Psychology of Happiness

I am doing some research on metta-bhavana (cultivation of loving-kindness) meditation and, along with a slew of recent articles discussing its efficacy, I just stumbled upon this little gem:

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one’s life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning.*

Think about ways that this practice could be used by meditators during metta practice. As we build our love, appreciation, acceptance, etc of ourselves, we can and should marvel in the fact that we might never have been, that all of our happy moments might never have occured. Choose an easy joy (e.g. meeting a romantic partner) and just think about how easily that might never have happened. We can do the same with the joys of our close friend (step 2), neutral person (be creative), and so on. Take joy – and be grateful – for the simple fact that what is, IS.

And then go be happy.

Amongst the study’s authors: Daniel Gilbert, of “Stumbling onto Happiness” fame (I blogged about the book last May).

* “It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2008, Vol. 95, No. 5, 1217–1224