Sigmund Freud made psychology
famous. The terms and theories that
seemed so easily to spin out of his vast imagination quickly entered common vernacular
and became in certain circles a set of informal parlor games.  Oedipal complex, anal retentive, fixation,
overbearing mothers, regression, reaction formation, the unconscious, an entire
panoply of tools ready-made for interesting discussions of human quirkiness.  Innumerable variations of professional
therapies followed, each popularized with literate, best selling books.  A consequence of this was that psychology
became identified in the public mind as the science of the abnormal.  This conception was reinforced by the focus
of its technologies from psychoanalysis to behavior modification to serial
killer profiling. There is now a chance
that this popular conception could change with the relatively new,
empirically-based study of happiness. Rather
than being about how to bring the lives of the abnormal to health, this
research has implications for how to improve the lives of the already healthy.  It is like the extension of research in
anatomy and physiology from the mission of curing to the happy world of nip and
tuck.

Daniel
Nettle, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle,
has written a clear and readable introduction to this literature.  He begins with concerns about how to define
the focus of the research. The two most
common terms are "happiness" and "subjective well-being".  The former is one of popular use, a part of "folk"
psychology, and carries with it all the ambiguities one would expect from
that. The latter, as a theoretical
construct, can be more easily shaped to fit the needs of the research.  Yet "happiness" has a caché that researchers seem reluctant to
give up. Nettle is clear about his own
preference in Chapter 1 where he discusses semantic issues, "We do
ourselves a disservice if we try to obfuscate this [the research into
happiness] with neologisms. This doesn’t
mean that some conceptual tidying-up is out of place …(8)."  Such "tidying-up" is the early work
of every new science as it seeks on the one hand to maintain contact with the
everyday issues that gave it life while on the other hand developing a language
that is clear enough for empirical work.

Nettle
divides the "semantic terrain" of happiness into three levels, (1)
the direct and transient feelings of joy or pleasure, (2) the more reflection-based
judgment that some segment of a life has a positive balance of joy or pleasure
over the myriad of negative experiences, and (3) the broad Aristotelian concept
of human flourishing, eudaimonia or
fulfilling one’s potential.

He
is wary of # 3, though not, to my mind, for very good reason, " … it is not clear who is to be the judge of what
one’s full potential is (20)". It
is interesting how easily a discussion of the semantics of "happiness"
morphs into a moral discussion, even one that seeks to rule out moral
discussion. Nettle insists that in
questions of eudaimonia it must be
left to the individual to judge whether his or her potential has been
fulfilled, " … within any liberal tradition of thought, happiness should
not be moralized. As long as people do
not harm each other, then it is their inalienable right to construe their own
potential in any way they like (20)." 
This seems to confuse (a) the right of an individual to choose the
course of his or her life, something that no classical liberal would deny, with
(b) the question of which course(s) of that individual’s life would maximize
his or her potential, both as a human being and as the unique human being that
the individual is. The right of the
individual to (a) does not render him or her infallible about (b).  Many people have judged rightly and with
excellent reasons that segments of their own or others’ lives had been wasted precisely because the realization
of the appropriate potentials were never
even sought.

Nettle
discusses briefly the research of Carol Ryff and others (for example, "Optimizing
well-being: The Empirical encounter of two traditions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002) which makes
use of the level #3 concept that includes personal growth, purpose, mastery of
one’s environment, self-directedness and pleasure.  Her research shows only weak correlations
between level #2 and level #3  happiness.  He quotes Ryff to the effect that history
provides plenty of cases of people who lived, "ugly, unjust, or pointless
lives who were nonetheless happy (24)". 
This seems straightforward and correct. 
Yet Nettle claims that if he were to judge another’s life to be such he
would have, "… left the domain of objective science for a kind of
tyranny of experts (24)." This assumes
(a) that one can have no objective rationale to make such judgments — so much
for Nuremberg, (b) that such judgments are a result of mere prejudice, (c) that
the only alternative to positing the infallibility of each individual about his
or her own life is a "tyranny of experts" and (d) that true science
is and must be free of moral and evaluative conclusions.  I would argue that each of these four claims
can quite easily be shown to be false. But
here I ask only that one imagine a rejection of the work of physicians or physical
trainers based upon the claim that to speak of disease or unrealized physical
potential is to impose a "tyranny of experts."  Nettle critiques the work of Seligman, for
example Authentic Happiness (2002),
and Csikszentmihalyi, for example Living
Well: The Psychology of Everyday Life, on similar
grounds.

Chapter
2 provides a good summary of some interesting conclusions that the happiness
research has provided about just how happy people on average are as well a
comparative studies of national happiness. 
In the UK
more than half of citizens rate their happiness an 8, 9 or 10 on a scale of 1 –
10. In none of the 42 countries studied
did the mean drop below 5, "the spectrum goes from the lugubrious
Bulgarians with an average satisfaction of 5.03 to the positively nauseating
Swiss with an average of 8.39 (51). But
why are people so happy? Or perhaps
better, why do people report such high levels of satisfaction with their
lives? One explanation could be that
people learn early in life to "impression manage" on the theory that presenting
oneself as satisfied makes a better impression than not.  Nettle notes that this could be why people
report greater satisfaction in face-to-face interviews than in postal surveys
and, "This effect is particularly pronounced when the interviewer is of
the opposite sex (53)." It is also
interesting and a bit counter-intuitive that people who are presently well
satisfied with their lives predict greater satisfaction levels ten years hence
than those who are presently less satisfied (58).  This contradicts a common idea that when one
is doing well "the other shoe will soon drop" as well as the notion
that starting at a lower based increases one’s optimism about improvement.

Nettle
concludes the chapter with the idea that the discovery of a general, popular
satisfaction with life puts into context claims of all forms of social
reformers, Marxists, Evangelists, therapists, and cultists that the system
needs radical revision. Happiness
research to the rescue of orthodoxy!

Chapter
3 discusses some of what has been concluded about what makes us happy.  These data come from an enormous number of
questionnaires in which people rate their own
satisfactions. These instruments have undergone
solid testing for reliability, for example there is good consistency between
answers by the same subject over time as well as between one subject about
himself and others about him. A strong
result is a correlation between happiness and physical health,
another is between happiness and longevity though the directions of causation,
if there are any, are not at all clear. 
Women appear to be slightly happier than men.  Higher social class ranking correlates with
an extra increment of happiness. The
same is true of income though to a lesser degree.

The
most often discussed result of this research is that increases in national
income and standards of living do not correlate with increases in national happiness.  The life of a janitor today is as filled with
material benefits as the life of a doctor of yesterday yet the janitor is no
happier (73). This leads some to
question the importance of GDP and other national economic measures as
indicators of national improvement. 
There are other studies showing that lottery winners experience only a
temporary boost in happiness followed by a return to earlier levels (even when
they still have their newly-increased wealth). 
There is a brief discussion in Chapter 4 of evidence that one’s mean
happiness over time seems to have a genetic component and that such mean levels
are relatively impervious to the effects of environment.  Nettle does a good job covering the
hypothesis of adaption that seeks to explain these phenomena.

There
is more to like about this small book. A
chapter on brain biochemistry covers Prozac, PET scan research and the drug Ecstasy.  A chapter on happiness altering technologies
has a very nice discussion of cognitive behavioral therapy.  Nettle notes an asymmetry between negative
and positive emotions. Negative emotions
are "imperialistic" in the way they generalize from one narrow
situation, a lover rejects you, to a far wider one, no
one likes me. Positive emotions, a lover
accepts you, do not do this. It follows
that reducing negative emotions is a more effective strategy for life
improvement than trying to increase positive ones.  This is a strength
of cognitive behavioral therapy.

In
the final chapter, A Design for Living, there is a nice discussion of the life
and death of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.  His life was important and meaningful,
he judged it so on his death bed, yet all indications are that it was one of
personal torment and sadness. Nettle
concludes with a quote from a man with whom I share a home town, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, "Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always
beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. (184)"

 

©
2006 John Mullen

 

John D. Mullen is Professor of Philosophy
at Dowling College
in Oakdale, New York. 
He has written the widely read book, Kierkegaard’s
Philosophy, a logic text, Hard
Thinking, and co-authored with Byron M. Roth, Decision Making: Its Logic and Practice.  Most recently in 2006 he has written "Nature,
Nurture and Individual Change", which appears on-line in the journal Behavior and Philosophy and argues that
the issue of nature vs. nurture is irrelevant to questions of personal change.

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical