But just as he seems to be on the verge of embracing hedonism, or at least a kitschy version thereof, he pulls back sharply in a burst of Calvinist disgust, enjoining the reader to “strive for more gratifications, while toning down the pursuit of pleasure.” “Gratifications,” it turns out, are “higher” forms of pleasure because they take some effort, and they include “playing three sets of tennis, or participating in a clever conversation, or reading Richard Russo.” In contrast, things like “watching a sitcom, masturbating, and inhaling perfume” involve no challenge and hence are only “pleasures.” This seems unnecessarily judgmental, and not only because Richard Russo is not exactly Marcel Proust, but the reader soon finds, to her complete confusion, that the whole category of “positive emotions,” including both gratification and pleasure, is suspect: “When an entire lifetime is taken up in the pursuit of positive emotions, however, authenticity and meaning are nowhere to be found,” and without them, evidently, there can be no “authentic happiness.” 14
Abandoning the positive emotions, Seligman’s book goes off in search of “character,” which he admits is a Calvinist-sounding concept—“nineteenth-century Protestant, constipated, and Victorian.” To get to the roots of character, he and his colleagues sift through two hundred “virtue catalogs”—including Aristotle and Plato, Augustine and Aquinas, the Old Testament, Confucius, Buddha, and Benjamin Franklin—out of which they distill “six virtues”: wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence. 15 Now, as we walked up the museum stairs to the Monet exhibition, I told him that he had lost me at this point in his book. Courage, for example, could take one very far from the “positive emotions,” with their predicted positive effects on health and success, and into dangerous and painful situations, just as spirituality could lead to social withdrawal, fasting, and self-mortification. In fact, I blathered on, the conventional notion of “character” seems to include the capacity for self-denial, even suffering, in pursuit of a higher goal. To my surprise, he deflected the implicit criticism onto his erstwhile collaborator, Ed Diener, saying that Diener is “all about the smiley face” and just “trying to make people feel better,” whereas he, Seligman, is concerned with “meaning and purpose.” Loyalty, I recall, did not make it onto the list of virtues.
Finally we arrived at the Monets, where after some preliminary gushing on his part we sat down on a bench and I settled my stenographer’s pad on my knee for some serious interviewing. But just then a security guard bore down on us and announced that I could not use a pen in the presence of the Monets. It is true, I don’t like the Monets, if only because they have been so thoroughly absorbed—along with lavender, scones, and “pictures of babies and young lambs”—into middle-class notions of coziness. I wanted to protest that I don’t hate them enough to stab them with my felt-tip pen, but I obediently traded it in for one of the stubby No. 2 pencils available at a nearby desk. At this point, the interview seemed to have gotten completely out of control: Seligman was the psychologist; I was the mental patient, deprived of sharp objects.
I plowed ahead, focusing now on the “Authentic Happiness Inventory,” a test available on one of his Web sites ( [http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu] http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu). I had scored a less-than-jubilant 3.67 out of 5, and one of the questions that had pulled down my score asked the test taker to choose between “A. I am ashamed of myself” and “E. I am extraordinarily proud of myself.” I am neither of these, and since we’d been talking about virtues, it seemed fair to ask: “Isn’t pride a sin?” He answered that “it may be bad, but it has a high predictive value.” Predictive of what—health? “The research is not fine-grained enough to say that pride predicts health.” Frustrated and by now utterly baffled, I moved on to another question that had hurt my score, where I had confessed to being “pessimistic about the future,” assuming that it was the future of our species at issue, not just my own. Now, in the museum, I mentioned the possibilities of specieswide disasters like extinction or barbarism, but he just looked at me intently and said that, if I could “learn” optimism, as in his earlier book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, which shows the reader how to reprogram his or her thoughts in a more optimistic direction, my productivity as a writer would soar.
Only when we returned to his office, away from the mood-elevating Monets, did things take a nasty turn. Going back to his Authentic Happiness Inventory, I remarked that many of the questions seemed a bit arbitrary, leading him to snap, “That’s a cheap shot and shows your failure to understand test development. It doesn’t matter what the questions are so long as they have predictive value. It could be a question about butterscotch ice cream and whether you like it. The issue is how well it predicts.” Well, no. First you come up with a test that seems to measure happiness as generally defined, and then you can look for things that happiness seems to correlate with, such as liking butterscotch ice cream. But you cannot fold the ice cream into the definition of happiness itself.
Instead of saying this, I moved on to one of the most irritatingly pseudoscientific assertions in his book, the “happiness equation,” which he introduces with the coy promise that it “is the only equation I ask you to consider,” as if positive psychology rests on whole thickets of equations from which the reader will mercifully be spared. 16 The equation is:
H = S + C + V
H is “your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control,” such as, for example, whether you engage in “optimism training” to suppress negative or pessimistic thoughts. I understand what he is trying to say: that a person’s happiness is determined in some way by his or her innate disposition (S), immediate circumstances (C), like a recent job loss or bereavement, and by the efforts (V) that the person makes to improve his or her outlook. This could be stated unobjectionably as:
H = f(S, C, V)
Or, in words: H is a function of S, C, V, where the exact nature of that function is yet to be determined. But to express it as an equation is to invite ridicule. I asked the question that would occur to any first-year physics student: “What are the units of measurement?” Because if you’re going to add these things up you will have to have the same units for H (happy thoughts per day?) as for V, S, and C. “Well, you’d need some constant in front of each,” he said, and when I pressed on, he responded that “C is going to decompose into twenty different things, like religion and marriage,” referring to the fact that positive psychologists have found that married and religious people are likely to be happier than single and skeptical people. So how, I ask, do you boil C into a single number? Again, his face twisted into a scowl, and he told me that I didn’t understand “beta weighting” and should go home and Google it.
So, just to be sure, I did, finding that “beta weights” are the coefficients of the “predictors” in a regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman had presented his formula as an ordinary equation, like E = mc2, not as an oversimplified regression analysis, leaving himself open to literal-minded questions like: How do we know H is a simple sum of the variables, rather than some more complicated relationship, possibly involving “second order” effects such as CV, or C times V? But clearly Seligman wanted an equation, because equations add a veneer of science, and he wanted it quickly, so he fell back on simple addition. No doubt equations make a book look weightier and full of mathematical rigor, but this one also makes Seligman look like the Wizard of Oz.
The field of psychology has produced its own critics of positive psychology, none more outspoken than Barbara Held, a professor at Bowdoin College. A striking woman with long black hair and a quick sense of humor, Held wrote her own self-help book, defiantly titled Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching. When she was invited to speak on a panel at the International Positive Psychology Summit in 2003, she arrived with T-shirts picturi
ng a smiley face with a cancel sign through it and offered them to both Seligman and Diener. One of her major complaints centers on positive psychology’s approval of “positive illusions” as a means to happiness and well-being. She quotes Seligman: “It is not the job of Positive Psychology to tell you that you should be optimistic, or spiritual, or kind or good-humored; it is rather to describe the consequences of these traits (for physical health, and higher achievement, at a cost perhaps of less realism)” (italics added). 17 If, as she writes, “positive psychologists of all stripes tout their dedication to rigorous science,” how can they be prepared to toss out “realism and objectivity?” She argues that some positive psychologists are employing a “double epistemic standard,” upholding objective and unbiased science while endorsing an “optimistic bias” in everyday life. 18
Happiness and Health
The central claim of positive psychology, as of positive thinking generally, is that happiness—or optimism, positive emotions, positive affect, or positive something—is not only desirable in and of itself but actually useful, leading to better health and greater success. One book on positive psychology states that “happiness . . . is more than pleasant, it is beneficial,” and Seligman begins Authentic Happiness by summarizing a few studies showing that happy (or positive) people live longer than unhappy ones. 19 In other words, you should make an effort to be happy, if only because the consequences of unhappiness may include poor health and lower achievement. Would happiness stop being an appealing goal if it turned out to be associated with illness and failure? Isn’t it possible to imagine being gloriously contented with a life spent indulging unhealthy habits, like the proverbially happy “pigs in shit”? Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work—as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call “success.”
Happy, or positive, people—however that is measured—do seem to be more successful at work. They are more likely to get a second interview while job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist burnout, and advance up the career ladder. But this probably reflects little more than the corporate bias in favor of a positive attitude and against “negative” people. A widely cited review article entitled “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?,” coauthored by Ed Diener, makes no mention of this bias and hence appears to do little more than to confirm it. 20
When it comes to the proposed health benefits of a positive outlook, the positive psychologists would seem to be on firmer ground. As we have seen, a positive outlook cannot cure cancer, but in the case of more common complaints, we tend to suspect that people who are melancholy, who complain a lot, or who ruminate obsessively about every fleeting symptom may in fact be making themselves sick. Recall the miraculous cures worked on chronic invalids by Phineas Quimby and others in the nineteenth century, simply by encouraging them to get up out of bed and start thinking of themselves as healthy people. We don’t have “neurasthenics” today, but there are plenty of ills with a psychosomatic component, some of which may indeed yield to a “mind over matter” approach. When John E. Sarno, a professor of rehabilitation medicine, published a book proposing that lower back pain was caused by repressed anger rather than a physical abnormality and that it was curable by mental exercises, thousands testified that they were helped, including the well-known health guru Andrew Weil. 21
In contrast to the flimsy research linking attitude to cancer survival, there are scores of studies showing that happy or optimistic people are likely to be healthier than those who are sour-tempered and pessimistic. Most of these studies, however, only establish correlations and tell us nothing about causality: Are people healthy because they’re happy or happy because they’re healthy? To sort out which comes first, you need longitudinal studies carried out over time. Three such studies are cited frequently by positive psychologists, and none is exactly airtight.
One, the 2001 “nun study,” which Seligman calls “the most remarkable study of happiness and longevity ever done,” purports to show that happier nuns live longer than less happy ones—into their nineties as opposed to their seventies or eighties. 22 The questionable thing here is the measure of happiness. In the early 1930s, when the nuns were about twenty-two years old, they had written brief sketches of their lives and commitment to the religious life. Some of these sketches contained a high “positive emotional content,” as judged by the researchers, with statements such as “I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.” As it turned out, the nuns who registered high in positive emotional content outlived the ones who had written such matter-of-fact statements as “with God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.” But since not everyone is capable of expressing their emotions vividly in writing, there’s a leap between “positive emotional content” and subjective happiness. One might just as well conclude that the key to longevity lies in good writing, and an earlier study by one of the authors seemed to suggest just that: nuns who, in their youth, wrote complex sentences with high “idea density” turned out to be less likely to succumb to Alzheimer’s disease in old age. 23
A second longitudinal study, also cited by Seligman at the beginning of Authentic Happiness, does not even bear directly on the proposition that happiness leads to better health. In this case, happiness was measured by the apparent authenticity of smiles. Poring over the class photos in two mid-twentieth-century yearbooks for Mills College, a private liberal arts school for women, the researchers found that about half the young women smiled “authentically,” with eyes crinkled and the corners of their mouths turned up, and that decades later these happy smilers reported being more happily married and generally satisfied with their lives. Whatever the relevance of this finding, it could not be replicated in a similar study of high school yearbook pictures from Wisconsin. 24 For the less elite population in the high school photos, happy smiles did not predict happy lives.
Finally, the positive psychologists like to cite a study of older Mexican Americans—sixty-five and up—that found that people who reported being happy were likely to live longer and experience less frailty than those who did not. 25 In Authentic Happiness, Seligman writes that this study, combined with the nun and Mills College studies, creates “an unambiguous picture of happiness as a prolonger of life and improver of health.” 26 But even here, a question can be raised. The study controlled for income, education, weight, smoking, and drinking but not for physical activity, which is a known predictor of health and strength in old age. It could be that the happier Mexican Americans were healthier simply because they were more likely to walk, dance, exercise, or engage in physical labor—a possibility that one of the authors of the study tells me they are now looking into.
Adding further ambiguity to the “picture of happiness as a prolonger of life and improver of health” are a number of studies showing that happiness or other positive emotional states may have no effect on one’s health. As we saw in chapter 1, an improved mental outlook—generated in support groups or through psychotherapy—does not extend the lives of breast cancer patients, and the same has been found for those suffering from throat and neck cancer. Nor, it turns out, does optimism add to the longevity of lung cancer patients. 27 The evidence that positive emotions can protect against coronary heart disease seems sturdier, although I am not in a position to evaluate it. At least a list of articles on heart disease and emotional states compiled for me by Seligman included a number of studies finding that optimism and other positive states can both protect against heart disease and hasten recovery from it. 28 But others on Seligman’s list were more equivocal, and one study cited by Barbara Held found that people high in “trait negative affect” do more complaining about angina but are at no greater risk of pathology than cheerful people. 29
Some of the studies Held has reviewed even con
clude that negative traits like pessimism can be healthier in the long run than optimism and happiness. 30 For example, a 2002 study found that women who are mildly depressed are more likely to live longer than nondepressed or very depressed women. Somewhat alarmingly, a longitudinal study of more than a thousand California schoolchildren concluded that optimism was likely to lead to an earlier death in middle or old age, possibly because the optimistic people took more risks. Another, more recent, study found that preteenagers who were realistic about their standing among their peers were less likely to become depressed than those who held positive illusions about their popularity. 31 But the most surprising case for pessimism comes from a 2001 study coauthored by Seligman himself, finding that, among older people, pessimists were less likely to fall into depression following a negative life event such as the death of a family member. 32 This study goes unmentioned in Authentic Happiness, but at the time it led Seligman to comment to the New York Times that “it’s important that optimism not be footless [probably meaning “footloose”] and unwarranted.” 33 So realism has its uses after all.