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Working for Happiness

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Alex Frankel - Aug. 02 (Opinion) - I started at UPS on Monday. I drove to the San Francisco UPS headquarters, a block-wide fortress of freight. A staffer from human resources took me to get a uniform and pointed me toward the locker room. I changed out of my street clothes and into the brown outfit. I had the locker room to myself; after buttoning up my shirt I took a second to stare into the mirror. As I changed into this new brown uniform, I was changing my attitude. I was becoming one of them. For a decade I had worked as a journalist, covering business and the rise of branding. But by that fateful morning, I'd decided to leave my desk behind and dive deeper into a subject that had long intrigued me: the role of corporate cultures in large companies. In what became a two-year adventure through the world of commerce, I served as a driver's assistant at UPS, poured coffee at a busy Starbucks cafe, folded garments at Gap, rented cars for Enterprise, and sold iPods at an Apple Store.

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The Activism Cure

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Meredith Maran - Jun. 21 (Special Report) - Philosopher-physician Albert Schweitzer once said, "The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." Kate Hanni, 48, a real estate broker in Napa, California, is living proof—emphasis on living. On June 21, 2006, she was lured to a million-dollar home by a man who'd posed as a home buyer, then attacked her when she arrived. For 25 minutes he beat, stabbed, and tortured her, then left her on the floor to die. "My hair was torn out," Kate says. "The skin on my hands and knees was gone. But worst of all, so was my dignity and my sense of safety in the world."

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The Daddy Brain

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Jeremy Adam Smith - Jun. 21 (Special Report) - Moms aren't the only ones whose bodies change after having a baby. Jeremy Adam Smith reveals the new science of fatherhood. Gopal Dayaneni is a stay-at-home father in Oakland, California. He still recalls the first time he gave a bottle to his six-week-old daughter, Ila. "I sat down with her in a rocking chair," he says. "She totally took the bottle, right up against my body, comfortable and warm. She looked up at me and I was so taken with her."

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Happiness, the Hard Way

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Darrin M. McMahon - May. 10 (Research) - I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought to have—and, moreover, something that's within our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be happy. That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.

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Born to Blush - why embarrassment is good for all of us

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Dacher Keltner - May. 10 (Research) - When I started to study embarrassment in the early 1990s, most researchers thought signs of mortification exposed confusion and thwarted intention. But I wasn't so sure. I was struck by how the smiles of people such as Gandhi and the Dalai Lama showed elements of embarrassment—gaze aversion, lip presses, and smile controls. They were not confused; they hadn't been thwarted. Why the embarrassment? At the same time, embarrassment is often absent among people at the other end of the moral spectrum: those prone to violence. In one experiment, I observed 10-year-old boys attempting to answer questions designed to be too difficult for kids their age (e.g., "What is a barometer?" "Who was Charles Darwin?"). Well-adjusted boys, I found, showed embarrassment when they missed the questions, displaying concern over their performance—and, perhaps, a deeper respect for the institution of education. Aggressive boys, in contrast, showed little or no embarrassment, and instead erupted with occasional facial displays of anger. One boy even gave the finger to the camera when the experimenter had to leave the testing room momentarily.

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Why is There Peace?

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Steven Pinker - Apr. 26 (Review) - Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.

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Better Than Sex

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Feb. 15 (Review) - Might be that sitting with your legs crossed repeating stuff like “May all beings be free from suffering,” is a little too far-out for you. I’m a scientist for crying out loud, so you can imagine how I might feel meditating while surrounded by prominent neuroscientists, which I recently did on a 7-day silent meditation retreat. Except that I actually didn’t feel silly. Why? Because there is new scientific research that demonstrates the incredible power of loving-kindness meditation: No need to be self-conscious when this stuff might be more effective than Prozac. Also called metta, loving-kindness meditation is the simple practice of directing well-wishes towards other people.

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Survival of the Kindest

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Psychology Today - By Dacher Keltner - Feb. 11 (Review) - Two hundred years ago on February 12, Adam Gopnik writes in Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, two pebbles -- Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln -- were dropped into the sea of life. Their ideas and forms of eloquence have redirected the currents of humanity. One current of Darwin's thought is well-known. His theory of evolution by natural selection would require new genesis stories about the origins of life forms, less arrogant notions about man's place in the great chain of being, and a rethinking of our species as one in flux—and with rather hairy relatives. Less well-known is a second current of Darwin's thought -- his conception of human nature. Think of Darwin and "survival of the fittest" leaps to mind, as do images of competitive individuals -- collections of selfish genes -- going at one another bloody in tooth and claw. "Survival of the fittest" was not Darwin's phrase, but Herbert Spencer's and that of Social Darwinists who used Darwin to justify their wished-for superiority of different classes and races. "Survival of the kindest" better captures Darwin's thinking about his own kind.

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Ten 2008 Tips for Raising Happy Kids

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Jan. 11 (Review) - Some of the most irritating things our kids do (whining and tattling come to mind) are nothing more than bad habits, and as we all know, bad habits are tough to break! Science has shown that people who are successful in making changes do it in 5 very specific stages.

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America's Trust Fall

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Pamela Paxton, Jeremy Adam Smith - Dec. 07 (Special Report) - "Trust no one" has essentially served as Americans' motto over the last two generations. For 40 years—the years of Vietnam, Watergate, junk bonds, Monica Lewinsky, Enron, the Catholic Church sex scandals, and the Iraq war—our trust in each other has been dropping steadily, while trust in many institutions has been seriously shaken in response to scandals. This trend is documented in a variety of national surveys. The General Social Survey, a periodic assessment of Americans' moods and values, shows a 10-point decline from 1976 to 2006 in the number of Americans who believe other people can generally be trusted. The General Social Survey also shows declines in trust in our institutions, although these declines are often closely linked to specific events. From the 1970s to today, trust has declined in the press (24 to 11 percent), education (36 to 28 percent), banks (35 percent to 31 percent), corporations (26 to 17 percent), and even organized religion (35 to 25 percent). And Gallup's annual Governance survey shows that trust in the government is even lower today than it was during the Watergate era, when the Nixon administration had been caught engaging in criminal acts. It's no wonder popular culture is so preoccupied with questions of trust.

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Happiness is being socially connected

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Nov. 02 (Review) - The upshot of 50 years of happiness research is that the quantity and quality of a person’s social connections—friendships, relationships with family members, closeness to neighbors, etc.—is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated. People with many friendships are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping.

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Back-to-School: Play and Academic Success

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - School starts next week, and so our kids will be back to a day of structured learning. But this year Fiona won't be taking Spanish and Mandarin and knitting and drama. Most days after school she and Molly [who starts Kindergarten!!], are going to walk home, hopefully with the neighborhood kids, and hang around and play. Why? I keep reading the statistics about how kids are spending less time playing, both indoors and out, and about how they are spending more time in organized activities (particularly athletics). Over the last two decades, children have lost 8 hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week.

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Look Twice

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Susan T. Fiske - Aug. 03 (Review) - Most people think they're less biased than average. But just as we can't all be better than average, we can't all be less prejudiced than average. Although the message--and the success so far--of Barack Obama's presidential campaign suggests an America that is moving past traditional racial divisions and prejudices, it's probably safe to assume that all of us harbor more biases than we think. Science suggests that most of us don't even know the half of it. A 20-year eruption of research from the field of "social neuroscience" reveals exactly how automatically and unconsciously prejudice operates. As members of a society with egalitarian ideals, most Americans have good intentions. But new research suggests our brains and our impulses all too often betray us. That's the bad news.

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Mix It Up!

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Jennifer Holladay - Aug. 03 (Review) - Today's students are the most racially tolerant generation our nation has ever seen. According to recent studies, they are more likely to have friends, or to date, across racial and ethnic lines than the generations who came before them. On the whole, they believe racism is wrong. But we still have a long way to go. According to federal statistics, one in four students report being targets of racial or ethnic bias in a typical school year; one in 10 say they've been called an offensive name at school; and, in urban schools, nearly 40 percent of students report seeing bigoted graffiti on campus. Disturbingly, schools are the third most common location for hate crimes. So what can educators and schools do to help elevate levels of racial tolerance among students?

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Raising Optimistic Kids

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - This post explains a little more about what it means to be optimistic or pessimistic and so that we parents can better foster optimism in our kids. Martin Seligman has been doing research on optimism for decades, and his book The Optimistic Child is a great resource for parents. According to Seligman and other researchers, how optimistic or pessimistic we are amounts to how we explain life's events, be they good or bad. There are three basic dimensions to an explanation: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. The OPTIMISITIC way of understanding why something GOOD happened would explain:

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The Benefits of Optimism

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Apr. 08 (Review) - Are our children hopeful? Do they expect good in the world? That things will work out for the best? Optimism is so closely related to happiness that the two can practically be equated. And guess what: optimism is a teachable skill. Hope, faith and optimism are all positive emotions about the future, and so are essential parts of a happy childhood. That is enough for me, but if a happy childhood isn't your first priority for your kids, think about these other benefits reaped by optimistic children. Compared to pessimistic people, optimists are:tools-icon-book.gif * More successful in school, at work, and in athletics * They are healthier and they live longer * They are more satisfied with their marriages * They are less likely to suffer from depression * They are less anxious

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For orangutans, laughter is contagious

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - It may be the highest form of flattery, but imitation is among the lowest forms of empathy. But that doesn't make it meaningless. A new study has shown that orangutans imitate each other's facial expressions, the first evidence that empathy may exist in non-humans. The study, published in Biology Letters and led by researchers from the University of Portsmouth (in the UK) and the University of Hanover (in Germany), examined 25 orangutans in captivity. Researchers honed in on one of the orangutans' expressions in particular: oval-shaped open-mouths that are equivalent to human laughter. Just like humans, researchers found, the orangutans' laughter was contagious: When one of them flashed his open-mouthed grin, others around him followed suit roughly two-thirds of the time.

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Foundations of Cooperation in Young Children

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - Mar. 26 (Review) - Considerable research in the field of moral development has established that children as young as one year of age engage in kind, helpful-or "pro-social"-behavior. But only recently have psychologists started to look at the conditions that help foster this kind of behavior in children. -- In a soon-to-be-published article in Cognition, noted Harvard University developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke and her graduate student Kristina Olson show that three-and-a-quarter-year-old kids deliberately act pro-socially, but they discriminate about to whom they lend a hand.

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What Kids Learn During Dinner

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - Of everything I'll discuss on Half Full, having dinner as a family is one of the most important things. Think of it as concentrated dose of nurture and nourishment, two of the greatest and most fundamental human needs. -- The powerful effects of family mealtimes come from two things: 1) Modeling: the dinner table is a place where kids learn important social and emotional skills that they might not have the opportunity to learn elsewhere. 2) Ritual: A family mealtime is a routine rich with meaning that combines the basic human needs of emotional nurturance and physical nutrition.

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The Power Paradox

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Dacher Keltner - Mar. 12 (Special Report) - Guided by centuries of advice like Machiavelli's and Greene's, we tend to believe that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion. Indeed, we might even assume that positions of power demand this kind of conduct--that to run smoothly, society needs leaders who are willing and able to use power this way. As seductive as these notions are, they are dead wrong. Instead, a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively when it's used responsibly, by people who are attuned to and engaged with the needs and interests of others. Years of research suggests that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror.

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Being social may help your heart

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - A new study lends some scientific support to the idea that humans are social creatures. -- The study, led by researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and published in the February issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, suggests that social health and heart health are linked. The researchers found that low-income participants with a history of heart problems were less likely to have recurring heart attacks or chest pain if they lived in a county with high "social capital, " which means that trust, cooperation, and social networks are pervasive there.

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The Science of Raising Happy Kids

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christine Carter, Kelly Corrigan - Feb. 28 (Opinion) - Videos to help busy parents raise happy and emotionally literate kids. From UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the scientific understanding of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior.

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A better relationship in 5 hours

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Feb. 14 (Review) - This posting continues a four-part series on improving your relationship to improve your children's well-being. Go here for Part I, "Your love life, your child's happiness," and here for Part II, How To Fight. Just to restate the obvious: it takes time to work on a relationship. Time you might otherwise be spending with your children. But the research shows that working on your relationship with your co-parent - even if you aren't married - can really influence your kids' well-being. So EVEN IF it means giving up a little time with the kids to become better friends with whomever is helping you raise them, I say: make it a priority.

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Cross-reference: GoodWiki-GreaterGood

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - Feb. 03 (Review) - This page is an annotated cross reference between the Topic Pages of GoodWiki and articles and sources in Greater Good Magazine and the Greater Good Blog.

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Political Primates

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christopher Boehm - Feb. 01 (Review) - Recent American politics has been defined by a series of bitter power struggles, in which the Bush administration is accused of overstepping its authority and its critics do their best to curb its power. In such conflicts we can see traces of countless earlier struggles, from the American Revolution to Watergate. Similar struggles for dominance and power take place in countries all over the world, and we even see them crop up in our local communities and family life.

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