Posts tagged happiness
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
(Image caption: This is the happiness equation, where t is the trial number, w0 is a constant term, other weights w capture the influence of different event types, 0 ≤ γ ≤ 1 is a forgetting factor that makes events in more recent trials more influential than those in earlier trials, CRj is the CR if chosen instead of a gamble on trial j, EVj is the EV of a gamble (average reward for the gamble) if chosen on trial j, and RPEj is the RPE on trial j contingent on choice of the gamble. The RPE is equal to the reward received minus the expectation in that trial EVj. If the CR was chosen, then EVj = 0 and RPEj = 0; if the gamble was chosen, then CRj = 0. The variables in the equation are quantities that the neuromodulator dopamine has been associated with in previous neuroscience studies. Credit: Robb Rutledge, UCL)
The happiness of over 18,000 people worldwide has been predicted by a mathematical equation developed by researchers at UCL, with results showing that moment-to-moment happiness reflects not just how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected.
The new equation accurately predicts exactly how happy people will say they are from moment to moment based on recent events, such as the rewards they receive and the expectations they have during a decision-making task. Scientists found that overall wealth accumulated during the experiment was not a good predictor of happiness. Instead, moment-to-moment happiness depended on the recent history of rewards and expectations. These expectations depended, for example, on whether the available options could lead to good or bad outcomes.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigated the relationship between happiness and reward, and the neural processes that lead to feelings that are central to our conscious experience, such as happiness. Before now, it was known that life events affect an individual’s happiness but not exactly how happy people will be from moment to moment as they make decisions and receive outcomes resulting from those decisions, something the new equation can predict.
Scientists believe that quantifying subjective states mathematically could help doctors better understand mood disorders, by seeing how self-reported feelings fluctuate in response to events like small wins and losses in a smartphone game. A better understanding of how mood is determined by life events and circumstances, and how that differs in people suffering from mood disorders, will hopefully lead to more effective treatments.
Research examining how and why happiness changes from moment to moment in individuals could also assist governments who deploy population measures of wellbeing to inform policy, by providing quantitative insight into what the collected information means. This is especially relevant to the UK following the launch of the National Wellbeing Programme in 2010 and subsequent annual reports by the Office for National Statistics on ‘Measuring National Wellbeing’.
For the study, 26 subjects completed a decision-making task in which their choices led to monetary gains and losses, and they were repeatedly asked to answer the question ‘how happy are you right now?’. The participant’s neural activity was also measured during the task using functional MRI and from these data, scientists built a computational model in which self-reported happiness was related to recent rewards and expectations. The model was then tested on 18,420 participants in the game ‘What makes me happy?’ in a smartphone app developed at UCL called 'The Great Brain Experiment'. Scientists were surprised to find that the same equation could be used to predict how happy subjects would be while they played the smartphone game, even though subjects could win only points and not money.
Lead author of the study, Dr Robb Rutledge (UCL Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and the new Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing), said: “We expected to see that recent rewards would affect moment-to-moment happiness but were surprised to find just how important expectations are in determining happiness. In real-world situations, the rewards associated with life decisions such as starting a new job or getting married are often not realised for a long time, and our results suggest expectations related to these decisions, good and bad, have a big effect on happiness.
"Life is full of expectations - it would be difficult to make good decisions without knowing, for example, which restaurant you like better. It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower. We find that there is some truth to this: lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness. However, expectations also affect happiness even before we learn the outcome of a decision. If you have plans to meet a friend at your favourite restaurant, those positive expectations may increase your happiness as soon as you make the plan. The new equation captures these different effects of expectations and allows happiness to be predicted based on the combined effects of many past events.
"It’s great that the data from the large and varied population using The Great Brain Experiment smartphone app shows that the same happiness equation applies to thousands people worldwide playing our game, as with our much smaller laboratory-based experiments which demonstrate the tremendous value of this approach for studying human well-being on a large scale."
The team used functional MRI to demonstrate that neural signals during decisions and outcomes in the task in an area of the brain called the striatum can be used to predict changes in moment-to-moment happiness. The striatum has a lot of connections with dopamine neurons, and signals in this brain area are thought to depend at least partially on dopamine. These results raise the possibility that dopamine may play a role in determining happiness.
Happiness lowers blood pressure
A synthetic gene module controlled by the happiness hormone dopamine produces an agent that lowers blood pressure. This opens up new avenues for therapies that are remote-controlled via the subsconscious.
The endogenous hormone dopamine triggers feelings of happiness. While its release is induced, among other things, by the “feel-good” classics sex, drugs or food, the brain does not content itself with a kick; it remembers the state of happiness and keeps wanting to achieve it again. Dopamine enables us to make the “right” decisions in order to experience even more moments of happiness.
Biological components reconnected
Now a team of researchers headed by ETH-Zurich professor Martin Fussenegger from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel has discovered a way to use the body’s dopamine system therapeutically. The researchers have created a new genetic module that can be controlled via dopamine. The feel-good messenger molecule activates the module depending on the dosage. In response to an increase in the dopamine level in the blood, the module produces the desired active agent.
The module consists of several biological components of the human organism, which are interconnected to form a synthetic signalling cascade. Dopamine receptors are found at the beginning of the cascade as sensors. A particular agent is produced as an end product: either a model protein called SEAP or ANP, a powerful vasodilator lowering blood pressure. The researchers placed these signal cascades in human cells, so-called HEK cells, around 100,000 of which were in turn inserted into capsules. These were then implanted in the abdomens of mice.
Contact with females activates module
These animals were subsequently exposed to situations that corresponded to their central reward system, such as sexual arousal, which a female mouse triggered in males, the injection of the drug methamphetamine or the drinking of golden syrup. In each case, the mouse brain responded with a “state of happiness”, the formation of dopamine and its release into the blood via the peripheral nervous system. In mice which received different concentrations of golden syrup, the “state of happiness” varied: the more the sugar was diluted, the smaller the amount of dopamine and thus the active agent that circulated in the blood. “This shows that dopamine does not merely switch our module on and off, but also that it responds based on the concentration of the happiness hormone,” says Fussenegger.
In another step, the scientists linked the dopamine sensor module to the production of the antihypertensive agent ANP and implanted the customised cells in the abdomens of hypertensive male mice. Contact with a female mouse triggered such feelings of happiness in the males that the dopamine-induced ANP production corrected the hypertension and the blood pressure even reached a normal level.
Serum dopamine linked to brain
Based on their experiments, the researchers were also able to demonstrate that dopamine is not only formed in the brain in corresponding feel-good situations, but also in nerves in the vegetative system, the so-called sympathetic nervous system, which are closely knit around blood vessels. The brain is interlinked with the rest of the body via the sympathetic nervous system, despite the fact that the brain is unable to release “its” dopamine directly into the circulation due to the blood-brain barrier. Dopamine receptors have also been known to exist in body tissue such as the kidneys, adrenalin glands or on blood vessels, as well as in the brain.
Dopamine, which circulates in the blood serum, regulates the breathing and the blood sugar balance. For a long time, it was thus assumed that the activities of brain and serum dopamine were connected. The fact that the ETH-Zurich researchers in Basel have now managed to demonstrate this connection deepens our understanding of the body’s reward system.
Eating as therapeutic input
Martin Fussenegger says that eating, for instance, can be seen as therapeutic input thanks to this module. “Using the gene network, we link up with the normal reward system,” he explains. Good food triggers feelings of happiness, which activate the module and intervene in a process that is normally only controlled by the subconscious. As a result, daily activities could be used for therapeutic interventions.
For the time being, however, the dopamine hypertension model is only a prototype. With their work, the scientists have proved that they can intervene in the body’s reward system as a result. Nonetheless, it is more than merely an idea or experiment in living cells. “It works in a mouse model that simulates a human disease and the components we used to produce the module also came from humans.” When and whether a treatment based on the happiness hormone will hit the market, however, remains uncertain. The development of prototypes into a marketable product takes years or even decades.
Further reading
Rössger K, Charpin-El-Hamri G & Fussenegger M. Reward-based hypertension control by a synthetic brain-dopamine interface. PNAS Early Edition, online 14th Oct. 2013.
Is the human brain capable of identifying a fake smile?
Since Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, much has been said about what lies behind her smile. Now, Spanish researchers have discovered how far this attention-grabbing expression confuses our emotion recognition and makes us perceive a face as happy, even if it is not.
Human beings deduce others´ state of mind from their facial expressions. “Fear, anger, sadness, displeasure and surprise are quickly inferred in this way,” David Beltrán Guerrero, researcher at the University of La Laguna, explains to SINC. But some emotions are more difficult to perceive.
“There is a wide range of more ambiguous expressions, from which it is difficult to deduce the underlying emotional state. A typical example is the expression of happiness,” says Beltrán, who is part of a group of experts at the Canarian institution who have analyzed, in three scientific articles, the smile’s capacity to distort people’s innate deductive ability.
“The smile plays a key role in recognizing others´ happiness. But, as we know, we are not really happy every time we smile,” he adds. In some cases, a smile merely expresses politeness or affiliation. In others, it may even be a way of hiding negative feelings and incentives, such as dominance, sarcasm, nervousness or embarrassment.
To develop this line of research, the authors created faces comprising smiling mouths and eyes expressing non-happy emotions, and compared them with faces in which both mouths and eyes expressed the same type of emotional state.
The main objective was to discover how far the smile skews the recognition of ambiguous expressions, making us identify them with happiness even though they are accompanied by eyes which clearly express a different feeling.
The power of a smile
“The influence of the smile is highly dependent on the type of task given to participants and, therefore, on the type of activity we are involved in when we come across this type of expression,” Beltrán notes.
Thus when the task is purely perceptive – like the detection of facial features - the smile has a very strong influence, to the extent that differences between ambiguous expressions (happy mouth and non-happy eyes) and genuinely happy expressions (happy mouth and eyes) are not distinguished.
On the other hand, when the task involves categorizing expressions, that is recognizing if they are happy, sad or any other emotion, the influence of the smile weakens, although it is still important, since 40% of the time, participants identify ambiguous expressions as genuinely happy.
However, the influence of the smile disappears in emotional assessment, that is when someone is asked to assess whether a facial expression is positive or negative: “A smile can cause us to interpret a non-happy expression as happy, except when we are involved in the emotional assessment of said expression,” he highlights.
A stimulus which is difficult to assess
According to the authors, the reason why a smile sometimes leads to the incorrect categorization of an expression is related to its high visual “salience”– its attention-grabbing capacity – and its almost exclusive association with the emotional state of happiness.
In a recent study, it was found that the smile dominates many of the initial stages of the brain processing of faces, to the extent that it prompts similar electrical activity in the brain for genuinely happy expressions and ambiguous expressions with smiles and non-happy eyes.
By measuring eye movements, it was observed that an ambiguous expression is confused and categorized as happy if the first gaze falls on the area of the smiling mouth, rather than the area of the eyes.
However, curiously the influence of the smile in these assessments is not the same for everyone. “Another study showed that people with social anxiety tend to confuse ambiguous expressions with genuinely happy expressions less frequently,” Beltrán concludes.
References:
Manuel G. Calvo, Hipólito Marrero, David Beltrán. “When does the brain distinguish between genuine and ambiguous smiles? An ERP study”. Brain and Cognition 81 (2013) 237–246.
Manuel G. Calvo, Andrés Fernández-Martín, Lauri Nummenmaa. “Perceptual, categorical, and affective processing of ambiguous smiling facial expressions”. Cognition 125 (2012) 373–393.
Manuel G. Calvo; Aida Gutiérrez-García; Pedro Avero; Daniel Lundqvist. “Attentional Mechanisms in Judging Genuine and Fake Smiles: Eye-Movement Patterns”. Emotion 2013, Vol. 13 (2013), No. 4, 792–802.
Trying to be Happier Works When Listening to Upbeat Music
The song, “Get Happy,” famously performed by Judy Garland, has encouraged people to improve their mood for decades. Recent research at the University of Missouri discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process. This research points to ways that people can actively improve their moods and corroborates earlier MU research.
“Our work provides support for what many people already do – listen to music to improve their moods,” said lead author Yuna Ferguson, who performed the study while she was an MU doctoral student in psychological science. “Although pursuing personal happiness may be thought of as a self-centered venture, research suggests that happiness relates to a higher probability of socially beneficial behavior, better physical health, higher income and greater relationship satisfaction.”
In two studies by Ferguson, participants successfully improved their moods in the short term and boosted their overall happiness over a two week period. During the first study, participants improved their mood after being instructed to attempt to do so, but only if they listened to the upbeat music of Copland, as opposed to the more somber Stravinsky. Other participants, who simply listened to the music without attempting to change their mood, also didn’t report a change in happiness. In the second study, participants reported higher levels of happiness after two weeks of lab sessions in which they listened to positive music while trying to feel happier, compared to control participants who only listened to music.
However, Ferguson noted that for people to put her research into practice, they must be wary of too much introspection into their mood or constantly asking, “Am I happy yet?”
“Rather than focusing on how much happiness they’ve gained and engaging in that kind of mental calculation, people could focus more on enjoying their experience of the journey towards happiness and not get hung up on the destination,” said Ferguson.
Ferguson’s work corroborated earlier findings by Ferguson’s doctoral advisor and co-author of the current study, Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological science in MU’s College of Arts and Science.
“The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model, developed in my earlier research, says that we can stay in the upper half of our ‘set range’ of potential happiness as long as we keep having positive experiences, and avoid wanting too much more than we have,” said Sheldon. “Yuna’s research suggests that we can intentionally seek to make mental changes leading to new positive experiences of life. The fact that we’re aware we’re doing this, has no detrimental effect.”
Ferguson is now assistant professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University Shenango. The study, “Trying to Be Happier Really Can Work: Two Experimental Studies,” was published in The Journal of Positive Psychology.
Is this peptide a key to happiness?
What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide?
The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called hypocretin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad.
The finding suggests that boosting hypocretin could elevate both mood and alertness in humans, thus laying the foundation for possible future treatments of psychiatric disorders like depression by targeting measureable abnormalities in brain chemistry.
In addition, the study measured for the first time the release of another peptide, this one called melanin concentrating hormone, or MCH. Researchers found that its release was minimal in waking but greatly increased during sleep, suggesting a key role for this peptide in making humans sleepy.
The study is published in the March 5 online edition of the journal Nature Communications.
"The current findings explain the sleepiness of narcolepsy, as well as the depression that frequently accompanies this disorder," said senior author Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep Research at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "The findings also suggest that hypocretin deficiency may underlie depression from other causes."
(Image: ALAMY)
If you start exercising, your brain recognizes this as a moment of stress. As your heart pressure increases, the brain thinks you are either fighting the enemy or fleeing from it. To protect yourself and your brain from stress, you release a protein called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor). This BDNF has a protective and also reparative element to your memory neurons and acts as a reset switch. That’s why we often feel so at ease and like things are clear after exercising.
Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low-expression form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men.
The findings appear online in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.