Calibrating happiness

By 2020 depression will be the second-largest cause of disability in the world for both men and women of all ages. So researchers are beavering away on what makes us happy. Have they got it right?

According to that archetypal pessimist, Murphy, if anything can wrong, it will. Now science is telling us that, for the habitual worrier, a lot really can go wrong.

In the early 1960s the Mayo Clinic ran a research project in which 50,000 representative people did a personality inventory test. Last year a team led by Mayo neuropsychiatrist Yonas Geda revisited a sample of those individuals -- or a relative -- to find out who among them had developed dementia or other cognitive impairment. (1)

Sure enough. Those who had showed up as pessimistic, anxious or depressed in the earlier test were 30 to 40 per cent more likely to be suffering from dementia. Pessimists and chronic worriers with the highest anxiety scores also had a moderately increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease during the same time-frame. This finding comes with a salutary warning from Dr Geda and colleagues that individuals should not leap to conclusions -- although that is exactly what a pessimist is likely to do.

Other reports accentuate the positive. A study of people aged 65 to 85 in the Netherlands showed that, during a nine-year period, highly optimistic people had half the risk of dying from all causes, and a 23 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular death compared to highly pessimistic people. In short, optimists are likely to live longer, even if they have something like heart disease. (2)

Furthermore, researchers at University College London studying a sample of middle-aged public servants have found that a happy disposition reduces the risk of getting heart disease in the first place, because the happy person has lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and thus a lower risk of hypertension. “Perhaps laughter is the best medicine,” says Jane Wardle, one of the team. (3)

A rising tide of depression

It is a timely reminder. The World Health Organization warns that a rising tide of depression is encircling the world -- particularly the more developed part of it. In Europe alone depression is close to being the second greatest burden of disease (after cardiovascular), afflicting around 30 million people. (4)

Many depressed people end up taking their own lives. Suicides have reached the level of 150,000 a year in Europe, and almost one million globally. The highest rates are found in Eastern Europe and the lowest in Latin America, Muslim countries and a few Asian nations -- a fact that is worth revisiting. There is an alarming rise in depression rates amongst young people.

But help is at hand. As economists count the cost of mental malaise in billions of dollars of health expenditure and lost productivity, and as governments, spurred on by the WHO, commit themselves to spending more billions on treatment and prevention, mind benders are coming to the rescue.

Positive psychology

In January, Time magazine announced “The New Science of Happiness” -- a benign conspiracy among some leading psychologists to use their profession to increase the happiness of the human race rather than simply relieve its misery. One of them, Martin Seligman, puts it this way: “It wasn’t enough for us to nullify disabling conditions and get [from minus five] to zero. We needed to ask, What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?”

Positive psychology, as the new trend is called, has two main points of reference: immediate experience and remembered experience. The first is emphasized by Nobel-prizewinner Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who says that, since time is a scarce resource, we should get the most out of it by paying more attention to our immediate experiences, choosing those which engage the mind and give us most pleasure. In other words, if life is journey, let’s make it as enjoyable as possible.

Seligman, on the other hand, is more concerned with where the journey is leading. The author of several books on optimism and catalyst of the positive psychology movement, he believes memory is a truer guide to happiness, subordinating pleasure to the more important tests of meaning (Did that game of golf serve my ultimate purpose in life?) and engagement (Did it deepen my involvement with my friends and hobby?)

While it may be true that some of us should be more selective about our “experiences” and live them more intensely, Kahneman’s focus on pleasure seems to leave us on the same utilitarian, consumerist treadmill that has fed our angst for so many decades. The lesson of recent times, surely, is that the pursuit of pleasure actually diverts us from the main sources of happiness.

The hardwiring of happiness

Seligman’s emphasis on larger meanings and deeper forms of engagement is consistent with research in the fields of attachment theory and meaning. In 2003 a major report on the mental health of American children and adolescents appeared. Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities represents the combined effort of 33 experts to get behind the worsening statistics, the drugs and other therapies, and come up with a new model for improving the mental and emotional lives of children. (5)

What they found at the bottom of childhood malaise was a lack of connectedness -- close connections to other people and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning. And this was not, primarily, a philosophical position but a scientific one: biology, psychology and the social sciences increasingly reveal that the human brain is “hardwired” for these connections, and that mental health -- including the development of the brain itself -- depends on the extent to which they are nurtured.

The essential link between attachment and meaning is captured in the report’s idea of an “authoritative community” -- in the first place the family, and after that all other groups or institutions that are able to nurture children, transmit to them a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person, and encourage them in religious seeking and love of neighbour. “Authoritative” in this context refers to “that particular combination of warmth and structure in which children in a democratic society appear most likely to thrive,” says the report.

Religion -- but on the ‘inside’

One of the most interesting things about this fascinating report is the evidence it uncovered for religion or spirituality as a “wired” need and task -- especially for the adolescent. This is reflected in the fact that 96 per cent of American teenagers say they believe in God and 40 per cent say they pray frequently. Despite such facts, little study has been done on the influence of religion on young people. What has been done, together with what is known from adult studies, suggests that religious belief and practice is strongly correlated with optimism, self-esteem, service, gratitude and other positive attitudes.

As one might expect, some psychologists and social scientists remain wary of research showing links between religion and mental health. They either find fault with the research itself, or attribute the psychological benefits of religion to intermediary factors such as the social support of belonging to a church. (6)

But the evidence keeps surfacing. At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology last month a small study was presented showing that among patients with a probable diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, those with higher levels of religiosity experienced slower cognitive decline.

Another recent study found that religious people were more satisfied with life than others because their religious practice gave them greater optimism and social support. But this was true only if their religiousness was “intrinsic”, or internalized. Merely external religious practice did not make people happier. (7)

This reinforces something noted in the Hardwired report: religion did its best work, so to speak, for those adolescents who reported personal devotion, or a “direct personal relationship with the Divine”. The protective effects of personal devotion -- reduced risk-taking and feelings of loneliness, greater regard for the self and others -- are twice as great for adolescents as for adults.

Finally, there is that interesting fact referred to earlier: suicide rates, which are one measure of the problem of depression, are lowest in Latin America, Muslim countries and some Asian nations. Without knowing exactly which Asian nations, two out of three items in this list suggest a connection between religion and mental health -- as well as, probably, family strength.

It makes sense. Throughout history the family and religion have given individuals security and meaning. If these institutions are now in meltdown, as they are in many societies, is it any wonder that a tide of depression is lapping at our doorsteps? Public agencies, whether governments or the WHO, that want to stave off a full-scale mental health tsunami could start by putting the family -- the original authoritative community -- at the center of their plans.

Carolyn Moynihan is the deputy editor of MercatorNet

Notes
(1) Mayo Clinic news release, April 21, 2005
(2) Archives of General Psychiatry, 2004;61:1126-1135
(3) “Happiness helps people stay happy”, NewScientist.com, April 18, 2005.
(4) Briefing Paper, WHO European Ministerial Conference on Mental Health: Facing the Challenges, Building Solutions, 13 December 2004 (EUR/04/5047810)
(5) Institute for American Values, http://www.americanvalues.org
(6) American Academy of Neurology news release, April 2005
(7) John M Salsman et al, “The Link Between Religion and Spirituality and Psychological Adjustment…”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2005