The Resilience of Happiness

written by Thomas Hill, PhD, posted on Psychology Today

Would you be happier without antibiotics, functional plumbing, and a car? What if you had never heard about these things in the first place, might you be happier then? New research that my colleagues and I published in Nature Human Behavior suggests that it may not really matter.

Questions about happiness are a tricky subject. As Daniel Gilbert points out in his book Stumbling on Happiness: “Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That’s why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you’ll buy too much, and if you shop after a big meal, you’ll buy too little.” If we don’t even understand our own happiness, how can we be expected to understand the happiness of others?

One way to try and get a better handle on happiness is to investigate its history. But how can we do this? The best way we know of, also noted by Daniel Gilbert, is to ask people. The UN’s World Happiness Report, in cooperation with many nations, has been doing this for quite a few years. This has come to be called Gross National Happiness, and some nations have been measuring it in various forms steadily since the 1970s. For example, you can see here that the proportion of survey respondents in the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom claiming to be “very satisfied” with their lives has been rising since roughly the 1980s.

What about before that? Can we see whether people were more or less happy before or after the World Wars? Obviously, we can’t go back and ask them. Not yet, anyway.

But new methods developed by psychologists and computer scientists allow us to examine written text to predict the emotional state of the author reliably. This is called “sentiment analysis” and it involves using words rated on scales of positivity and negativity. When one takes thousands of such rated words and applies them to thousands of words of written text, one can compute the overall positivity and negativity of the text. This, in turn, has been shown to correlate with the emotional attitude of the author.

In recent work, my co-authors (Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi, and Chanuki Seresinhe) and I used this method to compute a measure of sentiment for four nations (Germany, the USA, Italy, and the UK). We then asked if our measurement correlated with the “ground truth” survey measures noted above, taken from the Eurobarometer data. They did with a positive correlation of about 0.53, which is promising, if not ideal. Future work may improve that.