The science of happiness - an experiment in gratitude

Have you ever wished you could be happier, if only you could figure out how? Here's a great video that reminds us how expressing a little gratitude can help us unleash our inner happiness.



This experiment suggests that the act of expressing gratitude to a loved one increases our own levels of happiness. 

The use of the scientific method makes me happy. Of course, I couldn't agree more with the conclusions. But the scientist in me wants to know more. Without access to the original scientific publication, I can only speculate...

Personally, I'm a writer, not a speaker, and am familiar with a sensation of happiness after writing about a person I care for. Do you actually need to speak your feelings out loud to experience this boost of happiness, or will just writing them down suffice?

This being a scientific experiment and all, we know that it's important to have the proper controls so that we know exactly where the increases in happiness are coming from. Of course, by comparing a group of "talkers" (people who spoke to their loved ones) versus a group of "writers" (people who only wrote these feelings down), we saw that the act of verbally expressing gratitude produced the greatest increases in happiness. So yes, on face value, the results suggests that telling loved ones your feelings face to face is more responsible for the observed happiness than the act of writing.

If you watch closely however, you will notice that perhaps the differences between the "writers" and the "talkers" is not that dramatic, and perhaps we shouldn't just "trust the guy in the lab coat". The "writers" experienced increases in happiness of 2-4%, whereas the "talkers" experienced from 4-19% increases in happiness. So whilst the difference between 2 and 19% is large, some "talkers" experienced the same 4% increases in happiness as some "writers". To make a proper judgement as to whether there is a true difference between the two groups, we would need to do some kind of statistical testing.

Even if we don't bother too much with all that statistics stuff, perhaps it would be good enough if we could see what the average of each group is. Perhaps most "writers" experienced only 3% increases and most "talkers" experienced 5% increases. Who knows, perhaps the 19% increase comes from just one person, who for whatever reason produced dramatically different results from everyone else. This person would be an outlier, and we would view they contribution to the data with caution.

I'm a little surprised by the only incremental increases in happiness observed for the group of writers, considering the depth of emotion that I experience myself when writing. But this reminds me how science works---by removing those innate biases that may cloud our perception of what is 'real' and what is 'superstition'.

Whilst the experiment suggests (with the acknowledged flaws) that talking is better than writing, unfortunately, this experiment doesn't tell me whether just writing down your feelings produces an increase in happiness on it's own. To answer this question, the experimenters should have completed a second control experiment, to see whether just volunteering for the study itself produced an increase in happiness. So for example, they could have compared the group of "writers" to a group of "thinkers", who were left alone in a room during the study but did not write down their thoughts or speak them aloud. If the "writers" experienced an increase in happiness above what the "thinkers" did, only then could we say that the act of writing can increase our levels of happiness.

Is expressing your gratitude going to have an effect on happiness for everyone? The experimenter tells us that person who experienced this 19% increase in happiness was the least happy person to start with. So people who are particularly unhappy should be happy to know that expressing their feelings will most likely have a bigger effect on them than their already happy friends. This is an example of a "ceiling" effect, where you don't see any further changes to a variable that is already optimal. So to get good results, it would be important to start with a wide range of people with different levels of happiness---if everyone was happy to start with then we might not have seen this increase in happiness.

"The science of happiness" puts the happiness into science, and encourages us to think about what we are feeling. Sure, perhaps as far as scientific validity goes, there is room for improvement. I imagine it's very likely that simply participating in a study about happiness makes you feel happier over time, just an awareness of the emotion, immediately brings it to our attention. For example, if you're like me, you most likely felt happier just by watching this video and thinking about happiness. This is great news, because even without the pretty numbers and graphs we saw in this experiment, it suggests that all we need to do to be happy is to be aware of our happiness and show it to other people.

So get out there and be grateful to Pollyanna for showing us how to be glad.