Dr. Maxime (Max) Taquet is an Academic Clinical Fellow within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. Before studying medicine Dr. Taquet did a PhD in engineering sciences focused on the development of new brain imaging technologies. He did his doctoral research between UCLouvain (in Belgium) and Harvard Medical School where he was a research fellow. In his spare time, Max developed an app with a few friends to monitor mood and behavior. The app was used in a reality TV show in France and enabled the collection of 10 million data points among 60,000 people who reported their mood and behavior several times a day. He is now passionate about combining data of many kinds (brain imaging, mobile phone, electronic health records, etc.) to better diagnose and treat mental illness.
1) Based on the study “Hedonism and the choice of everyday activities” you authored with your colleagues, I make the following claim in my book The Fun Habit, “When our ‘fun cup’ is full, we can resist the allure of short-term gains (because these types of ‘rewards’ are already bountiful through deliberate design) and invest in long-term enrichment goals that will support our existence.” What nuances to this interpretation (regarding the hedonic flexibility principle) are important to note?
First, as you said, your assertion is an interpretation. It’s also our interpretation of the data. We cannot be certain that this is what’s happening. There might be other interpretations of the data with more validity. But as you said, I think this is the most likely interpretation. Intuitively, this interpretation makes sense, most of us understand we can’t just go on having fun all the time. We can’t constantly engage in activity that will increase our instant affect directly. We know that we all do things for other reasons than just improving our affect. One likely reason for this is because we have other goals in life than just feeling happy all the time. For instance, we want to have a family. We want to have a job. We want to achieve things, et cetera. We do things knowing the activity will decrease our affect in the short term, in the hope of longer-term benefits.
2) To some degree, hedonic tone (our ability to experience pleasure) appears to be an exercise in comparison. With that in mind, could hedonic flexibility be a function of inherently understanding that pleasure is better actualized when we experience a breadth of emotional states through what we choose to engage in?
We published a follow-up study in JAMA Psychiatry (“Mood Homeostasis, Low Mood, and History of Depression in 2 Large Population Samples”) where we tried to see whether people who were strong in the hedonic flexibility principle, how they compared against those who had lower flexibility—whether lower flexibility relates to depressed mood and depression. We found quite striking evidence that it was related to both depressed mood and actual clinical depression by looking at a wealth of data, both in France and Belgium, and in low- and middle-income countries. This study speaks to your question, which is that to be healthy, quite literally in this case, you need to have that flexibility to engage in a wealth of activities and not just to seek immediate pleasure. If you don’t have flexibility, you might remain in a vicious cycle of, “I’m feeling bad, and I’m going to engage in things that ultimately do not improve my circumstance.”
Using a computer simulation, we noted that simulated people with low hedonic flexibility had a much higher chance of having depressive episodes for reasons that make sense: When one’s mood goes down, you are less likely to engage in things that will bring it back up. With flexibility, one might say, “Well, actually I’m feeling quite good now. Maybe now is a good time to do a thing that I need to do but don’t really want to do.” And then equally when you’re feeling a bit down, rather than saying, “Oh well, now is a good time to start doing something that I don’t enjoy,” you say instead, “now might be a good time to call a friend or just take some time for myself and make sure that I don’t bring my mood even further down.” So I think flexibility is definitely relevant for resilience.
3) Your study found when we’re in a bad mood, we generally look for things to boost our mood. In consideration that escapism can be promotion-guided or prevention-guided, what’s notable about behaviors that are pleasurable but lead to self-development and mastery (e.g., sport) versus activities we engage in simply to escape discomfort (e.g., drinking)?
This is a very good question. It touches upon something fundamental—that different activities will have different levels of masteries for different people. For instance, exercise for somebody who really likes doing what they’re doing—a big, well-skilled basketball player. They go and play with their team, and they feel very good in the moment, and they feel very good afterward. The practice serves their further development. For some people, exercising is hard. They’re doing it because they’re on a diet and they force themselves because their doctors have told them to do it. In the moment, it doesn’t bring their mood up at all. In the longer term, it might bring the mood up. It’s very difficult to pinpoint just one activity as being, “Well this is great, both for promotion and also for escaping.”
Actually, the same could apply to drinking. If we’re talking about somebody who’s drinking a glass of whiskey on their own, it would be hard to explain that in terms of pursuing longer-term goals. But for somebody who says, “Well, actually I’m spending too much time working, and I might as well just go try to spend some time with my friends to improve my social life.” Well, that could serve the same long-term goals as exercising for some people. We don’t have the granularity of data to actually look at these different aspects. It is much more complex than just thinking in terms of specific activities being good or bad in the context of short- and long-term outcomes.
4) Even if not empirically evident from the data, what’s to be gleaned from the influence of engaging in prosocial behavior? For example, does chatting with a friend have a lasting impact on mood and/or better support the resilience to engage in harder activities (when compared to proself behaviors like shopping)?
In yet another follow-up study that we published in Psychological Science (“Happiness and the Propensity to Interact With Other People”), we looked at that specifically—at social interactions rather than activities. It’s essentially the same study design as the initial hedonic flexibility principle study. But instead of looking at activities, we looked at who people were with rather than what they were doing. And we found very similar principles. So actually what you were saying is not so much an extrapolation as it is what we found in this subsequent study. Essentially what we found is when people are in a good mood, they tend to engage in social “interactions,” which decrease their mood. I put that in quote, unquote, because the one social interaction that brings your mood down is loneliness. And essentially, this is what you were alluding to, which is some periods of loneliness are incredibly important for our development. You need to reflect; you need to have time on your own. You need to do some work on your own. You need to… Et cetera, et cetera. And these interactions are incredibly important. But equally, if we only spend time on our own, we all know that for our mental health that’s not going to be necessarily the best balance. It appears we benefit from a balance of deciding when to engage in social interaction and the need to be on our own.
5) After you completed this research on the hedonic flexibility principle with your colleagues, what left you intrigued and/or was left unanswered? Where do you hope to see future research in this area?
I’m a psychiatrist. I treat patients with mental illness. I hope that research leads to interventions that improve the mental health of people. I think that the hedonic flexibility principle can potentially be translated into interventions. Where we wouldn’t just tell people what to do, but we would try to help people decide on when to do things when they have the flexibility to do that. Guide their choice through behavioral activation, in a way that’s constantly adaptive based on people’s mood, rather than from something that’s preplanned based on an activity schedule. I think that’d be fantastic if it works to safeguard and protect people against the downward spiral toward depression. So that’s my biggest hope. Something as simple as an app people can use when they know that they have some flexibility during the day, helping them invest their time wisely and improve their hedonic flexibility.