Books on Happiness / Happiness_ The Science Behind Your Smile

Happiness

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Happiness

THE SCIENCE BEHIND YOUR SMILE

Daniel Nettle

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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© Daniel Nettle 2005

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Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2005

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

ISBN 0–19–280558–4

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

Contents

	Introduction	1
1	Comfort and joy	7
2	Bread and circuses	45
3	Love and work	65
4	Worriers and enthusiasts	91
5	Wanting and liking	115
6	Panaceas and placebos	141
7	A design for living	161
	Further reading	185
	Notes	187
	References	198
	Index	213

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List of figures

1.1 Faces displaying basic emotions, used by Paul Ekman in his research.

© Paul Ekman 1976–2004.

1.2 Three different senses of the term ‘happiness’. 2.1 Grumpy old men.

Clockwise: © The Times/Camera Press, London; © Ann Ronan Picture Library/HIP/TopFoto.co.uk; © Bettmann/ Corbis; © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; © TopFoto.co. uk; courtesy of Trinity College Library, Cambridge.

2.2 Distribution of responses to the question of how life has turned out.

2.3 Scale of where participants think they will be in ten years’ time.

3.1 Life satisfaction in contemporary Britain by social class, as defined by occupation.

3.2 Life satisfaction in contemporary Britain by marital status at age 42.

4.1 Average happiness rating of British adults on a 5 point scale, by neuroticism personality score.

4.2 Average happiness rating of British adults on a 5 point scale, by extroversion score.

5.1 Electric pleasure: a rat self-administering brain stimulation reward.

vi

Happiness is an ideal not of reason but of imagination

IMMANUEL KANT, GRUNDLEGUNG ZUR

METAPHYSIK DER SITTEN

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment

BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON

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Introduction

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Of these three, it is the third that seems most able to imbue our lives with purpose. Without its guiding light, there would be no way of knowing what to do with life and liberty, or so it would seem. Jefferson’s rights one and two wake the horse up and open the stable door, but only number three—the pursuit of happiness—is going to make it go anywhere.

The idea that happiness is central to the point of the human experience goes back to the ancients. The Greek philosopher Aristippus argued in the fourth century BC that the goal of life is to maximize the totality of one’s pleasures. If this is true, which is more debatable than it might seem, then happiness becomes the overarching explanatory concept in all of psychology, and surely the most urgent of personal questions for any human being to solve. More than this, happiness also moves to the centre of political and economic

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