Prof Yoram Barak1

Improving Happiness:Evidence Based Interventions

Prof Yoram Barak, MD, MHA.

Tel-Aviv University, Israel

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What Shall We Talk About ?

• Positive Psychology

• Increasing Happiness

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What Shall We NOT Talk About ?

• Chemical Interventions

• Positive Psychology

• Increasing Happiness

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Chemical Interventions:we are NOT talking about…

Dopamine = Reward

Serotonin = Irritability

Cannabinoids = Pleasure

Others……

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Prescribing Happiness

Prescribing Happiness:

Positive Psychology and Family Medicine

Paul J. Hershberger, PhD

Family Medicine 2005; 37 (9): 630-4

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What is Happiness good for ?

• The “Nuns” studies

• The top quartile in happiness lived 6.9 years longer

– Happy persons > cognitive flexibility, creativity… better doctors?..

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The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect:Does Happiness Lead to Success?

Sonja LyubomirskyUniversity of California, Riverside

Laura KingUniversity of Missouri—Columbia

Ed DienerUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and The Gallup Organization

Psychological Bulletin (Copyright 2005 by the Am Psychological Assoc)

2005, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803–855

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The happiness–success link

Numerous studies show that happy individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.

The happiness–success link exists not only because success makes people happy, but also because positive affect engenders success.

The results reveal that happiness is associated with and precedes numerous successful outcomes, as well as behaviors paralleling success.

Furthermore, the evidence suggests that positive affect—the hallmark of well-being—may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness.

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Happiness-Success:sample size

The final body of literature was composed of 225 papers, of which 11 are unpublished or dissertations.

From these 225 papers, we examined 293 samples, comprising over 275,000 participants, and computed 313 independent effect sizes.

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Health

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Physical Well Being

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What Shall We Talk About ?

• Positive Psychology

• Increasing Happiness

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Positive Psychology Progress:Empirical Validation of Interventions

Martin E. P. Seligman and Tracy A. Steen University of Pennsylvania

Nansook Park University of Rhode Island

Christopher Peterson University of Michigan

July–August 2005 ● American Psychologist

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PoP – the ChallengePositive psychologists do not claim to have invented the good

life or to have ushered in its scientific study, but the value of the overarching term positive psychology lies in its uniting of what had been scattered and disparate lines of theory and research about what makes life most worth living (Peterson & Park, 2003).

As the basic science continues, other lines of work are moving into the realm of application (Linley & Joseph, 2004).

Can psychologists take what they have learned about the science and practice of treating mental illness and use it to create a practice of making people lastingly happier? That is, can we create an evidence-based practice of positive psychology?

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Progress ReportPositive psychology is an umbrella term for the study of

positive emotions, positive character traits, and enabling institutions.

Research findings from positive psychology are intended to supplement, not remotely to replace, what is known about human suffering, weakness, and disorder. The intent is to have a more complete and balanced scientific understanding of the human experience—the peaks, the valleys, and everything in between.

We believe that a complete science and a complete practice of psychology should include an understanding of suffering and happiness, as well as their interaction, and validated interventions that both relieve suffering and increase happiness—two separable endeavors.

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InterventionsWe focus the rest of this article on the efficacy of psychological

interventions to increase individual happiness, in many ways the bottom line of work in positive psychology.

First, a caveat about the word happiness itself: We work under the assumption that happiness is a scientifically unwieldy term and that its serious study involves dissolving the term into at least three distinct and better-defined routes to “happiness” (Seligman, 2002):

(a) positive emotion and pleasure (the pleasant life); (b) engagement (the engaged life); (c) meaning (the meaningful life).

Our recent research suggests that people reliably differ according to the type of life that they pursue and, further, that the most satisfied people are those who orient their pursuits toward all three, with the greatest weight carried by engagement and meaning (Peterson, Park, & Seligman, 2005).

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INTERVENTIONSPlacebo control exercise: Early memories.Participants were asked to write about their early memories every

night for one week.Gratitude visit. Participants were given one week to write and then deliver a letter of

gratitude in person to someone who had been especially kind to them but had never been properly thanked.

Three good things in life. Participants were asked to write down three things that went well

each day and their causes every night for one week. In addition, they were asked to provide a causal explanation for each good thing.

You at your best. Participants were asked to write about a time when they were at their

best and then to reflect on the personal strengths displayed in the story. They were told to review their story once every day for a week and to reflect on the strengths they had identified.

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Gratitude Visit

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Three Good Things

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You at your Best

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The Future of Positive Interventions;”a-la-Seligman”

Specific interventions make people lastingly happier.This creates implications—small and large—for the future of

positive interventions and for clinical interventions. Operationalized happiness interventions compared to a placebo

control in a sizable random-assignment experiment demonstrated that writing about three good things that happened each day and why they happened —made people happier (and less depressed) up to six months later.

One other intervention—the gratitude visit—produced large positive changes but only for one month.

Six months is far from “happily ever after,” but these results suggest that lasting increased happiness might be possible even outside fairy tales.

Effect sizes were “moderate” or larger, which is at odds with the widespread belief that the pursuit of happiness is futile because of inevitable adaptation or an immutable hedonic set point.

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Two other ways of increasing happiness

• Kindness

• Spending Money

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HAPPY PEOPLE BECOME HAPPIER THROUGH KINDNESS: A COUNTING KINDNESSES INTERVENTION.

Otake K, et al.

J Happiness Studies 2006

• Whereas gratitude results when people receive kindness from other people, kindness entails enacting kind behavior toward other people.

• We expected that in addition to the strength of gratitude, the strength of kindness would also play an important role in increasing subjective happiness.

• It has been reported that women respond more positively when observing a random act of kindness than do men, suggesting that women may be more attuned to kindnesses (Baskerville et al., 2000).

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HAPPY PEOPLE BECOME HAPPIER THROUGH KINDNESS: A COUNTING KINDNESSES INTERVENTION.

Otake K, et al.

J Happiness Studies 2006

• The counting kindnesses intervention asked participants to become more aware of their own kind behavior toward other people every day for one week.

• Participants were asked to keep track of each and every act of kindness they performed and to report the daily number of these acts.

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HAPPY PEOPLE BECOME HAPPIER THROUGH KINDNESS: A COUNTING KINDNESSES INTERVENTION.

Otake K, et al.

J Happiness Studies 2006

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HAPPY PEOPLE BECOME HAPPIER THROUGH KINDNESS: A COUNTING KINDNESSES INTERVENTION.

Otake K, et al.

J Happiness Studies 2006

• The most important finding reported here is the close association between kindness and happiness is everyday life.

• Kind people experience more happiness and have happier memories.

• Simply by counting acts of kindness for one week, people appear to have become happier and more grateful.

• Thus, our results suggest that happy people are more kind in the first place and that they can become even happier, kinder and more grateful following a simple intervention.

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Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.Elizabeth W. Dunn, et al

Science,2008.

• Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn.

• Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself.

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Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.Elizabeth W. Dunn, et al

Science,2008.

• Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness both:– cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey

study) – longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending).

• Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves.

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Take Home Message:

The HAPPINESS diary• Practice increasing your own happiness

• Teach others to increase their happiness

• Provide clients with happiness diaries … so they may measure and practice the “three good things”

• Be kind, spend on others !

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ההקשבה על ! תודה

“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply did not know

where to go shopping!”Bo Derek

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