Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings. Claudia Hammond

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      Some researchers believe that we have a basic brain system for joy, which explains our tendency to take any opportunity to be playful. If you watch people working in an office, provided they have the time and the autonomy, they are ready to take any opportunity to feel joy; they are primed to have fun. I remember a colleague once admitting he could do a one-handed handspring. Then someone else said they could do that dance move from Singing in the Rain where the dancer steps up onto a chair back and lets it tip over backwards until it brings them to the floor. Inevitably the rest of us insisted on proof and we soon discovered that office ceiling fans make handsprings tricky and why actors in musicals avoid using typists’ chairs on castors. When I was a child I remember being very shocked when my father broke his finger in a desk-jumping competition in his office – shocked not that he’d injured himself, but that adults would play in that way.

      The first person to win the $100,000 Templeton Positive Psychology prize was Barbara Fredrickson from the University of Michigan. After studying positive emotions for more than a dozen years, she believes that they have a specific role – to ameliorate the effects of negative emotions on the body. To demonstrate this theory Professor Fredrickson first induced anxiety in a group of volunteers by telling them that in one minute’s time they would be required to give a speech which was to be filmed for evaluation by the rest of the group. The nerves soon began to show in their raised blood pressure and heart rates. Then they were given a film to watch which was either funny, happy, sad or neutral. It was found that the people who watched either the funny or happy film recovered their normal heart rates and blood pressure faster than the others, indicating that positive emotions can help to undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions. This might explain why certain stressful professions such as medicine become known for the dark humour that often accompanies the work. Medical students working in casualty for the first time are far more likely to recount tales of patients who claim to have fallen onto a peeled carrot while gardening than to concentrate on grisly stories about the appalling injuries they have seen. The deliberate creation of joy through humour works as an effective coping mechanism.

      The thought of future joy also has the benefit of encouraging us to plan ahead. One of the happiest moments in my life was the day my best friend Jo passed her driving test. We were seventeen and lived about twenty miles apart, but we knew that her ability to drive would lead to multiple opportunities for potential joy. No longer would we have to rely on our parents or older boys for lifts. To celebrate we set off in her rusty, royal blue Chevette called Cyril, which although old and slow had that essential element – a tape player. With the windows down we sang along to U2 as loudly as we could while driving around the county paying people surprise visits. Despite the fact that we were celebrating a joy and freedom that was yet to come, we felt ecstatic. This ability to imagine happiness in the future allows us to make plans which we hope will end in joy, even if it is necessary to forfeit some fun today in order to achieve them.

      There is a children’s story in which the main character is given a choice of gifts – she can have a delicious chocolate fudge cake or the recipe for the cake. The moral of the story is that the wise decision is to go for the recipe because then you can make endless chocolate cakes in the future – in other words, delayed gratification. However, we do soon learn that by forgoing a little joy now – by getting out of a warm bed to go to work, for example – we can experience even more joy later – when we have earned enough to go on holiday.

      There is an intriguing theory developed by Michael Apter from Georgetown University in the United States. He proposes that we alternate between two states – the ‘telic’ where we make the effort to pursue serious goals and the ‘paratelic’ where we seek out experiences for their own sake, often in a playful way, regardless of the future. His ‘reversal’ theory suggests that we all switch back and forth between these states, depending on where we are and how we feel. So perhaps the answer to the children’s quandary about the chocolate cake is that your choice of the cake or the recipe depends on whether you are in a telic or paratelic state. Presumably when my father broke his finger he was in the latter.

      the route to a happier life?

      While research on positive emotions has increased in recent years and the subject has begun to be taken more seriously, the question remains of whether research on happiness can in reality help us to experience this emotion more often. It’s not hard to improve mood in a laboratory. Show people a film of penguins waddling, playing and sliding on the ice and soon everyone feels a bit better. Lying in a flotation tank, singing out loud or listening to stirring music can all lift mood temporarily, but the late social psychologist Michael Argyle wanted to know what gives people lasting happiness. After years spent researching the subject he concluded that the answers lay in attending church, joining sports clubs and watching soap operas. His analyses showed that on average the people who did these activities were the happiest. All three pastimes share both a sense of belonging and of social occasion; even identifying with the characters in a soap opera can induce feelings of belonging in a way that most other TV programmes can’t. In fact, Argyle found that people who watched a lot of television were more unhappy than average. This could be a reflection of the situation which led them to have so much time to spare at home; maybe they were more likely to be unemployed, isolated or unable to afford to go out. Although the people attending church or sports clubs were the happiest, they had of course chosen to join these groups. The research doesn’t demonstrate that if everyone joined they would be happier. If you like neither sport nor religion it could make you more unhappy. When I met Michael Argyle a couple of years before he died his tip for a happier life was simple – to go for brisk ten-minute walk twice a day. People reported feeling better for two hours afterwards, so potentially two walks a day could result in four hours of uplifted mood.

      The simple idea of planning activities with the aim of improving mood has been used therapeutically. Unhappy people were asked to keep daily records of both their activities and their moods. Then the lists were analysed to find out what made them happiest and these activities were then incorporated more frequently into their routine. It transpired that people weren’t in fact doing their favourite activities very often, but when they did they felt happier.

      However, unfortunately for people who are unhappy, Michael Argyle found that people were relatively stable in their degree of happiness, regardless of what happened to them. A happy person suffering a misfortune might feel temporarily less happy than they were before, but that could still be happier than many people feel despite their lives apparently having gone well. Finding it easy to get on with people and taking exercise were also strong predictors of people’s happiness levels. As for money, becoming richer only makes people happier if the amounts are substantially higher than their expectations of earnings. With all these studies, however, there is the issue of exactly what people mean by happiness when they are filling out a questionnaire. Are they talking about moments of joy or an overall state of happiness? Why is it, for example, that five times as many Norwegians claim to be happy than Italians? Can the differences really be that extreme or are people interpreting the questions differently? Some researchers try looking at the reverse. Rather than measuring how happy people claim to be, they look to see which countries have the fewest suicides, but of course a low suicide rate only tells us that few people are suicidal, not that everybody else is happy.

      Joy is perhaps a rather unfair emotion because it is biased towards those who already feel happy. Happy people are better at coping with distressing events; they are more attractive to others; and they find it easy to conjure up happy memories. Moreover, because they feel happy they smile more, sending them on an upward spiral of happiness which, through facial feedback, might reinforce their good mood every time they smile. Meanwhile those who could benefit the most from that extra fillip granted by smiling, aren’t smiling because they feel sad, left on a downward spiral with unhappy memories foremost in their minds. From this perspective it’s hard to see how sadness could possibly be functional, but as we shall see in the next chapter even sadness has its place.

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