Week 8- Science of Happiness Notes

 Section 1: The Cutting Edge: Awe, Wonder, and Beauty 

Video: The Science of Awe, Beauty, and Spirituality 

  • Awe: The feeling of being around something that’s vast/ beyond your frame of reference/ beyond something that you can understand with your current knowledge structures.  
  • Early cultural treatments of awe were a religious experience. 
  • Later understandings of awe were a center of experiences. 
  • Sociologist Max Weber wrote about awe regarding its importance in social movements led by charismatic figures.  
  • E.O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia: we have an evolved love for nature and natural beauty. 

  • This draw is evolutionary because when we are drawn to beautiful things in nature, we often find resource-rich environments that provide us with food and water. 


  • The Benefits of Green- 

    • Drop-in rates of crime: Chicago housing projects with more greenery have 48% fewer property crimes and 56% fewer violent crimes. 
    • Kids with ADHD benefit from greenery as their symptoms often drop after walking in a green area/ park.  
    • Increased Happiness: Chicago housing projects that have more greenery report neighbors feel a greater sense of community and feel safer. 


  • Study of Awe involving trees vs. Buildings on Berkeley Campus: 

    • Participants who viewed trees/ experienced awe were less self-important than those who viewed buildings. 
    • Participants who viewed trees/ experienced awe were less entitled psychologically than those who viewed buildings. 
    • Participants who viewed trees/ experienced awe were more generous than those who viewed buildings. 
    • Participants who viewed trees/ experienced awe were more altruistic, prosocial, and kind than those who viewed buildings (experience with stranger dropping pens) 


  • Spirituality and Happiness: 

    • Spirituality-oriented people tend to report greater happiness. 
    • Spirituality-oriented people tend to report less depression. 


  • Brief experiences of awe: 

  1. Boost happiness. 
  2. Increase intellectual curiosity. 
  3. Deepen sense of humility. 
  4. Lower cytokine levels (good for health). 

 

Essay: Can Awe Buy You More Time and Happiness? 

  • Studies show that members of an awed group reported feeling like they had more time than those that felt happiness. 
  • “This led the researchers to predict that people who experience awe would be less likely to feel impatient—since people feel impatient when they think they’re short on time—and would be more willing to devote time to activities like volunteering”. 
  • Result of associated study: Those who felt more awe also felt less impatient. Those who felt awe were also more likely to volunteer than those who just felt happiness. 
  • “It impacts our willingness to volunteer to help other people and even our well-being,” she says. “The idea that an emotion can alleviate this problem is an incredible idea to me.” -Melanie Rudd (author of the study). 
  • Those who experienced feelings of awe are more likely to expose themselves to more art, music, and nature. 

 

Essay: Can Awe Boost Health? 

  • Research shows that exposure to feelings of awe can boost the body’s defense system.  
  • Positive emotions (including feelings of awe) are linked to a harder working immune system. 
  • “That awe, wonder and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy”. -Dacher Keltner 

 

Essay: How Awe Makes Us Generous 

  • Research from UC Berkely and UC Irvine leads us to believe that feelings of awe guide us to be more benevolent to others.  
  • In an experiment, participants were asked to state how often they feel awe and then took a test that measured their generous behavior.  
  • Results: those who experienced awe more frequently were more generous. 
  • In another experiment, participants were asked to recall a time when they felt awe. They were then asked to participate in an ethical decision-making task.  
  • Results: Those who experienced awe were more likely to demonstrate more ethical behavior.  
  • Participants who experienced awe reported “a reduced sense of self-importance relative to something larger and more powerful that they felt connected to”. 

 

 

Section 2: Laughter, Play, and Narrative 

Video: The Functions and Benefits of Laughter 

  • Laughter is a large component of happiness. 
  • Studies show that children laugh more frequently than adults. This may partially explain a deficiency of happiness in many adults.  
  • Evolutionary roots of laughter: Laughter signals playfulness and cooperativeness. 

  • Laughter as Medicine: 

  1. Decreases blood pressure. 
  2. Enhances immune function. 
  3. Reduces chronic pain. 
  4. Laughter therapy improves depression and sleep quality in the elderly. 


  • Study of Laughter and Bereavement 

            40 participants. 
  • The average age of 45. 
  • Spouse had died 6 months earlier. 
  • Participants were prompted to describe their relationship with their spouse. 
  • Emotional expressions were analyzed. 
  • People who laughed when describing partner showed better psychological health 2-4 years later. 

  • Laughter and relationships: 

    • Laughter predicts relationship satisfaction. 
    • Laughing together frequently is vital to relationship success. 
    • Shared laughter makes strangers feel closer to one another. 

 

Video: Why Do We Laugh? 

  • “According to Weems, laughter and humor help us process conflict in our environment through the dopamine that is released in our brains when we find something funny. Dopamine relieves tension...” “...but it’s also implicated in motivation, memory, and attention, affecting processes as varied as learning and pain management” (Suttie). 
  • “What elicits laughter isn’t the content of the joke but the way our brain works through the conflict the joke elicits,” (Scott Weems). 
  • Laughter increases blood flow and strengthens the heart similar to aerobic exercise.  
  • Laughter helps decrease an individual’s pain threshold. 
  • Positive humor that looks on the bright side of a situation is much more beneficial than sardonic humor. 
  • Humor is important in social relationships (in teachers, partners, and friendships). 

 

Video: Play and the Pursuit of Happiness 

  • Benefit: Play correlates with things we care about such as creativity, sociality, learning, solving problems. 

  • Socio-dramatic play (common in young children) where individuals assume other personalities/ identities. 


  • Criteria to be considered “play”: 

  1. Apparently purposeless. 
  2. Voluntary. 
  3. Inherently attractive (fun). 
  4. Feel free of time constraints. 
  5. Diminished consciousness of self. 

  • Functions of play: 

  1. Teaches boundaries between the safe and the harmful/transgressive. 
  2. Teaches skills. 
  3. Identity formation. 
  4. Knowledge of the physical world. 
  5. Empathy and theory of mind (learning new perspectives). 

Essay: Can we Play? 

  • Approaching the present, the amount of time children engages in play per day and per week is lessening. Schools are eliminating recess time, children are given less time for play generally throughout the day.  
  • Research shows that play is important to intellectual, physical, and social development.  
  • Play that is creative, self-motivated, and independent is most impactful to the development of children.  
  • Play provides the building blocks for understanding reality. 
  • Play teaches social connection. 
  • “Elementary school children use play to learn mutual respect, friendship, cooperation, and competition. For adolescents, play is a means of exploring possible identities, as well as a way to blow off steam and stay fit. Even adults have the potential to unite play, love, and work, attaining the dynamic, joyful state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’”. 


  • Play and Development: 

  • “A 2007 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics documents that play promotes not only behavioral development but brain growth as well. The University of North Carolina’s Abecedarian Early Child Intervention program found that children who received an enriched, play-oriented parenting and early childhood program had significantly higher IQ’s at age five than did a comparable group of children who were not in the program (105 vs. 85 points)” 


  • Why is play disappearing? 

  1. Play is being treated as a luxury. 
  2. Technological developments and innovation (more time watching TV and playing video games). 
  3. Push for sports/ rigid ruled games. 

 

Video: The Power of Narrative 

  • Two types of narratives: 

  1. “Micro-narratives”: narrate your daily stresses and triumphs (ex: through daily writing practices). 
  2. Telling the meta-narrative of yourself and your life’s journey. 

  • The common themes of suffering, compassion, and harm. 

  • Narration helps to increase health, well-being, and happiness.  

 

Section 3: Finding your “Fit.” 

Video: Person-Activity Fit 

  • Happiness practices do not benefit everyone equally, some apply better in individual’s lives than others. 

  • Person-activity fit, important characteristics of a person include: 

    • Motivation and effort: how driven are you to do an activity, how willing? 
    • Efficacy beliefs: do you believe you can do the activity? Do you think it will have an impact? 
    • Demographics: does your age, sex, culture, access to resources, warmth, or luxury items impact the effectiveness of happiness-boosting activities? 


  • Important characteristics of an activity include: 

  1. Dosage (how frequently/ how long). 
  2. Variety (repeatedly doing an activity in the same/ different way) 
  3. Characteristics could vary between activities (social/interpersonal) 

 

Video: Happiness Takes Work 

  • People desire “quick fix” solutions when seeking happiness, however, happiness takes effort, work, and commitment.  
  • Practices may become habitual over time, making necessary effort decrease, 

 

Section 4: Synthesis and Farewell 

Video: Key Lessons and Final Reflections 

  • Humans are biologically endowed to be kind, connected, and compassionate. 
  • Conflict and negative emotional experiences are an inevitable part of life. What's important to happiness is being able to recover from them. 
  • Our brains are limited resource organs, which can attend to a finite quantity of information at a time. By building skills of attention and mindfulness, we can derive more happiness from moment-to-moment experiences. 

 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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