James Montier's classic - The Psychology of Happiness

[siuyuin]

Check out James Montier's paper on the psychology of happiness.
www.trendfollowing.com/whitepaper/happiness.pdf

(Montier was co-head of global strategy at Societe Generale before
joining GMO, a global investment management firm based in Boston.)

Montier's quotes from Sheldon et al 2003
* About 50% of individual happiness comes from a genetic set
point. That is, we’re each predisposed to a certain level of
happiness. Some of us are just naturally more inclined to be cheery
than others.
* About 10% of our happiness is due to our circumstances. Our age,
race, gender, personal history, and, yes, wealth, only make up about
one-tenth of our happiness.
* The remaining 40% of an individual’s happiness seems to be
derived from intentional activity, from “discrete actions or practices
that people can choose to do”.

And here's his list of to do items:

If you are after specific investment advice, stop reading now. We
seek to explore one of Adam Smith’s obsessions: what it means to
be happy. We also discuss why that’s important to investors, and
how we can seek to improve our own levels of happiness. The list
below shows our top ten suggestions for improving happiness.

• Don’t equate happiness with money. People adapt to income shifts
relatively quickly, the long lasting benefits are essentially zero.

• Exercise regularly. Taking regular exercise generates further
energy,
and stimulates the mind and the body.

• Have sex (preferably with someone you love). Sex is consistently
rated as amongst the highest generators of happiness. So what are you
waiting for?

• Devote time and effort to close relationships. Close relationships
require work and effort, but pay vast rewards in terms of happiness.

• Pause for reflection, meditate on the good things in life. Simple
reflection on the good aspects of life helps prevent hedonic
adaptation.

• Seek work that engages your skills, look to enjoy your job. It
makes sense to do something you enjoy. This in turn is likely to allow
you to flourish at your job, creating a pleasant feedback loop.

• Give your body the sleep it needs.

• Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake, enjoy the moment. Faulty
perceptions of what makes you happy, may lead to the wrong pursuits.
Additionally, activities may become a means to an end, rather than
something to be enjoyed, defeating the purpose in the first place.

• Take control of your life, set yourself achievable goals.

• Remember to follow all the rules.

------

If this piques you, you might want to check out other pieces of
Montier's writings:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/07/james-montier-resource-page/
His has very insightful and often contrarian (investment) views that I
found a joy to read. And never minces his words.

-siu yuin

[siuyuin]

Being involved with social activities keeps unhappiness at bay.

-siu yuin

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/features/the-nature-of-loneliness.shtml?msource=MAG10

The nature of loneliness

Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo digs for the roots of social
isolation and its effects on health and humanity.

By Lydialyle Gibson
Illustrations by Polly Becker; photo by Dan Dry

Two years ago, Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo wrote a book about
loneliness, about how the need for social connection is so fundamental
in humans that without it we fall apart, down to the cellular level.
Over time blood pressure climbs and gene expression falters. Cognition
dulls; immune systems deteriorate. Aging accelerates under the
constant, corrosive presence of stress hormones. Loneliness, Cacioppo
argued, isn’t some personality defect or sign of weakness—it’s a
survival impulse like hunger or thirst, a trigger pushing us toward
the nourishment of human companionship. Furthermore, he wrote, “people
who get stuck in loneliness have not done anything wrong. None of us
is immune to feelings of isolation, any more than we are immune to
feelings of hunger or physical pain.”

Not long after Loneliness arrived in bookstores, the letters and e-
mails started coming in. One after another, readers opened up about
spouses they’d lost and friends they lost touch with, divorces that
cost them families of in-laws, the isolation they’d felt in new jobs
or new cities, at home with new babies, or for no reason they could
name. Some people wrote with questions about particular aspects of his
research; others just wanted to share their stories. “I still get e-
mails all the time,” says Cacioppo, who coauthored the book (published
by W. W. Norton & Company) with science writer William Patrick. Those
who feel stigmatized are grateful to find out they’re not at fault—and
that they’re not alone: 20 percent of Americans, about 60 million
people, Cacioppo estimates, suffer from loneliness that is chronic and
severe enough to be a major source of unhappiness.

When he can, he writes back. Even before Loneliness came out, Cacioppo
got letters from people who happened across his research in magazine
and newspaper stories. One woman, whom Cacioppo quoted in the opening
pages of the book, wanted to know how to “resolve the inner feeling of
being alone.” She went on to ask: “If and when you find any answers,
please write back and tell me.”

Over the past two decades, questions about loneliness—how it evolved,
how it works, how to fight it—have increasingly consumed Cacioppo. His
immersion has reached the point, he says, where it “makes me a little
bit embarrassed.” He never thought his research focus would be so
singular. The founding director of the University’s Center for
Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and a founder of social
neuroscience itself, Cacioppo had written in the past about a range of
subjects: attitudes and persuasion, communication and social
cognition, emotion, and cardiovascular psychophysiology. “I don’t
study things for this long,” he says. “I tend to follow Fermi in the
sense of, you study something for ten years, and at the end of ten
years your contributions are so small that it’s time to do something
else.” But loneliness is a deep well, and he’s fishing for the bottom.
“This just continues to change how I think about us as a species.”

Being lonely isn’t the same as being alone. Cacioppo is careful to
clarify this distinction in every public lecture and conference talk
he gives (and there are many, usually pretty crowded). Lonely people,
he’s found, are as likely as anyone to be surrounded by coworkers,
neighbors, friends, and family. They’re no less attractive or
intelligent or popular. What sets the lonely apart is a perceived
isolation, the sense that their relationships do not meet their social
needs.

That uneasy feeling goes back eons. The earliest humans experienced
it; loneliness was, Cacioppo believes, a powerful evolutionary force
binding prehistoric people to those they relied on for food, shelter,
and protection, to help them raise their young and carry on their
genetic legacy. In the book he hypothesized that the distress they
felt if they drifted toward the outskirts of their group served as a
warning to reengage or else perish. Cacioppo also points to the long
years children spend in abject dependence on their parents. “Even
being conservative,” he says, “it’s a good decade before they’re going
to be able to survive on their own.” Small wonder that isolation makes
people feel not only unhappy but also unsafe.



Which is why, for the most part, loneliness works. Nearly everyone
feels isolated and alone from time to time, but the majority emerge
from that unpleasant state on their own. Feeling lonely after a friend
moves away or a loved one dies prods people to reach out to those
around them, to renew their ties or replace broken ones. Generally,
Cacioppo says, “loneliness does seem to be working on its own in most
people. Some people get stuck, but on average, when you get lonely—or
when you’re in pain or when you’re hungry or you’re thirsty—you do
something to get out of that aversive state.”

Like other evolutionary adaptations, loneliness varies from person to
person. There are extroverts and introverts. There are those who don’t
seem to need friends at all. “Some people do not feel strong pain by
disconnection,” Cacioppo says. “That makes great sense, because those
are the explorers. We need them.” But for those who feel warmer near
the communal fire, isolation works as a civilizing influence. “It
gives you the capacity to shape better social members of your
species,” he says. In a chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Social
Exclusion (Oxford University Press), Cacioppo and Chicago
psychologists Louise Hawkley and Joshua Correll offer the example of a
child sent into the corner for misbehaving. “When a child is acting
selfish and narcissistic, you put them by themselves,” Cacioppo says.
“Well, that’s not a dramatic punishment, is it? And yet it’s painful.”
Children cry; they beg to be allowed back into the group. When they do
come back, “they’re better social citizens. They’ll now take the other
child’s perspective; they’ll share their toys.”

Questions of loneliness have consumed John Cacioppo for more than 20
years.

For a long time loneliness baffled scientists. It seemed paradoxical
to natural selection, a phenomenon that contradicted the idea that
only the fittest survive: persistently lonely people are unhealthy,
depressed, withdrawn, hostile. They find ordinary social encounters
threatening and push away the people who could help them. But
scientists always looked at the condition on a “personal timescale,”
Cacioppo says, rather than on an evolutionary one. For individuals,
loneliness is brutal; for the species, it’s beneficial. He saw
loneliness as a “really good, strong model” for showing the
interdependence of social and biological processes in human existence.

Cacioppo’s early interest in loneliness is a scientist’s story, not a
personal one. “Unfortunately, it’s not like I had this lonely
episode,” he says. “People are disappointed when they hear that.” In
1988 he read a Science paper whose conclusions seemed wrong to him.
Three sociologists conducted an analysis showing that objective
isolation—a lack of social contact—predicted death from a broad range
of maladies. The researchers suggested that “social support” from
friends and family might “foster a sense of meaning or coherence that
promotes health” and encourage loved ones to exercise, eat better,
sleep more, and drink less.

“But what I knew,” Cacioppo says, “was that no matter what social
species you’re talking about, all the way down to fruit flies, if you
isolate them they die earlier.” Scientists have shown that to be true
of mice, rats, pigs, squirrel monkeys, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees,
and rabbits. A 2008 study by two biologists in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences found that genetically impaired fruit
flies survive longer in the presence of other flies. “That’s probably
not due to social control from friends and family,” Cacioppo says.
“There’s something more interesting and more direct.”

By the time he read the 1988 paper, Cacioppo had been researching
social connection for years, becoming more and more interested in an
area that would later be called social neuroscience. Still a new
field, it challenges the idea that the nervous, endocrine, and immune
systems operate outside the reach of cultural influences. “The abyss
between biological and social levels of organization is a human
construction,” explains Cacioppo’s laboratory website. Human biology
“has evolved within a fiercely social world, provides potentials and
constraints for representation and behavior attuned to this social
world, and is shaped profoundly by the social world.”

Cacioppo and psychologist Gary Berntson gave social neuroscience its
name, in a 1992 American Psychologist paper. At the time, Cacioppo and
Berntson were colleagues at Ohio State; Cacioppo earned his master’s
and doctorate there before joining the faculty in 1989 (he came to
Chicago in 1999). In the article Cacioppo and Berntson pointed out
that mental disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and phobias
are “both determined by and are determinants of social processes.”
Addiction, juvenile delinquency, child abuse, spousal abuse,
prejudice, worker productivity, and the spread of AIDS are
“quintessentially social as well as neurophysiological phenomena.” So
focusing narrowly on the biological or social yields only a partial
picture. In primates, testosterone levels shape male tendencies toward
sex and aggression, but social rank and the availability of females
influence testosterone levels. “Social psychology, with its panoramic
focus on the effects of human association,” wrote Cacioppo and
Berntson, “is therefore a fundamental, although sometimes
unacknowledged, complement to the neurosciences.”



Sixteen years later, Loneliness offered a 300-page demonstration of
the link between social psychology and neuroscience. Since the book’s
release, Cacioppo has worked to reinforce and extend its hypotheses. A
February 2010 study of twins and their families, coauthored with
European researchers, confirmed that loneliness is “moderately
heritable.” Cacioppo puts the split at 50 percent genetic tendency and
50 percent environmental influences, although “we’re trying to figure
out what specifically is being inherited.” Recently he finished an
analysis showing that symptoms of depression associated with
loneliness can long outlast the condition itself. “So if you’re
chronically lonely this year, and then all the sudden that’s fixed,”
he says, “you’ll still see the effects for two years.” The converse is
also true: the emotional benefits of feeling connected persist for two
years, even if those connections wither.

In 2002 Cacioppo launched a longitudinal study of middle-aged and
older Americans around Chicago, tracking their health and daily
habits. In the book he offered some preliminary results on the
connection between loneliness and depression. Since then the study—
still ongoing—has shown that loneliness predicts not only depression
but also higher blood pressure and increased cortisol, a hormone
released in response to stress. Although loneliness doesn’t shorten
sleep duration, it does make sleep less restful, because of tiny,
subconscious awakenings throughout the night. In loneliness, Cacioppo
says, the brain still hears that ancient warning, and people are most
vulnerable when they’re asleep.

Some of the most troublesome effects are cognitive. Analyzing the work
of other researchers in a 2009 Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper,
Cacioppo and Hawkley laid out evidence that social disconnection
contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and impairs “executive functioning”—
the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and impulses. “Loneliness
leads to poor health behaviors, but only the impulsive kind, anything
that could be damaging but that’s pleasurable,” Cacioppo explains. “So
higher fat and sugar in your diet. And alcoholism, drug addiction, and
less exercise.”

In the paper Cacioppo and Hawkley noted that lonely people show
heightened focus on negative thoughts and perceptions. In fMRI
studies, the region of the brain associated with rewards lights up
more strongly in the nonlonely when they see pictures of happy social
situations. Images of unpleasant social encounters more forcefully
awaken lonely people’s visual cortices. In one Cacioppo experiment,
described in Loneliness, participants were asked to name the color
certain words were printed in. Lonely subjects, distracted by negative
messages in words like “fear” and “compete,” took a split second
longer than the nonlonely to identify the colors.

Lonely people tend to find greater fault with themselves and also
those around them; they expect others to be less friendly, less kind.
They’re bracing against “social threats,” but those expectations have
a way of fulfilling themselves, Cacioppo says. In the negative-
feedback loop of chronic loneliness, self-protection turns out to be
self-defeat.

In talks and interviews, Cacioppo often cites a study in which
sociologists asked respondents to list the number of confidants they
had. In 1985 the most frequent answer was three. In 2004, when
researchers repeated the survey, the most common answer had dropped to
zero. One-fourth of participants, drawn from a cross-section of the
American public, reported having no one to talk to intimately.

The reasons for the rise in social isolation are multiple and well
documented: contemporary American life is less rooted, more hectic,
more scattered. Jobs and friendships are transitory; divorce rates are
high, as is the number of single-parent households. More people move
away from home, and more people live alone—that number has increased
by 30 percent in the past 30 years, Cacioppo says.

Onto this landscape, social media erupted—Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,
LinkedIn—exerting an influence more complicated, Cacioppo says, than
some people might think. “If you’ve got a disability and you can’t get
out, social networking is a great boon.” People who use the Internet
to generate or enhance in-person relationships also benefit, he says.
But when others use online connections to substitute for face-to-face
ones, they become lonelier and more depressed. Lonely people are
likely to use the Internet as a crutch, the nonlonely as a leverage.
“So,” Cacioppo says, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”



One way to stem rising loneliness on a large scale may be to build
what Cacioppo calls “social resilience”: communities whose structure
or makeup fosters social well-being and whose cohesion is strong
enough to weather misfortune. “If what I’m saying is true, if
loneliness in part gives us the capacity to sculpt a better species,”
Cacioppo says, “then how can we put together better groups, better
towns, better communities, better societies?”

Last December he and researchers from Harvard and the University of
California, San Diego, published a paper suggesting loneliness is
contagious. Using data from a longitudinal study in small-town
Framingham, Massachusetts, they charted a social network of more than
12,000 ties among 5,124 people, determining that having one lonely
friend raised one’s chance of loneliness by 40 to 65 percent. A lonely
friend-of-a-friend raised the chance by 14 to 36 percent. By the third
degree of separation, the increased likelihood was slighter still, and
beyond that the effect disappeared. The phenomenon makes sense to
Cacioppo. “When I’m lonely, I’m more likely to interact with other
people negatively,” he says. That bad feeling spreads. “Think about
it: you have a bad day at work, you go home, your spouse suffers.
Well, so do strangers and friends you interact with.”

That study helped inform a new project. Working with sociologists,
Cacioppo is constructing a spatial map of Chicago’s South Side, in
which each of the 82 neighborhoods is broken down into areas where
higher percentages of people feel more and less lonely. The next task
is to figure out what makes the lonely areas so. “It’s not
socioeconomic status,” Cacioppo says. He’s looking at neighborhood
features such as block parties, well-kept homes, clean streets, public
facilities, and crime. How much difference does a community center
make? What about flower boxes along the sidewalks?

An even more elusive and delicate task is figuring out how to solve
individuals’ persistent loneliness. In August Cacioppo; Medical Center
researcher Christopher Masi, PhD’01; and two other coauthors published
a sweeping analysis of every study on loneliness intervention done
between 1970 and September 2009. Treatments fell into four types:
fostering “social contact” by bringing lonely people together or
providing access to e-mail; offering “social support” from visitors or
dogs or group activities; teaching social skills; and changing the way
they think about themselves and other people. Of those, the last,
training in “social cognition”—the ability to understand and navigate
social interactions—yielded promising results.

Meanwhile, the e-mails from readers persist, some offering stories of
hope, emergence. Cacioppo opened one section of Loneliness with a note
from a Florida woman: “I made a resolution last year to make more eye
contact with people and say hello to strangers every day. I am
surprised by their reaction. It is very uplifting for me and I hope
for them.” In the book, Cacioppo laid out general recommendations for
fighting loneliness; he and a clinical psychologist are working to
shape them into a course of cognitive behavior therapy. He advised
readers to reach out, even in small ways, to those around them, to
volunteer, say hello to someone at the grocery store or the library,
and eventually to find compatible, fulfilling friends. To open their
lives.

[Kevin Lai]

This reminded me of something that I read 

on happiness and sadness spreading like a disease 

searched it and here's the general text: 

http://www.physorg.com/news198250962.html

and here's the original research :) 

http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2338.full?view=long

talks about social network analysis and degree of separation and how it spreads like a disease .... 

actually what I recalled was another article that says something to the effect that sadness spreads doubly as fast and as effective vs happiness :P 

but i guess out of topic for our discussion haha