By Geoffrey Cowley
NEWSWEEK
We’ve tried health,
wealth and Prozac, but still we are not contented. Can a
different approach to psychology lead us to the good life? A
new book makes the case..
If good lives were built on good fortune,
Jacqueline Gavagan would have reason to despair. All was well
when she got out of bed last September 11. She had a loving
husband and a satisfying profession as speech pathologist. Her
two young children were thriving, and a third was due in seven
weeks. You can guess the rest.
GAVAGAN’S HUSBAND, 35-year-old Donald, worked as a bond
broker in the World Trade Center. By midmorning, he was
entombed in a million tons of burning rubble. So were many of
the couple’s closest friends. Does she still grieve? Of
course. But over the past year, the 36-year-old Brooklynite
has managed to restore meaning and even some joy to her life.
She started the effort at her husband’s
memorial service, by asking people to contribute to a fund
that might save a child’s life in his memory. Surgeons at
NYU Medical Center had successfully repaired her own
toddler’s defective heart earlier that year, and Gavagan
wanted to sponsor the operation for a child whose family
couldn’t afford it. The money flowed, and by April she was
back at NYU, comforting a woman from Kosovo while her son had
the surgery she sponsored. When asked who had fixed the
boy’s heart, Gavagan’s beaming 3-year-old answered,
“Everyone who loved Daddy.”
SECRETS OF RESILIENCE
Psychologists talk a lot about the
pathologies that can grow out of trauma and loss—the chronic
fear and anxiety, the guilt and anger, the hopelessness.
People with pathologies are, after all, the ones who need
help. But in its rush to understand illness, science has given
sanity short shrift. Why are people like Jacqueline Gavagan so
resilient? How do they deal so well with setbacks? And what,
beyond survival, do they live for? Is mental health just an
absence of illness, or can we realistically strive for
something more? Preachers and philosophers have always
relished such questions.
Now, after a century of near silence,
scientists are asking them, too. Words like “optimism” and
“contentment” are appearing with ever-greater frequency in
mainstream research journals—and some enthusiasts foresee a
whole new age in research psychology. As University of
Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman declares in his
new book, “Authentic Happiness” (321 pages. Free Press.
$26),
“The time has arrived for a science that
seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and
virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle
called the ‘good life’.”
-- Excerpt: 'Authentic Happiness'
Progress has been brisk. Like medical detectives sussing out
risk factors for a disease, the new positive psychologists
have amassed a heap of data on what people who deem themselves
happy have in common. Lesson one is that mood and temperament
have a large genetic component. In a now famous 1996 study,
University of Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke
Tellegen surveyed 732 pairs of identical twins and found them
closely matched for adult happiness, regardless of whether
they’d grown up together or apart. Such findings suggest
that while we all experience ups and downs, our moods revolve
around the emotional baselines or “set points” we’re
born with.
A second lesson is that our circumstances in life have
precious little to do with the satisfaction we experience.
Married church-goers tend to outscore single nonbelievers in
happiness surveys, but health, wealth, good looks and status
have astonishingly little effect on what the researchers call
“subjective well-being.” Even paraplegics and lottery
winners typically return to their baselines once they’ve had
six months to adjust to their sudden change of fortune. People
living in extreme poverty are, on average, less happy than
those whose basic needs are met. But once we cross that
threshold, greater wealth stops making life richer.
People in Japan have nearly nine times the
purchasing power of their neighbors in China, yet they score
lower in surveys of life satisfaction. In America, notes Hope
College psychologist David Myers, real income has doubled
since 1960. We’re twice as likely to own cars, air
conditioners and clothes dryers, twice as likely to eat out on
any given night. Yet our divorce rate has doubled, teen
suicide has tripled and depression has increased tenfold.
Somehow, we’re not cut out for the ease that comes with
wealth.
INFINITE PLEASURE?
If genes can make us happy but
circumstances can’t, is chemistry the key to contentment? In
drug-company laboratories, small armies of
neuropharmacologists are racing to formulate compounds that
will boost positive emotions and mask unpleasant ones,
enabling any gray-faced tax lawyer to try on Roberto
Bernini’s ebullience. In “Authentic Happiness,” Seligman
proposes a saner goal and a lower-tech strategy for achieving
it. Drawing on cognitive psychology and his own studies of
“learned optimism,” Seligman argues that anyone can
inhabit the upper floors of his emotional “set range” by
examining negative assumptions, savoring positive experiences
and managing the natural yearning for more. Desire, as the
Buddha understood, is infinite, but our capacity for pleasure
is not. By adapting to ever-richer indulgences, we only narrow
our options for pleasing ourselves. Restraint may yield higher
returns.
But “authentic happiness,” as Seligman defines it, is not
about maximizing utility or managing our moods. It’s about
outgrowing our obsessive concern with how we feel. Life in the
upper half of one’s set range may be pleasant, but is it
productive or meaningful? Does it stand for anything beyond
itself? These questions push the boundaries of a
psychologist’s traditional turf, but Seligman tackles them
with refreshing clarity.
Beyond pleasure lies what he terms
“gratification,” the enduring fulfillment that comes from
developing one’s strengths and putting them to positive use.
Half of us may lack the genes for bubbly good cheer, he
reasons, but no one lacks nascent strengths or the capacity to
nurture them. What Gavagan has accomplished in the past year
is a near-perfect embodiment of kindness, one of the two dozen
strengths that Seligman and his colleagues have cataloged. She
now hopes to save another child’s heart every September.
And she herself will be richer for it.
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With Anne Underwood
(Back)
