Week 3- Science of Happiness Notes

 Section 1: Compassion, Kindness and Happiness 

VIDEO: ROADMAP FOR WEEK 3 

  • Growing amounts of evidence point to the idea that aiming positive emotions (kindness, compassion, generosity) to others is pleasurable to the self. 
  • Spending money on others boosts happiness more than spending money on yourself. 
  • Supporting others promotes self-fulfillment and increased happiness. 
  • Volunteering increases life satisfaction. 

Section 2: What and Why of Compassion 

VIDEO: WHAT IS COMPASSION 

What motivates kindness? 
  1. Empathy 
  2. Social Status 
  3. Gratitude 
  4. Compassion 
  • Defining Compassion- A feeling that arises when one experiences another’s suffering and wants to help relieve the suffering. 
  • Compassion vs. Empathy- Empathy is understanding how someone feels but not necessarily feel compelled to help them. 
  • Compassion vs. Mimicry- Mimicry is separate from feelings of concern for others' welfare. 
  • Compassion vs. Pity- Pity implies that someone is inferior to the person pitying them. 
  • Compassion is tied to the root philosophies of many religions. 

  • Why are we compassionate? 

  1. 1871 Descendent of Man, Charles Darwin claims that compassion is our strongest instinct. 
  2. Linked to evolutionary adaptation. 
  3. Compassion helps us get along within communities and care for offspring. 
  • Scientists such as Hooria Jazaieri documented that compassion can be trained through the practice of compassionate self-reflection, this practice is directly linked to increased happiness. 

VIDEO: WHY DOES COMPASSION MATTER? 

  • What triggers compassion? 

  • Images presented to the suffering of others suffering. 

  • Stages of compassion- 

  1. Empathy 
  2. Feelings arise (distress or caregiving urges/ fuel to help) 
  3. Judgments about others, situation, and setting. 
How compassion leads to happiness- 
  • Empathy makes you socially adept. 
  • Reduced stress, heightened caregiving releases good feelings, leads to good health and wellbeing. 
  • Judging yourself as capable, “I can help”. 
  • Vagus Nerve- When compassion is induced, there is an increased response from the Vagus Nerve on the body. 
  • Compassion increases connection, feeling like others, specifically in cases of suffering.  
  • Increased pride boosts individualism and makes people say they do not feel like one another. 
  • Exposure to suffering induces Vagus Nerve activation. 
  • “Systematic engagement of caregiving circuitry in the brain” found through studies in which subjects were asked to extend feelings of compassion and love towards those suffering. 

  • Can we train compassion?  

- Emory team- developed training with stress tests. Those who were able to engage in compassionate emotion experienced lower levels of stress. 
- Amygdala response to suffering leading to stress. Compassion training boosts the prefrontal cortex's ability to level stress. 
- Compassion training leads to an increased ability to recruit the reward circuitry in the brain in moments of recognizing one's ability to help. 
- Behavioral Study- People are twice as likely to act generously and selflessly after undergoing compassion training. 
 

Section 3: The Kindness-Happiness Loop 

VIDEO: THE KINDNESS HAPPINESS LOOP 

  • Benefits of kindness 

  • SUNY Stony Brook study showing volunteerism increases happiness and extends life expectancy (caregivers in later stages of life who provide 14+ hours of care are less likely to die in a 7-year period than those who gave less than 14 hours of care) 
  • Less loneliness 
  • Stronger immune profiles 
  • Lower levels of depression 
  • Protective of cardiovascular profile/ heart disease (twice as protective as taking aspirin) 
  • Greater energy and strength 
  • Elizabeth Dunn at University of Columbia study: What happens when I give versus receive? Involved money. Findings show that people who gave money showed an increase in happiness, people who spent money on themselves saw a decline in happiness. 
  • Reelection in young children of kindness to others. 
  • When you train your mind to be kind to others, you see a rise in positive emotion daily. 

ARTICLE: BEING KIND MAKES US HAPPY 

  • Altruism is deeply rooted in human behavior. 
  • We find prosocial acts to be rewarding from the earliest stages of life. 
  • Results of experiments involving the child show that prosocial or generous giving behaviors may be evolutionary. 

VIDEO: HAPPINESS FOR A LIFETIME 

  • Momentary pleasures provide brief happiness. 
  • Monetary pleasures provide slightly longer but still brief happiness. 
  • Giving others provides lengthy happiness. 
  • Self-perception improves through helping others. 
  • “Helping others leads to a cascade of positive social consequences”. 

VIDEO: EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF KINDNESS 

  • Why do we act with altruism and kindness in the evolutionary context? 

  • Promotes survival of our offspring. 
  • Reciprocal altruism (1971) We will practice kindness with people we don’t share genes with, so we receive rewarding traits. 
  • Sexual selection processes, Darwin, Passing down positive traits due to increased likelihood of reproduction. 
  • Self-reported basis of attraction- kindness matters.  
  • Spontaneity vs. Planned generously: findings are that when giving spontaneously, we give way more than when planned (Harvard and Yale studies). 
  • Contrary to many expectations, kindness is an early developmental emergence.  

VIDEO: BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE THAT KINDNESS FOSTERS HAPPINESS 

  • How do we understand pleasure in the brain? 

  • Repeated behavior after positive brain response (associative learning). 
  • Increased research on reward circuitry in the brain, abuse of reward circuitry at the hands of drug abuse. 
  • What does this tell us about kindness? Reward systems are very similar from self-benefitting rewards to those that benefit others. 
  • UCLA Study- reward circuitry is tuned to give, but will it be tuned to helping someone or giving them support? Results: Support was associated with increased dopamine in the brain.  

Section 4: Skeptics and Champions of Compassion and Kindness 

 

VIDEO: SKEPTICAL VIEWS OF COMPASSION AND HAPPINESS 

  • Sigmund Freud’s skepticism suggested murderous tendencies are in our blood. 
  • Ayn Rand, libertarianism, rejecting altruism. 
  • Emmanual Kant, sympathy is always blind/weak. 
  • United States's war on compassion, solitary confinement, the harsh criminal justice system, over two million people in prison. 
  • Feelings of empathy have declined in the US over the past 20-30 years. 
  • Humans need caretaking of the young for a long period of time. 

 

VIDEOS: CHALLENGES TO COMPASSION AND KINDNESS 

  • Business as a barrier to kindness 
  • Violent video games, increased aggression, reduced cooperative kind tendencies. 
  • We tend to be more kind to people who resemble us. 
  • Even though we feel compassion, if we feel we do not have the capacity to do so, we will not engage.  

ESSAY: HOW TO INCREASE YOUR COMPASSION BANDWITH 

Exhaustion turns off compassion. 

  • Why does compassion collapse? 

  1. When many are suffering vs. One, we feel less compassion. 
  2. We are more likely to be compassionate to one person than a group. 
  3. Expectations for more compassion for more suffering, people become increasingly concerned with the emotional and financial burdens of extreme compassion, and it falls. 
  4. The amount of compassion is often dependent on expected costs. 

  • How do we increase compassion? 

  1. Teach people strategies to stay with their compassion instead of abandoning it. 
  2. Increasing the sense that their help will make a real difference. 
  3. Make help more accessible and seem less costly. 
  4. Train the brain- through meditation and mindfulness. 
  5. Make giving a choice. 

 

Section 5: Momentous Kindness 

VIDEO: KINDNESS IS CONTAGIOUS 

  • Kindness, compassion, and generosity are contagious. 
  • When people act generously produce increased generosity in those benefitted and in those who see generosity around them. 
  • When watching someone be kind, we adopt it too (elevation). 

 

ESSAY: WIRED TO BE INSPIRED 

  • Elevation: warm feeling one experiences after seeing an act of altruism m 
  • asking them to want to pass that kindness on. 
  • Morality is the primary system that stops people from hurting one another. 
  • Disgust: an emotion that makes us want to distance ourselves from something. Applies to things such as food and social elements. 
  • The moral community is built by humans' attitude of repulse toward the idea of moral depravity. 
  • Experiencing altruism paints humanity in an extremely positive light for the moment which causes inspiration and hopefulness. 

 

VIDEO: WHAT IS A HERO? 

  • Phil Zimbardo: Stanford Prison Experiment (impact social pressures), Focus on what makes people perform acts of altruism and what makes someone a hero. 

 

VIDEO: WHAT MAKES A HERO? &  THE HEROIC IMAGINATION PROJECT (Phil Zimbardo) 

  • Shifting social norms: 

  • Villains and heroes are outliers. 
  • “reluctant heroes” are the rest/ common. 
  • Converting the eccentric “me” to the socio-centric “we”. 
  • Heroism starts with imagination. 
  • Heros are most effective through a network. 
  • Maintaining neutrality is a practice of evil. 

  • Sample of 4.000 Americans 

    • 1 out of 5 or 20% of people are qualified as heroes. 
    • 1/3 of heroes volunteered frequently. 
    • Black people were 8 times more likely to qualify as heroes than whites. 
    • Having survived a disaster/ trauma makes someone 3 times more likely to be identified as a hero. 

  • Thinking about the other is the epitome of heroism. 
  • “heroism is the antidote to into public indifference and systemic evil” 

 

ESSAY: THE BALANITY OF HEROISM 

    • One consensus of the Stanford Prison Experiment: Ordinary people can commit acts we perceive as unthinkable. 
    • We believe that evil acts cross a line that most of us could not cross. Can acts of heroism also have a line? 
    • “Where altruism emphasizes selfless acts that assist others, heroism entails the potential for deeper personal sacrifice”. 
    • Heroism requires a quest. 
    • Heroic acts can be either passive or active. 
    • Heroism may result from a “moral tickle” that one cannot ignore. 


  • Nurturing heroic imagination 

    • By overusing the term “hero” we water down its meaning. 
    • We focus too much on the aspect of “social bravery” and ignore needs in front of us. 
    • Asking more questions and developing greater awareness of things that “aren't right.” 
    • Stop fearing interpersonal conflict. 
    • Remain aware of the extended time horizon, not just the present moment.  
    • References:
    • Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., Founding Faculty Director, Greater Good Science Center, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, UC Berkeley
      •       Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., Science Director, Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley

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