Lecture 1
Negative bias: bad is stronger than good
- Negative events have a bigger impact than positive effects
- People are more distressed by the loss of $50 than by finding $50.
- Negative information receives more attention and is processed more thoroughly than
positive information
- Evolutionary explanation: humans attuned to preventing bad things more than those
oriented toward maximizing good things
- A person who ignores the danger of fire may not live to see the next day
Baumeister et al: psychological has focused more on understanding bad things
Science of happiness is a recent phenomenon
- Ed diener: 400 publications on subjective wellbeing
- Martin Seligman: positive psychologt
- Mihalyi csikzentmihalyi: flow 1990
- Barbara fredercikson: broaden en build 2001
- Ruut veenhoven: dutch professor of happiness
Definition ans measurement of happiness
What is happiness
- A state of wellbeing and contentment
- The experience of joy, contentment, or positive well being combined with a sense
that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile
- Good mental states, including all the various evaluations positive and negative, that
people make of their lives and the affective relations of people to their experiences
- Happiness is a feeling of pleasure and positivity
Is happiness an elusive concept
Jingle (thorndike 1904) common term to refer to different underlying conceptions:
happiness refers to life satisfaction, positive affect, wellbeing
Jangle (Kelley 1927) different terms are used to describe common underlying
conceptions: happiness, life satisfaction, meaning in life and wellbeing
Hedonic/ subjective well-being as a composte of 3 related but distinct facets (tripartite
model) exam question
How happiness is understood in science
- Cognitive life evaluation: a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some specific
aspect of it: general satisfaction with life or domain specific satisfaction like marriage,
work, friendship etc
- Positive affect: a person’s feeling or emotional states typically measured with
reference to a particular point in time, excited, interested, enthusiastic
- Negative affect: a person feelings or emotional states, typically measured with
reference to a particular point in time, nervous, afraid, irritable
,Eudaimonic well being
- Eudaimonia: a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or good psychological
functioning
- Eudaimonic: actualization of ones potential by fulfilling ones daimon true self;
flourishing
As a different from:
Hedonic/ subjective wellbeing: with a focus on affect (maximalization of pleasure and
minimization of pain) and cognition
A bit of consensus and quite a bit of controversy
Consensus: two main approaches
- Hedonic well-being: satisfaction with life + presence of momentary positive affect +
absence of negative effect
- Eudaimonic: purpose and meaning in life
Controversy
What is the best indicator of happiness: hedonic or eudaimonic measure?
- In public policy they go for the more hedonic and subjective well being more easy
to measure
Happiness is a biased judgement: people estimate their own happiness level by (too much)
focus on one issue (typically something they don’t have) compare yourself with others
Focus on self report: just by asking people how they are, no other means
- Despite disadvantages
- People can report on their feelings in metrics
- Happiness is about subjective wellbeing, so why not ask them
Single items:
, - Systematic comparison of various measures in world happiness report (Helliwell)
showed nearly identical results for several measures
- Cantrils ladder (single item) produced somewhat lower than measures with multiple
items
- Multiple items reduce random error from ambiguity in single items
What is true happiness
-
- The case of objective happiness (kahnemann, 1999)
- Life satisfaction is a global retrospective judgement remembering is driven by
comparisons with other people: biased
- True happiness occurs in real time
- Day reconstruction method records the prevalence of immediate positive affect in
everyday experience: participants are instructed to think about the day, break it up
into episodes and describe each episode
- Provides unique information about what people do and how they feel in their
everyday lives
happiness is the temporal average of subjective experiences reported in real time over an
extended period
Discrepancy between real time experiences and our memories of the same experiences
- Is it the same?
- Your real time can experience can be good, but your memory can be a little bit bad
because of the last tune they were playing. So when you think back on it you can only
think about the last bad tune and have a negative association and memory of it,
while you were enjoying it at that moment. So you have a positive real time
experience but a bad memory
Collect experiences or collet memories
- We experience many beautiful moment, but most of them are not preserved
(behouden)
- We may forget about fabulous moments that we were experiencing when travelling
(making pictures all the time)
- Our memory collexts certain parts of what happened to us and processes them into a
story
Is the story that we remember afterwards more important because it is near to
impossible relive those fabulous moments?
So what is true happiness?
- Experiences are gone when you for example leave the beach where you were so
happy, but your memorie on that moment will stay, but you cant experience the
happiness again you felt at that moment.
- The true happiness was there, but is gone once its over and then you only have the
memories
, Kahneman states later: most people want to be satisfied and that’s smart
- “Happiness feels good in the moment. But its in the moment. What you’re left with
are your memories. And that’s a very striking (opvallend) thing- those memories stay
with you and the reality of life is gone in an instant”
- Critizing early: practicing gratitude and mindfulness as the happiness merchants
suggest is a good idea. But most of us don’t want to feel good in the moment. We
want to do stuff that matters, so we can look back on our lives with satisfaction”
so is it about experience of life satisfaction
“people don’t want to be happy the way I defined the term what I experience here and
now Kahneman
- Positive psychology has come to dominate the science of happiness
- Positive psychologists are trying to convince people to be happy without making any
changed in their situation: to learn how to be happy. That fits well with political
conservatism
- People want to be satisfied with their life and this is driven by their life
circumstances, not with momentary positive affect not relevant to improve
happiness
- Still the positive psychology approach ha been responsible for the most success
student courses on happiness at yale and Harvard
Hedonic treadmill:
All of us have like a baselevel of happiness (difference)
- People return to baseline relatively quickly. When you experience a good thing you
go higher than your baseline, but after a while you get used to it and go back to your
baseline, same with bad things
Hedonic adaption
- People tend to return to their baseline of happiness, both after positive and negative
events
- We can adjust
- Happiness levels tend to return to baseline after a major life event but may change
after lasting changed in life circumstances
- But it also depends on individual differences in adaption and prior levels of happiness
Negative bias: bad is stronger than good
- Negative events have a bigger impact than positive effects
- People are more distressed by the loss of $50 than by finding $50.
- Negative information receives more attention and is processed more thoroughly than
positive information
- Evolutionary explanation: humans attuned to preventing bad things more than those
oriented toward maximizing good things
- A person who ignores the danger of fire may not live to see the next day
Baumeister et al: psychological has focused more on understanding bad things
Science of happiness is a recent phenomenon
- Ed diener: 400 publications on subjective wellbeing
- Martin Seligman: positive psychologt
- Mihalyi csikzentmihalyi: flow 1990
- Barbara fredercikson: broaden en build 2001
- Ruut veenhoven: dutch professor of happiness
Definition ans measurement of happiness
What is happiness
- A state of wellbeing and contentment
- The experience of joy, contentment, or positive well being combined with a sense
that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile
- Good mental states, including all the various evaluations positive and negative, that
people make of their lives and the affective relations of people to their experiences
- Happiness is a feeling of pleasure and positivity
Is happiness an elusive concept
Jingle (thorndike 1904) common term to refer to different underlying conceptions:
happiness refers to life satisfaction, positive affect, wellbeing
Jangle (Kelley 1927) different terms are used to describe common underlying
conceptions: happiness, life satisfaction, meaning in life and wellbeing
Hedonic/ subjective well-being as a composte of 3 related but distinct facets (tripartite
model) exam question
How happiness is understood in science
- Cognitive life evaluation: a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some specific
aspect of it: general satisfaction with life or domain specific satisfaction like marriage,
work, friendship etc
- Positive affect: a person’s feeling or emotional states typically measured with
reference to a particular point in time, excited, interested, enthusiastic
- Negative affect: a person feelings or emotional states, typically measured with
reference to a particular point in time, nervous, afraid, irritable
,Eudaimonic well being
- Eudaimonia: a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or good psychological
functioning
- Eudaimonic: actualization of ones potential by fulfilling ones daimon true self;
flourishing
As a different from:
Hedonic/ subjective wellbeing: with a focus on affect (maximalization of pleasure and
minimization of pain) and cognition
A bit of consensus and quite a bit of controversy
Consensus: two main approaches
- Hedonic well-being: satisfaction with life + presence of momentary positive affect +
absence of negative effect
- Eudaimonic: purpose and meaning in life
Controversy
What is the best indicator of happiness: hedonic or eudaimonic measure?
- In public policy they go for the more hedonic and subjective well being more easy
to measure
Happiness is a biased judgement: people estimate their own happiness level by (too much)
focus on one issue (typically something they don’t have) compare yourself with others
Focus on self report: just by asking people how they are, no other means
- Despite disadvantages
- People can report on their feelings in metrics
- Happiness is about subjective wellbeing, so why not ask them
Single items:
, - Systematic comparison of various measures in world happiness report (Helliwell)
showed nearly identical results for several measures
- Cantrils ladder (single item) produced somewhat lower than measures with multiple
items
- Multiple items reduce random error from ambiguity in single items
What is true happiness
-
- The case of objective happiness (kahnemann, 1999)
- Life satisfaction is a global retrospective judgement remembering is driven by
comparisons with other people: biased
- True happiness occurs in real time
- Day reconstruction method records the prevalence of immediate positive affect in
everyday experience: participants are instructed to think about the day, break it up
into episodes and describe each episode
- Provides unique information about what people do and how they feel in their
everyday lives
happiness is the temporal average of subjective experiences reported in real time over an
extended period
Discrepancy between real time experiences and our memories of the same experiences
- Is it the same?
- Your real time can experience can be good, but your memory can be a little bit bad
because of the last tune they were playing. So when you think back on it you can only
think about the last bad tune and have a negative association and memory of it,
while you were enjoying it at that moment. So you have a positive real time
experience but a bad memory
Collect experiences or collet memories
- We experience many beautiful moment, but most of them are not preserved
(behouden)
- We may forget about fabulous moments that we were experiencing when travelling
(making pictures all the time)
- Our memory collexts certain parts of what happened to us and processes them into a
story
Is the story that we remember afterwards more important because it is near to
impossible relive those fabulous moments?
So what is true happiness?
- Experiences are gone when you for example leave the beach where you were so
happy, but your memorie on that moment will stay, but you cant experience the
happiness again you felt at that moment.
- The true happiness was there, but is gone once its over and then you only have the
memories
, Kahneman states later: most people want to be satisfied and that’s smart
- “Happiness feels good in the moment. But its in the moment. What you’re left with
are your memories. And that’s a very striking (opvallend) thing- those memories stay
with you and the reality of life is gone in an instant”
- Critizing early: practicing gratitude and mindfulness as the happiness merchants
suggest is a good idea. But most of us don’t want to feel good in the moment. We
want to do stuff that matters, so we can look back on our lives with satisfaction”
so is it about experience of life satisfaction
“people don’t want to be happy the way I defined the term what I experience here and
now Kahneman
- Positive psychology has come to dominate the science of happiness
- Positive psychologists are trying to convince people to be happy without making any
changed in their situation: to learn how to be happy. That fits well with political
conservatism
- People want to be satisfied with their life and this is driven by their life
circumstances, not with momentary positive affect not relevant to improve
happiness
- Still the positive psychology approach ha been responsible for the most success
student courses on happiness at yale and Harvard
Hedonic treadmill:
All of us have like a baselevel of happiness (difference)
- People return to baseline relatively quickly. When you experience a good thing you
go higher than your baseline, but after a while you get used to it and go back to your
baseline, same with bad things
Hedonic adaption
- People tend to return to their baseline of happiness, both after positive and negative
events
- We can adjust
- Happiness levels tend to return to baseline after a major life event but may change
after lasting changed in life circumstances
- But it also depends on individual differences in adaption and prior levels of happiness
