this is a very short talk so I’m gonna
give you a quick overview of about three
decades of research that my students and
I have done on how when and why
happiness can shift over time acacia
Parks earlier today talked about the
tons of randomized controlled
experiments that have been done that
show that when the people can become
happier when they deliberately practice
what we call positive activities so
practice is like expressing gratitude
savoring the good things in your life
doing generous acts for others acting
optimistically and so these things can
promote happiness but recently I’ve
become interested in the conditions
under which some positive activities
sometimes can actually undermine
happiness and make us less happy these
are my collaborators and so my lab
conducts what we call positive
interventions and a positive
intervention is basically an experiment
in which people are instructed to do
something that makes them that has a
positive outcome positive engines are
kind of like clinical trials but instead
of say testing the efficacy of a drug
we’re testing the efficacy of a half of
a happiness increasing strategy so over
the years we have conducted many
happiness interventions and how they
work is over the period of four six or
eight weeks or 10 weeks or 12 weeks we
ask volunteers to practice different
kinds of positive activities like
counting your blessings living your life
like it’s your last month before moving
away making someone else happier and
then we follow people across the time
and we measure their happiness we of
course always include various control
groups or comparison groups to see how
those fair relative to people who are
trying to become happier and so the
focus of my lab has really been and
trying to understand how and why
happiness increasing strategies work in
more technical terms this means
exploring the mediators and the
moderators that underlie the success of
the pursuit of happiness and so I’ll
just give you some examples of the kinds
of studies we’ve done the very very
first happiness
intervention that we ever did was back
in 1999 where we asked people to count
their blessings and everyone knows what
that means you basically keep a
gratitude Journal so what we did is
every either three times a week or once
a week over the course of the six weeks
we measured their people’s happiness and
well-being in all of our studies we give
multiple convergent measures of
well-being usually we combine them into
an index of happiness in this study we
also measured gratitude because it was a
gratitude study and what we found in
this study was that these are histograms
showing changes in gratitude and changes
in happiness from before to after the
six-week intervention and you see the
orange bars in the in the middle show
that people who counted their blessings
once a week became more grateful over
time and became happier over time people
who counted their blessings three times
a week actually experienced no benefit
at all and what this these findings
suggests to us is the importance of what
I call dosage these are sort of the
factors that we need to consider when
you consider kind of designing the
optimal happiness intervention and so
dosage is sort of how frequently or how
much are you doing the positive activity
if you count your blessings too often if
you try to count too many blessings you
might become bored it might become
tedious but worst of all you might
actually run out of blessings to count
right you might you might sort of you
can’t think of anything else that to to
be grateful for and that could actually
backfire and so one thing I’m interested
in is can counting too many blessings
actually backfire and make you feel
worse and when you run out of things to
be grateful for you might consider you
might conclude I don’t really have that
many blessings in my life
you might feel actually more sad and
more dismayed okay another factor that
we’re looking at is variety so it turns
out the optimal amount of variety when
you practice when you pursue happiness
makes people happier but a sub optimal
amount of variety can actually backfire
and so this is a study where we asked
people over the course of ten weeks to
practice acts of kindness and you see
people who did very different kinds of
acts of kindness this is the red line
they got happier over the course of the
intervention and they stayed happier
even a month later but if you look at
the Green Line these are people who were
asked to do kind of the same types of
acts of kindness over and over again and
they actually got less happy so variety
is really good it’s good to spice up the
pursuit of happiness by doing novel and
varied things but when there’s not a the
right amount of variety then you
actually can become less happy can
actually undermine your well-being so
there’s another factor that’s important
now I want to tell you about motivation
so it’s very kind of a right or
appropriate or optimal amount of
motivation to be happy as opposed to
kind of the wrong amount of motivation
to be happy so we explored this in
another experiment where we asked people
to try to become optimistic over the
course of this was eight weeks or to try
to be grateful so in our optimism
condition we asked people to every
single week to think about their life
and to imagine their best possible self
in various domains in life and career in
relationships in health sort of take a
moment to sort of think about that
everything has gone as well as it could
have your dreams have come true so this
is the optimism condition we also had a
gratitude condition we asked people to
write gratitude letters every week so
every week you choose someone in your
life who’s supported you is helped you
and you write them a letter
you can continue writing the letter to
the same person every week or you can
choose a new person every week for eight
weeks
and we do this for 15 minutes a week but
we’re really interested in the study in
motivation so the way that we tested
motivation for happiness as we recruited
people into two different kinds of
experiments so one group of subjects was
recruited to be in a happiness study
like do you want to be in a happiness
study come be part of our experiment and
so people who self selected themselves
in this experiment we call them the high
motivation people they’re motivated to
be happy and then people who saw this ad
that says there’s a generic happiness
experiment this studies about doing
cognitive exercises we call these the
low motivation group because they
specifically chose not to be in the
happiness study and so we found here was
the importance of motivation so the
yellow bars are people who are motivated
and the red orange bars of people are
not motivated so immediately after the
intervention the motivated people who
people who are motivated to be happy
were happier and this effect persisted
even six months later six months is a
really long time this these are
undergraduates really long time in the
life of an undergraduate uhm and so this
suggests that motivation matters as well
as well as variety and so it’s really
interesting because these these this so
this study suggests that that people who
are motivated to be happy actually
benefit more from pursuing happiness
actually get happier now this is a
little bit inconsistent with some recent
work that has found that it’s sort of on
the dark side of happiness it has found
that people who over value happiness who
agree with statements like how happy I
am at any given moment says a lot about
how worthwhile my life is they actually
do worse right so they get less happy
over time in our experiment people these
participants weren’t like overly focused
on happiness they weren’t obsessed with
happiness but clearly if you’re too
focused on becoming happy if you’re too
preoccupied with happiness it might lead
you to monitor your emotions too much it
might lead you to feel like a failure
when some practice of gratit let’s say
you’re practicing gratitude and it
doesn’t elicit the expected sort of
amount of happiness it might make you
feel like you’re sort of entitled to
happiness oh you might even deserve
happiness sort of too much if I make you
feel overly self focused when you when
you’re too motivated to be happy you
might be too focused on the end goal as
opposed to kind of enjoying the journey
to get there so clearly the pursuit of
happiness no matter what the approaches
can backfire when you’re sort of too
invested in it when you’re too you know
focused on it okay so we did another
study where we ask people to do acts of
kindness for others that’s the red line
and we compare that to people who did
acts of kindness for themselves now
here’s a intervention that you think
might make people feel good right you
treat yourself to a massage or to
lunch with a lunch and it turned out
that actually doing acts of kindness for
yourself feels good in the moment but it
doesn’t last and so in this study we
found that doing acts of kindness for
others made people happier and then they
maintained their happiness doing acts of
kindness for themselves sort of really
no different than a control group and we
also in a recent study found that it
also has health effects people who did
acts of kindness for others showed
changes in their RNA gene expression
profiles that were associated with
improved immune responses and so this
this finding suggests the importance of
focusing on other people when you pursue
happiness so when you pursue happiness
when it whatever you do if it’s overly
self focused or self directed that does
not make people happy that might
actually backfire that is actually
really a theme in a lot of research on
happiness that happiness is really about
other people you know other people
mattering connecting with other people
as opposed to being focused on yourself
anything you can do to take the focus
off of yourself and on to something else
whether it’s other people or a work or
hobby is a good thing okay a little bit
of a digression there um another finding
from our laboratory is that culture
matters in this room I’m sure this is
not a surprise to anyone sitting here
here’s an example of a study we that we
did where we compared students from
Seoul National University in South Korea
to students at UC Riverside where I
teach and students wrote gratitude
letters and they did and they also did
acts of kindness and so I’m going to
first show you the results for the
American students on the left and so you
see the yellow line American students
who wrote gratitude letters every week
got happier so when the line is going up
that means people are increasing
happiness American students who wrote
gratitude letters also got happier but
the the interesting part is what
happened with the South Korean students
so we found that South Korean students
who did acts of kindness those are
that’s the red line became happier but
South Korean students who wrote
gratitude letters actually got less
happy a little bit less happy this is
not significantly less but certainly
didn’t get happier and we were really
surprised about that finding cuz we
always found that gratitude is happiness
inducing
um and I’ve happened to be giving a talk
in South Korea and Seoul about these
data when they first came out and where
people told me is that well in South
Korea expressing gratitude can lead to
sort of a mixed emotional experience
that when you express gratitude there’s
a sense that the other person needs to
reciprocate
you might feel guilty or indebted when
you express gratitude and the most
interesting thing I heard actually is
that in the United States you know in
all of our studies who do you think are
the top targets of gratitude letters mom
and dad mom and dad are number one and
number two targets of gratitude letters
in the u.s. in Korea I was told parents
will sometimes feel insulted when
children thank them because because it’s
something that they’re doing as part of
their parental duty they might feel
disrespected that there’s there’s an
implication that there that that helping
or supporting their child is optional
and so gratitude this is very complex
actually we’re finding now in lots of
cultures that gratitude doesn’t always
feel good it does make people happy it
makes you feel connected and uplifted
and more humble but sometimes it makes
you feel guilty or indebted right
because there’s a burden to reciprocate
it might make you feel embarrassed or
ashamed for having needed help in the
first place and then sharing gratitude
can also we’ve all had the experience
sometimes right when we thank someone
and it’s awkward and maybe they don’t
take it well and they feel uncomfortable
or awkward actually I have a graduate
student right now who is doing work on
sort of the actual sharing and how that
feels and so it’s not always completely
a positive experience so but very very
interesting thing to study is gratitude
okay so um I’ve been talking about all
these different conditions under which
positive activities can be sort of
optimal can be successful when dosage
variety and all of these things are are
up to are kind of at the optimal levels
but I’m also as I said really interested
in sort of the conditions under which
positive activities might backfire or go
awry
so I’ve summarized these in these five
categories and the first category is
about dosage right when optimal dosage
might maximize gains and
happiness but sub-optimal or
inappropriate or incorrect dosage can
actually undermine happiness but I think
the biggest risk is with overdosing not
under dosing right so we’ve already
talked about if you count too many
blessings if you express gratitude too
frequently when you repeat the same
generous acts over and over again you
might actually feel less happy the
second is about motivation we sort of
talked about this when you value
happiness too much you might ask
yourself too often am i happy yet am i
happy yet am i happy yet that will sort
of interfere with your happiness pursuit
you’re sort of emphasizing too much
the end goal as opposed to the journey
and then person activity fit we talked
about culture when there’s a misfit when
there’s a poor fit between your culture
and your happiness activity then that
can backfire but there can also be a
misfit or a poor fit with your
personality or your values or your goals
as one example we did a study where we
asked depressed undergraduate students
to write gratitude letters and they
actually became less happy we we
actually stopped the study in the middle
for ethical reasons and when we when we
talked to them they said how some some
of them said I couldn’t think of someone
to be to write a gratitude letter to
which made them feel even worse even if
they did think of someone they felt like
they felt guilty that they had never
thanked that person before they felt
guilty or ashamed that they hadn’t
reciprocated they felt over benefited
they felt like they’re a burden on other
people who all these people are helping
them and they can’t reciprocate and so
we have to really be careful about you
know how we deliver these interventions
what I mean by mediators gone sour is
when the pursuit of happiness leads to
more negative emotions as opposed to
positive emotions when it leads you to
feel less connected less autonomous less
competent as opposed to more connected
or more competent than that can make you
feel more more unhappy and so an example
for example is let’s say you’re trying
to do acts of kindness for others but
but they backfire like your act of
kindness doesn’t help and that happens
sometimes right you try to help and it
just doesn’t work
that
you feel less competent and so that
makes you feel less happy the targets of
your gratitude might feel awkward or
uncomfortable that makes you feel worse
when you when you help others too much
and you neglect your own sort of
self-care and well-being we all know
about caretakers who sort of help too
much and they actually are prone to
depression and so we have to sort of
think about consider those issues and
finally something we haven’t really
talked about are the social costs of
positive activities so so what is the
impact of the pursuit of happiness not
just for the happiness seeker but for
people around that seeker your friends
your spouse the targets of your
gratitude the recipients of your
kindness so for example on when you
research shows that when you do acts of
kindness that are that is really visible
or direct as opposed to subtle and
invisible people might feel like it
might seem patronizing or people might
feel like kind of ineffectual or not
self-sufficient or vulnerable because
they need the help and so you have to be
really careful about how you give social
support how you give kindness and then
witnessing kindness this is one of my
favorite studies we did a study at the
coca-cola offices in Madrid where
employees were asked to do acts of
kindness for their colleagues and we
found that witnesses of acts of kindness
actually felt worse right so if you’re a
witness of your colleagues receiving
kindness
maybe you feel envious maybe sort of
there’s social-comparison going on you
actually might feel worse so witnessing
kindness usually makes people feel
better and uplifted and connected but
sometimes it makes people feel worse so
in some I want to say that we can learn
a great deal about happy how happiness
interventions can work by studying how
they when they don’t work and not just
because it’s sort of counterintuitive
and it’s interesting but just we as
well-being scientists as our well-being
scientists I think can learn a lot about
when things go wrong about how to make
them go right and so I think it’s really
critical to focus empirical attention on
what may not be positive about positive activities thank you
give you a quick overview of about three
decades of research that my students and
I have done on how when and why
happiness can shift over time acacia
Parks earlier today talked about the
tons of randomized controlled
experiments that have been done that
show that when the people can become
happier when they deliberately practice
what we call positive activities so
practice is like expressing gratitude
savoring the good things in your life
doing generous acts for others acting
optimistically and so these things can
promote happiness but recently I’ve
become interested in the conditions
under which some positive activities
sometimes can actually undermine
happiness and make us less happy these
are my collaborators and so my lab
conducts what we call positive
interventions and a positive
intervention is basically an experiment
in which people are instructed to do
something that makes them that has a
positive outcome positive engines are
kind of like clinical trials but instead
of say testing the efficacy of a drug
we’re testing the efficacy of a half of
a happiness increasing strategy so over
the years we have conducted many
happiness interventions and how they
work is over the period of four six or
eight weeks or 10 weeks or 12 weeks we
ask volunteers to practice different
kinds of positive activities like
counting your blessings living your life
like it’s your last month before moving
away making someone else happier and
then we follow people across the time
and we measure their happiness we of
course always include various control
groups or comparison groups to see how
those fair relative to people who are
trying to become happier and so the
focus of my lab has really been and
trying to understand how and why
happiness increasing strategies work in
more technical terms this means
exploring the mediators and the
moderators that underlie the success of
the pursuit of happiness and so I’ll
just give you some examples of the kinds
of studies we’ve done the very very
first happiness
intervention that we ever did was back
in 1999 where we asked people to count
their blessings and everyone knows what
that means you basically keep a
gratitude Journal so what we did is
every either three times a week or once
a week over the course of the six weeks
we measured their people’s happiness and
well-being in all of our studies we give
multiple convergent measures of
well-being usually we combine them into
an index of happiness in this study we
also measured gratitude because it was a
gratitude study and what we found in
this study was that these are histograms
showing changes in gratitude and changes
in happiness from before to after the
six-week intervention and you see the
orange bars in the in the middle show
that people who counted their blessings
once a week became more grateful over
time and became happier over time people
who counted their blessings three times
a week actually experienced no benefit
at all and what this these findings
suggests to us is the importance of what
I call dosage these are sort of the
factors that we need to consider when
you consider kind of designing the
optimal happiness intervention and so
dosage is sort of how frequently or how
much are you doing the positive activity
if you count your blessings too often if
you try to count too many blessings you
might become bored it might become
tedious but worst of all you might
actually run out of blessings to count
right you might you might sort of you
can’t think of anything else that to to
be grateful for and that could actually
backfire and so one thing I’m interested
in is can counting too many blessings
actually backfire and make you feel
worse and when you run out of things to
be grateful for you might consider you
might conclude I don’t really have that
many blessings in my life
you might feel actually more sad and
more dismayed okay another factor that
we’re looking at is variety so it turns
out the optimal amount of variety when
you practice when you pursue happiness
makes people happier but a sub optimal
amount of variety can actually backfire
and so this is a study where we asked
people over the course of ten weeks to
practice acts of kindness and you see
people who did very different kinds of
acts of kindness this is the red line
they got happier over the course of the
intervention and they stayed happier
even a month later but if you look at
the Green Line these are people who were
asked to do kind of the same types of
acts of kindness over and over again and
they actually got less happy so variety
is really good it’s good to spice up the
pursuit of happiness by doing novel and
varied things but when there’s not a the
right amount of variety then you
actually can become less happy can
actually undermine your well-being so
there’s another factor that’s important
now I want to tell you about motivation
so it’s very kind of a right or
appropriate or optimal amount of
motivation to be happy as opposed to
kind of the wrong amount of motivation
to be happy so we explored this in
another experiment where we asked people
to try to become optimistic over the
course of this was eight weeks or to try
to be grateful so in our optimism
condition we asked people to every
single week to think about their life
and to imagine their best possible self
in various domains in life and career in
relationships in health sort of take a
moment to sort of think about that
everything has gone as well as it could
have your dreams have come true so this
is the optimism condition we also had a
gratitude condition we asked people to
write gratitude letters every week so
every week you choose someone in your
life who’s supported you is helped you
and you write them a letter
you can continue writing the letter to
the same person every week or you can
choose a new person every week for eight
weeks
and we do this for 15 minutes a week but
we’re really interested in the study in
motivation so the way that we tested
motivation for happiness as we recruited
people into two different kinds of
experiments so one group of subjects was
recruited to be in a happiness study
like do you want to be in a happiness
study come be part of our experiment and
so people who self selected themselves
in this experiment we call them the high
motivation people they’re motivated to
be happy and then people who saw this ad
that says there’s a generic happiness
experiment this studies about doing
cognitive exercises we call these the
low motivation group because they
specifically chose not to be in the
happiness study and so we found here was
the importance of motivation so the
yellow bars are people who are motivated
and the red orange bars of people are
not motivated so immediately after the
intervention the motivated people who
people who are motivated to be happy
were happier and this effect persisted
even six months later six months is a
really long time this these are
undergraduates really long time in the
life of an undergraduate uhm and so this
suggests that motivation matters as well
as well as variety and so it’s really
interesting because these these this so
this study suggests that that people who
are motivated to be happy actually
benefit more from pursuing happiness
actually get happier now this is a
little bit inconsistent with some recent
work that has found that it’s sort of on
the dark side of happiness it has found
that people who over value happiness who
agree with statements like how happy I
am at any given moment says a lot about
how worthwhile my life is they actually
do worse right so they get less happy
over time in our experiment people these
participants weren’t like overly focused
on happiness they weren’t obsessed with
happiness but clearly if you’re too
focused on becoming happy if you’re too
preoccupied with happiness it might lead
you to monitor your emotions too much it
might lead you to feel like a failure
when some practice of gratit let’s say
you’re practicing gratitude and it
doesn’t elicit the expected sort of
amount of happiness it might make you
feel like you’re sort of entitled to
happiness oh you might even deserve
happiness sort of too much if I make you
feel overly self focused when you when
you’re too motivated to be happy you
might be too focused on the end goal as
opposed to kind of enjoying the journey
to get there so clearly the pursuit of
happiness no matter what the approaches
can backfire when you’re sort of too
invested in it when you’re too you know
focused on it okay so we did another
study where we ask people to do acts of
kindness for others that’s the red line
and we compare that to people who did
acts of kindness for themselves now
here’s a intervention that you think
might make people feel good right you
treat yourself to a massage or to
lunch with a lunch and it turned out
that actually doing acts of kindness for
yourself feels good in the moment but it
doesn’t last and so in this study we
found that doing acts of kindness for
others made people happier and then they
maintained their happiness doing acts of
kindness for themselves sort of really
no different than a control group and we
also in a recent study found that it
also has health effects people who did
acts of kindness for others showed
changes in their RNA gene expression
profiles that were associated with
improved immune responses and so this
this finding suggests the importance of
focusing on other people when you pursue
happiness so when you pursue happiness
when it whatever you do if it’s overly
self focused or self directed that does
not make people happy that might
actually backfire that is actually
really a theme in a lot of research on
happiness that happiness is really about
other people you know other people
mattering connecting with other people
as opposed to being focused on yourself
anything you can do to take the focus
off of yourself and on to something else
whether it’s other people or a work or
hobby is a good thing okay a little bit
of a digression there um another finding
from our laboratory is that culture
matters in this room I’m sure this is
not a surprise to anyone sitting here
here’s an example of a study we that we
did where we compared students from
Seoul National University in South Korea
to students at UC Riverside where I
teach and students wrote gratitude
letters and they did and they also did
acts of kindness and so I’m going to
first show you the results for the
American students on the left and so you
see the yellow line American students
who wrote gratitude letters every week
got happier so when the line is going up
that means people are increasing
happiness American students who wrote
gratitude letters also got happier but
the the interesting part is what
happened with the South Korean students
so we found that South Korean students
who did acts of kindness those are
that’s the red line became happier but
South Korean students who wrote
gratitude letters actually got less
happy a little bit less happy this is
not significantly less but certainly
didn’t get happier and we were really
surprised about that finding cuz we
always found that gratitude is happiness
inducing
um and I’ve happened to be giving a talk
in South Korea and Seoul about these
data when they first came out and where
people told me is that well in South
Korea expressing gratitude can lead to
sort of a mixed emotional experience
that when you express gratitude there’s
a sense that the other person needs to
reciprocate
you might feel guilty or indebted when
you express gratitude and the most
interesting thing I heard actually is
that in the United States you know in
all of our studies who do you think are
the top targets of gratitude letters mom
and dad mom and dad are number one and
number two targets of gratitude letters
in the u.s. in Korea I was told parents
will sometimes feel insulted when
children thank them because because it’s
something that they’re doing as part of
their parental duty they might feel
disrespected that there’s there’s an
implication that there that that helping
or supporting their child is optional
and so gratitude this is very complex
actually we’re finding now in lots of
cultures that gratitude doesn’t always
feel good it does make people happy it
makes you feel connected and uplifted
and more humble but sometimes it makes
you feel guilty or indebted right
because there’s a burden to reciprocate
it might make you feel embarrassed or
ashamed for having needed help in the
first place and then sharing gratitude
can also we’ve all had the experience
sometimes right when we thank someone
and it’s awkward and maybe they don’t
take it well and they feel uncomfortable
or awkward actually I have a graduate
student right now who is doing work on
sort of the actual sharing and how that
feels and so it’s not always completely
a positive experience so but very very
interesting thing to study is gratitude
okay so um I’ve been talking about all
these different conditions under which
positive activities can be sort of
optimal can be successful when dosage
variety and all of these things are are
up to are kind of at the optimal levels
but I’m also as I said really interested
in sort of the conditions under which
positive activities might backfire or go
awry
so I’ve summarized these in these five
categories and the first category is
about dosage right when optimal dosage
might maximize gains and
happiness but sub-optimal or
inappropriate or incorrect dosage can
actually undermine happiness but I think
the biggest risk is with overdosing not
under dosing right so we’ve already
talked about if you count too many
blessings if you express gratitude too
frequently when you repeat the same
generous acts over and over again you
might actually feel less happy the
second is about motivation we sort of
talked about this when you value
happiness too much you might ask
yourself too often am i happy yet am i
happy yet am i happy yet that will sort
of interfere with your happiness pursuit
you’re sort of emphasizing too much
the end goal as opposed to the journey
and then person activity fit we talked
about culture when there’s a misfit when
there’s a poor fit between your culture
and your happiness activity then that
can backfire but there can also be a
misfit or a poor fit with your
personality or your values or your goals
as one example we did a study where we
asked depressed undergraduate students
to write gratitude letters and they
actually became less happy we we
actually stopped the study in the middle
for ethical reasons and when we when we
talked to them they said how some some
of them said I couldn’t think of someone
to be to write a gratitude letter to
which made them feel even worse even if
they did think of someone they felt like
they felt guilty that they had never
thanked that person before they felt
guilty or ashamed that they hadn’t
reciprocated they felt over benefited
they felt like they’re a burden on other
people who all these people are helping
them and they can’t reciprocate and so
we have to really be careful about you
know how we deliver these interventions
what I mean by mediators gone sour is
when the pursuit of happiness leads to
more negative emotions as opposed to
positive emotions when it leads you to
feel less connected less autonomous less
competent as opposed to more connected
or more competent than that can make you
feel more more unhappy and so an example
for example is let’s say you’re trying
to do acts of kindness for others but
but they backfire like your act of
kindness doesn’t help and that happens
sometimes right you try to help and it
just doesn’t work
that
you feel less competent and so that
makes you feel less happy the targets of
your gratitude might feel awkward or
uncomfortable that makes you feel worse
when you when you help others too much
and you neglect your own sort of
self-care and well-being we all know
about caretakers who sort of help too
much and they actually are prone to
depression and so we have to sort of
think about consider those issues and
finally something we haven’t really
talked about are the social costs of
positive activities so so what is the
impact of the pursuit of happiness not
just for the happiness seeker but for
people around that seeker your friends
your spouse the targets of your
gratitude the recipients of your
kindness so for example on when you
research shows that when you do acts of
kindness that are that is really visible
or direct as opposed to subtle and
invisible people might feel like it
might seem patronizing or people might
feel like kind of ineffectual or not
self-sufficient or vulnerable because
they need the help and so you have to be
really careful about how you give social
support how you give kindness and then
witnessing kindness this is one of my
favorite studies we did a study at the
coca-cola offices in Madrid where
employees were asked to do acts of
kindness for their colleagues and we
found that witnesses of acts of kindness
actually felt worse right so if you’re a
witness of your colleagues receiving
kindness
maybe you feel envious maybe sort of
there’s social-comparison going on you
actually might feel worse so witnessing
kindness usually makes people feel
better and uplifted and connected but
sometimes it makes people feel worse so
in some I want to say that we can learn
a great deal about happy how happiness
interventions can work by studying how
they when they don’t work and not just
because it’s sort of counterintuitive
and it’s interesting but just we as
well-being scientists as our well-being
scientists I think can learn a lot about
when things go wrong about how to make
them go right and so I think it’s really
critical to focus empirical attention on
what may not be positive about positive activities thank you
Please follow and like us: