The science of happiness: is our happiness set in stone

¶ … Science of Happiness (2007), the author looks at how for a lot of its history, psychology has appeared to be preoccupied with people's weakness and pathology. The notion of psychotherapy relies on a vision of people as disturbed beings in need of fixing. Freud was deeply negative about human nature. He thought it ruled by profound, sinister forces that one could merely somewhat control. The behaviorists who came after came up with a representation of human life that appeared to be very mechanical and almost robotic. It was thought that people submissive beings ruthlessly fashioned by the motivation and the conditional rewards and retributions that encircled them.

Following World War II, psychologists attempted to make clear how numerous regular people could have consented in repression. Social psychologists came along, indicating in labs how impressionable people are. A few of the most well-known tests established that usual people could become impersonally numb to anguish when conforming to lawful orders or cruelly aggressive when acting the role of a prison guard.

Although not refuting humanity's faults, the innovative path of positive psychologists advocates centering on people's forces and qualities as a point of exit. Rather than examine the psychopathology essential to alcoholism, for instance, positive psychologists might look at the buoyancy of those who have achieved a successful healing. Instead of looking at religion as a fantasy and a prop, they might recognize the devices throughout which a religious practice like meditation augments psychological and bodily well-being.

A lot of recent data has shown that people do reasonably well in a diversity of disastrous and upsetting situations. People do feel devastated if something bad happens to them, but a person's brain is composed to make the best of the circumstances in which it finds itself.

In the article Is Our Happiness Set in Stone? (2007), the author looked at a study done in 1978, by a group of psychologists from Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts that found lottery winners were not considerably happier than those in the control-group and that patients with spinal-cord damages did not appear to be nearly as unhappy as there were anticipated to. Ever since this time, many in psychological and social science arenas have taken for granted that people go back to a relatively stable happiness set point, even after experiencing apparently life-changing dealings.

There have been a rising number of researchers who are questioning whether that set point really exists. Some have recommended that in spite of people's resiliency, they do not inevitably go back to a specific level of happiness. Others have suggested that psychologists also need to take into account environmental impacts on happiness. In either case, people may be able to make a mindful choice to advance their well-being.