The Woohoo! Report

By Judith Kleinfeld

FAIRBANKS — Why shouldn’t my friend Susan be happy? She has everything — money, a loving husband, a good job, and lots of friends.

Sure, her success in life makes her happy. But there’s a twist to Susan’s story. Her happy personality also created her success. People like to be around her. Her cheerful face makes others calmer and more optimistic.

Remember the saying, “Smile and the world smiles with you. Cry and you cry alone?” Research suggests the adage is true.

“Happy people are more likely to achieve favorable life circumstances,” find psychologist Sonja Lyubomirski and her colleagues in a review of 225 studies, published in Psychological Bulletin.

It’s not that happiness comes from success. The insight of this research is that happiness also creates success; it’s a causal circle.

Altruism and relationships with others

Happy people also have better relationships with people than others who are less happy. They say they have a higher number of people they can rely on, not counting family members. They also spend more hours volunteering for organizations.

Happier people are also more likely to be energetic and active. In diary studies, the happier people spent more time socializing with their friends and family, and in activities like going out to a party, a museum, a restaurant, or a shopping trip.

They have stronger marriages — and a fulfilling marriage is more strongly related to personal happiness than your income, your job, or anything else.

Physical and mental health

“A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones,” according to Proverbs 17:22. Proverbs has it right. Studies of people who can maintain their happiness despite serious illnesses live longer.

People with positive personalities suffering from end-stage renal disease, for example, were more apt to be alive four years later. On average, only 50 percent of people with this disease are alive four years later.

If they had happy dispositions, women experiencing a recurrence of breast cancer were more apt to be alive seven years later, and people with spinal cord injuries were more likely to be alive 11 years later.

Optimistic women even have babies with higher birth weights.

Work

Happier people score higher on tests of creativity. They find new ways to approach activities and problems in their daily lives and make better decisions.

Given an “in-basket test” where people had to complete diverse management assignments, happier people did better. They particularly mastered difficult information.

In this time of economic recession, it’s important to know that happier people who are interviewing for a job are more likely to receive a callback for a second interview and get re-employed. They are also less likely to lose their jobs. They get higher supervisory evaluations on their work quality, productivity and dependability.

Generosity and judgments of others

People with positive dispositions also are more inclined to see other people more positively. In one study, students talked with someone they didn’t know in a laboratory and then watched a series of videotapes showing an unfamiliar student.

Happier people recalled the person they met in the lab as kinder and warmer. Happy people also liked the person they saw on the videotape a lot more.

Even a photograph in a college yearbook leads to a “halo effect.” If an observer looked at a picture of a young woman with a genuine smile (her face crinkling around the eyes, not just the forced smile you give when someone tells you to say “cheese”), they saw her not only as having a better personality but also as more intelligent.

In another study, students who were more cheerful when they entered college earned more money 16 years later.

Happier people are also more apt to be kind and charitable people. They reported doing more things for others over the past few weeks, like shopping for a sick friend.

Students who were high in personal happiness reported spending a greater proportion of their time helping others, according to a study that tracked their experience each day.

“I don’t mean that if you are good you will be happy,” as Bertrand Russell put it, “I mean that if you are happy, you will be good.”

Judith Kleinfeld is a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She welcomes comments or criticism. E-mail: ffjsk@uaf.edu.

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