Authentic Happiness

Data-driven analysis of billions of words confirms a universal bias in favor of happy words.

Big Data methods applied to sources as varied as Korean Twitter feeds and Russian literature suggest that positive social interaction is built into human language. This so-called “Pollyanna Hypothesis," first proposed by University of Illinois psychologists in 1969, asserts that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently and diversely than negative words when communicating.

A longitudinal study has found that hopelessness and depression are each predictors of coronary heart disease (CHD). When adjusted for level of depression, hopelessness was an independent predictor of CHD. However, when adjusted for level of hopelessness, depression was not an independent predictor of CHD.

This study was the first of its kind to explore depression and hopelessness as individual predictors as long as 18 years out.

Researchers find that regulating one’s responses (emotion regulation) to life events increases happiness.

Learning to control emotions before, during and after a positive event can increase short-term and long-term happiness. Researchers reviewed scientific literature that included 157 positive emotion interventions. Results showed that there are several strategies that can effectively increases happiness. These strategies include selecting a situation, deploying attention, engaging in cognitive change and expressing a response. Doing so has a variety of benefits, such as helping people choose and modify situations where positive emotions are likely to occur, helping people appreciate their good fortune, and helping people foster positive emotions like joy and gratitude. Researchers focused on empirical evidence for 25 positive interventions. They found strong evidence in support of 13 of them, including mindfulness-based therapies, applications of character strengths, acts of kindness, and the gratitude visit.

This article offers a refreshing and important perspective on happiness, a subject we positive psychology researchers and practitioners spend a good deal of time and interest on. We tend to look at either internal correlations, like how optimism affects happiness levels, or external correlations, like how money affects happiness, but not how internal and external factors interact, as in a web, to affect happiness levels. Here called an "interactionist" approach, this paper is like looking through 3D glasses, one red lens, one blue, to form a picture of happiness that has more dimension, more practical applications. If happiness is an interconnected web of interactions, we can work with it from more complex and comprehensive angles, giving us more choices for interventions. We are also compelled to look more closely at how we all affect each others' happiness levels, making such work significant the community level.

Twitter has broken news stories, launched and ended careers, started social movements and toppled governments, all by being an easy, direct and immediate way for people to share what’s on their minds. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have now shown that the social media platform has another use: Twitter can serve as a dashboard indicator of a community’s psychological well being and can predict rates of heart disease.