Lecture 2/Hedonics Flashcards
Why study it?
Pleasure we derive is important, we also plan our lives to pursue it. Other 2 overlap with hedonics (engagement and meaning). Aristotle thought the good life was a life of “virtue in action” and that pleasure when not part of a thoughtfully chosen virtuous action was often a distraction. When the extent of pleasant experiences, cognitive engagement, and meaning in life are pitted against one another, the latter two are more important than the former. But the pleasure we derive from subjective experiences remains important, and most of us both value and pursue feelings of happiness. Hedonic wellbeing also ripples outward to impact physical wellbeing, cognitive creativity, and social engagement.
Gilbert’s definiton
Hedonic wellbeing for sure – talks about feelings.
What is hedonic wellbeing?
1999 Daniel Kahneman proposed study of hedonics as what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. Hedonic wellbeing is thus the subjective experience of how one feels in the moment or how one feels about life as a whole. Hedonic wellbeing has 2 components: positive emotions and pleasant experiences. We pursue both.
Positive emotions are more than just happiness
Happiness/joy, contentment, amusement, wonder/awe, love, hope, relief, gratitude, anticipation, pride. Only thing in common is positive valence.
Functional theory of emotions: emotions prepare us for action with specific action tendencies
Fear - escape, anger - attack, disgust - expel, guilt - make amends, shame - disappear, sadness - stillness/rethinking (think about what caused loss, functional as long as it doesn’t lead to depression). Negative emotions motivate you. Tiger going to eat you - fear, freeze/vigilant, attention to find an escape route. Going to eat kid - anger, prepare to fight off attack. If you like the tiger - no specific action.
The broaden and build theory of positive emotions
Positive emotions increase the breadth of the momentary thought action repertoire and help to build psychological and social resources, and undo the effects of negative emotions. They don’t have specific actions, they give you options for what you can do (broaden) and build psychological resources (more generous, build social resources), undo biological effects of negative emotions.
Two presumptions worth questioning?
Why do emotions have to spark specific actions or action tendencies? Do they have to be associated with urges towards physical action? Not always action, positive instances would be rarer in the ancestral environment, build resources to protect you, like intellectual resources- where are the berries? These resources make you more resilient. For instance joy might lead to play, interest to explore, contentment to savor, love to all of the above. They build durable personal resources - physical, social, intellectual, psychological.
Broadening hypothesis/study
Positive emotions broaden people’s attention and thinking. Between-participants manipulation: randomly assign to one of two emotions, contentment (low arousal), joy (high arousal), to neutral, to anger or to fear. Dependent measures were global vs local visual processing, global - triangle, local - squares. Engendered preference for global with positive emotion. Fear was higher than neutral though. Then breadth of thought-action repertoire: had them sum up the emotion they felt while watching the film (good manipulation check too), had them concentrate on the feeling they wrote and imagine it as vividly as possible, had them list all the things they want to do right now. Coded for breadth/diversity of action. Highest to lowest: joy, content, neutral, fear, anger.
Broadening and Aging Study
Isen - thought broadening sounded like cognitive flexibility (which lessens with age). Does positive mood increase cognitive flexibility? Old and young participants, random assignment, positive or neutral mood. DV: remote associates. In a neutral mood, the young people do better. In a positive mood, both do about the same. Old people think just as flexibly in a positive state (regardless of type of emotion). Also creative problem solving: assign young and old to do the candle problem and to positive or neutral mood. Young do better in neutral but old just as well in positive.
The undoing hypothesis
If neg emotions narrow and pos broaden, then pos should be antidotes for lingering effects of negative emotions. Undoing study: speech anxiety, between-ps: contentment, joy, neutral, sadness (want to see things do better than sadness so it’s not just low arousal that mitigates stuff), something extra about the positive valence. DV: duration of cardiovascular reactivity. Responses to speech preparation: heart rate, finger pulse amplitude, pulse transit to finger, pulse transit to ear, diastolic BP, systolic BP. Duration of cardiovascular reactivity in order of shortest to longest: content, joy, neutral, sadness.
Undoing hypothesis could help explain why pos emotions are good for health
Novitiate study (good for health psych because they live the same lifestyles basically). Coded personal essays for levels of positive emotion words. 678 sisters in 1932. Highest quartile living 10 years longer than lowest (Q1: 86.6, Q2:86.8, Q3:90.0, Q4:96.5). Coded on #of pos emotion words. So, something about positive emotionality seems protective. Baseball players: 1952 national baseball register, 230 photos coded for quality of smiles - no, partial, full Duchenne smile. 2009 - looked to see who had died and at what age. You see what you’d expect. Average joes Mroczek et al 2015 - 200 men studied from 1960s as part of an aging study - 8 days between 2002-2003 (mean age 73), daily reports of pain, physical symptoms, daily stressors, increase in negative emotions due to stressors, and decrease in positive emotions due to stressors. 10 year follow up - who died. Emotional reactivity (PA) predictive – positive emotions decreasing was more important than negative emotions increasing.
Is happiness good for society?
Boost in positive emotions makes you more helpful. Happy people are more productive at work (longitudinal), more likely to pick up papers in airport. Happy people volunteer more often (longitudinal), more helpful with Isen’s phone booth study and the airport.
Are happy people less biased towards their own racial ingroup? Broadening and the own-race bias (ORB).
Not replicated again. All white participants, either get joy, neutral, or fear. Learning phase: 28 caucasian and black faces. Testing: 28 original faces, 28 foils. Recognition of black faces better in positive than in neutral or fear. More likely to process others as humans (normally easier to individuate members of your own group). Maybe happy people see others as part of their ingroup.
Why do positive emotions eliminate ORB?
Positive emotions may promote more holistic visual processing, but they may also build resources by creating a state of “social broadening” during which distinctions between social groups and between the self and others become less salient (people stick less to kin groups, two groups can come together when happy)
How to measure hedonics
Why so hard to measure? Anytime target of interest is subjective experience, really the only way to know is to ask people. But subjective experience is squishy: hard to capture in language, differs across time, differs across culture/people, even messier for pleasure/displeasure than it is for positive emotions (pos emotions - facial displays, neurochemical signals).
