Iris Mauss is a professor in the psychology department at the University of California Berkeley and director of the Emotion & Emotion Regulation Lab. She’s known for her research on emotions and emotion regulation, with an emphasis on their influence on health and well-being. In her studies, she also explores the negative consequences the pursuit of happiness can have.
Her research has been cited in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today.
1) Your research has made a clear case that when a goal is emotionally rooted, placing too high a value on attaining that goal can lead to adverse effects. For instance, when one highly values happiness, it can create difficult-to-achieve standards, and worse, when not achieved, it can actually leave us unhappy. What are some strategies for someone who values happiness but would like to mitigate some of the risks associated with its pursuit?
We can begin to answer this question by examining when and why the value of happiness backfires, and then avoid it. To be clear, one thing that we’ve found is that the value of valuing happiness even to an extreme degree, as your question implies, is not always and necessarily a bad thing. This is important to note; it is possible to place a lot of value on happiness and not suffer negative paradoxical consequences.
What my collaborators Brett Ford, Felicia Zerwas, and Oliver John and I found is that people who approach this value in a particular way tend to be the people who have negative effects associated with valuing happiness. And so, what is that way? Well, when we try to measure it with surveys, we measure it with questions like, “I worry about my happiness, even when I’m happy,” or questions like, “When I’m not happy, there’s something wrong with me.”
The people who endorse questions like these also tend to endorse highly valuing happiness. But statistically, we can pull those two constructs apart and isolate out which of the negative wellbeing consequences are associated with simply valuing aspiring to be happy, and which of the negative wellbeing consequences are associated with approaching that value in a particular way. We could call this way of approaching happiness “concern about happiness” because there’s an element of not simply valuing happiness but worrying about happiness and placing a judgment on one’s level of happiness.
It seems that people who approach happiness in this maladaptive way, approach it from evaluative standpoints. To put it simply, they constantly judge and evaluate their own hedonic state rather than simply experiencing it. It seems that’s in part leading to them actually having what we call more negative meta-emotions, meaning that they look at their own emotional experiences, judge them and ultimately end up being disappointed with how they actually feel. So, rather than simply being immersed, they have this perspective of concern about their own emotional experiences.
What we found is when people who highly value happiness, who also are really concerned about their own happiness, they have this ruminative, judgmental tendency. For example, when we ask them to keep diaries and tell us about their day’s most positive experiences, those are exactly the moments when we find this backfiring quality—they will have a positive moment and experience some positive emotion, but at the same time they also experience this overlay of negative meta-emotion. If you longitudinally follow these people, they end up with less overall wellbeing, less satisfaction with their lives, and more depressive tendencies. So on the whole, while excessively valuing happiness is not necessarily and always bad, it can backfire. The art is to pursue happiness in ways that avoid the pitfalls.
2a) How might one discern that their approach to something emotionally rooted is maladaptive? For instance, although the benefits of gratitude are well-established, researchers (e.g., Lyubomirsky, Eurich) warn that gratitude journaling can lose its benefit if it’s done for the wrong reasons (e.g., if we don’t explore our experiences to gain insight or if we become too self-absorbed). I have been unable to find any credible proof that rigor is needed for journaling to be effective. Instead, there is a significant amount of anecdotal evidence that daily requirements can burden you with a sense of duty, making the practice counterproductive. 2b) Are there ways to personally assess and adapt a tactic of this type to help ensure fit and maximize its upside?
I think one way to read this question is, “are there big differences across people, in terms of what works and how something will work?” Absolutely. Everything we talk about is geared towards averages, right? We tend to neglect to say that there’s a huge distribution. What works for one person might not work for another person, and it can completely backfire for another person, so I think the question is completely spot on.
It’s a wonderful question to empower people. People tend to be the best judges of what works for them. Introspection has its limits, but when it comes to what makes you happy, I do think I would want to take a stance that individuals are the best suited to determine whether an intervention works for them.
But that is not to say this is straightforward! It is actually a really big question, “How does any person decide whether something has made them happier?” In a way, it gets at the question of how you, as a person, or as a researcher for that matter, define happiness, right?
We’ve been throwing the terms positive emotion, wellbeing, and happiness around, and each of those things actually could be our metric for a happy life. One first step that I would recommend is for a person to gain clarity about what they’re actually striving for. We started talking about fun, broadly construed, because what’s fun for one person might be dreadful for another person, right? There’s huge individual variation and cultural variation, too, right?
So, a first step is to determine what you’re actually wanting to achieve. Do you want to experience more positive emotion? Do you want to experience less negative emotion? Do you want to achieve greater wellbeing in your life? Do you want to achieve a greater overall sense of satisfaction with your life? Or, do you want to achieve greater meaning and purpose in life? Those five are all different definitions of happiness, and there likely are more. If you’re trying to decide if something works, you want first to gain clarity about which of those pieces you actually want to strive for (those definitions of happiness).
Once you know that, then your task is probably a little bit easier, right? Because then you can keep a journal or some other way to track your mood, or track your satisfaction with life, and so forth.
Important to note, you shouldn’t expect results immediately. You should give space to any kind of change and habit to take hold and for its effects to really develop. It’s not something that one should expect to change overnight.
3) Your research highlights that some of the concerns we have discussed are not as prevalent in Eastern cultures. What can Westerners discern from more collectivist cultures about valuing happiness in a way that’s potentially more beneficial (for subjective well-being)?
This is research led by Brett Ford, who’s at the University of Toronto (available here). What we started with is really the idea that most likely cultures differ in terms of how they think about happiness. It’s something that we must consider, that people from different socio-cultural backgrounds differ in terms of what happiness means to them. We further thought that, in this line of research, that more Eastern cultures might take a more social approach to happiness. And in turn, the extent to which they take a more social approach to happiness might mitigate some of the pitfalls of highly valuing happiness.
In our study, we compared a few different cultures hoping we might come out on a gradient, other than just East-West. We had U.S. American students, German students, Russian students, and two East Asian samples: Taiwanese and Japanese, whom we actually combined in this research.
What we found was that there indeed is a gradient, such that the more interdependent the culture, the stronger the linkage between valuing happiness and thinking of happiness as a more social thing; meaning, thinking of happiness as something that is linked to close social actions or in spending time with other people through social connection.
Basically, what we found is it was the U.S. lowest on that linkage, then came the Germans, then came the Russians, and then the Eastern Asians. In turn, we also found specifically in the U.S. the phenomenon we discussed before—the more highly a person valued happiness, the more depressed they actually were, and the less wellbeing they had.
In the Germans, interestingly, that link was actually nonexistent. So, to Germans valuing happiness was innocuous, also with the Russians and even more so in the East Asians. For them, that link was flipped, such that the more they valued happiness, the more wellbeing they had. Statistically, that was mediated by the strength of the linkage between valuing happiness and seeing happiness in social ways.
This is consistent with the idea that the social pursuit of happiness is the active ingredient, such that if you pursue it, and this goes back to question one—if you pursue happiness in a social way, that might help you avoid the pitfalls of highly valuing happiness.
4) What are important considerations defining affect and emotion through the use of a four-quadrant model/approach (e.g., valence and arousal)?
That’s an interesting question that, in some ways, goes back to what we talked about earlier: people and cultures differ in what they think happiness is. In the context of your interests around fun—and our interests about pursuing happiness—we as a culture have under-emphasized what Jeanne Tsai calls low-activation or low-arousal positive emotions, like calm, peace, serenity. That is one thing in response to your question, with implications for the science of happiness, the science of wellbeing, that we need to consider all four quadrants in terms of what we assume or advise people to strive for. Recent research highlights how this ‘blind spot’ can lead us to overlook paths to happiness, fulfillment, and productivity.
Another piece connected to the question of ‘quadrants’ is that positive emotion does not necessarily mean a lack of negative emotion and vice-versa. It’s a big question how exactly positive and negative emotions relate to one another, but it seems to be the case that at least when you broaden your scope and look across days or weeks or months, then people can have positive and negative emotions, so they’re a little bit more orthogonal rather than mutually exclusive as a quadrant model may lead you to believe.
This allows us to think about positive and negative emotions independently of one another as they relate to well-being. Positive emotions have really wonderful and important functions. But also, we can’t push away our negative emotions, and what our and others’ research suggests is that having the richness of all of the emotions may be the best approach in terms of wellbeing. In other words, at least in some circumstances, it might be best to experience the positive as well as the negative.
5) Considering that our emotions are generally a response to circumstance, and there are risks when manipulating our emotional response to a particular event, what are the merits and pitfalls of flipping the script and instead increasing opportunities for positive affect by manipulating/increasing the options for events that have a bias towards eliciting positive valence?
If you pursue happiness in an overly goal-directed way, if you treat experiences as a means to an end, that might actually not be so successful, or even backfire. That suggests that there’s merit in the idea of trying to structure our environment in a way that’s more conducive to experiencing, rather than judging, positive experiences. The prioritizing positivity research by Lahnna Catalino and Barbara Fredrickson, and also Sonja Lyubomirsky’s and Kristin Layous’s “positive activities” is exactly in line with this idea.
I want to note, though, that not everybody has the capacity to structure their environments. We assume a lot of control about our environment, but the ability to do so comes from privilege, right? When we assume that everybody might just be able to manipulate their environments in this way, where a lot of people don’t have that capacity to do this, we are not thinking about this question in a socially and culturally accurate way, right? When we recommend, “Oh, just restructure your life so that you’re happy,” … it can sound like coming from a place of maintaining the status quo and blaming people rather than circumstances, right? It can sound like we’re saying, “Let’s deny that in your life, there are real stresses, and just go and make yourself happy.” So I think, as we go about our work as researchers of well-being and health, it is important not to relay advice as an almost oppressive instrument, but as something that empowers people to pursue their best lives in whatever way they can.
I recently heard an interview with “pleasure activist” Adrienne Maree Brown, which resonated with these ideas. Her book is called Pleasure Activism. Brown makes the point that positive emotion is not necessarily an instrument of pacifying people and oppression, but it can be something that fuels people to do the good work—work and change they want to do and that improves the circumstances of their lives.
