WHY BOTHER TO BE HAPPY

WHY BOTHER TO BE HAPPY?

Why do we feel happy? Why do we feel anything at all? Why has evo­lution endowed us with emotional states that are so insistent, so con­suming, and so. well, so present.that we run our very lives around them?

EVOLUTION AND POSITIVE FEELING

In the world that psychologists are most comfortable 636i822g with, positive feelings about a person or an object get us to approach it, while negative feelings get us to avoid it. The delicious odor of brownies being baked pulls us toward the oven, and the repulsive smell of vomit pushes us to the other side of the sidewalk. But amoebae and worms also presumably approach the stuff they need and avoid pitfalls, using their basic sensory and motor faculties without any feeling. Somewhere during evolution, though, more complicated animals acquired the wet overlay of an emotional life. Why?

The first huge clue to unraveling this knotty issue comes from comparing negative emotion to positive emotion. Negative emotions-fear, sadness, and anger-are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us. In evolution, danger, loss, and trespass are all threats to survival itself. More than that, these external threats are all win-loss (or zero-sum) games, where whatever one person wins is exactly balanced by a loss for the other person. The net result is zero. Tennis is such a game, because every point one opponent gains is the other's loss; and so too is the squabble of a couple of three-year-olds over a single piece of chocolate. Negative emotions playa dominant role in win-loss games, and the more serious the outcome, the more intense and desperate are these emotions. A fight to the death is the quintessential win-loss game in evolution, and as such it arouses the panoply of negative emotions in their most extreme forms. Natural selection has likely favored the growth of negative emotions for this reason. Those of our ancestors who felt negative emotions strongly when life and limb were the issue likely fought and fled the best, and they passed on the relevant genes.

All emotions have a feeling component, a sensory component, a thinking component, and an action component. The feeling component of all the negative emotions is aversion-disgust, fear, repulsion, hatred, and the like. These feelings, like sights, sounds, and smells, intrude on consciousness and override whatever else is going on. Acting as a sensory alarm that a win-lose game is looming, negative feelings mobilize all the individuals to find out what's wrong and eliminate it. The type of thinking such emotions ineluctably engender is focused and intolerant, narrowing our attention to the weapon and not the hairstyle of our assailant. All of this culminates in quick and decisive action: fight, flight, or conserve.

This is so uncontroversial (except perhaps for the sensory part) as to be boring, and it has formed the backbone of evolutionary thinking about negative emotions since Darwin. It is strange, therefore, that there has been no accepted thinking about why we have positive emotion.

Scientists distinguish between phenomena and epiphenomena. Pushing the accelerator in your car is a phenomenon because it starts a chain of events that cause your car to speed up. An epiphenomenon is just a meter or measure that has no causal efficacy-for example, the speedometer moving up doesn't cause the car to speed up; it just tells the driver that the car is accelerating. Behaviorists like B. F. Skinner argued for half a century that all of mental life was mere epiphenomena, the milky froth on the cappuccino of behavior. When you flee from a bear, this argument goes, your fear merely reflects the fact that you are running away, with the subjective state frequently occurring after the behavior. In short, fear is not the engine of running away; it is just the speedometer.

I was an anti-behaviorist from the very beginning, even though I worked in a behavioral laboratory. Learned helplessness convinced me that the behaviorist program was dead wrong. Animals, and certainly people, could compute complex relationships among events (such as "Nothing I do matters"), and they could extrapolate those relationships to the future ("I was helpless yesterday, and regardless of new circumstances, I will be helpless again today"). Appreciating complex contingencies is the process of judgment, and extrapolating them to the future is the process of expectation. If one takes learned helplessness seriously, such processes cannot be explained away as epiphenomena, because they cause the behavior of giving up. The work on learned helplessness was one of the blasts that blew down the straw house of behaviorism and led in the 1970s to the enthroning of cognitive psychology in the fiefdoms of academic psychology.

I was thoroughly convinced that negative emotions (the so-called dysphorias) were not epiphenomena. The evolutionary account was compelling: Sadness and depression not only signaled loss, they brought about the behaviors of disengagement, giving up, and (in extreme cases) suicide. AnXiety and fear signaled the presence of danger, leading to preparations to flee, defend, or conserve. Anger signaled trespass, and it caused preparation to attack the trespasser and to redress injustice.

Strangely, though, I did not apply this logic to positive emotions, either in my theory or in my own life. The feelings of happiness, good cheer, ebullience, self-esteem, and joy all remained frothy for me. In my theory, I doubted that these emotions ever caused anything, or that they could ever be increased if you were not lucky enough to be born with an abundance of them. I wrote in The Optimistic Child that feelings of self-esteem in particular, and happiness in general, develop as only side effects of doing well in the world. However wonderful feelings of high self-esteem might be trying to achieve them before achieving good commerce with the world would be to confuse profoundly the means and the end. Or so I thought.

In my personal life, it had always discouraged me that these delightful emotions rarely visited me, and failed to stay for a long visit when they did. I had kept this to myself, feeling like a freak, until I read the literature on positive and negative affect. Careful research from the University of Minnesota shows that there is a personality trait of good cheer and bubbliness (called positive affectivity), which, it turns out, is highly heri­table. Whether one identical twin is a giggler or a grouch, it is highly likely that her sister, with exactly the same genes, will be one as well; but if the twins are fraternal, sharing only half their genes, the odds that they will have the same affectivity are not much greater than chance.

How do you think you score on positive and negative affectivity? What follows is the PANAS scale devised by David Watson, Lee Anna Clark, and Auke Tellegen, the best validated test for measuring these emotions. (Don't be put off by the technical-sounding name; it is a simple and proven test.) You can take the test here or on the website www.authentichappiness.org.