Hard-Wiring Happiness | Brain Pickings »

With a link to the talk at Columbia University by Srikumar Rao (of Are You Ready to Succeed? fame)

Synthetic Happiness « c-bStudios Blog »

Actually found this via Flickr, but photo people who were writing about Dan Gilbert’s work (“Stumbling on Happiness”) - awesome!

Happiest States Revealed by New Research - Yahoo! News »

Jeanna Bryner
Managing Editor
LiveScience.com – Thu Dec 17, 2:05 pm ET

Ever wondered if you’d be happier in sunny Florida or snow-coveredMinnesota? New research on state-level happiness could answer that question.

Florida and two other sunshine states made it to the Top 5, while Minnesota doesn’t show up until number 26 on the list of happiest states. In addition to rating the smile factor of U.S. states, the research also proved for the first time that a person’s self-reportedhappiness matches up with objective measures of well-being.

Essentially, if an individual says they’re happy, they are.

“When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, it is best to pay attention. Their answers are reliable,” said Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England. “This suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be very useful for governments to use in the design of economic and social policies,” Oswald said.

The happy-states list, however, doesn’t match up with a similar ranking reported last month, which found that the most tolerant and wealthiest states were, on average, the happiest. Oswald says this past is based on raw averages of people’s happiness in a state, and so doesn’t provide meaningful results.

“That study cannot control for individual characteristics,” Oswald told LiveScience. “In other words, all anyone has been able to do is to report the averages state-by-state, and the problem with doing that is you’re not comparing apples with apples because the people who live in New York City are nothing like the individuals living in Montana.”

Rather, Oswald and Stephen Wu, an economist at Hamilton College in New York, statistically created a representative American. That way they could take, for example, a 38-year-old woman with a high-school diploma and making medium-wage who is living anywhere and transplant her to another state and get a rough estimate of her happiness level.

“Not much point in looking at the happiness of a Texas rancher compared to a nurse in Ohio,” Oswald said.

The happiest states:

1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine

The scientists caution, however, that the top spot, Louisiana, might not reflect current levels of well-being since the data were collected before the disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina. They are confident that data for the other states does accurately reflect happiness levels.

See the full list of 50 states (and the District of Columbia) here.

Happiness measures

Their results come from a comparison of two data sets of happiness levels in each state, one that relied on participants’ self-reported well-being and the other an objective measure that took into account a state’s weather, home prices and other factors that are known reasons to frown (or smile).

The self-reported information came from 1.3 million U.S. citizens who took part in a survey between 2005 and 2008.

“We wanted to study whether people’s feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality - of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc - in their own state,” Oswald said.

The results showed the two measures matched up. “We were stunned when it first came up on our screens, because no one has ever managed to produce a clear validation before of subjective well-being, or happiness, data,” Oswald said.

They were also surprised at the least happy states, such as New York and Connecticut, which landed at the bottom two spots on the list.

“We were struck by the states that come at the bottom, because a lot of them are on the East Coast, highly prosperous and industrialized,” Oswald said. “That’s another way of saying they have a lot of congestion, high house prices, bad air quality.”

He added, “Many people think these states would be marvelous places to live in. The problem is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a non-fulfilling prophecy.”

Would you be happier in another state?

Using both the subjective well-being results, which included individual characteristics like demographics and income, and the objective findings, the team could figure out how an individual would fare in a particular state.

“We can create a like-to-like comparison, because we know the characteristics of people in every state,” Oswald said. “So we can adjust statistically to compare a representative person hypothetically put down in any state.”

This new research will be published online on Dec. 17 by the journal Science.

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• Original Story: Happiest States Revealed by New Research

Therapy 32 times more cost effective at increasing happiness than money | Eureka! Science News »

Research by the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester finds that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money. The research has obvious implications for large compensation awards in law courts but also has wider implications for general public health. Chris Boyce of the University of Warwick and Alex Wood of the University of Manchester compared large data sets where 1000s of people had reported on their well-being. They then looked at how well-being changed due to therapy compared to getting sudden increases in income, such as through lottery wins or pay rises. They found that a 4 month course of psychological therapy had a large effect on well-being. They then showed that the increase in well-being from an £800 course of therapy was so large that it would take a pay rise of over £25,000 to achieve an equivalent increase in well-being. The research therefore demonstrates that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money.

Governments pursue economic growth in the belief that it will raise the well-being of its citizens. However, the research suggests that more money only leads to tiny increases in happiness and is an inefficient way to increase the happiness of a population. This research suggests that if policy makers were concerned about improving well-being they would be better off increasing the access and availability of mental health care as opposed to increasing economic growth.

The new research paper, entitled “Money or Mental Health: The Cost of Alleviating Psychological Distress with Monetary Compensation versus Psychological Therapy” is published online this week at: Health Economics, Policy and Law.

This research helps to highlight how relatively ineffective extra income is at raising well-being. The researchers further draw on two striking pieces of independent evidence to illustrate their point - over the last 50 years developed countries have not seen any increases to national happiness in spite of huge economic gains. Mental health on the other hand appears to be deteriorating worldwide. The researchers argue that resources should be directed towards the things that have the best chance of improving the health and happiness of our nations - investment in mental health care by increasing the access and availability of psychological therapy could be a more effective way of improving national well-being than the pursuit of income growth.

The research also has important implications for the way in which “pain and suffering” is compensated in courts of law. Currently the default way in which individuals are compensated is with financial compensation. The research suggests that this is an inefficient way at repairing psychological harm following traumatic life events and that a more effective remedy would be to offer psychological therapy.

University of Warwick researcher Chris Boyce said:

“We have shown that psychological therapy could be much more cost effective than financial compensation at alleviating psychological distress. This is not only important in courts of law, where huge financial awards are the default way in which pain and suffering are compensated, but has wider implications for public health and well-being.”

“Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies. The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realise the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counselling, can have on improving our well-being.”

Source: University of Warwick

Social Medicine - Olivia Judson Blog - NYTimes.com »

“Wash your hands regularly.” “Cover your mouth when you sneeze.” “Throw away your used tissues.” These are some of the exhortations currently posted around London in an attempt to reduce the spread of flu. But one day, perhaps we’ll have public health campaigns of a different kind. “Be jolly: it’s catching.” Or, “Eat less: do it for your friends.”

Why? Because “traditional” infectious diseases — those, like flu and tuberculosis, that are caused by viruses or bacteria — are not the only aspects of health that can spread from one person to another. Taking up smoking is contagious; so is quitting. Obesity is contagious. So is happiness.

At least, these are the results coming in from long-term studies of social networks — the networks of friends and families, neighbors and colleagues that we all belong to. Such studies have found that one person’s change in behavior ripples through his or her friends, family and acquaintances. If one of your friends becomes happy, for example, you’re more likely to become happy too. If you’re great friends with someone who becomes obese, you’re much more likely to become obese as well.

And the effect doesn’t stop there. If your friend’s friend becomes happy, that increases the chance your friend will become happy — and that you will too. Conversely, if you become obese or depressed, you may inadvertently help your friends, and your friend’s friends, to become fat or gloomy. (Intriguingly, happiness and obesity seem to spread in different ways. Obesity spreads most easily between friends of the same sex who are emotionally close. Happiness spreads most readily between friends who live near each other: a happy friend on the same block makes more difference than a happy friend three miles away.)

I should say that doing long-term studies of social networks is difficult — it means interviewing and measuring thousands of people repeatedly over many years. After all, if I want to know whether you and your friends will change weight over the next five years, I have to measure all of you now and again in five years’ time. Moreover, I have to keep track of how friendships come and go, of who moves house and so on. In short, it’s a massive task just to collect the data.

So, while there have been plenty of studies of how pairs of people, especially spouses, affect each others’ health, there have been far fewer studies of how health reverberates through large social networks. The results I’m referring to here all come from the so-called “Framingham Heart Study,” which began in Massachusetts in 1948 and has continued to the present day. (Up to now, the study has involved two cohorts of several thousand people each; a third cohort has just been enrolled.)

It’s possible, therefore, that the results I’m talking about are specific to this group of people. However, I think that’s unlikely. The details of how an attribute spreads may differ from one group to another: perhaps in some places, friends have less influence and siblings have more. But the general result — that healthy (or unhealthy) behaviors, habits and outlooks are infectious — is, I think, likely to prove robust.

But then, how does something like obesity get “caught”? That’s not clear. One idea is that people judge their own weight by that of their friends — you think of yourself as thin if you are thinner than the people you know — and eat accordingly. Another is that friends mirror one another’s eating habits. Many studies have found that people tend to eat less when they are eating with someone who is not eating much. Also, people tend to eat more when they eat with friends rather than with strangers. Perhaps, too, a habit of eating, say, dessert when you are with your friends makes you more likely to eat it when you are alone.

(And happiness? Again, it’s not clear how it spreads, though there are plenty of ideas. For example, since we tend to unconsciously mimic the postures and facial expressions of those around us, perhaps we begin to take on the moods of others by adopting postures consistent with those moods. Or perhaps talking to people who are cheerful imbues us with cheerful thoughts.)

Whatever the mechanisms, the implications are profound. Obesity, smoking and happiness all have substantial effects on health. Obesity is associated with a host of troubles, from diabetes to many kinds of cancer.

Happiness, meanwhile, appears to improve health. Although this idea is still controversial, several recent studies have found that happy people tend to have more robust immune systems. For example, in one experiment volunteers were scored for happiness then had cold viruses squirted up their noses; those who were happier were much less likely to fall sick. (I’m not sure I’d be volunteering for that experiment, regardless of my emotional state — hats off to those who did.) In another, volunteers were vaccinated against the virus that causes hepatitis B; several months later, the happy volunteers showed a stronger response to the vaccine than the unhappy volunteers.

The discovery that the health of one person affects the health of those around them isn’t new. Depressed mothers, for example, have a suite of unhappy effects on their children: their children are less likely to be vaccinated, less likely to do well at school and more likely to have emotional problems of their own. Nor is it news that social lives affect health: it’s long been known that people with more friends tend to be healthier. But the finding that particular attributes of health — or lack of it — can ripple through social networks shows that one person’s health can have far reaching effects.

I draw a couple of conclusions from this. The first is that unless you are a hermit living entirely alone, your choices and wellbeing do not affect just you. The second, and more important, conclusion is that medicine isn’t simply about improving the health of an individual here and an individual there. It’s about the health of the whole society.

Notes:

For the spread of quitting smoking, see Christakis, N. A. and Fowler, J. H. 2008. “The collective dynamics of smoking in a large social network.” New England Journal of Medicine 358: 2249-2258. For obesity spreading, see Christakis, N. A. and Fowler, J. H. 2007. “The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years.” New England Journal of Medicine 357: 370-379. For happiness spreading, see Fowler, J. H. and Christakis, N. A. 2008. “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study.” BMJ 337: a2338. Note that these authors have recently published a book about human connectedness; I haven’t read it as I didn’t find out about it until too late, but if you find this subject interesting, my guess is that the book would be worth a look.

Many thanks to Dan Haydon for insights, comments and suggestions.