Lecture: The Self Flashcards
Lykken & Tellegen opinion on Happiness
It can be genetic, some genetic proponent for happiness
Diener & Seligman opinion on Happiness
Happy people have lots of friends
Strategies to increase happiness
Gratitude: count blessings
Engage in kind acts
Reappraisal
Situations are what you make of them
Situation a threat vs challenge
Distance
Third person perspective
Mindfulness
Accept emotions
Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman 1978 Study
Aim: show how money doesn’t buy happiness
Procedure:
Lottery winners vs accident victims
They both had to rate their happiness in the past, present, and future
Findings: Victims were the lowest on the happiness rate but they were above the mean. They expected to be happier in the future than the lottery winners.
Over time, positive things or negative things, we go back to a baseline of happiness
Why do people don’t expect that winning lottery won’t increase happiness?
Poor at affective forecasting
Psychological immune system - we adapt to bad and good
Focalism
When should spend money to lead to happiness?
If you spend money on experience and spend it on others
What is the peak-end rule?
Matters what happens at the peak and at the end
How good or bad it was at the peak and the end
Self-affirmation theory
Values affirmation has shown to boost performance of African American middle school student, Latino-American high schoolers & First-generation college student (who can face problems with stereotypes)
Social Comparison
Drive to evaluate our opinions and abilities
upward and downward comparison
Upward comparison
Motivating, compare yourself to someone who is doing better
Downward comparison
Feel better about yourself, compare yourself to someone who is doing worse
Shelley Taylor
Breast cancer patients do both upward and downward comparison
Gilbert’s two-stage process
We compare ourselves to everyone around us and then we correct that if we compare ourselves to others we shouldn’t
But we don’t correct under cognitive load
Gilbert Study
Participants some were told the other people were trained and others that the partners were deliberately misled
But when under cognitive load, they would compare themselves to people they shouldn’t compare themselves to (they didn’t correct themselves as normally)
Lyubomirsky & Ross (1997)
Anagram study
Rearrange
Either the Confederate is outperforming the participant or the participant is outperforming the Confederate
Teaching study
Teach children about moral dilemmas and were videotaped and graded with puppets
They were told if the other person was better or worse than them at the task
People came in happy or unhappy
The results:
Unhappy people: If do better, happy (downward), if do worse, devastated (upward)
Happy people: If do better, happy (downward); if do worse, barely affected
Happy people
Are less likely to engage in upward comparison
less likely to derograte a non-chosen alternative
equally likely to engage in downward comparison
