Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile

Christian Century, Dec 26, 2006 by Ellen Charry

Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile. By Daniel Nettle. Oxford University Press, 224 pp., $21.00.

Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. By Matthieu Ricard. Little, Brown, 288 pp., $22.95.

Happiness: A History. By Darwin M. McMahon. Atlantic Monthly Press, 560 pp., $15.00.

A Brief History of Happiness. By Nicholas White. Blackwell, 208 pp., $17.95 paperback.

Happiness and Greek Ethical Thought. By M. Andrew Holowchak. Continuum, 272 pp., $120.00.

THE QUEST FOR happiness is back with a vengeance. The bookstore's self-help section is overflowing. Colleges offer courses on happiness, and they are oversubscribed. Institutes that present "pleasant activity training" and "mindfulness training" and help you learn to increase your "flow" abound. Meanwhile, we all feel a bit serotonin-deprived and eagerly await the next mind-enhancing drug, a safe and legal version of Ecstasy.

British psychologist Adam Phillips has declared that the whole happiness craze is bunk. We simply need to come to terms with the unavoidability of suffering, he says. From the "don't worry, be happy" policy espoused by Daniel Nettle to the "grin and bear it" approach espoused by Phillips, the array of ideas about happiness is overwhelming.

The books we have here are both popular and academically serious. They are (in alphabetical order by author) a treatment of ancient Greek philosophy with a current proposal (Holowchak), a history of the search for happiness (McMahon), advice from experimental psychology (Nettle), a plea for compassion from popularized Tibetan Buddhism (Ricard), and a history of the various philosophical positions on happiness (White). We will take the more popular treatments first and then turn to the more serious academic works.

Daniel Nettle is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle, England. In Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, he brings findings from sociology and psychology together with evidence from neuroscience and biochemistry, and concludes that we have a happiness set point that is strongly correlated with personality factors. Evidence shows that most people in the developed world are reasonably happy, but that all except the most happy expect to become more so in the future. We adapt to both positive and negative changes in circumstances. The initially positive effects of desirable events seem to wear off, and we return to our previous happiness level. It is similar with setbacks; we adapt to them--although some setbacks, like permanent injury and bereavement, are harder to bounce back from--and we resume the happiness level we had before the change.

The greatest predictor of happiness or unhappiness, Nettle found, is whether we are extroverted or introverted. Extroverts, he says, are likely to be more happy than introverts, less given to neuroticism and depression, and more likely to spring back from stressors. He links introversion--unfairly, in my judgment--to neuroticism, which he associates with the fear and worry that are hangovers from prehistoric days when fear was a helpful instrument for physical survival against predators. Nettle advocates hobbies, sports and religion as helpful diversions that enable introverts to complexify their personality arsenal so that if failure or setback should occur in one area, other involvements will be in place to take up the slack. We may not be able to make ourselves happy, Nettle writes, but we can train ourselves to be less unhappy.

Being on the introverted side myself, as most academics are, I found Nettle's categorization of intellectuals as neurotic a bit short-sighted. After all, extroverts are less likely than introverts to be cautious, and more likely than introverts to enter into relationships precipitously and then find themselves in a bind or in danger. The treatment is out of balance.

Another popular volume is Matthieu Ricard's Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. Ricard is a French cellular geneticist who gave it all up to become a Buddhist monk. He uses many of the same studies that Nettle cites and employs a similarly accessible style, but to a different end. While Nettle avoids allowing any moral judgments into his "purely" scientific treatment of happiness, Ricard is openly evangelical, insisting that the Buddhist way of compassion for all beings is the only way to lasting happiness. Studies show that adequate income provides a foundation for happiness, but after the basics are met, happiness departs from income and status levels and resides in another realm.

Ricard combines the Buddhist interest in stopping craving, especially for vain objects, with the Western focus ondoing social good. Mindfulness achieved through meditation can refocus us on becoming compassionate, loving and caring toward all beings. Ricard is eager not so much to shed his Western heritage as to under-gird its social concern with control of anger, rejection of hatred, a sense of the unity of all being and especially the cultivation of compassion that he takes from Buddhism. His most arresting point is that holding on to negative emotions is self-defeating. Negative emotions are manufactured by our own mental weaknesses, and they are the path to violence and enslavement. Emancipation comes through enlightenment--through realizing that negativity toward others destroys not only them but ourselves.