Exercise is one of the most robust ways that people can increase their happiness.  The problem is that it’s just not that much fun.  Enter “Fun Theory”!  By making the stairs into a piano, they increased usage of the stairs by 66%, which means increased happiness now AND increased happiness later (due to the exercise).  Watch the video!

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country's mood. I'm sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included. However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data. The possibilities are endless.

Some interesting trends from their limited graph....

Thanksgiving (2 years running) is the most positive day of the year...social pressure to be thankful?  Does it mean people are happier or not?

Why is the day after Father's day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the least negative day?

Click here to view the index

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country’s mood.  I’m sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included.  However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data.  The possibilities are endless.

 Some interesting trends from their limited graph….

Thanksgiving is the happiest day of the year (or the day we all feel we have to say something positive…:)).

 Why is the day after Father’s day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the  least negative day?

 Click here to view the index 

This article talks about the reasons why women have sex.  Men are obviously less of a mystery.  I haven’t read the book, but perusing the reasons offered in the article, it would seem reasonable to group many of the women’s reasons into categories of emotion management.  Sex appears to be a way to alleviate guilt (feeling sorry for someone), anger (revenge), or anxiety (pre-emptive protection).

In their new book, Why Women Have Sex,University of Texas psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss aim to illuminate the complexities of women’s sexual motivations through women’s own words—an important step, they say, to better understanding how women can achieve sexual satisfaction. Based on five years of research and an online survey of 1,000 women, the authors consider motivation ranging from altruistic sex (“I felt sorry for the guy”) to revengeful sex (“I wanted to get back at my partner”) to palliative sex (“I had a migraine”). We hear from women who’ve had sex to boost their confidence, even if it’s with a man (or woman) they find repulsive, and from those who’ve used sex to barter for gifts or household chores (9 percent of us have used this form of economic sex, according to a University of Michigan study). We learn that 31 percent of women have had sex to evoke jealousy in the ones they love, while others have done it to protect themselves from getting hurt. Some, like the 25-year-old woman we described earlier, have had sex to boost their self-esteem, and 84 percent of women report they’ve done it simply to “keep the peace” at home.

Following on this study and this article which show that women are less happy than men, I thought I would examine some of the data from our website, YourMorals.org.  Clearly our data is not representative of the population, so we cannot make any claims as to the validity of the trend which the authors describe.  The trend they established, whereby women, who were once happier than men, have become less happy than men over time, is very well researched.  What we can potentially do is examine whether one distinctive group of women, women who visit our website, happen to report more or less life satisfaction than men who visit our website.

As you can see, women actually report more life satisfaction (which is different than happiness, but the authors of the study use both life satisfaction and happiness questions to make their point) than men in our sample and the trend is robust across questions, meaning that women score as ‘more satisfied’ on all five of the questions on Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale, the measure we use on YourMorals.org.  Further, the graphs below, broken down by the source of visitors to our site, show that the effect is somewhat robust, meaning that it’s likely not just an oddity of traffic from one particular source.  Women who come from search engines (eg. by looking for ‘morality quiz’) or who read the NY times or who read BeliefNet’s conservative blog site all seem to be more satisfied than their male counterparts.

So what does this tell us?  Obviously since our data is non-representative and non-longitudinal, we can’t say much about the original hypothesis.  However, if we believe the original hypothesis that women are generally less satisfied with life than men, we can perhaps learn something from this group where women seem to do relatively well on scores of life satisfaction.  The authors didn’t really come up with a mechanism for the decline of happiness measures among women and so perhaps inspecting a group that does relatively well can give us clues to the mechanism in the same way that observing that people who have darker skin have less risk for skin cancer can tell us about the mechanism of skin cancer.

What do the women who visit yourmorals.org have in common?   Measurably, our sample is liberal (2.5 on a 7 point scale with 1 being very liberal and 7 being very conservative), younger (mean age = 37.6), very well educated (mean education is somewhere between college educated and having completed some graduate school), and politically attentive (the great majority either pay some attention or a lot of attention to politics).  Less measurably (we do have measures, but not for all visitors), our visitors likely have curiosity (see Todd Kashdan’s book), intellectual desire, and the time to explore those interests.  Perhaps the clue to increasing the subjective well being of women lies somewhere in there.

Most of the data from this article is taken from the General Social Survey, a representative sample of 1,500 Americans done each year.  The pattern is replicated in several other datasets with a general trend that Women used to be more happy than men and have since (1972) become less happy.  Why?

Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice gives me the most plausible answer.  I would be interested in looking at the data further to prove it, but it seems plausible that women are encountering more choice, while men don’t feel the pressure to choose among as many things (eg. taking care of children).

Here is the original article.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It's important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It’s important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.

Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I've been looking at the data for triends.  One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented.  They aren't just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different.  They seem to moralize less and are more self vs. other oriented on scales like the Schwartz Values Scale.One hypothesis about this would be that Libertarians are less positively affected by other people.  Happiness research consistently shows that relationships are very important for people's happiness....This is true for both liberals and conservatives.  But is this the case for Libertarians?Consider the following 2 graphs.  The first one shows the relationship between a measure of depression symptoms (BSI - eg. "feeling blue" in the past 7 days) and a measure of abstract feelings toward others (Feeling Towards Others Scale by Belinda Campos at UC-Irvine, eg.  "For me, happiness comes from performing acts of kindness for others.").

....and here is a graph with a similar pattern replacing depression symptoms with Ed Diener's Satisfaction with Life Scale.

 

The interesting pattern is that feeling close to abstract other people (not explicitly friends or family, for whom the pattern is different) is positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to depressive symptoms for everyone, liberal or conservative, except libertarians.There are of course caveats to this result (as there are in any research).  Our sample is limited to people who visit our website, who tend to be well educated internet users, so this may only be true for those kinds of people.  Still, this result seems to converge with other evidence, both in our data and in society, that libertarians are more self than other oriented (eg. Ayn Rand's book, the Virtue of Selfishness).  If positive affect motivates many people to be other oriented, then the fact that libertarians lack the other-orientation->positive emotion relationship would help explain their lack of other orientation.

If happiness is a lot about the standard to which one compares oneself, then perfectionists, who compare themselves to the ultimate standard, are bound to experience a disproportionate share of unhappiness.From Psychology Today:

 Perfectionists, experts now know, are made and not born, commonly at an early age. They also know that perfectionism is increasing. One reason: Pressure on children to achieve is rampant, because parents now seek much of their status from the performance of their kids.