Topic 17: Happiness and Wellbeing Flashcards
What factors explains a variation in happiness?
The things we have (life circumstances)
The way we are (personality, basic dispositions)
The things we do (daily intentional activities)
When asked, ‘what do you think will bring happiness?’ what do people tend to say?
People tend to list life circumstances such as:
- having abundant money/possessions
- having a good job
- being married/having children
These are people’s intuition
Are people’s intuition about life circumstances bringing happiness valid?
Hard to say because you cannot experimentally manipulate things like wealth, jobs to assess their causal effects.
What are three ways in which we can address the question: Does wealth determine happiness?
- Within a country, as average income grows over time, do people become happier?
- Within a country, are richer people happier?
- Across countries, do wealthier countries have happier people?
What is evidence to suggest that wealth does not determine happiness?
In the US, growth of average income has not been accompanied by increase in happiness.
However, this masks income inequality.
Why does overall economic growth have little effect on happiness?
Because everyone becomes wealthier at the same time, not just you.
Does marital status determine happiness?
Overall, we see that the effects of marital status dissipates.
Does parenthood make people happier?
Evidence is mixed.
Some studies show that parents are happier than nonparents, others showing the opposite.
Depends on how happiness is measured and where the study is conducted - e.g. caring for children is not very enjoyable but later in life, people claim that having children made them happier.
What is evidence that location makes a difference when determining whether parenthood makes people happier?
A study across 22 countries found that parents tend to be happier than non parents in countries that have policies that provide more support for parents.
What is the effect of children on marital satisfaction?
Lots of evidence shows a drop in marital satisfaction when children arrive, lowest when teenagers, recovery when kids leave.
What is the evidence to suggest that the effect of life circumstances on variation of happiness is quite small?
Lyubomirsky estimated that only 10% of long term variation in happiness is to do with life circumstances.
So, the intuition that happiness depends on mostly life circumstances is incorrect.
Remaining 90% could be to do with the way we are.
What are the Big Five Dimensions of personality?
OCEAN:
Openness to experience
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Which of the big five dimensions of personality does happiness correlate with?
Extraversion - positive correlation to happiness
Neuroticism - negative correlation to happiness
What is the heritability of happiness?
0.50
Identical twins share similar levels of happiness regardless of whether they grew up together on not.
Means that whereas life circumstances explain 10% of variation in happiness, genetic predisposition explains 50%.
What is the set point theory of happiness?
We are predisposed to experience a certain level of happiness.
Major life events may temporarily influence our happiness but we tend to return to our set point.
This happens because of psychological adaptation where we adjust to both positive and negative changes in circumstance, returning to our baseline (hedonic treadmill).
If 50% genes and 10% life circumstances can be accounted for variation of happiness, what is the remaining 40% due to?
Intentional activities - Things we do
What are the ‘intentional activities’/things we do to be happier people?
- exercise regularly
- spend more time with family/friends
- express gratitude frequently
- readily offer to help others
etc.
What are the effects of gratitude?
- Cognitive gratitude makes people interpret situations in a more positive way
- Psycho-social gratitude promotes social connections and relationships
What is mindfulness?
Refers to deliberately paying attention to experiences in the present movement
- your breath, bodily sensations, body posture, thoughts, feelings to do with your current activity
What is mind wandering?
Refers to being on autopilot.
The mind jumping from thought to thought, thinking about something other than what you are currently doing.
People reported being less happy when their minds were wandering.
What is Affective Forecasting?
When you make future predictions regarding your own emotional reactions to future events. such as getting a new laptop will make me happy, holiday will make me happy.
