from the I-was-not-told-there-would-be-math dept.
What makes people happy? Finding a definitive answer to this question could certainly make someone very rich (but whether that would in turn make them happy is another matter). The problem is that happiness is especially slippery. While we know much about the consequences of happiness that it can improve our health and well-being and how we get on in the world much less in known about its causes, let alone how to guarantee its appearance.
Making happiness a goal, for example, often has counter-productive consequences that ultimately lead to less happiness overall. Finding happiness is, for many, akin to divining water: when we do find it we are often at a loss to explain how it happened.
In an attempt to provide insight to the happiness conundrum, a group of researchers from London recently published a mathematical formula in PNAS that predicts people's subjective ratings of their happiness from moment to moment. Drawing on models of how we respond to reward, they showed that people feel happy when they experience momentary rewards, and that the influence of such rewards quickly decays over time.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by martyb on Monday August 11 2014, @01:16PM
In my experience, happiness is often confused. There is pleasure and then there is joy.
Pleasure can come about it many ways, such as getting drunk, or seeing a pretty sunset, etc.
Joy, is a 'deeper' thing for me. Like helping a child learn how to hit a baseball, and seeing the look on their face when they first connect and the ball goes sailing off into the distance. Or seeing someone struggling with a flat tire on the side of the road, stopping by and swapping in the spare, and seeing the look of gratitude and relief on their face. Or, training hard for a track meet, and coming in first place with a personal best.
It seems to me to be one of those things that if you have never experienced it, there are no words to describe it, and if you *have* experienced it, then words are not really necessary.
When I seek pleasure, even if I attain it, it still seems to come up short compared to the joy I receive from genuinely trying to help someone else without expecting anything in return.
I'm struggling to express these concepts here; I hope someone can get the gist of what I'm trying to say and elaborate on it.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday August 11 2014, @02:47PM
Those philosopher types like Plato and Socrates actually struggled to put this into words too, so don't feel bad if you can't.
In the physical sense, it has to do with which endorphins are being released in response to various stimuli. The cocktail you get with a couple of beers is different from the one you get kissing your significant other or holding a child or behaving charitably.
But for a more subjective take on it, the difference has to do with time scale: The stuff you put under "pleasures" doesn't last very long. The stuff you put under "joy" is mostly lasting. For example, when you train hard for your track meet, and you win it, the feeling of "I'm the fastest person around!" sticks with you for a long while. Or when you take care of someone else, the feeling of "I'm a good person who takes care of others" stays with you. That means that the joys build up over time, whereas the pleasures do not. So if you focus on the joys of life, you will end up seeing yourself as a fast runner and a charitable person and a loving parent/spouse/child all at the same time. Whereas you aren't as likely to be happily drunk for months on end (lots of people try though: that's called alcoholism - it usually leads to being unhappily drunk instead).
Another factor is that all the things that you put under joy require an effort on your part, and all the things you labeled pleasure do not. The only thing you have to do to watch a sunset is stop what you're doing and look in the right direction, which means the universe is providing a moment of entertainment. By contrast, when you win a race or teach a kid to play baseball or give someone a hand, you can look at that and say "I did that". So joys attribute the source of happiness to yourself, whereas pleasures attribute the source of happiness to the universe at large. A lot of unhappy people attribute the source of their emotions to their circumstances rather than their actions, and that's not an accident.
The message is not that pleasures are bad. It's that joys are better.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 11 2014, @03:04PM
Insightful in my opinion.
And perhaps an indication to make action that put you in circumstances that make you happy. And if everything feels pointless then try some action anyway or plan how to get to it. During the path to joy pickup some pleasure. Let joy be the goal not the pleasure.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday August 11 2014, @01:24PM
Abstract:
"The subjective well-being or happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies. Although happiness is influenced by life circumstances and population demographics such as wealth, we know little about how the cumulative influence of daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. Using computational modeling, we show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is explained not by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations. The robustness of this account was evident in a large-scale replication involving 18,420 participants. Using functional MRI, we show that the very same influences account for task-dependent striatal activity in a manner akin to the influences underpinning changes in happiness"
I was about to make fun of it but that's a mighty impressive figure (*18,420) they got right there...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bytram on Monday August 11 2014, @01:55PM
Yeah, happiness is Complex... there's the Real part and then there is the Imaginary part. =)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday August 11 2014, @04:39PM
Imagine applying this quantification of happiness to video games! You could quantify how happy your companions make you. Let's look at Star Wars: The Old Republic (since I usually do Star Wars examples). You could have a new stat called Happiness Above Replacement companion (HAR), by analogy with baseball's WAR (wins above replacement, which measures how much better or worse a player is than a totally average player).
Companions who make you happier would have a higher HAR score and be more likely to be chosen for missions. Companions with a low HAR score would never leave your ship.
T7-01 has a HAR of +1, in other words he's the baseline for how happy a companion makes you. He's helpful, easy to please, and unobtrusive, but limited in what he can do.
Kira has a HAR of +10, since she's fun, witty, and a good fighter.
Quyzen has a HAR of -10, because he's a big freaky lizard with a strange worldview and poor conversation skills.
Doc has a HAR of -10 too, because he's so annoying.
Vette would probably have the highest HAR score of the game, since she makes so many funny comments. She may not be as useful as other companions, but adventures are more fun with her along.
Then again, Mako would have a high score, too. She's funny and likable, and very versatile with her skill set.
Being able to quantify how happy a game makes you, and by extension how much fun it is, ought to be a whole new frontier in video game programming.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 11 2014, @05:26PM
Most people have figured this out long ago. Just stay ignorant of how most everything works and you'll be happy.
When you do, every so often, catch a glimpse of the fact that most of your problems are largely your fault there will be plenty of others to pacify you.
(Score: 2) by elf on Monday August 11 2014, @07:06PM
Everyone is different and because of this its going to be very difficult to make a magic formula. If you are going to do it right you need to dissect the human psyche and people have been trying to do this for a long time with out getting that far.
Unfortunately I can't read the details to know what they are doing (The Abstract doesn't say much) so its hard to really comment on what they are doing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Monday August 11 2014, @07:38PM
Maybe this article is relevant here:
The Science of Happiness
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/15-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-happier.html [inc.com]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 1) by UpnAtom on Tuesday August 12 2014, @04:02AM
I've 18 years experience as a psychotherapist, if that has much relevance!
Long-term happiness is remarkably elusive. Yet the rules for it are quite simple:
1. Be generally content and optimistic.
Having nothing intolerable in your life. If you hate your job, try really hard to find a new one. If you suffer from health problems, be tenacious in sorting them out -- or learn to tolerate them.
2. Feel happy more than unhappy.
Put your effort into medium-term happiness rather than short-term. Learn to appreciate what you have, the people around you, nature etc. Remember that the happiest people are generally penniless monks. Learn meditation or self-hypnosis. Learn to relax properly and quickly. Look after your health.
I often hear people say "you can't be happy without being unhappy". It's nonsense. Rebounding from unhappiness can amplify happiness but if you need to feel unhappy in order to feel happy, you'll never have long-term happiness.
Lastly, don't take bad feelings seriously. They generally have minimal correlation with reality. The only problems they tend to indicate are their own problematic nature ie making us unhappy and avoid things.