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Happiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feeling for human beings. Recently, people have achieved further understanding about them.
Happiness
University of Illinois, psychologist Ed Diener, who has studied happiness for a quarter century, was in Scotland recently, explaining to members of Parliament and business leaders the value of increasing traditional measures of a country's wealth with a national index of happiness. Such an index would measure policies known to increase people's sense of well-being, such as democratic freedoms, access to health care and the rule of law.
Eric Wilson tried to get with the program. Urged on by friends, he bought books on how to become happier. He made every effort to smooth out his habitual worried look and wear a sunny smile, since a happy expression can lead to genuinely happy feelings. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, took up jogging, reputed to boost the brain's supply of joyful neuro-chemicals, and began his conversations with "great!" and "wonderful!", the better to exercise his capacity for enthusiasm.
However, some scientists are releasing the most-extensive-ever study comparing moderate and extreme levels of happiness, and finding that being happier is not always better. In surveys of 118, 519 people from 96 countries, scientists examined how various levels of subjective well-being matched up with income, education, political participation, volunteer activities and close relationships. They also analyzed how different levels of happiness, as reported by college students, correlated with various outcomes. Even allowing for imprecision in people's self-reported sense of well-being, the results were unambiguous. The highest levels of happiness go along with the most stable, longest and most contented relationships. That is, even a little discontent with your partner can cause you to look around for someone better, until you are at best a serial monogamist and at, worst never in a loving, stable relationship.
Nevertheless, "once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be harmful" to income, career success, education and political participation, Diener and colleagues write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is extremely happy, 8s were more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more motivated to improve both their own lot (thus driving themselves to acquire more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs) and the lot of their community (causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency. "If you're totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in the world," says Diener, "you don't feel very motivated to work for change. Be wary when people tell you that you should be happier. "
Sadness
The drawbacks of constant, extreme happiness should not be surprising, since negative emotions evolved for a reason. Fear tips us off to the presence of danger, for instance. Sadness, too, seems to be part of our biological inheritance. Wilson argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness of the human condition. He also asserts that " the happy man is a hollow man," but he is hardly the first scholar to see melancholia (精神憂郁癥) as inspiration. A classical Greek text, possibly written by Aristotle, asks, "Why is it that all those who have become outstanding in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?" Wilson's answer is that "the blues can be a catalyst (催化劑) for a special kind of genius, a genius for exploring dark boundaries between opposites. "The ever-restless, the chronically discontent, are dissatisfied with the status quo, be it in art or literature or politics.
For all their familiarity, these arguments are nevertheless being crushed by the happiness movement. Last August, the novelist Mary Gordon lamented to The New York Times that "among writers... what is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad. " And, Jess Decourcy Hinds, an English teacher, recounted how, after her father died, friends pressed her to distract herself from her profound sadness and sense of loss. " Why don't people accept that after a parent's death, there will be years of grief?" she wrote. "Everyone wants mourners to ' snap out of it' because observing another's distress isn't easy."
It's hard to say exactly when ordinary Americans, no less than psychiatrists (精神病學(xué)家) began insisting that sadness is pathological (病態(tài)的). But by the end of the millennium that attitude was well established. In 1999, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway 50 years after its premiere. A reporter asked two psychiatrists to read the script. Their diagnosis: Willy Loman was suffering from clinical depression, a pathological ^condition that could and should be treated with drugs. Miller was appalled. "Loman is not a depressive," he told The New York Times. " He is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is where he is. "What society once viewed as an appropriate reaction to failed hopes and dashed dreams, it now regards as a psychiatric illness.
As NYU's Wakefield and Allan Horwitz of Rutgers University point out in The Loss of Sadness, this message has its roots in the bible of mental illness, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Its definition of a "major depressive episode" is remarkably broad. You must experience five not-uncommon symptoms, such as insomnia (失眠), difficulty concentrating and feeling sad or empty, for two weeks; the symptoms must cause distress or impairment, and they cannot be due to the death of a loved one. Anyone meeting these criteria is supposed to be treated.
When someone is appropriately sad, friends and colleagues offer support and sympathy. But by labeling appropriate sadness pathological, "we have attached a stigma to being said," says Wake-field, "with the result that depression tends to elicit hostility and rejection" with an undercurrent of "' Get over it; take a pill. ' The normal range of human emotion is not being tolerated. " "We don't know how drugs react with normal sadness and its functions, such as reconstituting your life out of the pain," says Wakefield. Those psychiatrists also express doubts to medicalise the sadness.
