Archive

Wellbeing research - 24/1/08

The last newsletter considered how researchers from different disciplines have tried to understand what wellbeing means. We saw that much of the current interest in wellbeing using a psychological approach, where wellbeing is understood in terms of subjective experience – how people feel about themselves and their lives, and what makes them happy.

So what do we actually know about happiness?

Surprisingly, if we had asked that question about 10 years ago the answer would have been “not very much”. Ever since psychology became accepted as a science, psychologists have focused on understanding negative feelings and experiences – depression, anxiety, anger, fear and so on – yet given little serious attention to what makes some people truly flourish. This isn’t because psychologists are an inherently negative and miserable bunch (!), but because it is the negative emotions which cause serious distress and long-term problems, and so have been regarded as more important.

However, it’s also true that standard theories of emotion struggle to account for positive feelings. Most theories try to explain emotion in terms of negative emotions such as anger, fear etc.

But positive emotions don’t fit so well into this kind of model. What kind of action does feeling happy promote? In fact, US psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has suggested a radical reinterpretation of the role of happiness and other good feelings. She proposes that positive emotions have little to do with action. Rather, they do three things:

–            Broaden our scope of attention
–            Reverse the effects of negative emotions
–            Enable long-term psychological growth

Frederickson suggests that while negative emotions narrow people’s scope of attention and keep them focused on the task at hand (e.g. fight or flight), positive emotions actively broaden people’s likely thoughts and actions. In other words, when we are experiencing positive emotions we have more “flexibility” in the way we think and behave – this, in turn, promotes personal growth because it allows us to have new ideas and build our intellectual and psychological resources.

Next time we’ll discuss some of the positive benefits of being happy. It turns out that happiness doesn’t just feel pleasant – it’s actually good for you!

Wellbeing research - December 2007

In our previous newsletter, available on the archives on the site, we described the Greek terms hedonia and eudaimonia, which represent an early attempt to define wellbeing. This time, we want to bring things up to date and look at some of the ways that people have tried to understand what wellbeing means today. Bound up with the question of defining wellbeing is the equally troublesome issue of how to measure it – after all, it’s hard to evaluate something if you don’t know what it is!

Firstly, let’s consider what wellbeing means. There are several approaches to this. Classical theory assumes that people will always tend to act in their own best interests given the opportunity. Following this view, would suggest that wellbeing is highest when people are best able to satisfy their desires, because what people do of their own free will is, by definition, what increases their wellbeing. For many, the idea of “measuring” wellbeing is something of a misnomer – wellbeing is just what happens when people are given maximum opportunities and left to their own devices.

Others have criticised this approach, arguing that people are not always rationally self-interested and that, even if they were, it would still be possible to agree on some general conditions that are beneficial for wellbeing.

A third, more recent perspective comes from psychology, in particular the influential “positive psychology” movement. Psychologists tend to emphasise how people think and feel about their own lives, recognising that they are not always rationally self-interested and may sometimes make decisions that are not beneficial to their own wellbeing. On the other hand, they also recognise that no single set of objective conditions can ever completely describe wellbeing, because people are different and some will be more happy and satisfied than others in the same circumstances. For psychologists, measuring wellbeing is a matter of using surveys and questionnaires (sometimes called “psychometric instruments”) that can tap-in to people’s underlying thoughts and feelings.

In the next newsletter we’ll be zeroing-in on the psychological approach to wellbeing and looking at some of its basic findings.

Wellbeing research - November 2007

If you’ve been following the news over the last year or so, you’ll have noticed that “wellbeing” is very much in vogue. From Labour peer Lord Layard’s book Happiness, to the BBC’s television series The Happiness Formula, and even to Conservative leader David Cameron’s  recent claim that we should be “focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general wellbeing”, it seems that everyone is talking about  it.

In this series of newsletters we’ll be looking at wellbeing from a scientific perspective. We’ll be exploring questions such as: What does wellbeing really mean? How do we measure it? How does it relate to things like happiness, income, good health and quality of life? And what do the findings tell us about how we live our lives and the choices we make?

To kick things off, it’s worth noting that although the term “wellbeing” is fairly new, the idea of living a good life is as old as the hills, and has been the subject of a great deal of discussion and debate. The Ancient Greeks, for example, distinguished between two different forms of happiness: hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia refers to the kind of positive feelings that arise from pleasurable experiences– the kind of happiness you might experience when eating a really good meal, perhaps. By contrast, eudaimonia is the lasting, deeper happiness that comes through cultivating your potential, having a meaningful life and being of virtuous character.

Of the two, eudaimonia is probably closest to what modern researchers mean when they talk about wellbeing. For instance, the American psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term “Authentic Happiness”. His research finds that pursuing eudaimonic goals generally leads to greater overall satisfaction with life than simply searching for the next pleasure fix.

In the next newsletter, we’ll consider in more detail the different ways that researchers have tried to conceptualise wellbeing. We will also explore some of the challenges that arise when they try to measure it!