Is the incidence of depression higher where people are experiencing more negative emotion and suffering?

It would be difficult to be interested in human flourishing without having some interest in understanding the differences in incidence of “suffering”, negative emotion, and depression in different parts of the world.

I have written a few posts about negative emotion recently, but it is now a few years since I looked explicitly for a relationship between “suffering” and depression at an international level. The last time I looked, I couldn’t see any relationship. I concluded that “the data … suggest there is no simple relationship”.

There is now some new data available, so I have taken another look. But I don’t want you to get too excited, because you might end up feeling disappointed.

A data set on depressive disorders in 2010 has been compiled by Alize Ferrari and others as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study. The researchers collected data on the depressive disorders from published articles and pooled the data using a statistical technique (Bayesian meta-regression). The data used below relates to major depressive disorder (MDD) which is also known as clinical depression. It involves at least one major depressive episode in which the affected individual experiences a depressed mood almost all day, every day for at least 2 weeks.

The negative emotion data is sourced from the Gallup World Poll. Respondents were asked if they experienced worry, anger, sadness or depression yesterday. The data used is based on country averages of yes/no answers (yes = 1).

The data on suffering is from the new Gallup-Healthways Global Well-being index. The index covers 5 dimensions of well-being: purpose (liking what you do and learning or doing something interesting); social (having supportive relationships); financial (having enough money to do what you want and not being worried about money); community (liking where you live and having pride in your community) and physical (feeling active and productive, and in good health). People are classed as suffering in a particular element if their well-being in that element is low and inconsistent.

For the purpose of this exercise I have estimated the percentage suffering in each country as the average of the percentages suffering in each dimension.

After the three data sets were combined I had data for 114 countries. At the country level, there is a modest degree of correlation between the three variables:

Struggling and MDD:                          0.24

Struggling and negative emotion:        0.20

Negative emotion and MDD:              0.06 .

The graph presented below provides a basis to compare averages for the relevant variables in 10 regions of the world.

All three indicators tell an unambiguous story of misery in the Middle East and North Africa. Suffering seems somewhat higher in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the incidence of negative emotion is apparently lower in that part of the world than in the Middle East and North Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe seems to have a fairly high incidence of all three indicators of misery. The incidence of depression and suffering is similarly high in the former Soviet countries, but the incidence of negative emotion is similarly lower.

East Asia stands out as having a relatively low incidence of negative emotion and depression, but a higher incidence of suffering than Latin America. According to the Gallup-Healthways data, the incidence of suffering in Latin America is not much greater than in Europe.

It is possible to speculate on reasons why the three indicators tell different stories in several regions of the world. Cultural factors probably explain the relatively low incidence of negative emotion in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Cultural factors might also explain why the incidence of suffering has been assessed to be relatively low in Latin America. (As discussed in an earlier post, cultural factors might also explain why the Gallup-Healthways index shows a high percentage of the population in Latin America to be thriving). There may also be potential for the estimates of depression to be biased by such factors as differences in availability of trained mental health professionals.

That leaves me concluding that caution is required in comparing suffering, negative emotion and depression in different parts of the world. I know that is a fairly lame conclusion, but I did warn you not to get too excited.

Do international comparisons show that people in countries with low average life satisfaction tend to have a high incidence of negative emotion?

It seems intuitively reasonable that people in countries with low average life satisfaction levels would tend to have a higher incidence of negative emotion. The theory of subjective well-being homeostasis, discussed in my last post, provides a theoretical basis to predict that will happen. Adaptation and resilience normally keep life satisfaction within a set-point range, but if resilience is weak, life satisfaction can fail to recover from negative experiences. On that basis we would expect low average life satisfaction to be associated with a relatively high incidence of homeostatic breakdown.

At first sight, Figure 1 appears to provide very limited support for the homeostasis theory. There are no countries in which high average life satisfaction is accompanied by a high incidence of negative emotion. At the other end of the scale, however, there are many countries in which low average life satisfaction is accompanied by a relatively low incidence of negative emotion.

The data is sourced from the Gallup World Poll (via World Happiness Report 2013). The negative emotion data for each country is the average of yes/no answers (yes = 1) to the question of whether respondents experienced worry, anger, sadness, anger and depression yesterday. The life satisfaction data is based on the Cantril ladder which involves survey respondents being asked to rate their lives against an 11 point scale in which the top rung of the ladder (rating of 10) corresponds to the best possible life and the bottom rung of the ladder (rating of 0) corresponds to the worst possible life.

Figure 2 shows the expected relationship after controlling for a range of socio-economic and cultural factors. This involved adjusting the data on incidence of negative emotion using the results of a regression analysis. The adjusted data are estimates of what the incidence of negative emotion might have been in the absence of variation in the socio-economic and cultural factors (i.e. with the socio-economic variables equal to the average over all countries and European/American culture).

The regression analysis suggests that at a national level an increase of 1 unit in average life satisfaction reduces the incidence of negative emotion by about 0.02 (SE = 0.007) i.e. by about 10% at the world average level of negative affect. The regression explained about 45% of international variation in the incidence of negative emotion.

The socio-economic variables included in the regression were per capita GDP, social support (relatives and friends to count on), freedom (proportion satisfied with freedom to choose what they do) and corruption (proportion saying corruption is widespread in business or government). The estimated coefficients for those variables were all significantly different from zero, with a negative estimated coefficient on income. It isn’t surprising that high average incomes could be associated with a high incidence of negative emotion if not accompanied by high average life satisfaction and social support.

The cultural influence has been accounted for by using regional dummy variables. The estimates suggest that cultural factors reduce the reported incidence of negative emotion by the following amounts:

East Asia:                                 0.134 (SE 0.025)

Africa:                                      0.104 (SE 0.017)

South Asia:                              0.103 (SE 0.027)

Former Soviet Union:              0.092 (SE 0.020)

Central and Eastern Europe:    0.055 (SE 0.018)

South East Asia:                       0.050 (SE 0.022)

The low incidence of reported negative emotion in East Asia is consistent with previous research on cross-cultural difference in subjective wellbeing. (See, for example a recent article by Lufanna Lai, Robert Cummins and Anna Lau – abstract here.)

One of the most interesting findings of the regression analysis reported above is that the coefficient for Latin America was not significantly different from zero. This is in contrast to the findings of studies relating to positive emotion (including those reported on this blog here and here) which suggests that Latin American culture has a strong positive impact. It seems that the positivity of Latin Americans does not translate to a lower incidence of negative emotion in that part of the world. 

Does homeostasis explain the stability of life satisfaction in high income countries?

The theory of subjective well-being homeostasis proposes that life satisfaction is controlled by automatic neurological processes in a manner analogous to the maintenance of body temperature. The theory has been proposed by Professor Robert Cummins of the Australian Centre on Quality of Life (ACQOL), Deakin University. The basic idea is that positive and negative experiences can cause temporary changes in life satisfaction, but homeostasis normally brings it back within a set-point range. The exception occurs where chronic failure of the homeostatic system results in depression.

The theory proposes that homeostatic buffers enable humans to function normally:

• adaptation restores life satisfaction to the set-point range following positive changes in circumstances, such as an increase in income;
• resilience tends to restore life satisfaction to the set-point range following strong negative challenges.

Resilience depends on external resources, particularly intimate relationships and wealth, and internal buffers designed to minimise the impact of personal failure on positive feelings about the self. The internal buffers can operate at an unconscious level - e.g. assisting an individual to cope by enabling positive emotions to become accessible. They also operate at a conscious level by altering the way individuals see themselves in relation to the challenge (e.g. denying personal responsibility or viewing the failure as unimportant).

The distinguishing feature of the homeostasis theory is not the existence of adaptation and resilience – which are widely acknowledged in the happiness research literature – but the idea that these processes tend to restore emotional systems to unique set-points for each individual.

When I first read about homeostasis theory, a few years ago, evidence that some individuals experience long-term changes in life satisfaction seemed inconsistent with the idea of constant individual set-points. However, as Bob Cummins has pointed out, changes in life satisfaction do not necessarily imply change in an individual’s set-point (or homeostatically protected mood). If initial measurements of life satisfaction are higher than, or lower than, the set-point, then subsequent measurements can be expected to show a return to the set-point range.

My remaining doubts about homeostasis theory centre mainly around the question of how it can be reconciled with the international evidence of lower average life satisfaction in low-income countries. I find it hard to accept that a high proportion of the people in low-income countries who claim to have relatively low levels of satisfaction with their lives are suffering failure of their homeostatic systems. In some low-income countries, e.g. China, relatively low average life satisfaction seems to be accompanied by relatively high positive affect and relatively low negative affect.

Perhaps set-point ranges remain constant – if we think in terms of hypothetical neural correlates – but the relationship between set-point ranges and life satisfaction scales may change with changes in perceptions of what might be possible. As discussed in a recent post, individuals who move from a remote village to a major city might feel that their lives have improved, even though they become less contented with their living standards after moving to the new location. Does that mean they have become more vulnerable to homeostatic breakdown? I am not qualified to make informed predictions in relation to such matters, but my guess is that there would not be an increased risk of breakdown if the people concerned remain optimistic about their prospects in the city and retain the option to return to the village for family support if they need it.

The predictions of homeostasis theory seem to stand up well to tests that have been conducted so far. For example, homeostasis theory predicts that there will be greater variation in subjective well-being among people with low incomes than among people with high incomes. This is because people with low incomes (or low wealth) are more vulnerable to changes in circumstances. Analysis using data from the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index indicates that the standard deviation of subjective well-being is indeed substantially higher for people with relatively incomes, and declines as household incomes rise to around $100,000.

Homeostasis theory seems to provide a more plausible explanation for the stability of average life satisfaction in high-income countries than a rival theory, advanced by some economists, that this stability reflects evaluative judgements of life by the people in those countries. Evidence that life satisfaction is influenced by genes, and strongly related to self-esteem, optimism and feelings of being in control of one’s life, suggests that it is more appropriately interpreted as reflecting the moods (or frames of mind) of respondents than evaluative judgements. 

Researchers who want subjective well-being measures to reflect evaluative judgements that individuals make about the quality of their lives should consider an approach which requires greater cognitive inputs e.g. the ACSA question which asks people to assess their current well-being relative to the best and worst periods of their lives.

What does it mean to be thriving?

I am asking myself that question because I am trying to come to grips with the findings of the new Gallup-Healthways Global Well-Being Index.

The methodology of the index looks like a sensible way to assess the extent to which people are thriving in different countries. Surveys are used to obtain subjective data relating to the following five elements:

• Purpose: liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting every day
• Social: having supportive relationships - someone who encourages you to be healthy and family and friends who give you positive energy
• Financial: having enough money to do what you want to do and not being worried about money
• Community: liking where you live and having pride in your community
• Physical: feeling active and productive, and that your physical health is near perfect.

When I look at the results, however, I wonder whether the new Gallup-Healthways index actually measures the extent to which people are thriving.

The top ten countries in the index are as follows:

1. Panama
2. Costa Rica
3. Denmark
4. Austria
5. Brazil
6. Uruguay
7. El Salvador
8. Sweden
9. Guatemala
10. Canada.

When Scott Sumner looked at that ranking he wasn’t surprised to see some of the countries of Latin America do well, but he was shocked to see Sweden bracketed by Guatemala and El Salvador.  His comment:

“Just to be clear, I’m NOT saying that the people in those two countries are not just as happy as the Swedes; for all I know they are happier.  I have no idea how to measure happiness. But if you are talking about country rankings, people are going to assume you are making some sort of statement about socio-economic/political systems.  And if a large share of the people in these highly successful societies are risking murder, rape and dying of thirst in order to flee to a country where they don’t speak the language, so that they can get jobs cleaning toilets or picking vegetables in the hot sun all day long, then I have to wonder whether these rankings actually mean much of anything”.

Gallup’s potential net migration index suggests that large numbers of people who live in Guatemala and El Salvador would indeed prefer to live elsewhere. Recent surveys suggest that while about 28% of the population of Guatemala would prefer to live elsewhere, the corresponding figure for El Salvador is about 33%.

In Free to Flourish I made the point that if you want to measure the quality of different societies it makes more sense to attempt to define the characteristics of a good society and attempt to measure the extent to which societies have those characteristics, rather than to attempt to infer the quality of a society solely from happiness indexes. Nevertheless, it comes as a surprise when a high proportion of the population is assessed to be thriving in societies from which large numbers of people wish to migrate to seek better opportunities.

When I set out to find out the reasons for the results obtained by Gallup-Healthways my first thought was that it might reflect the method used to rank countries. The criterion used is the percentage of the population that are thriving on the basis of three or more of the elements defined above. However, when I constructed an index by averaging the scores on all five elements (giving thriving a rating of 3, struggling a rating of 2 and suffering a rating of 1), El Salvador remained in 7^th place and the ranking of Guatemala remained fairly high (falling from 9^th to 14^th).

My second thought was that people would be unlikely to give equal weight to the five specified elements in assessing the quality of their lives. In order to assess what weights might be appropriate I used regression analysis to explain the old Gallup thriving index in terms of the five elements of the new index. The old Gallup index is based on the Cantril methodology under which survey respondents are asked to evaluate their own lives relative to the best and worst possible life. Under the old Gallup index the percentages of the population assessed to be thriving in El Salvador and Sweden were 36% and 68% respectively.

There is a problem with the use of regression analysis to obtain weights because the old and new indexes relate to surveys taken years apart, but that seemed to me to be a minor problem by comparison with use of equal weights.

The results of the analysis suggest that it might be appropriate to give a weighting of 40% to Purpose, 30% to Financial, 30% to Physical, and zero weight to Social and Community. The rankings on that basis are:

1. Panama 
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Austria
5. Costa Rica
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Iceland
9. Mexico
10. El Salvador

At this point I have to acknowledge that the high rating given to El Salvador is unlikely to be a result of the methodology used for ranking, or failure to weight elements appropriately.

No matter how I look at it, the people of El Salvador seem to be highly positive about their lives. This is consistent with the results of other Gallup surveys which have shown that the people of El Salvador experience a great deal of positive emotion.

The problem is that while it is good to have positive emotional states or positive states of mind, thriving involves more than that. From observed behaviour it is obvious that humans see their ability to thrive as related to objective circumstances such as incomes, life expectancy and education – which are reflected in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) – as well as to their emotional states.

Anyone interested in identifying the countries in which people have the best opportunities to thrive might find the following chart of some interest.

What is the secret of happiness?

Now that I have your attention I will do my best to keep it – but you cannot expect me to attempt to answer such an important question in just a few paragraphs.

It might be appropriate to begin by issuing a health warning about my ability to answer such a complex question. I can claim a great deal of interest in the subject, but my expertise is limited.

In my view human happiness is ultimately about having a meaningful life – one that is meaningful to the person living it - but that is certainly not a secret. Wise people have been saying similar things for thousands of years.

What I am about to write about now has to do with momentary happiness and the way we pursue our goals. It seems like a good idea for individuals to pursue their goals in ways that enable them to experience many happy moments and not too much disappointment along the way.

Some recent research on the links between risk-taking, expectations, rewards and happiness has produced some interesting findings. I propose to present some of those findings in a somewhat novel way and to combine them with some additional speculations.

The research by Robb Rutledge (of University College, London) and colleagues involved presenting participants in a decision-making game with choices between certain and risky options and repeatedly asking them to report their momentary happiness. The study used fMRI to examine the relationship between happiness reports and neural responses. The study also made use of the Great Brain Experiment app, to test results on large numbers of people playing the decision-making game on smart phones and tablets. (The game is actually still available the Great Brain Experiment site and good fun to play.) The research is reported in an article entitled ‘A Computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being’, recently published in PNAS. Good summaries of the article have been published by ‘The Telegraph’ and ‘The Atlantic’.

The study found that momentary happiness is determined by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations. The happiness equation takes the following form:

Happiness = baseline average mood + what you can settle for (CR) + what you'll get on average if you gamble (EV) + the difference between that and what you actually get (RPE). 

The equation takes account of the fact that memory fades, so that more recent events have a larger impact on happiness than earlier events.

The findings suggest that happiness depends not on how well things are going, but on whether they are going better than expected.

It is a mistake to interpret the findings as in the headline in one paper: “The secret of happiness? LOWER your expectations: A good day is when things are going better than expected”. One reason the results don’t imply that people should lower their expectations is because the measure of expectation used is average reward, rather than a direct measure of optimism or pessimism. It would be slightly more accurate to interpret the findings as suggesting that people can avoid disappointment by staying within their comfort zone instead of choosing riskier options that involve high average (expected) reward. But that interpretation is also inadequate because it overlooks the pleasure that people get from anticipating a high reward (even if the outcome is not as good as expected) and also overlooks the buzz that some people get when they gamble (choose an option with high potential reward but lower average reward) and win.

I have attempted to map out some relationships between expectations, forecast errors and happiness in the following two charts.

In the first chart, we begin in Quadrant A, with expectations and happiness as indicated by the blue line i.e. a happiness rating above 7. Unfortunately, it turns out that outcomes are below expectations, so in Quadrant B it is apparent that we have a negative prediction error of -3. When we translate that to the X axis in Quadrant C (using the 45⁰ line in the south-east quadrant) we find that an error of -3 corresponds to a happiness rating of less than 6.

So, the question now arises of how you should respond to that disappointment. One way to respond is to get back into your comfort zone and adopt a strategy involving lower expectations and no prediction error. That strategy avoids disappointment but it means that you forgo the pleasure of contemplating the happiness that you could expect, on average, under the original strategy.

An alternative response is depicted in the second chart. That involves sticking with the original strategy but improving your luck.

 An improvement in luck is shown by a shift in the relationship in Quadrant B. By improving your luck you are able to achieve an outcome better than expected and end up happier than you expected.

So, the secret of happiness is to get lucky! 

Jokes aside, it makes sense to stick to a strategy that you have good reason to think will yield high returns over the longer term, even if you experience disappointing results in the short term. In other words, the secret of happiness is adopt the strategy that you expect to yield greatest rewards over the longer term and “stay the course”.

Some readers might question the wisdom of that on the grounds that most people tend to be optimistic in their expectations, relative to average reward (or mathematical expectation). However, the findings of a recent paper by Gigi Foster and Paul Frijters, which examines the formation of expectations by undergraduates at two Australian universities, suggests that optimistic expectations are benign. The results suggest that apart from their direct contribution to happiness, optimistic expectations motivate people to work harder to achieve their goals.

So, adding all that together, the secret of happiness would be to adopt the strategy that you expect to yield greatest rewards over the longer term, and to back your expectations by staying the course and working hard. But you already knew that!  And something important seems to be missing.

The real secret of happiness, in my view, is to play the inner frame games of self-acceptance and cheerfulness, and to adopt an attitude of awe and fascination about the world. 


Postscript:
I linked to the wrong article by Gigi Foster and Paul Frijters. An abstract of the article I meant to to link to can be found here.

Should researchers recognize that emotional states are influenced by life evaluations?

There is nothing novel about the idea that people who have a positive frame of mind about the opportunities and challenges that life offers tend to experience positive emotions as they go about their daily lives. 

We are not surprised that people who smile and laugh a lot, obtain enjoyment from whatever they are doing, feel they are learning or doing something interesting and feel that they are treated with respect tend to rate their lives highly. If such people don’t consider their current lives as close to the best possible, it is likely to be because they are optimistic about the potential for their lives to get even better. It might be reasonable to suppose that their positive emotions reflect frames of mind stemming from their dispositions and their evaluations of their lives as well as from their current experiences.

However, when I looked up “positive emotion”, “frame of mind” and “research” on Google I found a lot of references to research on cognitive approaches to improving well-being, but I didn’t see any on life evaluations as a determinant of positive emotion. Researchers do not seem to have perceived life evaluations – for example, responses to survey questions asking people to rate their lives between best possible and worst possible – as frames of mind. Emotional state variables (positive emotion and negative emotion) are sometimes included in analyses which seek to explain life evaluations, but I am not aware of studies which view life evaluations as a potential explanatory variable.

The question posed in this post is linked to the finding in my last post that average positive emotion ratings in countries in the former Soviet Union are lower, while those in Latin American countries are higher, than might be expected on the basis of negative emotion ratings in those regions. I suggested that the most likely reason for this was the development of shared frames of mind by people in those regions. That poses the question of whether these shared frames reflect life evaluations or something more profound.

Which variables should be included in a regression model to assess the influence of frames of mind on positive emotions at a national level? The most obvious measure of positive emotions to use is the Gallup measure which reflects the extent to which people are well-rested, smile and laugh a lot, obtain enjoyment from what they are doing, are learning or doing something interesting and feel that they are treated with respect. It seemed appropriate to include the Gallup measure of negative emotion (reflecting pain, worry, sadness, stress or anger) as an explanatory variable to take account of experience that might lead people to have a negative frame of mind. Regional variables were included for reasons just discussed. Gallup data was used to reflect average life evaluations at a national level (Cantril ladder).

Three other frame of mind variables were included because they have previously been found to be significant determinants of both life evaluation and positive emotion ratings. (See, for example, the research by John Helliwell and Shun Wang presented in Table 2.1 of Chapter 2 of World Happiness Report 2013.) These variables were satisfaction with freedom, perceptions of social support and generosity. All data was obtained from the online appendix to Chapter 2 of the World Happiness Report.

Separate regional variables were included in the initial regressions but only Latin America, the Former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and Middle East and North Africa were found to be significant. The final regression model explains about 70 percent of the variation in positive emotion at a national level. The results of the analysis are reflected in the Figure below. (All estimated coefficients were significantly different from zero at the 95% level. Further information can be made available on request.)

Two important points are evident from the Figure:

• The relatively low positive emotion ratings of people in the former Soviet Union and the positive ratings of people in Latin America are still evident after controlling for several other variables. These anomalies cannot be explained in terms of life evaluations or the other frame of mind variables considered.
• The influence of life evaluations on positive emotion involves more than just satisfaction with freedom, perceptions of social support and generosity.

Postscript 1:

I acknowledged above that frames of mind can stem from dispositions as well as from life evaluations. In retrospect, I should also have noted that dispositions can affect life evaluations.

A paper just published by Eugenio Proto and Andrew Oswald explores the role of genetics in influencing average life evaluations at a national level (“National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A cautious exploration”, July 2014, IZA DP 8300). The paper suggests that genetic distance from Denmark is a significant determinant of life satisfaction.

If the genetic influence on disposition had an impact on positive affect in addition to its influence on life evaluations (and other variables including negative affect and regional variables) that should be reflected in the residuals of the regression described above. However, the residuals for Denmark and countries that are genetically close to Denmark (Norway, Sweden, Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland) are small and mainly negative.

Postscript 2:

Inclusion of genetic distance from Denmark in the regression analysis made little difference to the results obtained. The coefficient on the genetic variable had the 'wrong' sign and was not significantly different from zero. The results suggest that any genetic influence on positive affect occurs via life evaluations and other variables.

Postscript 3:
Research by Gian Vittoria Caprara, Nancy Eisenberg and Guido Alessandri on the dispositional basis of happiness is relevant to this post. The authors note that life satisfaction, optimism and self-esteem have recently been traced to a common disposition, namely positivity. The authors' measure of positivity reflects all these factors. Their research suggests that positivity predicts future positive affectivity, rather than vice versa. 

Why don't we see a close relationship between low negative emotion and high positive emotion?

Think about how you felt yesterday. Did you feel much pain, worry, sadness, stress or anger? If you felt less of those negative emotions than the world average, then do you think it would be reasonable to predict that your experience of positive emotions might be higher than the world average? The relevant positive experiences are smiling and laughing a lot, feeling enjoyment, well-rested and treated with respect, and learning or doing something interesting.

Apparently that prediction is not as reasonable as I thought it would be. People in countries where average levels of negative emotion are relatively low do not necessarily have relatively high average levels of positive emotion. This is apparent in the Figure below which has been drawn from data from recent polls conducted by the Gallup organisation.

The Figure does show an inverse correlation between positive and negative emotion, but most of the action is at the upper end of negative emotion. It seems to be much less common for people with high negative emotion to also experience high positive emotion than it is for people who experience low negative emotion to also experience low positive emotion.

Interestingly, the chart also shows that the average of positive emotion for people in Bhutan - the home of Gross National Happiness (GNH) - is low by comparison with both of its giant neighbours, China and India. Gallup has suggested that Bhutan’s low score on positive emotion is attributable to the fact that the percentage of the population who feel that they are treated with a “great deal of respect” was the lowest for all countries included in the 2013 survey. Perhaps this reflects the restrictions on individual liberty imposed by the government in pursuit of its GNH objective. It is also possible that the GNH objective gives participants in happiness surveys an incentive to use their responses to tell the government that they are not happy with its performance. 

   

However, the main point I want to make concerns the salient characteristics of the countries which combine low negative emotion with low positive emotion or unusually high positive emotion. Most of the countries in the first category were formerly members of the Soviet Union (shown with red diamonds). By contrast, most Latin American countries (shown with purple diamonds) have unusually high positive emotion scores.

The most likely explanation of the different emotional experiences of people in the former Soviet Union and Latin America is the development of shared frames of mind (cultural framing). Sonja Lyubomirsky has observed that expressions of happiness or success in Russia are often perceived as inviting envy, resentment, and suspicion, at least partly because there is a cultural belief in Russia that anyone who is happy or successful might have used immoral means for achieving these states. (Reported in a recent article on happiness aversion by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers). I guess such beliefs could have been reinforced by living under communism and the regimes that have followed the fall of communism. It is also possible that negative emotions would be understated in a culture where people had incentives to adopt a “must not complain” attitude to life.

With regard to Latin America, Jon Clifton, the author of the report of the Gallup survey suggests:

“That so many people are reporting positive emotions in Latin America at least partly reflects the cultural tendency in the region to focus on the positives in life”.

There is evidence (for example in a report by Eduardo Loro) that when people in Latin America are asked about their health, they tend to report a higher level of satisfaction than is warranted, given objective indicators of their health status.

The existence of such a cultural bias does not mean that the high positive emotion reported for Latin America is not genuinely felt. Research by Mohsen Joshanloo provides some evidence of lower happiness aversion in Latin America than in many other parts of the world. It seems reasonable to predict that the high positive emotion in Latin America would provide health benefits e.g. lower rates of hypertension, as in other parts of the world (see research by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find studies that control for the relevant variables to confirm whether that is the case. There are studies suggesting that rates of hypertension are relatively high in some Latin American countries, but that seems to be attributable to obesity and other risk factors.  

We are good?

I was asked that question by a waitress in the restaurant at Holiday Inn in Port Moresby a few months ago. I told her that I was good and asked whether she was good. She responded: “We are good”.

This novel use of the hospital ‘we’ seemed amusing. But the incident came to mind just now because of the potential for ‘good’ to mean different things.

How do you respond when someone greets you by asking: How are you? There was a time when I nearly always said “I’m good”, but I became more conscious of what I was saying after some clever person responded that he was not asking about my morals. In retrospect, I should have told him that I was referring to my emotional state, which was good because I was in good health and also felt somewhat virtuous and competent.

A few years ago I wrote a post on the topic: Is our inner nature good? What I wrote still seems ok; perhaps I could even claim it is good. I ended up more or less endorsing the view that our inner nature must be good because moral beliefs and motivations come from a small set of intuitions that evolution has prepared the human brain to develop. Those intuitions enable and constrain the social construction of virtues and values. 

There is scientific support for that line of thinking, but a scientific approach cannot take us far in considering our inner natures.

It may be worth considering why a scientific approach cannot be particularly enlightening about our own inner natures. One basic reason is that we live our lives as players rather than spectators. If we try to observe ourselves in the way we observe other people we tend to make predictions that get in the way of our intentions. We cannot escape the fact that our perceptions influence our behaviour, and vice versa. If I perceive myself as the kind of person who behaves in a particular way, then that will influence my intentions and how I behave; and if I change my behaviour, that will influence how I perceive myself.

In order to become more like the person you would like to become, you need to know how and to “do it like you mean it” (to use a phrase I heard often as a child while helping grown-ups with farm work). A story told by Tim Gallwey in The Inner Game of Golf comes to mind to illustrate the point (p183). A golfer came to Gallwey for coaching to improve his golf swing. After the golfer demonstrated his dreadful swing, Gallwey asked him how he would like to be able to swing. When the golfer started to explain, Gallwey asked him to demonstrate. That resulted in an immediate improvement in performance.

Now, it is fairly obvious that people can’t become experts in any field by just pretending to have expertise. The golfer only had the potential to improve his swing instantaneously because he knew how to do so.

Going back a step, how do we know we can trust our intuitions about what kind of person we would like to be? Our perceptions about our inner natures must influence our thinking about what kinds of persons we would like to be. There are many different stories we can tell ourselves about our inner natures. If you tell yourself that “the flesh warreth against the spirit” then I guess your goal must be to overcome the temptations of the flesh.  If you tell yourself that your body is just a machine designed to make you happy then I guess your goal would be to keep all the parts in good working order and become a proficient machine operator. If you tell yourself that all sensations are illusory or impermanent and that attachment to them causes suffering, then I guess your goal would be to become equanimous. If you tell yourself that you have an authentic self which grows into a strong, healthy and peaceful presence when you practice unconditional acceptance of all your bodily sensations, then I guess your goal is to get into the flow and let that happen.

Although it must be fairly obvious that I think some of those stories would serve me better than others, I don’t think it is possible to prove any of them to be false. Even so, it seems to me that plausibility is still an important consideration in choosing which stories to accept. As a general rule small leaps of faith are probably better than large leaps of faith. That thought occurred to me as I was reading Michael Winn’s book, Way of the Inner Smile, a few days ago. For example, the following passage explaining how the inner smile differs from feelings of love and compassion seems to me to be a plausible description of personal experience:

“The Inner Smile is probably something closer to the experience of unconditional acceptance. The seed quality of unconditional acceptance is smiled through the outer biological layers of the self in towards the core of one’s being, and this generates a counter-wave of smiling energy that emanates back out from the core and flows in the chi (subtle energy) channels of the body”. (p 55)

The plausibility of that story relies on personal experience rather than on scientific verification of the existence of such things as smiling energy and chi channels. Some ideas in the book seem to me to be less plausible, but it would distract from the points I am trying to make if I elaborate now.

So, what points am I trying to make? Feeling good is about competence and virtue as well as health. Feeling good is about becoming more like the person you want to become. In order to develop a strong sense of what kind of person you would like to become it may be helpful to find a story about your inner nature that you find plausible. When considering your inner nature, the most relevant test of plausibility is personal experience rather than science. And we should not forget to smile.

Postscript:

Lucy Lopez has provided the following comment:

 You wrote: "Feeling good is about competence and virtue as well as health. Feeling good is about becoming more like the person you want to become. In order to develop a strong sense of what kind of person you would like to become it may be helpful to find a story about your inner nature that you find plausible. When considering your inner nature, the most relevant test of plausibility is personal experience rather than science. And we should not forget to smile."

Firstly, the thinking mind is almost never inactive and so intervenes in every experience.  So much so that most people find it hard to distinguish between their thoughts, beliefs and ideas and their FEELINGS.  In fact, most find it hard to actually allow themselves to feel, almost always reporting on what they think rather than how they feel.  

So, for instance, if I ask you how you feel and you say 'I'm good'. that is more than likely an expression of the idea of 'I'm okay' or 'There's nothing terribly wrong with me' rather than an expression of how you're really feeling.

But it is possible to get in touch with our feelings and acknowledge them even when we sometimes may not have any existing words for them.  When you really allow yourself to FEEL, or should I say to ACKNOWLEDGE how you're feeling, it can be quite a revelation.  That's because we have been so conditioned to deny, distrust and hide our feelings.  

When we do allow ourselves to tune into our feelings fully and acknowledge them, we can do two things:

1. We can decide if we want to continue feeling the way we are feeling or not.  If we want to continue feeling the same way, there is nothing more to do.  If we don't want to feel the way we're feeling, we can ask the question: How would I LIKE to feel?  Without presuming we know the answer (in other words, without resorting to thought/ideas, we allow that feeling to arise spontaneously.  Again, it may often surprise us how different that feeling is to what we might THINK we want to feel.  (BTW, this is a technique I teach).

2. We can look for the thoughts and beliefs that underlie our feelings and examine these for their validity, whereupon we might consider different thoughts and different beliefs.

The point to all this is that you don't need to rely on some intellectual concept of the kind of person you'd like to be.  Sure, you may begin by thinking about it but it is far more effective, efficient and natural to FEEL the kind of person you want to be because more than likely, you'll be guided by what feels good i.e. peaceful, joyous, blissful, equanimous even...The kind of states you experience during meditation as Voltaire describes it:

'Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or pure consciousness without objuectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity'.

Always happy to respond to your ideas :)

Lucy's blog:  "Get Enlightened Today"

Is the story of human flourishing all about emancipation

Yes, the story of human flourishing is all about emancipation. There is no other word that better describes what human flourishing is about.

At least that is the way it seems to me - and that view has been reinforced by reading Christian Welzel’s book, Freedom Rising, which is subtitled: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation.

The central idea in the book is that a desire for emancipation from external constraints is deeply rooted in human nature. It stems from the ability of humans to make conscious choices and to imagine a less constrained existence.

Emancipative values remain relatively dormant when people are poor, illiterate and isolated in local groups - they tend to place lower value on freedom of choice and more equal opportunity than on meeting their most basic needs.  Emancipative values emerge strongly as people acquire more action resources (wealth, intellectual skills and opportunities to connect with others). As people recognize the value of civic entitlements, such as the right to vote, they are inspired to take collective action to achieve them.

A society ascends a utility ladder of freedoms as its people obtain more action resources, adopt emancipative values and attain more civic entitlements. Life provides greater opportunities for most people as societies ascend this ladder. That is fundamentally what human flourishing is about in my view.

For individuals, ascending Welzel’s utility ladder of freedoms is much the same as ascending Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. However, Welzel’s emancipation theory has the advantage of being able to explain movement up the ladder in terms of forces of social evolution as well as desires that are deeply rooted in human nature.

Some implications of Welzel’s emancipation theory are capable of being tested empirically. The index of emancipative values used in the empirical work incorporates twelve items from the World Values Survey covering values relating to autonomy, choice, equality and voice (e.g. protecting freedom of speech and giving people more say in government and workplace decisions). Action resources are measured using various indexes of technology, education and national income. Civic entitlements are measured using Freedom House indicators and various other sources such as Vanhanen’s index of democratization.

The results of four tests of implications of Welzel’s emancipation theory are briefly reported below.

First, the empirical work confirms that emancipative values tend to become more widespread as action resources become more widespread. The results indicate that action resources (particularly intellectual resources) strengthen emancipative values at both the individual and societal level, but operate most strongly at the societal level. An individual’s intellectual resources strengthen her emancipative values more when she lives in a society in which intellectual resources are more widespread.

Second, the empirical results reported are consistent with the view that the sequence of change runs from emancipative values to civic entitlements rather than vice versa. Increases in emancipative values are explained by action resources rather than civic entitlements.

Third, evidence is presented that as emancipative values become more widely shared, the dominant life strategies in a population shift from an extrinsic focus on material circumstances to an intrinsic focus on emotional qualities. As emancipative values become more widely shared, people become less preoccupied with their financial situation and their satisfaction with life becomes more closely related to their emotional state (happiness).

Fourth, evidence is presented that a strong sense of general well-being becomes more common as intrinsic life strategies become prevalent. In other words, levels of life satisfaction tend to be higher when life satisfaction becomes more closely related to emotional state rather than material circumstances.

   

To sum up, Welzel’s emancipation theory seems to me to fit the facts pretty well in terms of what we know about the ways in which values have changed and civic entitlements have expanded as living standards have risen.

I will consider in my next post whether or not Freedom Rising provides a satisfactory explanation of the conditions that got the ball rolling by enabling people to achieve higher material living standards, first in Western Europe and then in many other parts of the world. That is not just an important historical question. It is also relevant in considering what factors could cause the processes of emancipation and human flourishing to be interrupted in future.

Which are the most popular posts on Freedom and Flourishing?

This blog is going into recess for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, you might like to read some of the most popular posts on the blog, listed below:

Is push-pin as good as poetry?

How does income inequality affect happiness?

Once a neurotic always a neurotic?

What are the characteristics of a good society?

What did Milton Friedman have to say about human flourishing?

Was the industrial revolution mainly about the growth of manufacturing industry?

Is enlightenment humanism a coherent world view?

You might also consider spending a dollar and reading my book, Free to Flourish.

Do realistic optimists have more successful lives?

I think realistic optimists probably do have more successful lives than optimists and pessimists, but unfortunately I cannot claim that I have a particularly strong basis for that view.

A couple of months ago I notice a story by Tia Ghose on Huffington Post reporting on research findings by Sophia Chou of the National Taiwan University. The research apparently suggests that realistic optimists – people who combine the positive outlook of optimists with the clear-eyed perspective of pessimists – get the best of both worlds. Their realism enables them to perform better at work because they don’t delude themselves that they can do well without working hard. Their optimism enables them to avoid getting bogged down by unhappiness.

I was particularly interested because of something I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago entitled: Why can’t we have a realistic basis for optimism? My consideration was prompted by a discussion by Martin Seligman of issues relating to possible circumstances where expectations may influence reality.

After reading the article by Tia Ghose, I decided to go looking for the relevant paper by Sophia Chou, which was presented at the American Psychological Association in Hawaii earlier this year. I haven’t been able to find a copy of the paper on the internet. I could write to the author and ask for a copy, but I don’t think I will bother. My qualifications are in economics, so I have reason to be pessimistic about my ability to judge the quality of the research behind these findings.

Sophia Chou’s research findings seem to me to make a lot of sense, but I guess a realistic optimist would wait for her paper to be published in a peer reviewed journal before getting excited about them.

Should we choose eudaimonia over hedonia?

Last week my attention was drawn to the findings of some recent research, led by Barbara Fredrickson, which suggests that eudaimonia – which can be described in broad terms as a sense of wellbeing associated with a noble purpose or engagement in meaningful activities - provides positive health benefits in protecting against a variety of human ills, including arthritis, heart disease and viral infection. By contrast, the study suggests that hedonia – a sense of happiness associated with pleasure, satisfaction and self-gratification – has the opposite effects.

The findings are noteworthy because previous research has suggested that both eudaimonia and hedonia are associated with improved physical and mental health outcomes. I feel more inspired than surprised by the findings. Like many other people I was brought up to believe that a noble purpose can be protective, but in adult life I viewed that as more a matter of faith than anything else. It is interesting to learn there may be a scientific basis for such beliefs.

The research combined psychology tests to determine the nature of happiness experienced by 80 healthy adults with a health check and test of blood samples to assess gene expression associated with chronic stress and antiviral responses. Barbara Fredrickson is a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina. On this project she collaborated with a team led by Steven Cole, professor of medicine and psychiatry, at the University of California. (The research findings have been published in PNAS.)

Like previous studies, this study indicated that there is a relatively high correlation observed between eudaimonic and hedonic indicators of happiness (r= 0.79). People who score highly in terms of eudaimonic happiness tend also to score highly in terms of hedonic happiness, and vice versa, but there was nevertheless sufficient difference to enable the impacts of eudaimonia and hedonia to be disentangled.

The authors’ conclusion is a bit complicated, but it seems to be implying that if the ‘good life’ means a long and healthy life, then eudaimonic wellbeing is superior to hedonic wellbeing.

 However, there are some important qualifications noted in the discussion:

‘In interpreting these results, it is important to note that hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are not mutually exclusive approaches to happiness, nor do they represent a simple typology or a tradeoff. Both types of well-being share some common sources (e.g., perceived social connections) and can reciprocally influence one another [i.e., positive affect predisposes people to find positive meaning, and finding positive meaning increases positive affect]. As such, the current finding that a purified index of eudaimonic well-being (purged of shared variance with hedonia) predicts a more favourable pattern of gene expression than does a purified index of hedonic well-being (purged of shared variance with eudaimonia) says more about which form of well-being one would not want to do without, rather than which form one would be better to avoid. For people in whom one form of well-being outweighs the other, striving predominately toward meaning may have more favourable effects on health than striving predominately toward positive affect per se’. (References to cited works have been omitted from the quote.)

I struggle to understand what some of that paragraph means – the findings of the study seem to me to suggest that some kind of trade-off between eudaimonia and hedonia must be involved, despite the existence of complementarity. The issues involved appear a little clearer, however, when I bring my training in economics to bear and think in terms of a possibilities curve that surrounds all the combinations of eudaimonia and hedonia that it might be possible for an individual to achieve.

I have drawn the possibilities curve to depict a trade-off between hedonia and eudaimonia at most of the attainable points (i.e. between A and B) but allowing some regions where single-minded pursuit of either hedonia or eudaimonia might result in inferior outcomes. I draw the curve as concave to the origin over most of its length because I imagine that the eudaimonic benefits we can obtain by sacrificing a unit of hedonic benefits would tend to diminish as we sacrifice more and more hedonic benefits. My reasoning is that there are likely to be diminishing returns to devoting time both to activities that produce high hedonic benefits and activities that produce high eudaimonic benefits. I expect that single minded pursuit of hedonia might be counterproductive for the same reason that J S Mill argued that happiness cannot be obtained by seeking it (as discussed here previously). And I expect that single minded pursuit of eudaimonia might be counterproductive for the same reason that Aristotle argued that we need amusement – ‘for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously’. (That comes from the passage in Nicomachean Ethics Book X, where Aristotle suggests that it would, indeed, be strange if amusement was your purpose in life and you were to take trouble and suffer hardship all your life just in order to amuse yourself.)

The sentence in the paragraph quoted above about the findings saying more about ‘which form of well-being one would not want to do without, rather than which form one would be better to avoid’, seems to envisage a person who is at a point inside the possibilities curve, such as the point at the question mark. A person in that position might be considering whether to seek to become happier by moving in the direction of point H or point E.

I should emphasize that the possibilities curve I have drawn is based mainly on my speculations and may not be related to what Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues have in mind.

However, I think my diagram may have some value in considering the information and practical wisdom we need to make sensible decisions about how we live our lives:

• ·         First, we need to know ourselves well enough to know where we stand at present relative to the possibilities that are available to us.
• ·         Second, additional information (such as the findings about potential health consequences in the study discussed above) has potential to help us to choose wisely among the possibilities that are available.

My final point is the same as the point I made a few years ago in discussing whether J S Mill was correct in his rejection of Jeremy Bentham’s claim that pushpin is a good as poetry. There doesn’t seem to me to be much point in arguing whether eudaimonia is or is not superior to hedonia. The important issue is about obtaining balance in one’s life.

Should people seek contentment or accomplishment?

This is a tricky question, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.

I have been thinking that one of the problems in using life satisfaction as a measure of human flourishing is that satisfaction implies contentment, and contentment may kill motivation to do things that are worthwhile. That has made me wonder whether or not it is possible for people to become too satisfied with their lives.

When I considered this issue in writing Free to Flourish, I concluded that despite such problems, life satisfaction might still be an adequate measure of human flourishing. I reached that conclusion on the basis of a comparison of different measures of subjective well-being by the British Office of National Statistics (ONS). The results showed a fairly high level of correlation (0.66) between responses when people were asked ‘How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’ and ‘Overall, to what extent do you think the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’.

However, that doesn’t really answer the question of whether it is better for people to seek contentment or accomplishment. It may be possible that people obtain greater satisfaction from life when they seek worthwhile accomplishment than when they seek contentment. It may also be possible that contentment helps people to devote their lives to doing things that they consider to be worthwhile. Such ideas are neither new, nor necessarily inconsistent.

People may not actually need to choose between contentment and accomplishment. Perhaps we only think a choice has to be made because we tend to equate contentment with sloth and accomplishment with frenzied effort. It is not obvious that a choice has to be made if contentment means equanimity and accomplishment means achievement of a worthwhile goal.

My intuitions suggest to me that the important requirement for both contentment and accomplishment is for people to make conscious choices about their goals in life, rather than just drifting without purpose. As children, we are strongly influenced by parents, peers teachers etc. but as we grow to adulthood, we cannot fully flourish unless we make good use of our emotional and intellectual resources to manage our own lives.

So, where is the evidence that goal setting works?  When I went looking for such evidence, the first thing I found was a post by Ray Williams entitled ‘Why goal setting doesn’t work’ on the ‘Psychology Today’ blog. Williams presents several different arguments to cast doubt on goal-setting, but his most powerful point seems to be the following:

‘The inherent problem with goal setting is related to how the brain works. Recent neuroscience research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioral change or thinking-pattern change will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter it commences a de-motivator with a desire to return to known, comfortable behavior and thought patterns’.

That left me somewhat confused, so I took advantage of the fact that Jim Belshaw was conducting a discussion about goal setting on his blog, to ask participants what they thought about Ray Williams’ contribution. One of the participants, Evan Hadkins, who has a particular interest in personal development issues, made the following comments (slightly edited):

‘The goal setting literature does emphasise being realistic (the usual acronym being SMART). This of course is a bit of a cop out - if the goal isn't achieved then it wasn't realistic for one reason or another.

His reductionist pleasure-pain/fear psychology is wrong. (He is not alone in this error.)

I think he is a bit unfair to the goal setters. Lots of them talk about goals serving your wider values and choosing carefully what goals you aim for.

As to being in the now: Our longings, regrets, memories, fantasies, visions, plans and everything else all occur now. He doesn't understand this. He is not alone in this misunderstanding.

Overall I think it is pretty sloppy and confused. Lots of the goal setting literature emphasises worthwhile aims and being careful what you wish for. And his advice about intentions has all the problems of change that he levelled against goal setting. But I do agree with what I think is his basic point: goals should be realistic and serve worthwhile ends’.

I agree with Evan’s comments. Evan’s point about reductionist pleasure-pain/fear psychology brought to mind the ‘no failure just feedback’ idea that I picked up from NLP practitioners a few decades ago. The point is that our responses to evidence of failure to attain goals depend on our attitudes. We are unlikely to be devastated if we value the feedback we obtain as providing opportunities to consider how we can improve our future performance.

Evan’s point about choosing carefully what goals you aim for brought to mind the NLP concept of a ‘well-formed outcome’, with its emphasis on specifying the goal in a way you find compelling and running quality control checks to make sure that the desired goal is right for you in all circumstances of your life.

My answer to the question I raised initially is that people should be seeking contentment and accomplishment, making conscious choices about the kind of life they want to lead, by pursuing goals they consider worthwhile and feel passionate about. In my view it is not possible for individuals to be fully flourishing if they just drift aimlessly – unless, of course, drifting aimlessly is a goal they choose to pursue with a great deal of passion.