Is happiness really greater when shared?

Neuroscience of Happiness Part 3

Is happiness really greater when shared? Social interactions and relationships have consistently been found to play a role in happiness and considered to be one of the strongest predictors of well-being (Diener & Seligman, 2002). While social isolation was shown to correlate with the activation of physical pain networks in the brain (Eisenberger, 2012), behaviors that foster social bonds reliably improve self-reported well-being. This link is consistent in young children (Aknin et al., 2012), adults (Dunn et al., 2008) and even across cultures (Aknin et al., 2013).

The formation of meaningful social behaviour in the first place is said to rely largely on empathy; the ability to recognise and share others emotions (Davidson & Schuyler, 2015). Several studies have shown that empathising with others largely activates the same neural networks as one’s own experience of an emotion, for instance the ventral striatum in the case of shared social rewards (Singer & Klimecki, 2014). Similarly, researchers found the mesolimbic reward system to be engaged in the same way when people donated money to charity and when they received it themselves (Moll et al., 2006). In fact, the ventral striatum showed even greater activation following the donation as compared to a monetary reward for oneself. This suggests that it can make people just as happy or even happier to give rewards to others than to receive them. Another interesting contribution to this line of research came from a study of extraordinary altruists, which recruited a sample of people who volunteered to donate their kidney to a stranger (Marsh et al., 2014). The authors’ investigation of the neural implications of this extremely prosocial and altruistic behaviour revealed a structurally greater volume of the amygdala (the emotion centre of the brain) in this sample as compared to controls. Other research has further found activity in the amygdala to correlate with trait happiness, with greater activation reported in response to positive stimuli but no differences found in the case of negative stimuli, from which the authors concluded that the general well-being of happy people makes them more sensitive to positivity but still able to respond appropriately to negativity (Cunningham & Kirkland, 2014).

There appears to be a positive feedback loop, as prosocial behavior contributes positively to well-being which in turn fosters more of that prosocial behavior (Aknin et al., 2011). The ultimate vocalization of happiness, namely laughter, has also been studied in the context of social interactions. Regardless of its form, real or symbolic, laughter was found to mediate the happiness levels people reported following an interaction and has therefore been considered a reliable proxy of the effectiveness of social bonding (Vlahovic et al., 2012). This effect can be explained by the underlying release of endorphins in the central nervous system, resulting in feelings of heightened well-being and reduced psychological stress (Dunbar et al., 2012). On the other hand, the ability to experience and maintain happiness in social contexts likely depends not only on the interaction itself but also on the person’s underlying personality traits, prime examples being extraversion, which usually manifests behaviourally as outgoingness, and neuroticism, a psychological trait that often involves elevated feelings of anger, threat or frustration in a given situation (Widiger & Oltmanns, 2017). Extraversion has continuously been shown to positively predict happiness, with previous research suggesting that more cortical arousal is obtained from social activities, while neuroticism seems to correlate with lower happiness scores regardless of social context because of the associated predispositions to negativity, often in the form of anxiety or depression (Cheng & Furnham, 2003).

There is another interesting line of research arguing that long-lasting happiness, in the form of self-reported well-being, is directly correlated with higher resilience and faster emotional recovery from negativity (Davidson & Schuyler, 2015). To test this hypothesis a study has conducted an automatic emotion regulation task and examined the magnitude of eyeblink reflex, considered an emotion-sensitive measure of startle, both during and after the presentation of negative picture stimuli, e.g. a crying baby (Schaefer et al., 2013). Those with higher self-reported scores on well-being, specifically in the purpose of life dimension (based on Scales of Psychological Well-Being by (Ryff, 1989; Ryff & Keyes, 1995)), generally showed better recovery, as assessed by a smaller eyeblink, after being presented with negative stimuli. Although the stimuli were limited to the visual modality and the experimental setting not representative of the experience of negative events in real life, this study can be seen as preliminary evidence that general well-being may indeed increase resilience, by enhancing the automatic regulation of emotion, towards negativity.

General well-being can be considered a more long-lasting manifestation of happiness, which is most apparent in the way we interact with other people, something to which prosocial behaviors, like showing empathy and altruism, substantially contribute. Well-being also seems to make us more resilient in our response to the world around us, and the positive or negative experiences we encounter. All these considerations raise the question of how robust and stable we can really consider our happiness to be. Is there such a thing as a recipe for happiness or can we only enjoy it while it lasts? Both empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that ultimately all our joys and sorrows undergo what is known as hedonic adaptation, a psychological process by which their effects fade with time as one becomes accustomed to both the positive and negative life experiences (Lyubomirsky, 2010). The implication this has for our attainment of happiness, however, is not as discouraging as it may initially seem, because although our adjustment to the things that make us happy means a peak of happiness will not be maintained over time, it is by the same mechanism that we also adapt to the things that make us unhappy in order to re-attain our plateau of happiness.