Feeling happy and being in a good mood is extremely enjoyable. The majority of us quite rightly base a lot of our decisions in life based on this principal. We probably choose to share our beds with our partners because being with them makes us happy (or at least we hope they it does. We avoid waiting in long queues and arguing because they quite often put us in bad moods. So how can I be happier? An awful lot of psychology research can have a tendency to point to our failings, mainly suggesting that humans are irrational and a bit weird. The good news is that there is also some research examining what makes people happy and unhappy and what influences our good and bad moods. Here we’ll have a look at a couple of things; Memories and Gratitude.
Memories. We have an awful lot of them and frequently find ourselves recollecting both the good and bad times. The emergence of polariods, digital camera’s and then Facebook tagging has made this little hobby even easier. Such recollections are likely to have rather significant effects on our mood and as you might imagine, not everybody realises this. Gillihan et al. (2007) were interested in these possibilities and designed a very clever experiment to delve further. Researchers approached members of the public at a large train station in the US armed with 3 different questionnaires. Potential participants were told that the questionnaire would ask them about different experiences in life.
Each of the 3 questionnaires consisted of 19 questions that would prompt the recall of memories from participants’ lives. The ‘positive memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning positive memories; e.g. ‘What is the best present you have ever received?’ The ‘negative memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning negative memories; e.g. ‘When was the last time you had stomach flu?” and the third questionnaire, ‘neutral memories’ consisted of (as you may have guessed) neutral memories; e.g. ‘What time did you wake up this morning?’ At the end of every questionnaires participants were also asked to rate their current mood and what they thought the study was about. Before we get to the results, 326 people agreed to do this study with no payment or reward. Here we have either some lovely evidence of genuine kindness or slightly less optimistically we have evidence that 326 train commuters were extremely bored. Take your pick. As much as I want the former to be the true my money is on boredom.
Mood appeared to be significantly affected by memories participant recalled. Participants that had recalled positive memories were in a better mood than those that had recalled neutral memories. Recalling negative memories placed participants in a more negative mood than remembering neutral memories. The message is, or appears to be – if you are feeling down then can a good think about some nice memories make you feel better. An interesting thought is whether or not such activities as manic camera snapping and Facebook tagging are being driven by these mood enhancing effects of memory. On some kind of unconscious level do we make a huge effort to capture happy moments or at least pretend moments are happy (painted on smiles at the ready) because of how these memories can later be used to regulate our moods?
These results are interesting but it is unlikely that the recall of a memory is going to have a long lasting effect. So what else can be done? According to a study by Froh et al. (2007) the answer is to start showing a little more gratitude. The researchers assigned 211 youths to one of three conditions. The three groups were instructed to spend a little bit of time each week getting expressive by partaking in one of three writing exercises. One group were instructed to write about 5 things they were grateful for, another group wrote 5 of their everyday hassles and the final group wrote about any 5 things that had happened in the last week. To the good news; counting ones blessings had some rather positive effects up to 3 weeks later. Compared to the other groups the gratitude group experienced greater optimism about life, life satisfaction and less negative affect immediately afterwards and then again 3 weeks later.
Although doing this every week may seem a bit odd and hippy-ish my recommendation is to embrace this little bit of oddness. The cost of spending a little time each week writing is enjoyable in itself. Throw in enhanced satisfaction and optimism about life down the line and everybody is a winner.
Application
Think of the good times.
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