Richard Easterlin restarted the debate on individual happiness with his description of the paradox of happiness. The evidence reported by Easterlin suggested that over the course of a lifetime, people’s happiness depends very little on variations in income or wealth. Even comparisons between different countries did not show significant correlations between income and happiness: poorer countries did not show higher indexes of “unhappiness” compared to richer countries. The evidence reported by Easterlin had very important consequences: not only did it contribute to modifying the idea according to which the well-being of a nation is measured by indexes of macroeconomic growth, but it also urged economists and psychologists to investigate more thoroughly the causes of happiness itself. The important question naturally arises: if it is not economic success that guarantees a “happy” life, then what are the determining forces of individual and social well-being?

Easterlin, like Kahneman, Frank and others, tried to explain this paradox by using the metaphor of the so-called “treadmill effect”, according to which an increase in income/wealth leads to an effect similar to that produced by running on a treadmill, that is, of little forward movement. 

Analyzed from the point of view of the necessities of life (primary, secondary, etc.), there are definitions of happiness which are different not only from the point of view of psychology and philosophy, but also in material terms. Happiness has its foundation in the satisfaction of primary necessities which derive from biological instincts and impulses, such as hunger, sleep, sexual gratification and still more. Naturally the satisfaction of biological instincts and impulses can be considered as an integral part of happiness, but not as its exclusive constituents. Biological necessities create a condition of expectation and of unhappiness which tends to be resolved in the moment these needs are satisfied. This satisfaction generates a “biological happiness”, identifiable with pleasure, which inevitably influences the mind, although this condition is always changeable as the same impulses and instincts will certainly arise again. In the psychology of economics, the decline of the theory that a rise in income increases individual well-being led to the birth of several theories, including that called the paradox of happiness.

Silvia, if happiness for psychologists corresponds with a state of mind, with a general sensation of pleasure and satisfaction, for economists it corresponds instead with the satisfaction of desires and preferences. Therefore, what must be pragmatically investigated is the desirability and not the utility of an object, which is tied to the pleasure that the object produces. Abandoning the hedonic notion of utility not only brings the centre of attention back to subjective states such as satisfaction, pain, pleasure, and so on, but also lays the basis for their observation and, in some cases, for their measurement. Many psychological studies have highlighted the importance of personal relationships to individual well-being. The most significant results reported are that (a) interpersonal relationships are spontaneous between human beings and are sought out in order to improve personal well-being. The presence of these motivations, beginning at an early age, shows that the search for human relationships has in instinctual foundation; (b) being deprived of these relationships leads to malaise, sometimes even to sickness; and (c) head aptation to positive or negative events is decidedly partial. In recent years economists have tried to “measure” the happiness of people by comparing it with some typical economic indicators such as income, wealth, unemployment and so on. In 1971, Brickman and Campbell, extending adaptation theory to the study of individual and collective happi- ness, came to the conclusion that happiness follows the adaptation (or set point) theory, according to which improvements in the objective circumstances of life (income and wealth included) do not produce real effects on the well-being of individuals. In fact, one can witness a growing trend toward satisfaction with one’s life in individuals with lower income levels.

Recently Blanchard published a “dispersion diagram” which relates per capita income to an average index of self-declared well-being for a large number of countries in the world. This diagram highlights the fact that the inhabitants of countries with higher levels of income do not declare themselves to be particularly happy, but rather provide ambiguous results. Individuals who double their income do not double their happiness, as the maximum benefit deriving from newly acquired happiness diminishes with time and people set themselves higher and higher objectives. The studies carried out by Inglehart revealed how individuals plot out unique paths in search of their own happiness, disproving the thesis of biologists according to whom it is possible to trace happiness back to a genetic predisposition, and supporting, on the contrary, the determining role of life conditions. When the needs directly linked to survival are satisfied, for example, they gradually receive less and less attention compared to non-physiological necessities. From the moment an individual’s level of income or resources frees him/her from the problem of survival, individual happiness no longer depends in any important way on further increases in income, but rather on the quality of life and on the possibilities for self-expression.

Richard Easterlin restarted the debate on individual happiness with his description of the paradox of happiness. The evidence reported by Easterlin suggested that over the course of a lifetime, people’s happiness depends very little on variations in income or wealth. Even comparisons between different countries did not show significant correlations between income and happiness: poorer countries did not show higher indexes of “unhappiness” compared to richer countries. The evidence reported by Easterlin had very important consequences: not only did it contribute to modifying the idea according to which the well-being of a nation is measured by indexes of macroeconomic growth, but it also urged economists and psychologists to investigate more thoroughly the causes of happiness itself. The important question naturally arises: if it is not economic success that guarantees a “happy” life, then what are the determining forces of individual and social well-being?

Easterlin, like Kahneman, Frank and others, tried to explain this paradox by using the metaphor of the so-called “treadmill effect”, according to which an increase in income/wealth leads to an effect similar to that produced by running on a treadmill, that is, of little forward movement. 

The principal effects are: hedonic,according to which our satisfaction or well-being subsequent to the acquisition of a new consumer good, after a temporary improvement, regresses to its previous level; satisfying, according to which, when one’s income rises, in order that objective happiness may increase, continuous and more intense pleasures are necessary; and situational, on the basis of which the well-being that we draw from consumption depends above all on the value of the consumption itself as compared with the consumption of others. It is interesting that when one’s income increases an individual needs continuous and more intense pleasures in order to maintain the same level of satisfaction. The satisfaction treadmill effect shows how subjective happiness remains constant despite marked improvements in the material conditions of life.

Silvia, defining one’s own value on the basis of money and material possessions corresponds with inferior levels of happiness, a sort of “zero-sum game” in which the constant need to improve oneself and to receive approval serves only to create and perpetuate a vicious cycle of consumption. More recently, the psychologist Csíkszentmihályi pointed out another variable that has nothing to do with wealth, which he calls flow or “optimal experience”, maintaining that a deep and stable sense of happiness can come about when one concentrates on and works hard at the achievement of an important objective (which is especially the case in creative endeavours), and finally succeeds in reaching that objective. The American psychologist Seligman actually proposes a formula for happiness: H=S+C+V, in which H stands for happiness or rather our permanent level of happiness; S stands for set range or of happiness, depending on one’s outlook on life; C indicates the circumstances of our life which can influence the level of happiness (wealth/poverty, marriage, social life, age, health, sex, faith, etc.); and V indicates all those factors which depend upon our voluntary control. According to Seligman the first two factors S and C are impossible or difficult to change, while it is possible to work on many internal circumstances (V) in order to increase our permanent level of happiness; among these circumstances are positive emotions which can relate to the past, the present and the future.

I believe what we quite poorly call "happiness" and are trained to chase like this big and shiny carrot that will finally make us whole is physiologically co-related to resistance and psychologically dependent on our beliefs, values and goals.

I find resistance to be a really interesting marker as I understand it can be measured physiologically from quite a few angles (breathing patterns, heart rate variability (HRV) and coherence, skin galvanic response, brainwave states, hormones...) and can also be easily felt experientially.

When we oppose "what is" - for whatever reason and the object of resistance can belong to any sphere, from the basic survival needs to the highest aspirations - and/or when our personal agendas are unmet, we aren't "happy" and experience various degrees of resistance.

However, certain conditions that will stop some from being happy might not be an obstacle to others, which is why the absence or presence of the many degrees of "happiness" seems ultimately constellated from a mixture of our personal values (usually driven by personality traits and stage development) and the amount of inherited conditioning still present (whatever mainstream views that are typically encouraged by caregivers, teachers and society at large in any given place and time).      

From this perspective, the contrary of resistance might be love. Love is a force that aims at fusing things together (fusing with rather than repelling) and its main byproduct is meaning (we're hungry for meaning). Perhaps loving and being loved (establishing meaningful relationships) are the most basic needs most of us share, whether we find them in their simplest forms (such as mother and baby for example) or with higher degrees of complexity (such as in learning to love "what is" so as to extract meaning out of any event we experience).

Thank you Mauro for your beautiful question 

Javi, thank you for your wonderful remarks. I absolutely agree. They could not be expressed better

Maybe, it is possible to construct a scientific system which measures pleasure and pain through categories such as quality, intensity, duration and certainty. An action that generates happiness is useful, and this happiness increases the happiness of one’s community. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between two forms of utility: the decision utility of a result, namely the weight assigned to the result in a decision; and the experienced utility of a result, that is the measurement of the hedonic experience of the outcome produced. The distinction between these two types of utility opens up new paths in the study of rationality and decision making, and in evaluating the degree of happiness that a certain choice produces. In reality it rarely happens that the expected utility is maximized, and therefore attempts to reach high and stable levels of pleasure are almost always destined to fail. Moreover, errors in the attribution of decision utility to obtained results can often issue from incorrect predictions of hedonic experience. In particular, the evaluation of our past hedonic experiences can undergo important variations and thus lead to error. This is because hedonic experience can change in relation to different circumstances and can also change with time. Also for this reason it is particularly difficult to specify what we will like in the future and therefore to create an accurate expected utility. Very often we are not able to predict our hedonic responses to external stimuli. Even when we find ourselves in situations that allow for the formulation of precise predictions we tend to decide on our future consumption without considering the changeability of our preferences. But it is above all retrospective evaluation that characterizes the formation of hedonic utility; retrospective evaluation represents the sum of knowledge that an individual has accumulated in relation to stimuli and events. If it is true that in our life we rely on memory to guide our future choices, it is also true that even when it seems very reliable, memory can prove misleading. 

I think that another important question is the illusions and disillusions of memory. The unreliability of memory derives from the fact that the elements of each experience are so disparate that with the distance of time, the reconstruction of an event becomes difficult. Memories do not depend on a single “trace”, but depend on the complex task of recomposing the “fragments” of different autobiographical levels. Just as single memories depend on the reconstruction of a mosaic composed of different materials (visual, auditory, and olfactory perceptions, semantic criteria and still more), so the memories of our life depend on the reuniting of heterogeneous fragments.

In general, I would agree. But I think this conception of the autobiographical memory is corroborated by observations of patients afflicted with forms of retrograde amnesia which have “erased” fragments of their past. These patients, while generally conserving their long-term memory, lose their memories of specific events or of more recent years. In order to reconstruct their own past, amnesiac patients, when they see family members (almost as though it were the first time), must “insert” the specific facts of their past and of more recent general events into the story line of their own autobiographical memory. The biographical elements learned from others are experienced with cold detachment, even if they contribute to the reconstruction of autobiographical continuity, and more broadly to the meaning of the patient’s existence. A person who has lost part of his/her memory collects the new information and uses it on order to “tell him/herself stories” about his/her own identity. In truth, all of us tell ourselves stories about our past and progressively restructure the meaning of single memories, to the point where the reality of memory becomes progressively less important compared to its reconstruction “in parts” which implies distortions, embellishments, omissions, transformations and so on.

I think that the studies of Marigold Linton very clearly demonstrate the prevalence and thus the importance of this phenomenon. In 1972, the American psychologist began to note down in a diary various everyday events in a concise manner. In order to avoid allotting different space to different memories, which might facilitate the recollection of some memories instead of others, she noted events day by day, standardizing the annotations in length to about three lines each. Linton wrote down at least two events per day, and once a month she randomly reviewed the pages relating to two days, re-read them, and tried to establish the date on which they had occurred and to recall the events. At the moment the events were noted down and upon their re-reading they were also evaluated in terms of importance, meaning, the emotions involved, etc. Through this technique, which allowed her to be both an experimental subject and an experimental object at the same time, Linton was able to establish that memory vanishes at the rate of approximately 5-6 per cent per year. This rate would entail the disappearance of about half of the memories of specific events after thirteen years if these were not held within a wider system of autobiographical memory containing general facts and data about the periods of our life. These wider systems of memory are made up of single elements which can in fact disintegrate, while the perception of the general structure and meaning of memories remains. Another aspect of autobiographical memories is our ability to date them with some measure of precision. Generally, we have the sensation that particular events have happened more frequently the better our memory of them is. For this reason more recent events are both dated with greater precision and are considered to be more frequent, while events that are further away in time are dated in an approximate way and are held to be rarer than they actually were. A large number of our errors in dating derive from the fact that our interior perception of time does not coincide with real time: if we are active and involved in a number of activities, events that are relatively close to us in time seem more distant, while the opposite happens when we are inactive or not very busy.

Sure, Silvia. One of the mechanisms that regulates the dating precision of our memories is the association between individual memories and collective points of reference. For example, we can easily recall something that happened to us “at the time when”, “the day that”, “the year in which” a particularly memorable event occurred. When these points of reference are lacking, our dating of memories can be very imprecise, which contributes to the lessening of the accuracy of the memories themselves, to the extent that we may be unsure whether some events occurred or not. It must be said that memory is often imagined as an file in which experiences are deposited, a durable file which contains the so-called long-term memories, consolidated and stabilized on the basis of short-term or working memories. This two tiered conception of memory was established as a result of the theories of Donald Hebb, who was the first to maintain that short-term memory depended on electrical alterations of the synapses while long-term memory depended on structural alterations. In accordance with Hebbian theories, psychobiologists demonstrated that the process of memory consol- idation was fragile, and that numerous physical treatments — an electric shock given immediately after an experience or the administering of antibiotics which block protein synthesis (and therefore the production of new synapses) — impeded the conversion of short-term memory into long-term memory. However, they maintained that once the consolidation had occurred, nothing was able to disturb stable memories, except for the slow and inexorable process of oblivion, which is more pronounced in older subjects.

Memories, in reality, are not stable, but continuously restructured. Their changeability over time has been demonstrated in two types of research, experimental and clinical. The first approach is based on studies carried out by Larry R. Squire on the effects of electroshock therapy: this treatment — still used by some psychiatrists in cases of serious depression — has a negative effect on human and animal memory. If this treatment is administered immediately after an experience, specifically before short-term memory has been transformed into long-term memory, retrograde amnesia occurs, erasing the memory of that experience. The reason for this is that electroshocks disturb the electrical phenomena that form short-term memory, thereby impeding its consolidation. Squire, however, pointed out that electroshock acts not only on the consolidation of memory, that is on the transformation of short-term memory into long-term memory, but also on the memories that have already been consolidated. This contradicts to some extent the established dogma that memory, once consolidated, could no longer be disrupted by treatments that disturb the electrical phenomena at the basis of short-term memory. If what Squire found is true, the stability of long-term memory would be a myth and the process of its consolidation would not ensure the retention of the experiences codified in a “stable” form.

Some recent research linked to the studies of Alberto Oliverio, Karin Nader and Joseph LeDoux tends to corroborate Squires findings and demonstrates that in addition to consolidation, re-consolidation also exists, which is the restructuring of previous experiences. A particular type of restructuring permits the incorporation of false memories into the long-term memory of subjects who have been shown doctored photographs: cognitive psychologists explained that when the false images refer to infancy they can generate false memories which are incorporated in the subject’s autobiographical memory and convince the individual that a certain event really did happen. Images, in fact, can be more deceiving than words, which is shown by the frequent use of more than one story in attempts to implant a false memory in a person’s mind.

I would like to add that cognitive psychologists maintain that in order to effectively evaluate an event retrospectively it is necessary to: recall the experiences of the moment that gave rise to that event;
 try to understand the instantaneous perceptions and sensations; and express a global evaluation. In order to perform these operations various procedures exist. One may invoke the principle of temporal integration according to which states of mind that follow one after another in time must be treated in the same way. Even more effective than temporal integration is the principle of temporal monot- onicity, which means that in a sequence of experiences, if one element is made more pleasurable, the whole new sequence will be preferred, but if one element is made less pleasurable, the initial sequence will be preferred. Numerous studies have shown, however, that actual retrospective eval- uations involve neither the use of the principle of temporal integration nor that of temporal monotonicity. When performing a comprehensive assessment individuals use rules such as that of peak-end, according to which, through consideration of a combination of the most intense effect registered over the course of the entire event and of the sensation occurring in the final phase, global evaluations can be made with a high rate of precision. Another rule is that of indifference or insensitivity to duration: the global retrospective evaluation of pain or pleasure is not influ- enced by the duration of the event.

There is an interesting experiment that shows the violations to the law of temporal monotonicity. Some paid volunteers who had been divided into two groups were led to believe that they would be subjected to three experiments causing moderate physical pain, while in reality there were only two such experiments. In the “short trial” the subject had to keep one of his/her hands immersed in 14°C water for sixty seconds, drying it off immediately afterwards. In the “long trial” the subject had to keep his/her other hand immersed for ninety seconds: for the first sixty seconds the temperature of the water was kept at 14°C, exactly as in the “short trial”; but during the following thirty seconds the temperature of the water was gradually increased to 15°C, a level that was still unpleasant but perceived by the majority as being a clear improvement compared to the beginning. The first group was subjected first to the short trial and then to the long, while for the second group the order was reversed. A few minutes after the conclusion of the second trial the participants were reminded that they still had to face a third experiment. They were then asked which of the two trials just experi- enced they would choose to repeat. The choices of the trial to be repeated were clearly different in the two groups. In the first group 17 out of 21 preferred to repeat the long trial, violating the principle of temporal monotonicity; in the second group, only 5 out of 11 expressed that preference. The results of both groups satisfied the peak-end rule, confirming the indifference towards duration. For a minority composed of individuals who did not feel any decrease in discomfort, the peak and end levels of pleasure were the same in both the short and the long trial. These subjects should have given the same evaluation to the two trials in accordance with the peak-end rule, a prediction confirmed by the distribution of the real preferences close to the 50 per cent mark. In the case of the larger group of subjects who indicated a decrease in discomfort in the final phase of the long trial, according to the peak-end rule this experiment should have caused less aversion than the short trial, and this prediction was also confirmed by their real choices. In all, about two thirds of the subjects in this experiment violated the principle of dominance, a result confirmed by numerous experiments carried out on a wide range of individuals in a series of slightly different conditions ...

With the passing of time numerous details and specific events can become more ambiguous and slowly be modified in our memories. In order to investigate this phenomenon, studies were carried out in which volunteers had to note down in a diary important events of their everyday life. Some time later a psychologist read back passages from their diaries to the volunteers, asking if they remembered the events recorded. In some cases the psychologist deliberately modified the (typewritten) text: the longer the interval of time that had elapsed, the higher the probability was that the volunteers would recognize the (false) events described in “their” diary as their own memories. The inability to grasp the difference between one’s own “true” and “false” memories depends, in large part, on the oblivion that autobiographical memory faces.

It must be said that further analyses have clarified the mechanism responsible for these violations of temporal monotonicity. The majority of the subjects convinced themselves, erroneously, that the lowest temperature to which they had been exposed had not been the same in the two trials, as their memory of the worst moment of the long trial had been softened by the improvement that occurred in the final phase. The evidence suggests that events are judged more through a few snapshots of the experience rather than through a continuous recollection of the experience similar to a film clip. The snapshots are, in effect, montages that can blend impressions drawn from various parts of the experience. The whole experience is evaluated on the basis of the weighted average of the utility of these moments.

Silvia, there are many variables which make the measurement of happiness or, as Kahneman says, of “subjective well-being”, extremely difficult. Among other things, one would need to decide whether to adopt a bottom-up analysis, which would be based on the assumption that it is the circumstances or the environment that determines greater or lesser happiness, or a top-down analysis, which would be based on the assumption that it is personality that constitutes the strongest determining factor of well-being, and overall happiness influences the sentiments that are felt in different situations. On the other hand, unhappiness is also of great interest. Unhappiness not the opposite of happiness, but the result of the activation of specific human cognitive mechanisms. In his attempt to give an account of unhappiness Kahneman takes various explanatory levels into consideration. The first level is the social and cultural context that the subject is part of. Secondly, there are the objective characteristics of the society in which the subject lives (poverty, infant mortality, social unrest, and so on); Kahneman places less emphasis on the balance of pleasure or pain or subjective affirmations, which however remain important. Subjective well-being involves a component of judgement and of comparison with ideals, aspirations, others and one’s own past. Global well-being is strongly correlated with a series of emotional states, with their persistence and with their connection to particular events; and here the individual differences are very note- worthy. Third and finally, there are the neuronal and motivational systems that may cause unhappiness.

Sure, here, as often, in order to understand the higher levels it is necessary to understand the lower ones. Kahneman developed a system for evaluating happiness from the bottom up, and introduced a new concept, the Good/Bad dimension, a general dimension for evaluating happiness. He first of all distinguishes four variants of G/B, which are differentiated by the level of integration to which they refer: happiness, well-being:dimensions at the highest level of integration that pertain to all areas of life; satisfaction: which refers to wider areas of life, such as family life or work; 
remembered utility: the global evaluation assigned to a particular past event or to a situation in which a similar experience recurs; and 
instant utility: that is to say satisfaction or dissatisfaction as attributes of an experience at a particular moment. This constitutes the most useful category for understanding the predisposition for wanting to stop or continue an experience in progress.

Yes, but to identify objective and normative criteria which would allow us to understand happiness, Kahneman uses a bottom-up analysis which proceeds from the bottom (instant utility) towards the top. This involves the elimination of the subjective judgements that an individual formulates about his/her own state. In other words, first he admits the role of subjectivity in the evaluation of instant utility, and then he abandons it, as the retrospective evaluation of an event can be influenced by errors in memory or by emotions. Subjective evaluations can in fact be highly influenced by emotional experiences. It follows that an individual who has had experiences the majority of which are negative will, in all probability, describe him/herself as unsatisfied or unhappy.

Dear Silvia, Kahneman distinguishes between objective and subjective happiness: the first derives from the registration of instant utility during a certain event; the second is reflected in the answer tothe question of how happy a person is. The relationship between objective and subjective happiness is analogous to the relationship between the total utility and the remembered utility of an event. Paradoxically, in the end objective happiness is based on subjective data: the G/B experiences of moments in life. It has been called objective because the summation of instantaneous utilities is determined by logical rules and could in theory be performed by an observer who has access to the temporal data on instant utility. A human being’s natural inclination is to define the total utility felt during a period of time as the temporal sum of instant utility. Kahneman attempts to describe the procedures necessary for this method by invoking some principles regarding subjective assessments. First of all, assessments must contain all of the useful and relevant elements in order to allow for temporal integration. Second, the scale has a stable zero point (which corresponds with neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither approach nor avoid), and the measurements of the decisions that diverge from this point are measurable. Third, subjective evaluations must correctly rate experiences on the basis of their good/bad intensity, but the intervals between the assessments can be arbitrary. And fourth, the observer must have knowledge of the points of reference used by the subject. These assumptions, however, relate to a theoretical possibility rather than a practical procedure