324/9781315681337-2

The word ‘happiness’ should be retired because it's so ambiguous.

(Daniel Kahneman, 2012)

Introduction

The world's greatest living psychologist (at least according to his friend Steven Pinker) and only living psychologist to have won the Nobel Prize for economics, Daniel Kahneman, is on record to have declared himself a pessimist (Kahneman, 2011). However, many people might still be puzzled at Kahneman's declaration that ‘happiness’, at least as a word, should be abandoned and replaced with something more useful given how much time, effort and money people spend on the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps, you might think, that is taking pessimism just a bit too far. But let us consider a few facts and figures.

In relation to tourism and happiness, in 2013 the World Tourism Organization (see www.unwto.org) estimated that there were over 1 billion international travellers worldwide who spent over US$1.4 trillion in order to travel. In relation to alcohol and happiness, in the UK alone the expenditure on alcohol has been estimated for 2012 at approximately £38 billion (Institute of Alcohol Studies, www.ias.org.uk). Similarly, in the week leading up to Christmas 2011 UK shoppers had spent £8 billion in shops by Christmas Eve at a rate of an estimated £2.5 million every minute, with the total expenditure for Christmas in the UK coming in at a staggering £69.1 billion (Daily Mirror, 19 December 2011, accessed at www.mirror.co.uk). There are bucketloads of such figures that could be rolled out, but they all lead to the one question: What is it that we are trying to buy? Haven't we been told that money can't buy love? That money can't buy happiness? So why do we seem to behave as if the opposite were true?

To return to the world's greatest living psychologist, what is even more puzzling about Daniel Kahneman is that as a self-confessed pessimist he moved from Israel to work in the United States. If there is one country in the world that has elevated the pursuit of happiness to a major cultural preoccupation, then it has to be the US. Enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence are the immortal words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Those of us who are a little sceptical of such high ideals might suggest that Americans have been more preoccupied with the pursuit of wealth than the pursuit of happiness, given that more than half of the world's billionaires live in the US (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). However, a more constructive response might be to point to the development of the positive psychology movement in the US and to argue that surely this movement follows in the great tradition begun in the Declaration of Independence. The founder of this movement, the psychologist Martin Seligman, describes its origins to have taken place in his back garden when his 5-year-old daughter Nikki asked him why he was always so grouchy. As Seligman writes:

Nikki … was throwing weeds into the air and dancing and singing. Since she was distracting me, I yelled at her, and she walked away. Within a few minutes she was back, saying, ‘Daddy, I want to talk to you.’

‘Yes, Nikki?’

‘Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three until when I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.’

This was an epiphany for me. In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch.

(Seligman, 2002, p. 28)

This insightful question from a wise 5-year-old seems to have led to a mid-life crisis in which the inventor of Learned Helplessness, a state that would surely make anyone a grouchy old man, rediscovered his inner positive self and then wrote, as it states on the front cover, The New York Times Bestseller Authentic Happiness (2002), and a whole truckload of similar books besides.

One crucial point that we must make about the positive psychology movement (we will return to it frequently in later chapters) is that surely it must be annoying to older generations to see some of their ideas repackaged and recycled? Wasn't that a positive psychology movement back in the 1950s when the great (and, of course, subsequently very rich) Norman Vincent Peale wrote classics such as The Power of Positive Thinking, The Power of Positive Living, The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking, The Power of Positive Thinking for Young People, and, my favourite title of all, Stay Alive All Your Life? I guess you begin to get the idea. Anyway, Norman's conquest of positive thinking includes examples that sound just like Seligman in his back garden:

Altogether too many people are defeated by the everyday problems of life. They go struggling, perhaps even whining, through their days with a sense of dull resentment at what they consider the ‘bad breaks’ life has given them…. By learning how to cast them from the mind, by refusing to become mentally subservient to them, and by channelling spiritual power through your thoughts, you can rise above obstacles which ordinarily might defeat you.

(Peale, 1953, pp. vii–viii)

On the basis of this continual pursuit of happiness and all things positive, you might naively assume that Americans should come top of the happiness league tables that are now generated from large-scale surveys of how people feel. Absolutely not!

An extremely insightful and highly recommended book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better For Everyone (2010), includes a wealth of charts and figures demonstrating why the US, of all the developed countries, typically comes bottom on almost all indicators that are relevant to health, well-being and quality of life. Figure 1.1 presents the case, showing that of all the developed nations, the US has the greatest income inequality, which in turn is linked to a variety of negative indicators such as the Index of Health and Social Problems.

FIGURE 1.1 Income inequality and the Index of Health and Social Problems.

Source: Wilkinson and Pickett (2010). Reproduced with permission.

In order to understand the consequences of such an unequal society whilst being bombarded by positive thinking and the pursuit of happiness, Wilkinson and Pickett point to the work of the US psychologist Jean Twenge, who, in publications such as Generation Me (2006), has identified some worrying longitudinal trends in the US. In a summary of studies carried out between the 1950s and the 1990s, Twenge found that there has been a continuous upward trend in the levels of anxiety over those 40 years for both men and women in the US. Over a similar time period, studies also seem to show that people in the US report increasingly positive levels of self-esteem on standardised measures of esteem. The paradox therefore seems to be that Americans are becoming both more anxious and more positive about themselves at the same time, which seems to present a puzzling scenario. In explanation, Twenge has argued that high self-esteem can come in two varieties: the first is a genuine healthy style that is open to experience and to feedback from others; in contrast, the second is a type of defensive egotism or narcissism that is not open to experience or to feedback from others, but which provides a defence against social-evaluative threats. We will examine this defensive self-esteem and a number of other similar problems in detail in Chapter 2. However, it is important to point out the possible links to the ‘Have a nice day – Have a nice life’ think positive movement with which the US is currently preoccupied.

The problem with all such simplistic philosophies is that they come with a psychological blindness that can put people at risk, whilst leading to the apparent paradoxes such as why we are wealthier but not happier, or why we think more positively but act more negatively. In Chapter 3 we will consider more sophisticated psychological models such as our own SPAARS model (Power and Dalgleish, 2008) and Kahneman's (2011) arguments for two major systems: System 1, which operates largely automatically and outside of awareness, and System 2, which is largely conscious and controlled. However, at this point we will just note the entertaining book by Barbara Ehrenreich Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World (2009) (published in the US under the title Bright-Sided). In a nutshell, Ehrenreich argues that the think positive movement is just one of the many tricks by which the rich enjoy being rich but try to keep the poor, the infirm, the unemployed and the disabled quiet about their situations: ‘Just think positive and you too could be President!’ However, and just to set the balance straight, we are certainly not arguing that positive psychology is all bad, but that in the popular press unfortunately it has become synonymous with a simplistic happiology industry; in later chapters we will examine many of the plusses, including issues about strengths and virtues, the importance of forgiveness, gratitude and acts of kindness in our interpersonal relations, and the assessment and improvement of our quality of life. The issue for us is that the positive psychology movement in its popular presentation appears to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For example, so-called ‘negative’ emotions, which got such a bad press in Seligman's writings at the beginning of the movement, are essential parts of us and, when used in the appropriate way, also add to our strengths, virtues, and improve the quality of our interpersonal relationships (see Chapter 3).

Popular conceptions and misconceptions of ‘happiness’

One of the puzzles of modern economics is that, despite the genuine increase in the wealth of the developed nations, there has not been an equivalent increase in the happiness of people populating those nations (e.g. Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2008). One interpretation has been that although physical capital has increased, there has been a concomitant decline in social capital, that is, in the quality of the social support and social networks with which we all enrich our lives. Although the reasons for the decline in social capital are likely to be complex (Layard, 2011), we can take one simple example: the impact of television over the past 50 years has been considerable. A study of television's impact in the Kingdom of Bhutan, located to the east of Tibet in the Himalayas, has come up with some dramatic results. The Kingdom of Bhutan has taken a unique approach to the state of its population in that it has introduced an economic population measure known as Gross National Happiness (GNH), which sits alongside other economies’ preoccupation with Gross National Product (GNP). In the time since television was introduced into Bhutan in 1999, there has been a dramatic decline in social capital, or GNH, to the extent that the Bhutanese Government is likely to cut down the number of TV channels and the amount of TV coverage that will be available in the future (Layard, 2011; MacDonald, 2003).

One of the problems that economists struggle with is the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of states such as happiness; our emphasis throughout this book is very much that it is not the objective event or situation but the subjective appraisal of an event or situation that is more important in determining the consequent emotional state (see Power and Dalgleish, 2008). Although there may be thresholds below which material deprivation and poverty do impact on happiness (Diener, 2003), above these thresholds the impact on happiness and on quality of life is likely to be more subjective or appraisal-based (e.g. Power, 2003), which is why the relationship between health and well-being indicators with income inequality emerges in the wealthy developed nations.

A second issue that the economic app...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Happiness: an overview
• 2 Love and mania: disorders of happiness
• 3 The power of negative emotions
• 4 The happiness industry
• 5 A timeshare in paradise: of gods and the afterlife
• 6 Positive psychology, health and illness
• 7 Transforming the self
• References
• Author index
• Subject index