1 COVER STORY THE SUPER POWER OF HAPPINESS Grin and …socialecology.uci.edu/sites/socialecology.uci.edu/files/users/ayuzukir/... · COVER STORY THE SUPER POWER OF HAPPINESS H 18

The groundbreaking work

of University of California

Riverside professor Sonja

Lyubomirksy in how to cre-

ate more happiness in your

life is the result of years of

complex study and delicate

parsing of data and human

emotional calculus.

Luckily, she’s done the

math for us and offers us

happiness-enhancing strate-

gies that, research indi-

cates, work best.

Start by writing a few

things down:

1. Count your blessings.

Do it privately or in a journal

or out loud to those you’ve

been meaning to thank for

years.

2. Cultivate optimism.

Write down what your best

possible future could be.

Practice looking at the

bright side of everything.

3. Replay and savor life’s

joys. Write about those mo-

ments, share them with oth-

ers.

4. Commit to your goals.

Pick the most significant

and devote time and effort

to pursuing them.

>> Page 20: Things to do

actively.

Want more happiness?Grab a pencil ...

Sunday, April 28, 2013 Orange County Register1

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er mother still has the “smiling camper” award Sarah Press-man won when she was 12. So maybe this was meant to be. ThatPressman would grow up to be one of the few scientists in theworld who is proving that happy people are darn near bullet-

proof. Which is not exactly science-talk, but

it’s a start for the layman interested inliving well.

What Pressman and her colleaguesare doing, for the first time ever, is con-sistently showing that people who arehappy, optimistic, on-the-bright-sidetypes have an honest-to-goodness, phys-iological advantage over the angry, hos-tile, depressed, sad or pessimistic view-ers of life.

How honest-to-goodness? Recent sci-entific studies in the field of positive psy-chology have found that happy people’sheart rates recover more quickly afterbeing stressed. That the rate at whichthey contract colds is lower. That theyexperience less pain and inflammationafter surgery. That they have less heartdisease and die less frequently whenthey do have heart attacks. That theysurvive lung cancer longer. That theyhave better immune function. That theysuffer fewer strokes. That even theirwounds heal faster. If elderly, they fallless often. Perhaps not surprisingly giv-en all that, they live longer.

But how can this be? How does thiswork?

“It’s not a placebo, I’ll tell you that.”Sarah Pressman is smiling. She does

a lot of that. She is wired for it. In fact,scientists have determined that 50 per-cent of her happiness is genetic, 10 per-cent is determined by her life circum-stance and 40 percent she controls.That’s how it is for all of us.

“Happiness is the anti-stress,” shesays, but the associate professor at UCIrvine is not really wired for slow, so shecontinues apace. “It has everything to dowith helping the body recover fromstress. When you are under stress, yourblood pressure goes up, your heart rategoes up, your stress hormones go up,your cortisol levels (which increase yourblood sugar and suppress your immunesystem), they’re up. Your adrenaline ris-es. The wear and tear on your body is ad-vancing at an accelerated rate. There’sno question, stress kills you. When yousmile, or show joy and enthusiasm, could

Grin andbelieve it

WHEN IS A SMILE MORE THAN JUST A SMILE? WHEN IT LOWERS YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE, BOOSTSYOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM AND LENGTHENS YOUR LIFE.

Stor ies By AMY WILSON ● Photos by MINDY SCHAUER

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

COVER STORY T H E S U P E R P O W E R O F H A P P I N E S S

H

18

SEE PAGE 20

LIVEHAPPY IPHONE APP Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky developedthis app using her scientifically based findings on whatworks to improve happiness and, thus, well-being. The99 cent app, which reviewers have found to be helpfulthough at times technologically problematic, leads youthrough a set of daily activities that have been provento boost both short- and long-term happiness.

Sarah Pressman, associateprofessor of psychology andsocial behavior at UC Irvine,plays with her dog, Milo, atthe Huntington Beach DogBeach. Does Pressman smilelike this a lot? Oh, you bet shedoes. And, she says, Milo hasa lot to do with that.

Orange County Register Sunday, April 28, 20131

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COVER STORYT H E S U P E R P O W E R O F H A P P I N E S S 19

Sunday, April 28, 2013 Orange County Register1

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be just contentment, in a variety of ways,all those elevations drop.”

Let’s take the cold and influenza vi-ruses study for an example of how thisworks. It was conducted in 2006 by doc-toral candidate Pressman and research-er Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D., while Press-man was working in the Laboratory forthe Study of Stress, Immunity and Dis-ease at Carnegie-Mellon University.

The study, published in the journalPsychosomatic Medi-cine, was done in col-laboration with re-searchers at the Uni-versity of PittsburghSchool of Medicine, theUniversity of Roches-ter School of Medicineand Dentistry, and theUniversity of VirginiaHealth Sciences Cen-ter.

Over the course of acouple of weeks, par-ticipants in the studywere asked to assesstheir own emotionalstyles. They were se-questered in a hoteland nose drops thatcontained the viruseswere introduced intotheir systems. Every-one waited to see whogot sick. And, lo, thosewho had more positiveoutlooks were less like-ly to get sick. And thosewho had negative emo-tional styles were morelikely to think theywere sick despite the fact that objectiveevidence said they weren’t.

There were several medical mea-sures to confirm that they weren’t sick,but one involved a simple scale: Weigh-ing the volume of discarded tissues to de-termine mucus volume. Sometimes, sci-ence isn’t pretty.

The happy truth While it’s true that even Aristotle

pondered the role health might play inhis voluminous study of happiness, it wasonly 40 years ago that it was first hy-pothesized that emotions could influ-ence immunity and disease.

But 100 times more work has been

done on negative emotions and their ef-fects on illness than on positive emo-tions. That work is only about 15 yearsold.

The science of positive psychology isnot without its critics – those who thinkhappiness can’t be quantified or speci-fied enough to be of much help to healers.“It’s not common to have doctors ask ifyou are happy,” says Pressman, “andwe’d like to change that.”

There is no more persuasive argu-ment that they should ask than a review

of how cardiovascular patients havedone when someone thought to askabout their natural optimism. It’s not anew study but, for sheer simplicity, it’sinstructive.

In the 1980s, 120 Bay Area men sur-vived their first heart attacks and agroup of psychologists set about tryingto alter their Type A personalities. Asmight be expected, the psychologistsfailed. But in the process, they gathereda lot of data about the lives of the men –the amount of original damage to theirheart, blood pressure history, body massand lifestyle, including whether theywere optimistic or pessimistic types.

So when half of the men later died of a

second heart attack, any possible wayanyone could have predicted thosedeaths was worth a look. And only onecharacteristic was borne out: Of the 16most pessimistic men, 15 had died. Of the16 most optimistic, only five had died.

The study’s results have been con-firmed in study after study since, incountry after country, with researchersnow wondering if depression is such acontributing factor to heart attack deaththat it should be its own area of research.Other questions have also arisen about

whether good genesare tied to good heartsand good dispositions.More research isclearly indicated.

Still, the resultswere eye-opening.

So what is theknown anatomy atwork here?

In Pressman’s andin most studies likeones she authors, themeasures used includethings like how quicklyblood pressure ratesrecover after stressorsare applied, or howquickly heart rates godown or how cortisol –stress hormone – mea-surements are altered.

It wasn’t a giantleap for University ofNorth Carolina re-searchers BarbaraFrederickson and Be-thany Kok last year toturn their attention tothe vagus nerve, whichstarts in the brain and

runs through various branches to thelungs and stomach and, in one of itsmany jobs, helps control the heart rate.The nerve also has responsibility forconveying the state of most of the body’sorgans to the brain. What interestedFredrickson and Kok was the differencebetween those who had high and low va-gal tone.

Vagal tone is measured by monitoringsomeone’s heart rate as he or shebreathes in and out.

As Kok explains: “Another way tolook at vagal tone is that it measures a person’s physiological flexibility, or re-sponsiveness – their ability to be in the >>

FROM PAG E 1 8

Another reason for Pressman to smile: husband Brian Potetz, who joinsher and Milo for a walk on Dog Beach.

COVER STORY T H E S U P E R P O W E R O F H A P P I N E S S20

STOP SMOKING Part of the LIVESTRONG agenda, the MY-QUIT COACH app, which comes in the original version ($4)and a lite version (free), is set up to see where you’re at,where you could be and how to get you there. Tips, pro-

gress charts and lotsa cheerleading provided. The differ-ence between the versions looks to be in monitoring. Thefull-price option also could be useful in that the more buy-in you have, the more likely you are to quit.

UC Riverside psychology

professor Sonja Lyubomir-

sky has written a lot on how

to take advantage of the 40

percent of our happiness

that seems to be within our

control. (Fifty percent is ge-

netic, and the remaining 10

percent is life circum-

stance). Here are her tips –

all have some science be-

hind them:

DO

Practice acts of kindness.

Doing for anyone, known or

unknown, planned or un-

planned, lifts you. The re-

search is unequivocal.

Nurture relationships.

Pick one that needs work

and invest time and energy

into making it great again.

Engage in activities. Lose

yourself in things that give

you pleasure.

Develop strategies for

coping. Practice ways to en-

dure stress or hardship.

Learn to forgive. Work on

letting go of anger toward

those who have hurt you.

Practice spirituality or re-

ligion. Involve yourself or

read and ponder the possi-

bilities for you.

Take care of your body.

Physical activity and med-

itation are good; so are

laughing and smiling.

DON’T

Engage in social compari-

son or overthinking. As in

comparing yourself to the

Joneses or the other house-

wives of Orange County. Dis-

tract yourself to cut down

on these destructive behav-

iors.– From “The How of Happi-

ness: A New Approach to Get-ting the Life You Want,” PenguinBooks,thehowofhappiness.com

Stop writing and start doing

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CHRIS MORRIS, FOR THE REGISTER

COVER STORYT H E S U P E R P O W E R O F H A P P I N E S S 21right physiological state at the righttime. Counterintuitive though it mayseem, the ‘default’ state of the body is actually an aroused, active state, with higher heart rate, and a gen-eral readiness to act. You can imaginethat this would be adaptive in situationswhere threats were common or unpre-dictable, and so having a body that wasphysiologically prepared to react in-stantly would be really advantageous.”

The vagus nerve, then, she says, actsas a “brake” that brings the heart ratedown to an appropriate level for restingwhen a high heart rate is not needed.

Those people who have low vagal tonevalues – their hearts don’t slow as easily– have been shown to be more likely tohave heart attacks as well as longer post-stress recovery rates.

Back to the study conducted by Fre-derickson and Kok that measured theirparticipants’ vagal tone and then askedthem to rate their most powerful emo-tional daily experience – hope, joy, love,anger, boredom, disgust. Half the partici-pants were taught a meditation tech-nique that was supposed to make themfeel good about themselves and othersand asked to meditate daily.

Meditators who had scored with high

vagal tone, it turned out, improved theirtone significantly, and those meditatorswho were shown to have original low va-gal tone saw no such boost.

Good news for the happy folks. Again.Not so good for the unhappies.

But wait. There might be hope.Sarah Pressman to the rescuePressman leans in to talk about her

suddenly famous smile study. “I still can’tbelieve it worked.” She’s in her brand-new office, with her University of Kansasmemorabilia and her big window on asunny campus, and pulls up a YouTubeclip of Stephen Colbert making light of astudy. It’s her study he’s referencing.Pretty cool. He wasn’t alone. The WallStreet Journal picked it up; so, too, theNew York Times.

How could they resist? Who doesn’tlove the idea that science has shown thata fake smile is as good as a real one whenit comes to lowering your blood pressureafter stress?

That’s what they did, in a nutshell.Pressman and colleague Tara Kraft, thatis, just last year while both were at theUniversity of Kansas, when they decidedto investigate whether the sheer act of

SEE PAGE 22

Salvatore Maddi, UCI pro-

fessor of psychology, has

studied stress for 40 years.

He doesn’t think it has to be

the anti-happiness. Instead,

he’s found that those who

handle stress best have de-

veloped patterns for doing

so over a lifetime of prac-

tice. Maddi’s work started

with a 12-year study of

those who’d been laid off in

the break-up of Ma Bell.

Two-thirds in the study did

not fare well; one-third

thrived. A trick of the suc-

cessful? Commitment to

stay on task. He calls this

“resilience,” or “a function

of existential courage, the

thing that gives you the mo-

tivation to keep going.” – A.W.

A note on resilience

22 Sunday, April 28, 2013 Orange County Register1

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smiling had any real health-relatedbenefits. Previous research had shownthem that positive emotions helpedduring stressful times, and smiling af-fects emotions, but they wonderedwhether smiling did anything to alle-viate stress.

The two scientists divided studyparticipants into three groups. Eachgroup had stress-inducing tasks to do,but each was trained to hold a differentfacial expression during the task. Onegroup held chopsticks in their mouthsso they could not engage their smilemuscles; another was asked to put on astandard smile, a fake smile that en-gaged the mouth but not the eyes; andanother was to engage the eyes usingwhat science calls a Duchenne smile.(Half the entire study, as a controlgroup, was not trained in smiling.)

The genuine and the fake smilegroups both buffered the stress well,and – get this – both offered their wear-er the benefit of a lowered heart rateand faster recovery after the task wascompleted.

“It was as fake as it gets,” Pressmansays, obviously pleased. “The happi-ness does not have to be deep-seated toget health-positive results.”

The theory is so promising it’sbreathtaking: That because stress re-covery predicts future heart disease, ifyou manage the one, you can managethe other. And when the immune sys-tem is involved, cell growth is involved,and a vast array of other diseases couldbe affected as well.

Pressman is cautious. “Of course, ifyou are already sick, you can’t happyyour way to a new kidney.”

What is happiness, after all? Andhow does it work?

Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., knownas the father of the positive psychologymovement, summed this up in his book,“Flourish: A Visionary New Under-standing of Happiness and Well-Being”(Free Press, 2011). To paraphrase:

People who are happy believe theiractions matter. Hence, they take bettercare of themselves, see a doctor morefrequently, do as they are told to do bythat doctor. Maybe that explains someof this.

People who are happy, studies show,are more likely to diet, not smoke, exer-cise and sleep better.

People who are happy have morefriends, richer social lives, thus morepeople to call for support when theyneed it, a more sure path to health.

People who are happy might have a

Kraft holdschopsticks iinsuch a waythat the mus-cles we usewhen smilingcannot be en-gaged.

Kraft’s Du-chenne smileengages themuscles aroundthe mouth andthe eyes. Thisone’s a “genu-ine” smile.

COURTESY OF TARA KRAFT

The Grin and Bear it study: Doctoralstudent in clinical psychology andPressman’s co-researcher TaraKraft shows a “fake” smile, engag-ing the mouth,not the eyes. Thestudy showedthat faking asmile has thesame effect asgenuinely smilingwhen it comes tobattling stress.

FROM PAG E 2 1

SEE PAGE 23

COVER STORY

The field of positive psychology isyoung, but the science is evolving,with hundreds of researchers work-ing to find the connections betweenhow we feel and how we are. Onestudy at a time, scientists are en-deavoring to find how the mecha-nism of that connection works andhow it can be made to work betterfor us.

Some of the major studies men-tioned in the story, in order of appear-ance:● T.F. Robles, K.P. Brooks and S.D.Pressman. “Trait positive affect buffersthe effects of acute stress on skin bar-rier recovery.” Health Psychology,2009.● Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D.; Cuneyt M. Al-per, M.D; William J. Doyle, Ph.D.; JohnJ. Treanor, M.D.; and Ronald B. Turner,M.D. “Positive Emotional Style PredictsResistance to Illness After Experi-mental Exposure to Rhinovirus or Influ-enza A Virus,” Psychosomatic Med-icine, 2006.● B. Frederickson, B. Kok. University ofNorth Carolina. “Think Yourself Well.”Psychosomatic Medicine, Dec. 2012.● Sarah D. Pressman, Ph.D. and Tara L.Kraft, University of Kansas. “Grin andBear It: The Influence of ManipulatedFacial Expression on the Stress Re-sponse.” Psychological Science, Nov.2012.● Sarah D. Pressman, M.W. Gallagher,S.J. Lopez. Is the Emotion-Health Con-nection a “First-World Problem”? Psy-chological Science, 2013.

Measuring happiness

Orange County Register Sunday, April 28, 2013 231

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genetic advantage. Cohen of Carnegie-Mellon found in a separate study in2006 that sad, depressed and unhappypeople secrete more interleukin-6 – aninflammatory substance known to ele-vate body temperature that may be in-dicated in such diverse diseases as de-pression, arthritis, lupus and cancer –than happy people. People who are happy – well, is this justa luxury emotion for people who haveplenty?

Pressman wondered about that. Didemotions only matter to the health ofthose who already had their basicneeds met? Did happiness only figurein as a boost to those who were alreadysafe, fed, getting good health care, sup-port and comfort?

In work that was published online inthe journal Psychological Science lastmonth, Pressman was again a little tak-en aback by her study’s results.

The researchers were looking athow strong the effect between positiveemotions and health were on people inThird World countries, specificallythose with low gross domestic prod-ucts like Malawi and Rwanda.

In those places, researchers hypoth-esized that other factors – like starva-tion, infection, lack of shelter, violence –would inordinately influence health sothat happiness would hardly figure in.That positive emotions making a differ-ence in health was a luxury affordedthose who had much and who couldspend time actually thinking abouttheir health.

Researchers examined the connec-tion in 150,000 people in 142 countries.“What was surprising here,” Pressmansays, “was that the (happiness) associ-ations were about twice as strong.”

That is, the more likely that basicneeds were not met, the more happi-ness mattered to health.

Yeah, it’s that strong.

FROM PAG E 2 2

COVER STORY

What a difference a smilemakes. Look at the photographson the right. Famous faces,sure. Pretty smiles, absolutely.

Science tells us that not onlydo we respond positively tothose smiles – let’s not get intopolitics here, for the sake of sci-ence – but when Marilyn, Juliaand President Obama smiledthese smiles, their brains kickedin some serious feel-good dopa-mine that worked to make themeven gladder still. So the veryact of smiling begets more hap-piness.

The smile’s purpose? A fewtheories are out there. Maybe itwas a fancy way of bracing our-selves and asking others not tohurt us. It worked and perpetu-ated itself. Or it was a learnedconstraint – to keep us from bit-ing others – that contorted ourfaces in this interesting way.

UCI’s Sarah Pressman saysthere’s actually been “littlework on the physiological rea-sons we smile. My recent re-search suggests that smilingmight activate a relaxation – orlow-threat – response in thebody, for example, by loweringheart rate in times of stress,but we don’t know the physio-logical processes and neuralpathways that allow this to hap-pen yet.”

Pressman intends to keeplooking.

KEVIN WINTER, GETTY IMAGES

Julia Roberts told the world that she usesbaking soda on her mega-watt smile.

JENNIFER GRAYLOCK, AP

BERT STERN, AP

Marilyn Monroe’s smile lit up the moviescreen in 29 films.

ANDRE DE DIENES, AP

MARK WILSON, GETTY IMAGESCHARLES DHARAPAK, AP

President OBama’s smile is often comment-ed on as being amazingly consistent.

Smile and the world smiles with you