Emotion, Mental health, Social and behavioural

How happiness campaigns could end up making us sadder

These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have an ironic effect, actually making sad people feel sadder.

30 August 2012

By Christian Jarrett

Founded in 2010, the Action for Happiness movement states: "What we want for our society is as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery". These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have an ironic effect, actually making sad people feel sadder (update: please see the comments below where the Director of Action for Happiness, Mark Williamson, gives his response to this study).

Brock Bastian and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of Australian and Japanese students and found that those people who believed more strongly that society expects us to try to be happy, also tended to evaluate their own negative emotions more negatively. In other words, believing that there's a cultural expectation to strive for happiness is associated with feeling sad about being sad. In turn, people who felt this societal expectation more keenly, also reported experiencing negative emotions more often and having poorer wellbeing (a fall-out that was mediated by these participants being more critical of their own negative emotions). Comparing across cultures, the overall pattern of results was present but weaker in Japan, where negative emotions are generally better tolerated.

These initial findings provided only a snapshot. To get a better sense of the causality of societal expectations, Bastian and his team conducted two further studies in which Australian participants were first primed with carefully prepared newspaper articles, and then prompted to feel negative emotion by reminiscing in writing about a negative event from their lives.

Reading a news article about research that claimed sadness is infectious or that sad people are disliked led participants to experience more negative emotion after they'd reminisced about a bad event in their past. It's as if a reminder of society's intolerance to negative emotion aggravated participants' own negative feelings. By contrast, reading an article that said sad people are accepted and liked, led participants to experience less negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise.

Results from the control condition in this study were particularly revealing. In this case participants were primed with a mundane article about fertiliser. They experienced just as much negative emotion after the reminiscence exercise as participants who'd read the article about sad people being disliked. This suggests the reminder about society's intolerance of negative emotions was unnecessary for aggravating the experience of sadness. "Social pressures appear to be highly normative and particularly so within Western cultures," the researchers said.

Bastian and his colleagues said their findings show how our beliefs about society's intolerance of negative emotions has downstream effects, changing how we experience our own emotions, "ironically aggravating those same emotions that are deemed to be socially undesirable or unacceptable."

"Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasising social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often," the researchers concluded.

** Mark Williamson says: August 30, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Hello, thanks for this interesting post. I'm Director of the Action for Happiness movement you refer to, so I hope you don't mind if I add a bit of clarification from our side. This piece raises a really important point – that sadness and other negative emotions are an inevitable part of life and if we encourage people to ignore these or tell them that they should be "happy all the time" this is in fact a path to worse psychological health. We completely agree with this.

At Action for Happiness, we think about happiness in a much broader and more meaningful way than just short-lived feelings of pleasure and enjoyment. Matthieu Ricard put it well when he said that "Happiness is a deep sense of flourishing, not a mere pleasurable feeling or fleeting emotion but an optimal state of being". (Obviously, there's a terminology point here, but this way of thinking about happiness is consistent with what parents say when you ask them what they want most for their children. Almost all answer "to be happy" – they don't mean smiling all the time, they mean living a life that is happy overall – i.e. healthy, resilient, good relationships, rewarding work, enjoyable hobbies/interests, financial security etc).

Also, the main thrust of Action for Happiness is to encourage people to care more about the happiness of OTHERS. It's not a self-help movement of people just trying to make themselves happier, it's a movement of people who want to create a happier society for everyone. So this includes people campaigning for greater investment in mental health, teachers helping kids develop emotional resilience, business leaders encouraging their employees to learn mindfulness techniques, community members setting up local wellbeing groups and much more.

Many members of our movement are people who have struggled with depression and anxiety and we encourage people to talk openly about their experiences. We also do a lot to encourage the uptake of mindfulness practices which, as I'm sure you'll know, are about accepting thoughts and emotions as they arise (whether negative or positive) rather than trying to ignore negative feelings and encourage only positive ones. One of our recent events even had a talk from Oliver Burkeman about his book "The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking".

So yes, if our movement was "Action for telling people they have to be happy" then everything you've written above would be spot on. But actually, we're more like "Action for helping people lead genuinely happier lives, including accepting and dealing constructively with adversity and anxiety" – but that name didn't seem quite so catchy!

Best wishes to all, Mark Williamson (Director, Action for Happiness)