Happiness literature pet peeve: the tricks of mood management

Positive psychology has produced a host of techniques in the past few decades for extending the duration of positive moods (‘happiness’) and reducing the severity and frequency of negative moods. These include savouring, basking, gratitude, mindfulness, renunciation and even just plain-old Ophra-friendly ‘positive thinking’.

Review: Stability of Happiness: theories and evidence on whether happiness can change, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Richard E. Lucas eds.

Whether happiness can change might seem like an odd question to ask. Of course! I felt really good after the pizza last night, and when I missed the bus this morning I felt terrible. But wait, now that I think about it, this week has actually been pretty much the same as last week, so I guess my happiness doesn’t change. Although…come to think of it…I might actually be in a rut... I really should do something about the slow decline of my life satisfaction. These are the dimensions of happiness that Stability of Happiness explores, and it does an excellent job.

Review of 'Happiness and Economic Growth'

Happiness and Economic Growth: Lessons from developing countries, by Andrew E. Clark and Claudia Senik eds. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK,  2014) pp. xiv + 277

Happiness literature pet peeve — The Average Effect

I think most people would readily admit that happiness (broadly defined; not just emotional affect) is a complex thing, so they why do they jump so easily to fawning over the latest TED talk one-liner?

Carl Jung

This week happiness is about relationships. Last week it was about solitude. Next week it will be ‘turns out money does matter!’ The fact is that all of these findings are correct, but only for certain people.

Some fast crude thoughts on Graditude

Culled from a Facebook conversation with a colleague. 

I’m actually quite ambivalent on gratitude, but I haven’t reached the point where I can articulate my thoughts on it very well. Robert Emmons, who leads the gratitude research program in psych, wrote some tremendous work early in his career on religion, spirituality and mental health. I feel that his gratitude work is a really piss-weak distillation of a trope he found there into something you can easily run crude, empirical studies of for the academy and otherwise market to the American earnestness brigade. More generally, gratitude is part of the California ‘smile society’ of hedonic psychologists who are more interested in whether people feel happy than whether they are psychologically healthy. Just practice gratitude and all your worries will float away. This attitude, like the privilege movement and the tendency towards smiling and earnestness, strikes me as so god-awfully American.

Some random stuff on atheist ethics

A friend of mine had some follow up questions to my blog post about the existential meaning of life. They were, roughly:
1. Wouldn't things be easier if there was a cosmic moral order?
2. Have you come across the idea that we can be moral without God thanks to our genes?
3. Is atheism incompatible with moral absolutes? Does it restrict us to consequentialist morality?
4. How does one determine their 'authentic self'?

Here are my answers as written in an email:

Presentation Transcript: weaknesses, 2nd and 3rd paper, the budget constraint

We were recently required to give 15 minute presentations, so I mashed up three topics. The first is the things about my thesis that I am most worried about, the second is my other two papers (after the paper presenting the model) and the third is some thought bubbles I had recently about the budget constraint. Fears and the 2nd and 3rd papers ended up getting mashed together because I thought that would be the easiest way to discuss these issues.