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{"took": 38, "total": 470, "max_score": 1.6061544, "results": [{"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@82d7f45507d746e899007a24e3bd20c2", "_score": 1.6061544, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Terms of Happiness: Happiness Definitions"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@82d7f45507d746e899007a24e3bd20c2", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What is Happiness?", "Terms of Happiness: Happiness Definitions"], "excerpt": "Terms of <b>Happiness</b>: <b>Happiness</b> Definitions", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@82d7f45507d746e899007a24e3bd20c2"}, "score": 1.6061544}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4e9021dba26a4f549c57b94f7dbc1cac", "_score": 1.5292451, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Terms of Happiness: Happiness Definitions", "html_content": "The terms of happiness Periodically in \"The Science of Happiness,\" we'll feature a unit called \"The Terms of Happiness,\" in which we define terminology that's important to the core concepts of that week. This is our first, and perhaps most elementary, \"Terms of Happiness\" unit, covering some of the terms scientists use to define happiness. Happiness: This is a big one. Most of us probably don\u2019t believe we need a formal definition of happiness--we know it when we feel it, and we often use the term to describe a range of positive emotions, including joy, pride, contentment, and gratitude. But as Dacher suggested in his previous video, to understand the causes and effects of happiness, researchers first need to define it. Many of them use the term interchangeably with \u201csubjective well-being,\u201d which they measure by simply asking people to report how satisfied they feel with their own lives and how much positive and negative emotion they\u2019re experiencing. In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky elaborates, describing happiness as \u201cthe experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one\u2019s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.\u201d That definition resonates with the focus of this course and the approach the Greater Good Science Center takes toward happiness: It captures the fleeting positive emotions that come with happiness, along with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life\u2014and suggests how these properties of happiness complement each other. Here are some of the terms that describe what scientists measure when they set out to measure happiness. You'll encounter them across studies of happiness featured in this course. Life satisfaction: A general assessment that, as a whole, one's life is good and worth living. Researchers usually measure life satisfaction by using the Satisfaction with Life Scale, developed by University of Illinois professor Ed Diener and colleagues. Positive affect: A technical term to describe the experience of feeling a positive emotion, such as joy, love, or amusement. As Dr. Lyubomirsky notes above, positive affect is an important ingredient to happiness and is sometimes used synonymously with happiness, though it generally refers to a fleeting emotional state rather than an enduring way of being. It is often measured using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Subjective well-being: As mentioned above, researchers often use this term interchangably with happiness, perhaps because it sounds more precise and scientific. It refers to the way people evaluate their lives, in terms of both their global life satisfaction and emotional states--i.e., it is often assessed by measuring life satisfaction and positive affect. It is strongly tied to positive health. "}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4e9021dba26a4f549c57b94f7dbc1cac", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What is Happiness?", "Terms of Happiness: Happiness Definitions"], "excerpt": "Terms of <b>Happiness</b>: <b>Happiness</b> Definitions", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4e9021dba26a4f549c57b94f7dbc1cac"}, "score": 1.5292451}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@f91dec1e670a403a9b8fcb7d87694901", "_score": 1.3772337, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question 32: Multiple Choice", "capa_content": " According to the article \"Is a Happy Life Different from a Meaningful One?\", which of the following best characterizes the relationship between happiness and meaning in life? Happiness and meaning tend to be unrelated. Happiness and meaning often go hand-in-hand and reinforce one another. Happiness that is based on pleasure (\u201chedonic happiness\u201d) is more likely to promote good health than happiness based on meaning (\u201ceudaimonic happiness\u201d). Pursuing meaningful goals gets in the way of happiness. "}, "content_type": "CAPA", "problem_types": ["multiplechoiceresponse"], "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@f91dec1e670a403a9b8fcb7d87694901", "start_date": "2014-11-04T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Final Exam", "Final Exam", "Final Exam"], "excerpt": "between <b>happiness</b> and meaning in life? <b>Happiness</b> and meaning tend to", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@f91dec1e670a403a9b8fcb7d87694901"}, "score": 1.3772337}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@687a955f222142d4bae3e1f25d21f0e9", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Philosophical Views on Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@687a955f222142d4bae3e1f25d21f0e9", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What is Happiness?", "Philosophical Views on Happiness"], "excerpt": "Philosophical Views on <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@687a955f222142d4bae3e1f25d21f0e9"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@dcfd109baeb147a3bbdce520334afc0a", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "How Scientists Define Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@dcfd109baeb147a3bbdce520334afc0a", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What is Happiness?", "How Scientists Define Happiness"], "excerpt": "How Scientists Define <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@dcfd109baeb147a3bbdce520334afc0a"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@e449f86b90c14a9ebc5d14ba7ab5f906", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Happiness Button", "html_content": "As you may remember from the introductory video for this course, when Dacher teaches the science of happiness at UC Berkeley, he invites his students to imagine that someone has invented a happiness machine that could make a person happy just by pressing a button. He asks his students: Would you press the button? Now we pose that same question to you. If you had access to the happiness machine, would you use it? Why or why not? Please respond to the poll below, then share your thoughts about why you would or would not press the button. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@e449f86b90c14a9ebc5d14ba7ab5f906", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "Why Does Happiness Matter?", "The Happiness Button"], "excerpt": "The <b>Happiness</b> Button<span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>Dacher teaches the science of <b>happiness</b> at UC Berkeley, he invites his", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@e449f86b90c14a9ebc5d14ba7ab5f906"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@b2fd30d2c3f045228023a304c56667ca", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Pursuit of Happiness", "transcript_en": "So thus far, we've learned about what happiness is, we've learned about some of the benefits that are associated with being happy, and how it relates to some of the positive emotions that we might think of. We've even tried out an activity: the 3 Good Things that's meant to help us develop into happier versions of ourselves. But this activity, this whole notion of offering an activity as part of this course brings up a question, which is: is this even worthwhile? Is it even possible to shift the happiness lever within ourselves? Or are we born with a particular level of happiness which is pretty much all we can obtain in life? In this next sequence, let's listen to Sonja Lyubomirsky as she walks us through some of the pessimism about whether it's even possible to pursue happiness and tells us a little bit about her own research which sheds some light on that question."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@b2fd30d2c3f045228023a304c56667ca", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "Can We Increase Our Own Happiness?", "Is Increasing Happiness Possible?"], "excerpt": "The Pursuit of <b>Happiness</b><span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>So thus far, we've learned about what <b>happiness</b> is, we've learned", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@b2fd30d2c3f045228023a304c56667ca"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a3bd5203f592428384a268f74f77d118", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Is Increasing Happiness Possible?"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a3bd5203f592428384a268f74f77d118", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "Can We Increase Our Own Happiness?", "Is Increasing Happiness Possible?"], "excerpt": "Is Increasing <b>Happiness</b> Possible?", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a3bd5203f592428384a268f74f77d118"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@849cf92487194777941b3b9678321e05", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Kindness-Happiness Loop", "transcript_en": "So you\u2019ve just learned a bit about compassion, what it is, and how to think about it evolutionarily, now let\u2019s take on this really important question that I hope you\u2019re thinking about which is how is compassion a pathway to happiness and a meaningful life? So one way to think about this question is to look at what happens when we\u2019re kind? What are some of the benefits of kindness, which we've learned in the social scientific literature is very often the product of being compassionate and feeling concern. So for example, if you look at the United States at rates of volunteerism which is defined as when you give assistance to somebody in need for no compensation, 31% of Americans in recent surveys were reported to be volunteering. And what we're learning from really groundbreaking research by people like Stephanie Brown at SUNY Stony Brook, is that volunteerism actually enhances your well being and your life expectancy. In her particular study, if you look at caregivers in their later stages of life if they provide care 14 hours a week or more, they are 36% less likely to die in a seven year period than people who provide less than 14 hours a week of care in this study. Really remarkable evidence that kindness, caring, volunteering, assisting others, is good for your life expectancy. So what are some other advantages or benefits to kindness? Here I'm surveying a really emerging and exciting literature, the more I practice kindness, the more I'm enhancing the welfare of others, I tend to be less lonely on a regular basis, I show stronger immune profiles, I have better health symptoms, sort of less pain and the like, I have fewer bodily aches, I report lower levels of depression. There's studies that show that volunteerism and helping others is twice as protective for your cardiovascular profile as taking aspirin. Other studies still show that you know when you volunteer in the later stages of life you have a greater life expectancy you feel more energetic and strong, there's so many benefits you've probably intuitively felt of practicing kindness, being altruistic, sharing with others. If you go to the happiness literature, and here we're going to cite really one of the most important studies that got the science of happiness off the ground. It was done by Elizabeth Dunn up at the University of British Columbia and her colleagues, and they asked this really simple question, right. What happens when I give to other people, if I give a resource to other people in terms of my happiness as compared to if I receive something or I get to indulge in some desire? Now what they did in this really elegant simple study, is first they measured how happy people were in their study, they then gave them some money to give away, I think it was $20 to another participant, and in one of two conditions they either gave that money away as I said, or they were told to just kind of spend in on themselves on something they didn't feel they could buy until they had that money. So later in the study they measured how happy the people are, and so it's a really simple question. Where do you find the greater happiness benefit? Giving the money away, or spending it on self and you're probably anticipating the answer which is people who gave money away rose in happiness over the course of the day, people who spent in on themselves showed a slight decrease in happiness, and really impressively, more recent work is showing by Dunn and others that this finding replicates in dozens and dozens of countries, that giving gives you a bigger happiness benefit than spending on the self. Not only do you see this in adults, Aknin and colleagues in other work have shown if you just look at what brings little kids the greatest delight as measured in kind of the bursts of smiles on their faces, you find that when kids give out of their own desirable treats they give to a puppet in an experiment, that\u2019s when they show the greatests smiles of delight compared to other conditions so we\u2019re seeing this in young kids as well that there\u2019s kind of this basic benefit to being kind. Barb Fredrickson likewise generating evidence that\u2019s on this theme and you\u2019ve heard about Barb from the University of North Carolina on the positive emotions, has done several different studies where she has ordinary citizens like you and I practice loving kindness meditations over an eight or nine week study. And this is just where people are meditating on directing kind warm thoughts towards other people for five ten minutes a day, and if you track people\u2019s positive emotions , like contentment and amusement and joy which we\u2019ve talked about, over the course of the nine weeks when you practice and train your mind to kind of be kinder towards others you see these rises in daily experiences of positive emotions. Again, yet another benefit to the practice of kindness the sort of orientation that we\u2019ve been thinking about towards other people\u2019s welfare. So as we start to kind of close out this section, you know I hope you\u2019re noticing what Aknin and Dunn and Mike Norton at Harvard Business School were thinking about which is there's this really powerful happiness kindness bidirectional loop, which is that the more I practice kindness or I volunteer or I help a stranger in need or I direct resources in charity or philanthropy, I actually get this warm glow of generosity and then that happiness feeling feeds into further acts of kindness. So it's this really virtuous cycle."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@849cf92487194777941b3b9678321e05", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "How Kindness Fosters Happiness", "The Kindness-Happiness Loop"], "excerpt": "The Kindness-<b>Happiness</b> Loop<span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>a pathway to <b>happiness</b> and a meaningful life? So one way to think", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@849cf92487194777941b3b9678321e05"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@1face127818e494d8133c6272e1c1e39", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Kindness-Happiness Loop"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@1face127818e494d8133c6272e1c1e39", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "How Kindness Fosters Happiness", "The Kindness-Happiness Loop"], "excerpt": "The Kindness-<b>Happiness</b> Loop", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@1face127818e494d8133c6272e1c1e39"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@6d2e73dc4fa243fa9dcabc76ad28e3f2", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Debunking Myths of Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@6d2e73dc4fa243fa9dcabc76ad28e3f2", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What Does--and Doesn't--Make Us Happy?", "Debunking Myths of Happiness"], "excerpt": "Debunking Myths of <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@6d2e73dc4fa243fa9dcabc76ad28e3f2"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5373b76292e14f1ebfc3c350035e86b0", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question: Money and Happiness", "html_content": "Research by Ed Diener & Martin Seligman, Robert Biswas-Diener, Richard Easterlin, and others suggests that money might boost happiness when it helps lift people out of impoverished circumstances, but beyond that, its effects on happiness are limited. \"More money may enhance SWB [subjective well-being] when it means avoiding poverty and living in a developed nation,\" write Drs. Diener and Biswas-Diener in a widely cited paper, \"but income appears to increase SWB little over the long-term when more of it is gained by well-off individuals whose material desires rise with their incomes.\" Given what you have learned so far from the science of happiness, why do you think this is? In other words, what do you think accounts for this limited relationship between money and happiness? Please post your response below and see what your classmates have to say."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5373b76292e14f1ebfc3c350035e86b0", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What Does--and Doesn't--Make Us Happy?", "Money and Happiness Data/Controversy"], "excerpt": "Question: Money and <b>Happiness</b><span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>Easterlin, and others suggests that money might boost <b>happiness</b> when", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5373b76292e14f1ebfc3c350035e86b0"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@2057202128e4452387909efca7de9d67", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Economics of Happiness", "html_content": "The Economics of Happiness By John Robbins When I was 21, I told my father that I didn\u2019t want to work with him any longer at the ice cream company he co-founded, Baskin-Robbins, and I didn\u2019t want to depend on his financial achievements. I did not want to have a trust fund or any other access to or dependence on his money. I wanted to discover and live my own values, and I knew that I wasn\u2019t strong enough to do that if I remained tethered, even a little, to my father\u2019s fortune. I left Baskin-Robbins and the money my father had made selling ice cream because I didn\u2019t want to live a life of affluence based on a product that could harm people\u2019s health. I also recoiled at the idea of inheriting a life of privilege while so many others had to struggle for their basic livelihood. \u00a9 narvikk I didn\u2019t take the steps I did because I thought money is bad. On the contrary, I believe money is good and important. Without it, it\u2019s impossible to thrive in the modern world and difficult even to survive. But money isn\u2019t a god. It\u2019s something to use. Not something to crave or to worship, and certainly not something that should rule our lives. There seem to be two schools of thought about the relationship between money and happiness: On the one hand, there are those who say money isn\u2019t that important. \u201cYou can only become truly accomplished at something you love,\u201d writes Maya Angelou. \u201cDon\u2019t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can\u2019t take their eyes off you.\u201d In her camp is the environmental advocate John Muir, who once said that he was better off than the billionaire E. H. Harriman. \u201cI have all the money I want,\u201d Muir explained, \u201cand he hasn\u2019t.\u201d On the other hand, there are those who say that money is essential, and that there is something spiritually pretentious and elitist about pretending otherwise. It\u2019s not the love of money that is the root of all evil, they would say, but the lack of money. Maybe money can\u2019t directly buy happiness, but it certainly can buy lots of things that contribute tremendously to happiness. While it is possible to be happy with less, it is far easier to be happy with more. They would argue that those who believe money is not important have probably never watched their children go hungry. I believe there is truth in both camps. Up to a certain point, money is vital to happiness for almost everyone. It can buy food, clothing, and housing and provide for other basic needs. Once a person\u2019s basic needs are met, though, money takes on a different meaning. For a family barely scraping by, $500 could be the difference between paying the rent or being evicted\u2014between having a place to sleep and being homeless. To someone more affluent, $500 might simply mean a few hours spent shopping for clothes, or that much more financial security and increased savings. But what does science tell us about the relationship between money and happiness? A vast amount of research about the question has been conducted globally in the last few decades. As more and more scientists have become involved, the studies, experiments, and forms of research have become increasingly sophisticated. No longer must scientists simply rely on what people tell them. What people say can be verified. Well-being can be assessed by various empirical measures with high consistency, reliability, and validity. This research has consistently pointed to a conclusion that might surprise some: Money brings happiness only insofar as it lifts people out of poverty. Once that point is clearly passed, the link between monetary wealth and happiness is actually very small. Why money is like beer Take, for example, the people of Denmark and Sweden, who have consistently been found to be among the happiest in the world. These prosperous societies score at or near the top of most measures of quality of life, happiness, and social well-being. What makes things interesting, though, is that the people of Costa Rica, according to these same studies, are actually happier, even though the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of Costa Rica is only one-fourth that of Denmark and Sweden. Similarly, the Guatemalans are happier than people in the United States, despite income levels only a tenth as high. And the people of Honduras are as happy as those of the United Kingdom, even with a per capita GDP that is only 12 percent as great. In fact, the more you look at the data comparing people\u2019s monetary wealth with their levels of happiness, the harder it is to see any correlation at all once you get past the poverty line. Surveys of the richest Americans, for example, show happiness scores identical to those of the Amish, a people who intentionally live almost entirely without cars or telephones. Of course, the lowest life-satisfaction scores come from the world\u2019s most destitute people. The happiness numbers for homeless people in Calcutta, India, for example, are among the lowest ever recorded. But, according to research by psychologists Robert Biswas-Diener and Ed Diener, when these people have enough money to move off the street and into a slum, their levels of happiness and satisfaction rise and become nearly equivalent to those of a sample of college students from 47 nations. Psychologist David Lykken, summarizing his extensive studies on the subject, says that \u201cpeople who go to work in their overalls and on the bus are just as happy, on the average, as those in suits who drive to work in their own Mercedes.\u201d How about the ultrarich? According to a study by Ed Diener and his colleagues, the Forbes 100 wealthiest Americans are barely happier than the average person. The happiness scores of the richest Americans, in fact, are only slightly higher than those of Masai tribesmen, a semi-nomadic African people who live without electricity or running water. After analyzing more than 150 studies on wealth and happiness, Diener and his colleague Martin Seligman, two of the world\u2019s top experts on the science of happiness, wrote:\u201cAlthough economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction . . . and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust.\u201d Money, it seems, is a little like beer. Most people like it, but more is not necessarily better. A beer might improve your mood, but drinking 10 beers not only won\u2019t increase your happiness tenfold, it might not increase it at all. Yet we keep thinking that having more of the things money can buy will make us happier. Despite our current economic problems, we still have bigger homes, more cars, more appliances, and more possessions than any people have ever had at any time in history. But has acquiring all this stuff been worth the costs? While we\u2019ve been on this multidecade shopping binge, our rates of depression, obesity, heart attacks, divorces, and suicides have skyrocketed. Antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. As a nation, we consume two-thirds of the global market for drugs prescribed to combat chronic sadness and hopelessness. One study found that today, the average American child experiences higher levels of anxiety than did the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s. And yet, when Americans were asked in a survey what single factor they believed would most improve the quality of their lives, the most common answer was \u201cmore money.\u201d Maybe we\u2019re caught in ancient fears of not having enough to make it, primal fears of not having what we need to survive. Maybe we\u2019re stuck believing that nothing is ever enough, that true satisfaction is impossible because danger lurks around every corner. Maybe we\u2019ve been bombarded from an early and vulnerable age with the message that money and the things it can buy are our only ticket to happiness. And maybe we\u2019ve been hampered, as a people, by the fact that the primary index we have created to measure our economic well-being is absolutely guaranteed to get everything wrong. Pointing us in the wrong direction For the past 75 years, the GDP has been the fundamental measure of a nation\u2019s economic progress. The reason the United States is considered the world\u2019s most prosperous nation is because it has the largest GDP. Economists, politicians, and other leaders take for granted that the higher a nation\u2019s GDP, the better off are its people. Unfortunately, using the GDP (and its nearly identical twin, the GNP) to measure well-being and genuine progress makes about as much sense as using a fork to eat soup: It\u2019s the wrong tool for the job. Two months before he was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy explained why: Our gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods, and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm, nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. How can we develop a healthy relationship to wealth and to genuine economic progress when our most fundamental gauge to assess societal well-being is so askew? The GDP, like the GNP, simply adds together all monetary expenditures. The GDP does not care one whit what it is we\u2019re consuming, about how equitably distributed a country\u2019s wealth might be, nor whether the money we spend is ours or is borrowed from future generations. It is entirely possible for the nation with the world\u2019s highest GDP to also have the world\u2019s highest poverty rate and the world\u2019s highest level of national debt. The GDP rises whenever money changes hands. When families break down and children require foster care, the GDP grows, but not so when parents successfully care for their children. People who max out their credit cards buying things they don\u2019t need make the GDP look good. People who save their money and live sensibly don\u2019t. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. Healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don\u2019t smoke. In recent years, the GDP has gotten substantial boosts from toxic waste spills such as the Exxon Valdez disaster and the boom in prison construction. Meanwhile, natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless, unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue. But even then, the GDP measures the resulting economic activity in a manner that is fundamentally misleading. As economist Mark Anielski points out, by counting the depletion of natural resources as current income rather than as the liquidation of assets, the GDP \u201cviolates both basic accounting principles and common sense.\u201d Alternatives to the GDP One of the reasons the current financial crisis took so many economic experts by surprise is that the systems we use to measure our economic well-being failed us. They did not register that the euphoric growth performance of the world economy prior to the 2008 downturn was, in fact, utterly unsustainable. It is clear now that much of the then-heralded economic growth was a statistical mirage, based on real estate and stock prices that had been grossly inflated by bubbles. If we had had a better measurement system, would we have seen the problems earlier? Would governments have been able to take precautionary measures to avoid or at least minimize the present turmoil? As long as we continue to rely on the GDP, our leaders will lack a timely and reliable set of wealth accounts\u2014the \u201cbalance sheets\u201d of the economy. Fortunately, many efforts are underway to develop economic indexes that are far more reliable measures of genuine wealth and progress than the GDP. Amartya Sen is a Nobel laureate in economics from Harvard who has received more than 80 honorary doctorates for his work in understanding the underlying mechanisms of poverty, famine, and gender inequality. He is also one of many leading economists who recognize that, as he put it in 2008, \u201cthe gross domestic product is very misleading and something must be done to get better measures of well-being.\u201d Professor Sen and another Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, are co-chairmen of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, established in 2008 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy to develop an alternative to the GDP. The government of China, similarly, is increasingly recognizing that the nation\u2019s torrid economic growth has come at a growing ecological and social cost. Anielski, author of a groundbreaking book on alternatives to the GDP, The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth, is working with the Chinese government on how to adopt \u201cgreen GDP accounting.\u201d The goal is to take quality of life and the environment into account when measuring the country\u2019s economic health. There are many other alternatives under development, including one being created by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international consortium of 30 countries that are committed to democracy and the market economy. I\u2019m heartened to see the many efforts under way to develop alternatives to the GDP that take into account the health of our lives, the strength of our communities, and the sustainability of the environment. And yet it is no simple task to develop a monetized system that can measure the real determinants of happiness and well-being and do justice to the vast complexities of modern economic life. It may be that no single alternative index will emerge to entirely replace the GDP, and we will come to rely on a variety of indexes, each with its own perspectives, to provide us with as complete a picture as possible of the real state of our economic affairs and our societal well-being. And then perhaps we will be able to develop policies that lead to our ultimate goal\u2014a sustainable prosperity shared by all."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@2057202128e4452387909efca7de9d67", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What Does--and Doesn't--Make Us Happy?", "The Economics of Happiness"], "excerpt": "The Economics of <b>Happiness</b><span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>The Economics of <b>Happiness</b> By John Robbins When I was 21, I told my", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@2057202128e4452387909efca7de9d67"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Social Connection and Happiness", "transcript_en": "I like to start this next section on the relationship between social connection and happiness with a quote by Brene Brown what she says is connection is why we're here that's what gives us meaning and purpose in life another interesting set of thinkers in the space are Ed Diener and Marty Seligman and Ed Diener and Marty did a a research paper called very happy people and what they did is they looked around and interviewed and surveyed people about their levels of happiness and other aspects of their life and properties of their personality and what they found you know overall was that very happy people tended to have rich and satisfying relationships and the spend little time alone relative to people with average levels of happiness and what they sort of claim is a social relationships form a necessary but not sufficient condition for high happiness in other words you can't only have social relationships but if you don't have strong social relationships you're not likely to end up a person who would be characterized as very happy another study that looked at the relationship between social connection and happiness interviewed people about how many friends they have and then ask them how happy they were and it turns out that having more friends is a great predictor of subjective well-being also known as happiness another thinker in this space is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi took some high and and Csikszentmihalyi is famous for having come up with a term called flow and flow is a topic that we'll cover later in the course but one of the studies that he did showed that when when you ask people what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and how it contributes to their happiness the things that are most strongly related to feeling happy is talking with friends another research group looked at people in a cafe in sort of naturalistic observations as Cassie Mogilner and what she did is she had people do a little task that sort of made them think more about time they think more about money and what happens when people thought about time they spent more time socializing when they thought about money they spent more time working and then the crux is the people that spent more time socializing reported greater happiness when they were walking out the cafe so again spending time investing resources in connecting with people is something that that is associated with greater happiness finally Dan Kahneman and a researcher from Princeton when he developed a method for measuring wellness your positive emotions and emotional states in general called The Daily reconstruction method he asked people to recount experiences in their day and talk about how they made them feel with regards to positive emotion negative emotion and a couple other dimensions and what he found was the things the activities experiences that were most highly associated with positive emotion was number one intimate relations but number two socializing so again time and time again when you ask people what makes them happier when you look at when people are happiest tends to be when they are around other people when they're engaged and meaningful social interactions one of the last little pieces of literature we're gonna look to in in looking at or when thinking about happiness and social connection is the impact the deleterious impact of isolation and loneliness turns out that loneliness has all kinds of negative impacts on health and well-being measure both physiologically and through questionnaires in survey methods for example people who are lonely show decreased inflammatory control or hyper inflammation in their bodies a worsened immune responses and difficulty sleeping another little piece of the story that's really interesting has to do with what it feels like in in the brain and to actually be socially excluded and researchers at UCLA Matt Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger have been studying this issue and shown that when people are actively excluded from the game their brains light up regions that are the same regions that light up when when they feel pain when they're undergoing physical physically painful experiences so again being isolated being alone is is associated with with states that really don't know contribute substantially to happiness"}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Intro to Week 2", "Links between Social Connections and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Social Connection and <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cd37346403b2443d83ed248b24133c17", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Relationships, Marriage, and Happiness", "transcript_en": "Now what were going to do now is take a look at this fascinating new science of what makes for healthy romantic partnerships that bring us happiness. First a little bit of background, and here I\u2019m drawing upon the observations of Helen Fisher an anthropologist from Rutgers university and her wonderful work which is that in most cultures that have been studied, remote cultures that have radically different levels of economic development, religious orientation, political orientation that there is this tendency to want to pair bond in humans that we have a sense of who were raising offspring with. If you look at the United States' society and industrialized cultures, most people will enter into some sort of long term partner ship 85 to 90 percent, whether it be marriage or recognized as a long term partnership, and are really interesting historical studies just for your own background understanding that these partnerships, as you might imagine, have changed over time So several centuries ago they were really about economic exchange and we\u2019ve moved more towards a love/ passion based model of why we fold into these partnerships.  And just by way of background, a lot of the data suggests when you take a step back, 40-50 percent of the marriages ending in the United States of the marriages that stay together a lot of them are struggling and unhappy, those marriages have pretty big effects upon the well being of kids, so its really something we have to lean on science to get a little wisdom to understand pathways to happy marriages. So first lets draw upon that Bowlby formulation and think about why do people fall in love and a little bit of science on love and desire before we get to the scientific study of happier and healthier marriages, and this is work by John Gonzaga and colleagues here at Berkeley and it\u2019ll start to bring together some of the traditions you learned about. Gonzaga was interested in \u201care there two different passions\u201d as John Bowllby would suggest of an attachment commitment passion of love vs a sexual desire or kind of a reproductive interest that really gets people together and so what John did was consult the literature on non human primates and looked at the nonverbal behaviors by which we express these important emotions of desire and romantic love. What humans do like non human primates, when they feel desire is a lot of lip related behavior; lip puckers, lip licking, were not unique, our primate predecessors do this, and biting their lips, and as we express love and devotion we tend to do non verbal behaviors that non human primates do as well. So, for example, open handed gestures, head tilts, warm smiles and the like, and what John found is really nice evidence that there are these core passions that get people into unions or partnerships of love and desire and in this particular study, what he found, very fitting with what we\u2019ve learned about oxytocin, is that, when I show these warm gestures of love, right, a nice head tilt and open handed gesture a warm smile, nice eye contact, I actually show the release of oxytocin go into my blood stream, it rises, whereas when I show sexual behaviors of lip licks and lip puckers you don\u2019t see the release of oxytocin so its really telling us, Bowlby was on to something by focusing on the passions to think about how we form these romantic partnerships. So now lets take on the question, once we\u2019ve formed a partnership, what makes for a happy marriage or romantic partnership? It\u2019s a really tricky question right? What we know from early studies of David Meyers and others is that in general there is a benefit to being in a partnership to being married in terms of your level of happiness but of course scientifically that\u2019s a very problematic relationship because you might have what we call selection effects where certain kinds of people enter into partnerships or marriages and it may be that just more warm kind happy people find it easier to get married and that\u2019s why marriage produces happiness, it\u2019s the person but not the institution and a more recent science has started to work on kinda disambiguating this and discovering that you know what really matters is to have kind of a happier marriage that will give you a boost in happiness, that happier marriages kinda buffer you against declines in well being much later in life, they help you handle stress and that poses the question of well how do we find these how do we cultivate these kind of happier more content romantic partnerships and marriages. So let me give you a couple of scientific approaches with very practical implications. One perspective that dominated the science of marriage and romantic partnerships really you might call it the demographic perspective which what they would do is gather cross sectional data, gather survey data from partners in a marriage or relationship and look at what correlates with happiness in that relationship right how satisfied they are. And what you find for example pretty replicated across studies is you know the older you are when you get married the happier you are, tend to be, in a relationship and a lot of reasons for that, you\u2019re more secure economically, you\u2019re a little bit wiser and so on. So tell your kids, wait a little while to get married. There are a lot of studies showing that if you\u2019re from a lower social class background you\u2019re less happy in your marriage and again there are a lot of reasons for that. If you\u2019re from a lower SES background its harder to pay bills, you\u2019re working multiple jobs, you\u2019re having more trouble having peaceful times with your kids because you\u2019re traveling around doing your work so but that tends to be a finding. There\u2019s a personality finding showing very replicated that if you\u2019re kinda anxious and neurotic and you tend to complain a lot you have less happy marriages for obvious reasons you\u2019re filling the atmosphere of the relationship with more complaints and tension and the like and those are largely correlational findings and it really should be noted that they only told us a little bit about the quality of the marriage and that really changed when John Gottman and Robert Levenson, John\u2019s up at the University of Washington Bob Levenson is a colleague here at Berkeley, pioneered a different approach to marriage that will really draw from what you\u2019re learning in this class which you might call the dynamic interaction style perspective which is they were really interested in do the face to face ways in which we talk to our partners in which we handle our conflicts in which we conduct our daily lives together, do those dynamic interactions together predict whether we\u2019ll stay together or not? They did a famous study which lead to what some of you may have heard about called the four horseman of the apocalypse. Here\u2019s how it goes: they got some young couples, 75 or so, in the Indiana area and they brought them to the lab and then they had them just engage in some conversations about what they did that day or what they\u2019re struggling with in their relationship and then they followed those couples for now a couple of decades to really track who stays together and who ruptures the relationship or divorces and what they\u2019ve documented is there are four specific behaviors that predict when these behaviors occur in combination there\u2019s a 92% likelihood that the couple will divorce about a decade later. And the behaviors are, I hope you\u2019re taking notes, number one is contempt, when you look down upon you\u2019re partner or you feel they\u2019re not worthy or you don\u2019t dignify them and you may roll your eyes or pthhh sort of do that sound when they\u2019re speaking, bad news. Number two is criticism, instead of kind of thinking about collaborative conversation or praise, when you\u2019re more inclined as your first tendency to criticize to fault find to cavil or carp or bring out problems, bad news for the relationship. Number three is stonewalling and this is a patterns of behavior a little bit more common in the men in this study where the individual might put out their hand and say you know we\u2019ve already talked about that I know our son is struggling in school we don\u2019t need to talk about that anymore they just shut down conversation, stonewalling. And finally, the fourth toxic behavior is what Gottman and Levenson call defensiveness which is kind of a counter punch approach to conversation where you know if you\u2019re partner says hey you\u2019re always late to dinner parties you counter punch ya, but you\u2019re a ridiculous dancer whatever it is you kind of throw in the critical response instead of kinda being accepting of it or taking it in and its really remarkable when you think about it from a ten minute conversation captured early in the marriage these four behaviors of contempt criticism stonewalling and defensiveness when they all happen, 92% chance several years later they are gonna get divorced. Very powerful discoveries. So, I hope you\u2019re asking the question that\u2019s the tough side, what makes for a problematic marriage or partnership what can we do to sort of build up stronger partnerships and Gottman and Levenson inspired a bunch of young scientists people like Emily Impet, Shelly Gable, Nancy Collins down at the University of California Santa Barbara to start to think about well what are the face to face kind of things you can cultivate that help relationships survive and actually be happy. This is gonna be really intuitive but what these studies show is, and again think about the paradigms I study a couple early in its formation I follow it longitudinally over time and look at whether they stay together whether they\u2019re happy or not and here\u2019s what we\u2019re starting to learn and we\u2019re gonna return to these themes later humor really helps, right, if you can laugh, tell jokes, have funny nicknames about your partner kind of engage in playful teasing when you\u2019re in really intense conflict, studies find that those subtle acts of humor and play which we often lose sight of de escalate all of the tension and stress of the stressful times of the marriage and produce happiness in the relationship. Point two, we\u2019ll talk about this in greater depth later, but Amy Gordon at UC Berkeley has found that couples who do that little extra work of appreciation where they write a nice email, send a nice text, pat a person on the back, say thank you for the different dinner that was cooked express appreciation with an embrace all these things that we\u2019re starting to talk about, those couples, simple acts of appreciation are much less likely to break up later, a year later, showing that appreciation is really important to the relationship. We know as well thanks to work by Mike McCullough and Frank Fincham and others, Mike McCullough a very important positive psychologist at the University of Miami, that forgiveness really matters. That letting go of grudges, and we\u2019ll talk about this later in the class, recognizing that all humans make mistakes, if couples can forgive and even within family structures if families are more forgiving, later in time they\u2019re happier not only as couples but their kids are happier too and we\u2019ll talk about the mechanics of forgiveness. Finally, and this is kind of a theme of acceptance and being mindfully open to things, studies find that when couples are open to the emotional disclosures of their partner and take them in in an accepting way non judgmental way, instead of pushing back or suppressing, those couples actually do a lot better in terms of their happiness profiles later in time so we\u2019re starting to get a really good picture of things you can do for happier and healthier relationships over time. "}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cd37346403b2443d83ed248b24133c17", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Romantic Relationships, Family, and Friendships", "Relationships, Marriage, and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Relationships, Marriage, and <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cd37346403b2443d83ed248b24133c17"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@discussion+block@71d7591b05fd47639e090c60c18962fc", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Discussion: Marriage & Happiness"}, "content_type": "Discussion", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@discussion+block@71d7591b05fd47639e090c60c18962fc", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Romantic Relationships, Family, and Friendships", "Relationships, Marriage, and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Discussion: Marriage & <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@discussion+block@71d7591b05fd47639e090c60c18962fc"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a2eebb99c1f7426ea009757c83da14b9", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Relationships, Marriage, and Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a2eebb99c1f7426ea009757c83da14b9", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Romantic Relationships, Family, and Friendships", "Relationships, Marriage, and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Relationships, Marriage, and <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@a2eebb99c1f7426ea009757c83da14b9"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2517db341ee144ea9b9d7a0e7f585646", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Parenting and Happiness", "transcript_en": "Now I\u2019m going to turn to another relationship that we consider--that researchers are interested in with respect to happiness and that\u2019s the relationship between parents and children in other words, does being a parent make you happier, and this topic has generated some nuanced and somewhat controversial results. In 2004, Danny Kahneman from Princeton published a finding that suggested parenting is pretty much a little bit better than doing housework but not as much fun as a whole list of other things including relaxing, napping, shopping things like that and that kind of left a little bit of a sour taste in the mouth of people who suggest that parenting does predict happiness. Another finding that informed the space was that when people are young and in their entr\u00e9e to parenthood it turns out that happiness levels decline with the birth of each subsequent child so the first child that they have does lead to a boost in happiness but as they have a second and a third, their happiness tends to decline on the other side of the spectrum there\u2019s a finding which suggests that people who have bigger families have more joy when they reach the sort of mid life part of their lives and so something about having more children, having more people around in their families leads them to rate themselves as having more experiences of joy and finally sonya lubermersky recently did a meta analysis which means looking at a lot of different studies that look at the relationship between parenting and happiness where she concludes that parents are indeed slightly happier than non parents. When researchers look at this in a sort of sequential way, that is ask people over time, before they have kids, how happy are you, when they\u2019re having kids, when child birth happens, how happy are you, first month, six months, years out, the plots tend to take this sort of upside U shape so they go up, happiness levels go up, right when kids are born, and then they go back down to the levels that they were before people had kids afterwards so that suggests that people who become parents ultimately adapt to that experience of being parents and it doesn\u2019t have an appreciable effect on happiness again sonya lubermerskys study shows that parents are on average slightly happier than non parents. However, a 2014 meta analysis that looked at the same thing as Sonya\u2019s study shows that it sort of depends that parents are happier but only parents that decided that they were purposefully wanting to be parents it also shows that parents experience more daily joy but also more daily stress than non parents and so there\u2019s this sort of more nuanced story that comes out of this of this literature suggesting that maybe there\u2019s more work to be done and perhaps maybe it\u2019s a little bit like what Dacher mentioned earlier when he was talking about the relationship between marriage and happiness and that is that happy parents, people who are happy about becoming parents, and who interact with their children in a happy and securely attached way, reap the benefits towards happiness of becoming parents whereas people who don\u2019t live that way who expect happiness but aren\u2019t necessarily using the right tools to be happy might not actually experience happiness from becoming parents. The next thing we\u2019re gonna do is read an article that explores some of the complexities between the relationship of parenting and happiness"}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2517db341ee144ea9b9d7a0e7f585646", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Romantic Relationships, Family, and Friendships", "Parenting and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Parenting and <b>Happiness</b><span class=\"search-results-ellipsis\"></span>researchers are interested in with respect to <b>happiness</b> and that\u2019s the", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2517db341ee144ea9b9d7a0e7f585646"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@3fa3f385d0594018b854acece970a7b5", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Parenting and Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@3fa3f385d0594018b854acece970a7b5", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Romantic Relationships, Family, and Friendships", "Parenting and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Parenting and <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@3fa3f385d0594018b854acece970a7b5"}, "score": 1.2979687}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@18c6dc3cefc0400296c4f824d75717d9", "_score": 1.2979687, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Discussion: Empathy and Happiness"}, "content_type": "Sequence", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@18c6dc3cefc0400296c4f824d75717d9", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "The Science of Empathy", "Discussion: Empathy and Happiness"], "excerpt": "Discussion: Empathy and <b>Happiness</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@vertical+block@18c6dc3cefc0400296c4f824d75717d9"}, "score": 1.2979687}], "access_denied_count": 0}

https://courses.stage.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/search/?query=Code

{"took": 9, "total": 6, "max_score": 0.20239222, "results": [{"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@de41f91cc3574ad2bbdb38df28a42113", "_score": 0.20239222, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Philip Zimbardo: The Heroic Imagination Project", "transcript_en": "There are a lot of heroes projects. There\u2019s My Giraffe, there\u2019s Hero Story. We\u2019re the only one that\u2019s encouraging research because there\u2019s very little. So, here\u2019s research we've done only one that\u2019s encouraging research because there\u2019s very little. So, here\u2019s research with a sample of 4,000 Americans in the national probability sample, and opportunity matters. 1 of 5, 20% qualify as heroes on the definition I gave you. Opportunity matters. You\u2019re not gonna be a hero if you live in the suburbs. No shit happens in the suburbs. Education matters. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be a hero because you are more aware of situations. Volunteering matters. One third of of all the sample who were heroes also had volunteered significantly, up to 59 hours a week. Gender matters. Males more than females, because in this case, women tend not to... women tend to take a lot of their heroic action as not heroic as, you know, sacrifice. This is what I do for my family, for my friend. Race matters. Blacks were 8 times more likely than whites to qualify as heroes. We think that's in part rate of opportunity. In our next survey, we're going to track down by area code to see if in fact these are people coming from inner cities having survived a disaster. Personal trauma makes you 3 times more likely than everybody else to be both a hero and a volunteer. And what\u2019s amazing about this research is that each of these statements is valid after controlling for all demographic variables, all educational variables, all socioeconomic status variables. Uh, those 800 heroes, 72% report helping another person in a dangerous emergency, 16% report whistle blowing an injustice, 6% reported sacrificing for a nonrelative or stranger, 15% report defying unjust authority. And not one of these people is noticed as a hero. So that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying. So these are the unsung quiet heroes, they do their thing, they put themselves in danger. They put themselves---  defend a moral cause, helping someone in need. And we want to highlight them. We want them to be inspirational to other people just like them. Um, so, today we have developed our website, heroicimagination.org. We hope you will visit. The Heroic Imagination Project: \u201cexploring and encouraging our inner heroes.\u201d We want to give voice to the nation\u2019s quiet heroes\u2014it's actually to the world\u2019s quiet heroes\u2014 and, the social context of heroism, again, it\u2019s thinking about the other. So I\u2019ve given up evil. No more dining in hell. I\u2019m only gonna promote goodness and heroism, support Dacher\u2019s work in my new  not-yet-over-the-hill life. So the question is every one of us can be a hero. The Heroic Imagination Project is amplifying the voice of the world\u2019s quiet heroes using research education networks, promote a heroic imagination in everyone and then empower ordinary people of all ages of all nations to engage in extraordinary acts of heroism. Heroism is the antidote to public indifference\u2019s systemic evil. We are working to transform compassion into heroic action. So the new conception of heroes is anyone can be a hero. So we want to democratize... it\u2019s not special, and we wanted to misfire. Most heroes are ordinary people. It\u2019s the act that\u2019s extraordinary. We want to focus on the act and not highlight the special people. We want to diffuse the notion away from s-solo heroes to heroes working in networks in teams and ensembles. And that\u2019s essentially what we want kids to do in imposing bullying, for example. And we\u2019re going to have people give a public declaration on their website: \u201cI\u2019m willing to be a hero in waiting, your name, your age, where you\u2019re from, and while I\u2019m waiting, I'm going to be a hero in training with several friends, and every day we\u2019re going to do an act of goodness.\u201d That is, we\u2019re going to have a whole series of things they can do to be health heroes, eco heroes, disability heroes, tech heroes, because essentially what we\u2019re building is the social habits of heroism. It\u2019s a focus on the other. It\u2019s a focus away from the \u201cme\u201d and into the \u201cwe.\u201d And each of these is not heroic, but you\u2019re in training to be heroic. Heroism also involves opportunity as you will see in a moment. So flying around all day just won\u2019t cut it. Sooner or later, you\u2019re going to have to fight some evil. So heroes have to act. So the difference between heroism and altruism is heroes take action, and what we have developed is a hero tool kit, hero resource kit, and we're going to give it to them, and they're going to be our HIP. It's called Heroic Imagination Project, so we want people to become hipsters. John Donne says, \"No man is an island (or no woman) ... entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in all of mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.\" So HIP is the bell for whom heroism tolls. Every person is part of humanity. Each person's pulse is  part of humanity's heartbeat. Heroes circulate the life force of goodness in our veins. And so what the world needs now is more heroes. You. So what Yoda tells us: \"Do or do not. There is no 'try.'\" It's time to take action. Against evil."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@de41f91cc3574ad2bbdb38df28a42113", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "Scaling Up Kindness", "What Makes a Hero?"], "excerpt": "track down by area <b>code</b> to see if in fact these are people coming from", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@de41f91cc3574ad2bbdb38df28a42113"}, "score": 0.20239222}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@30b8edc9405841769dff5bb827ab9368", "_score": 0.15179417, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Science of Trust", "transcript_en": "When you think about the things that we\u2019ve been talking about, to start out cooperatively, to apologize for mistakes, to show embarrassment and modesty, to forgive, what really is at stake is this higher order construct or dimension of social relationships which is trust. Trust has gotten a lot of attention from social scientists of late because first of all it\u2019s been on the decline and it\u2019s pretty well documented that we trust our institutions less, we trust our fellow citizens less, there\u2019s less trust in organizations. So it\u2019s really something to work on, and for really good reason. Paul Zak, an economist down at Claremont who\u2019s really one of the pioneers in the science of trust, has looked at the relationship between how trusting a nation is and how well they\u2019re doing in terms, of happiness. And what you find is a very strong association such that more trusting cultures tend to be happier, it\u2019s really paramount for social networks to be trusting in order to cultivate happiness. So in this section what we\u2019re going to think about together is how to cultivate an ethic of trust, right. Very often scientists, when thinking about the deep evolutionary origins of things like cooperation and forgiveness and the like, think about then how cultures through social practices and rituals and values, create ethics or sort of sets of norms around this particular practice. Now when you think about just sort of looking into your social world, trust is built into a lot of the universal time-honored processes in social relationships. So when we greet people in different parts of the world, we engage in trust eliciting behavior like open handed gestures and bows and the like. If you look at the structure of language and how we speak to each other, a lot of the principles of how we speak honor principles of politeness that we\u2019re indirect they\u2019re not demanding we\u2019re not critical, and that\u2019s really a way of building trust. When we think about cultivating respect in the workplace for example, trust is really the end game of that particular ethic. Now as we move through this literature it\u2019s really important to bear in mind what you\u2019ve learned about thus far in terms of how branches of our nervous system both in the brain and in our peripheral nervous system are activated by prosocial tendencies like compassion and empathy and cooperation. And the same really proves to be true with respect to trust which is that this sense that other people will act in behalf of your interest trust tends to covary, or to occur with a lot of these neurophysiological processes of prosociality things like activation of the vagus nerve or particular circuits in that caregiving circuitry that you learned about. One of the classic early studies in trust by Kosfeld documented this where if give people a little whiff of oxytocin which you\u2019ve learned about, it actually makes people give away more money in one of those economic games so really trust is engaging these branches to our prosocial nervous system. So let\u2019s think about some very concrete specific things that you can do to cultivate trust in any relationship you\u2019re engaged in. from strangers out in public, to your intimate partners. And of course we\u2019re going to start with something we\u2019ve been interested in in our lab which is touch, tactile contact. Think about it, we know physical touch is soothing, it activates reward circuits in the brain, it creates a sense of sort of general safety in your mind, and there are really impressive studies showing, out in social networks and groups, if you practice the right kind of touch, you will actually cultivate trust and cooperative behavior. So for example in one study from 2004, a teacher was instructed to touch in an appropriate way students, or not to touch them and then asked them to do something on the blackboard, and what you find is that the right kind of touch elevates students\u2019 participation in class right so it\u2019s bringing about trusting behavior in a classroom environment. We actually studied touch in one of my favorite social contexts which is basketball, and asked whether again this way of cultivating trust through the right kind of touch can actually make teams sort of more proficient and trusting and cooperative on the basketball court. So what we did and this comes out of my own personal love of basketball and actually the first author Michael Kraus who was a Berkeley student now at Illinois is a great basketball played and we played a lot with each other and we wondered, why do we trust each other on the basketball court when we\u2019re banging into each other and competing, and we had this idea that touch is really this glue of trust on the basketball court. So to get at that general idea, we took one game of every team in the national basketball association in the 2008/2009 season, and we coded all the touch that happened during that game. Each game took us about 17 hours to code we\u2019re coding these little quarter second fist bumps and head wraps and the like, and what you see if you look at the basketball court and this is true for other sports as well, is people do all kinds of crazy things to touch right. They high five, they fist bump, they arm embrace, they bear hug,they wrap uhm Tim Duncan wrapping Parker on the head after doing something well, they arm embrace, they chest bump, they flying hip bump, and then not recommended at the work place but if things are going great you can do the flying chest bump as these two Detroit pistons are. And what we found which is really quite amazing is that, holding constant how well the team was doing in the game that we coded, how much money they were making, pre-season expectations, the amount of touch actually predicted how well the team was doing at the end of the season according to not only winning games which we represent in the graph, but also sophisticated measures of were they cooperating in the court, were they helping each other out on defense, touch builds trust through basic processes. So when we think about trying to build trust in our relationships with our friends and work colleagues and adversaries and family members and community members and the like, there are other ways we can go and I wanted to move through this science and bring into focus a few highlights. One is to be really sensitive to the language you use. Love can be war or love can be a game. Work can be a bloodbath or work can be a drama. There are many different ways we can use language to describe our lives and those ways of describing what we\u2019re doing matter importantly. Let me give you an example. Lee Ross who was my advisor down at Stanford did this incredible study where he has students play the prisoner\u2019s dilemma game that you learned about, and he describes the game and there are 2 conditions, and all Ross did was vary what the game was called. In one condition, it was called the wall street game and in another condition, it was called the community game, and what you find is that students playing the wall street game are 3 times as likely to defect or to cheat on their partner as the people who were playing the community game. So the language you use really matters. Steve Neuberg out at Arizona State did an early study in this literature from the 1980s, if I just read words that relate to competition, right, words like \u201cfight\u201d and \u201cwin\u201d and so forth as opposed to neutral words, I defect most of the time in a prisoner\u2019s dilemma game, 84% of the time as opposed to 50% of the time in the control condition. Language matters. And in fact, there are a lot of very compelling demonstrations of how important language is to cooperation, forgiveness, and building trust. It is well known in the negotiation literature that if negotiators get a chance to communicate with each other, just a few minutes of describing their interests or values, they do better in negotiations and they\u2019ll be more likely to cooperate in the prisoners dilemma game, and for those of you who are really interested in taking this to the next level and sort of thinking about the very subtle ways you can use language, I\u2019d recommend the literature on non-violent communication of Marshall Rosenberg, which has a lot of wisdom about how to just shift simple things like I statements when phrasing opinions, that really are about more trusting cooperative communication."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@30b8edc9405841769dff5bb827ab9368", "start_date": "2014-09-30T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 4: Cooperation & Reconciliation", "Building Trust", "Intro to Trust"], "excerpt": "season, and we <b>code</b>d all the touch that happened during that game.", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@30b8edc9405841769dff5bb827ab9368"}, "score": 0.15179417}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079", "_score": 0.15179417, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Fundamentals of Training the Mind for Happiness", "transcript_en": "So in this section we\u2019re going to talk about training your mind for happiness. Disciplining the mind and watching out for the obstacles to happiness and thinking about particular patterns of belief or ways of looking at the world that are good for health and happiness. Of course, this is really an old tradition when you consult the great wisdom of, for example, Buddhism. There are a lot of different exercises that are about sort of watching out for the problematic patterns of thought and cultivating more healthy ways of construing the world. If you look to more recent developments on this thesis, this idea that really training our mind and really cultivating more healthy patterns of thought and watching out for toxic patterns of thought is foundational to the cognitive revolution that has shaped so many therapeutic practices that we see today. You have probably heard about that there are certain attritional patterns for successes and failures that give rise to prolonged episodes of depression when we kind of look to internal, global, permanent enduring stable characteristics to make sense of our faults. That really is a pattern of thought that gives rise to depression. This idea that the construal processes of the mind are at the heart of social adaptation is found in cognitive behavioral approaches to anxiety, where you look to the patterns of thought, the patterns of rumination, the tendency to catastrophize or to think that danger is always looming. As we work on these patterns of thought, we find our anxiety drops. It\u2019s a very deep idea in many different traditions to train our mind for happiness. We also find that there is a clear evidence of the benefits of a resilient mind or training our mind in different kinds of studies as people respond to trauma. So Shelly Taylor of UCLA made this very important discovery in 1984 that people, when diagnosed of diseases we show this profound resilience. We see this way of recons truing the disease as a way to adapt. George Bonanano, out of Columbia University, has shown time and time again people respond with incredible sort of shifts in thinking and patterns of resilience to every imaginable trauma, from forms of abuse to losing a spouse in the middle of life. We have these resilient patterns of thought. So what we really hope is that in this section, we zero in on what are those healthy patterns of thought that may be good for happiness and health. Now, the one way to think about this is first of all, we should be mindful and alert to toxic patterns of thought that can really cost us in terms of happiness. So let\u2019s look at a few of those, and see if these ring true for you. A first one that has really captivated a lot scholarship is the real perils of perfectionism. The sense that I can always be perfect is really an obstacle to my own happiness. Carol Dweck, at Stanford University has devoted decades of her career to really documenting in her work on mindsets that you may have heard about that we have in readings at the Greater Good Science Center. That really, when parents and teachers praise their kids for being perfect, right the kids feel alienated and anxious. By contrast, when you praise kids for just trying hard and putting effort into some things they feel motivated. There are studies that show that if you know you get individuals and this work early in the field by Tory Higgins for example, to kind of think about their ideal aspirations in a sort of oppressive way, it makes them dejected and anxious. By we have to watch out for these perfectionistic ideals. And Steve Hinshaw colleague here at UC Berkeley has written in the \u201ctriple bind\u201d that really there is an epidemic of perfectionism in particular for young women, who today\u2019s expectations say they should not only be beautiful and smart but powerful and athletic and sort of changing the world\u2019s circumstances and that can be too much in terms of perfectionism. A second toxic though, and Sonja Lyubormirsky has really done the excellent work on this is to always be comparing ourselves to others. Right, the perils of social comparison, of keeping up with the Jones\u2019s. And we know from studies that happier people tend to define their happiness on their own terms and not compare themselves to others and think about how they\u2019re always falling short. Yet another thing we should be mindful of as a peril or potential toxic thought is really comes out of Tom Gilovich\u2019s work on really thinking about how we devote resources either to material objects and commodities versus experiences with others. We\u2019ve learned time and time again that if we orient the mind towards experience, we fare well in terms of happiness. If we orient the expenditure of money or what we\u2019re interested in or pursuing to material objects, it costs us in terms of our personal happiness. On this kind of theme, one of the great discoveries in this new science of happiness on potential toxic thoughts was that of Barry Schwartz and his colleagues at Swarthmore, where Barry was really interested in how we approach our experiences of pleasure, right. Going out for dinner, having a drink with friends, seeing a play, taking a walk in the woods. And what Schwartz has done is really differentiate two different ways of looking at our experiences. One approach is to maximize pleasure, for every instant we try to get as much happiness out of it as possible. Another approach is what he calls satisficing; it\u2019s kind of an economic term, which is to find delight in what\u2019s given to us. To take pleasure in what we get. And he measured this with a really innovative scale. So let me give you a couple items from this measure of maximizing versus satisficing. So if you\u2019re a maximizer, you would agree with the following statement: when I am in the car listening to music, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing. Even if I am satisfied with what I am already listening to. You\u2019re always looking for opportunities to maximize more pleasure. And as you might imagine, what Schwartz and colleagues find, that mindset of always wanting more happiness, trying to maximize our pleasure, costs us in terms of happiness. So maximizers, when identified with this scale, when they purchase things they have more regret. They have less satisfaction with life. They tend to be more depressed. When they do well in a circumstance they actually feel less satisfied. And they\u2019re actually less optimistic about what the future holds. As we kind of round out our discussion of these toxic thoughts, and the sort of ways we can train our mind for happiness and greater contentment and delight in our current circumstances. It really is important to sort of bring to bear on this question the literature of optimism. Really pioneered by Marty Seligman and Chris Peterson over the years. So optimism, as defined in the scientific literature, as the expectation that you would have that the future is socially desirable, good, and pleasurable. So for example, somebody who scores higher on optimism would endorse the item that in uncertain times, which is part of life, I often expect the best. By contrast, somebody who is more pessimistic would endorse the item such as, if something can go wrong for me, it definitely will, right? I\u2019m sure that this seems pretty intuitive to you, and over the past couple of decades Seligman and Peterson and a lot of their colleagues time and time again have documented that there are a lot of benefits to this more half full, optimistic mindset. What we find in the scientific literature is optimistic people who have those positive expectations about their future; they just feel greater subjective well being. They report greater happiness. They report higher levels on a daily basis of positive emotions. If you study their neurophysiology as Chris Oveis has at UC San Diego, you find that they have higher levels of activation in the Vagus nerve in a calm state. There have been famous studies showing from Harvard that if you measure optimism from a young man\u2019s life in 1945, 35 years later, controlling for a lot of factors, they feel healthier. They report better health. There are actually studies finding that in the political realm, if you code how optimistic acceptance speeches are in 20th presidential candidates, about 90 percent of the time that proves to be the winning candidate. That there is this social contagious value to optimism. That is why, for example, some of the happiness practices, like writing about a kind of optimistic sense of self in the future, really have shown, and this is the work of Laura King, to bring about happiness and health benefits."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "Toxic Thoughts vs. Training the Mind for Happiness", "The Fundamentals of Training the Mind for Happiness"], "excerpt": "political realm, if you <b>code</b> how optimistic acceptance speeches are in", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079"}, "score": 0.15179417}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@a537f4818d46485f961a58b78f246570", "_score": 0.12649514, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Tom Gilovich: The Psychological Barriers to Gratitude", "transcript_en": "So, you heard from the terrific presentation in the last panel what a great thing gratitude is, and therefore, the natural question is \"How do we get more of it? You can study that question directly by thinking \"What are people like?,\" and \"What is gratitude like?,\" and how can we mix the two together nicely to promote it. You can also tackle that question indirectly by saying \"What are some of the roadblocks to gratitude?,\" and that's the approach I want to take today. I want to talk about two enemies of gratitude, and if we approach it and think about what are the barriers, how can we pull the barriers down to produce more of this very beneficial emotion? So, first barrier is what I call a headwind/tailwind asymmetry. If any of you ride a bike for exercise or go running for exercise, you'll know that when you're running or bicycling into the wind, you're very aware of it and just can't wait til the course turns around and you've got the wind at your back. When that happens, you feel great, but then you forget about it very quickly and you're just not very aware of the wind at your back, and that's just a fundamental feature of how our minds and how the world works.We're just gonna be more aware of those barriers than the things that boost us along. You can see thatd epicted in this slide right here, that is to say if you went on Google Image right now and typed in 'headwinds,' you'd get actual photos like you see on the left. It's easy to capture that in nature. If, on the other hand, you went to Google Images and you typed in 'tailwinds,' you wouldn't see a single real world image. You have to depict in schematically; you can't just capture it in an image, and what's true photographically is also true psychologically. That is to say, since we're goal-striving, problem-solving organisms, we're naturally going to be oriented toward the barriers that we have to overcome. That's a very good thing for our material existence, but it creates an obvious problem in terms of not being aware of all the stuff that's helped us along. You see this in all sorts of areas of life; let me just present two real quick ones. The first one will be familiar to anyone, and it's nice to see there are people like this that are roughly my age... an old comedic duo from the 1960s that captures this idea: \"How about you don't sing the rest of the show? I'll do this on my own.\"\"Mom always liked you best!\"Alright, that was the Smothers Brothers, and sorry I don't have the time to let that one run, to show you the comedy out of it, but they made a career out of that basic line, \"Mom always liked you best!\" If you think in terms of the headwind/tailwind asymmetry, it makes sense that kids would think that, that is,every time their siblings being treated well, that's in your face, you know it. When you're treated well,you may not notice that so well. So, do kids actually think this? Yes, if you ask a bunch of older and younger siblings, everyone's aware that parents are harsher on the older sibling than the younger sibling, you see that there [on slide], it's tilted toward the older sibling direction. However, the thicker bar, the responses on the part of older siblings, they see that difference as much more pronounced. Their parents were harsher on them, it seems, than their younger siblings. Let's take it out of the family and go to this national family that we have. We have this unusual electoral device known as the 'electoral college.' Does the electoral college tend to work against your candidates,or does it tend to work for your candidates? Well, if you're a Republican, and since we've left the confines of Berkeley, there may be a Republican or two here, you're likely to remember those times that it worked against you and that's in your face. Whereas, if you're a Democrat, you're going to think that the times it's worked against you, and you're going to be very aware of that. So, if you ask people \"Does the electoral college help your side or hurt your side?,\" it's a rout; people think that it helps the other side rather than their side. So, that's barrier number one: this inherent asymmetry between headwinds and tailwinds. The second problem, or enemy, of gratitude is our remarkable capacity for adaptation. A nice illustration of how almost every human strength is a human weakness as well; when something terrible happens to us, this is one of the greatest gifts that we have: this terrible thing happens and we're laidlow by it, but we quickly, remarkably quickly, overcome it and people who suffered great tragedies move on to live very fulfilling lives. On the other hand, it's a problem when it comes to good things: you strive for things, to have these great things in your life, you get lots of joy from them, and eventually, they aren't so joyous. Let me show you another film clip that illustrates this phenomenon, the dark side of habituation or adaptation: \"I was on an airplane and there was internet, high-speed internet on the airplane, that's the newest thing that I know exists, and I'm sitting on the plane, they go 'Open up your laptop, you can surf the internet,' and it's fast, I'm watching Youtube clips, I mean, on an airplane. Then it breaks down, and they apologize, 'The internet's not working,' and the guy next to me goes 'Pffft, this is bull*#%*.' Like,how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Ok, I think we can all relate to that, we can all relate to the fact that we ought to be thinking of air travel itself as some miracle, that that happens, and the first time you took a flight you probably thought of it that way, but you probably haven't thought of it that way since. That's the power of adaptation: it can undermine gratitude. So, what's my solution to these two problems, the headwind/tailwind asymmetry and the remarkable power of adaptation? My partial solution comes from research I had been doing before I started to shift toward gratitude, having to do with the amount of enduring satisfaction and gratification you get out of experiential consumption or material consumption. The thesis behind that work is captured in this NewYorker cartoon, a very simple cartoon that makes it as a cartoon because we know that that's ridiculous.No one would be on their death bed wishing that they had bought more stuff, and yet, we might bewishing we had had more experiences. We do get more enduring gratification out of our experiences than our material possessions. All of us have limited budgets; we have to make decisions: should we spend on this enduring thing, or should we spend it more on this transitory experience? That's the thrust of the research. Today, I want to talk about it in the context of what experiential or material consumption can do to foster gratitude. So, let's consider that first barrier to gratitude: the headwind/tailwind asymmetry, and simply ask \"Which makes a better story? A tale about a strong headwind or a tale about a strong tailwind?\" The answer, of course, is obvious: all literature is about overcoming barriers and obstacles.There's no arc if it's just a story about a tailwind. Now, you could say \"Well, this is going to increase the problem.\" We're going to tell more experiential stories about the headwinds, but the interesting thing about stories is, yeah, you're talking about a problem, but in the talking about it, they become less of a problem. You've all experienced the vacation or camping trip from hell that was awful in a whole bunch of ways, but you keep telling the story and, over time, it becomes the hilarious vacation from hell.You're turning that headwind that's something problematic into something more beneficial, and something that might provoke and promote gratitude. Do people tend to talk more about their experiences than their possessions? The answer is yes. If you ask... we did several studies on this; [in] one, we just asked Cornell students to think of a significant material and experiential purchase they'd made over the last certain period of time, we used different time intervals, and then they're asked \"How often have you talked about it?,\" and if you'd had an informal conversation like we've had several times here today, and you didn't know what to say, and you had to fill that social gap somehow, would you reach for your experiential story or your material story, and I think you know what the answer to that is: people are more likely, they report they've talked more about their experiences than their possessions, and they would talk more about their experiences than their possessions. Does that work for them? That is, when you tell stories of experiences versus the things that you have,how does that go? Well, you can do simple studies where you bring two strangers together, and you direct them: have a get-acquainted conversation, but you're restricted to talking about experiences or you're restricted to talking about a recent material purchase. Afterwards, you pull them apart and you have them rate \"How much did you enjoy this conversation? How much did you enjoy each other?\"What you find is that they enjoy the conversation more when you talk about experiences you've had and they enjoy one another more when they've talked about their experiences. You can talk about material goods your friends give you, [there's] some latitude to do so, but there's a pretty short leash. Ifyou talk too much about the new BMW, you're just going to lose your audience. You can talk more about the trip to New Zealand longer, and you still have your audience. So, through the stories that we tell, which are a more integral part of our experiences than our possessions, it helps to overcome this first headwind/tailwind barrier. What about the second barrier, which is the power of adaptation? The question becomes \"You spend your money very well, when you buy things as well as when you buy possessions, so you're probably going to be happy-- happier, as a result of having spent that money?\" How long does that happiness last? Does it last longer when you purchase an experience, rather than a possession? From studies like this [see slide], you can see that, again, people spend their money well; they're made happier by the money they spend on either thing and they're about equally so: ask them \"How happy were you when you purchased this experiential or material purchase?,\" they were equally happy. If you ask them down the road, and as you can see, there's a drop off on the gratification you get from your material possession, and if anything, it goes in the opposite direction. The experiential gifts that you give yourself are gifts that keep on giving, they become even better over time. Why do... the interesting psychological question, the one that we want to focus on, is \"Why do experiences provide more enduring satisfaction and (as we'll see) more gratitude than material purchases?\" One is, as we've already seen, they yield more and better stories: you talk about them and part of our enjoyment of things are looking forward to them, experiencing them, and then remembering and talking about them. We get more remembered conversation value out of our experiences than our possessions. They become a bigger part of who you are: you may relate intensely to your material goods, you may think they are a big part of you, but still, they're out there. They aren't ultimately a part of you, whereas, your experiences really are who you are. In fact, arguably, you are the sum total of your experiences. So, your experiences are closer and they connect us more to other people. All o fthose things ought to make the experiences more enduring; those are also the very kinds of things tha tare going to produce more gratitude. Do they? Well, you can do surveys: the data in front of you right now [see slide] reinforces the story has been known now for about ten years. You ask people to recall a material or experiential purchase. They find more gratification out of the experiential purchase than the material purchase. If you ask them\"How grateful were you for that?,\" even the material goods that we really like a lot... [the response is]\"That was exciting, that was fun\"... you're really not grateful in the same way that you are for an experience that you've had. Another way to assess this is to look at reviews of material and experiential products. We surveyed reviews on a bunch of material and experiential websites, and you just have people code them for how favorable are they, how excited I am about the trip or the thing that I have bought, and how grateful I am, and what you find is people express much more gratitude about experiential purchases than material purchases. Another way to look at this, it's been shown that people who undergo a gratitude induction, as we saw earlier, become more generous, more pro-social, they give to other people more.Well, if that's true, and this promotes gratitude, if we have people think about a gratifying experiential purchase, do they become more generous, and the answer is 'yes.' You put people through a dictator game, where they can divide money between themselves and another person, if they've just been reminded of an experiential purchase, they are more generous. They give away more money than if they've just been reminded of a material good. So, consistent evidence across different waves of measuring it, that people are more grateful after thinking about their gratifying experiential things rather than material things. I've talked about all of this on an individual basis, but what's true of us? How should we spend our money, should we tilt experientially or materially, is also true of us as a society. You are not only consumers, you are voters,and it's governments that provide an experiential infrastructure. You can't have these kinds of gratifying experiences, you can't go out bike riding, or hiking, if there aren't trails. You can't have gratifying experiences at the beaches or national parks if they're all falling apart, and the experiential infrastructure in the United States is decaying. No question about it, and therefore, one of the messages of this research that I hope you all take with you is \"Remember it at the ballot box.\" We do need to invest more in our experiential infrastructure. Thank you very much."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@a537f4818d46485f961a58b78f246570", "start_date": "2014-10-28T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 8: Gratitude", "Challenges to Gratitude", "Tom Gilovich: The Psychological Barriers to Gratitude"], "excerpt": "material and experiential websites, and you just have people <b>code</b> them", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@a537f4818d46485f961a58b78f246570"}, "score": 0.12649514}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@717af1215eaf41e3b92322ad9b5627af", "_score": 0.10375911, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Reading: The Banality of Heroism", "html_content": "The Banality of Heroism By Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo This essay originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Thirty-five years ago, one of us (Philip Zimbardo) launched what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Twenty-four young men, who had responded to a newspaper ad calling for participants in a study, were randomly assigned roles as \u201cprisoners\u201d or \u201cguards\u201d in a simulated jail in Stanford University\u2019s psychology department. The \u201cprisoners\u201d were arrested at their homes by real police officers, booked, and brought to the jail. Everything from the deliberately humiliating prison uniforms to the cell numbers on the laboratory doors to the mandatory strip searches and delousing were designed to replicate the depersonalizing experience of being in a real prison. The men who were assigned to be guards were given khaki uniforms, mirrored glasses, and billy clubs. The idea was to study the psychology of imprisonment\u2014to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place. But within a matter of hours, what had been intended as a controlled experiment in human behavior took on a disturbing life of its own. After a prisoner rebellion on the second day of the experiment, the guards began using increasingly degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners became more and more passive. Each group rapidly took on the behaviors associated with their role, not because of any particular internal predisposition or instructions from the experimenters, but rather because the situation itself so powerfully called for the two groups to assume their new identities. Interestingly, even the experimenters were so caught up in the drama that they lost objectivity, only terminating the out-of-control study when an objective outsider stepped in, reminding them of their duty to treat the participants humanely and ethically. The experiment, scheduled to last two weeks, ended abruptly after six days. As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the \u201cbanality of evil\u201d \u2014that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. In addition to the Stanford Prison Experiment, studies conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram at Yale University also revealed the banality of evil. The Milgram experiments asked participants to play the role of a \u201cteacher,\u201d who was responsible for administering electric shocks to a \u201clearner\u201d when the learner failed to answer test questions correctly. The participants were not aware that the learner was working with the experimenters and did not actually receive any shocks. As the learners failed more and more, the teachers were instructed to increase the voltage intensity of the shocks\u2014even when the learners started screaming, pleading to have the shocks stop, and eventually stopped responding altogether. Pressed by the experimenters\u2014serious looking men in lab coats, who said they\u2019d assume responsibility for the consequences\u2014most participants did not stop administering shocks until they reached 300 volts or above\u2014already in the lethal range. The majority of teachers delivered the maximum shock of 450 volts. We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable\u2014that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over. This is true not only for perpetrators of torture and other horrible acts, but for people who commit a more common kind of wrong\u2014the wrong of taking no action when action is called for. Whether we consider Nazi Germany or Abu Ghraib prison, there were many people who observed what was happening and said nothing. At Abu Ghraib, one photo shows two soldiers smiling before a pyramid of naked prisoners while a dozen other soldiers stand around watching passively. If you observe such abuses and don\u2019t say, \u201cThis is wrong! Stop it!\u201d you give tacit approval to continue. You are part of the silent majority that makes evil deeds more acceptable. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance, there were the \u201cgood guards\u201d who maintained the prison. Good guards, on the shifts when the worst abuses occurred, never did anything bad to the prisoners, but not once over the whole week did they confront the other guards and say, \u201cWhat are you doing? We get paid the same money without knocking ourselves out.\u201d Or, \u201cHey, remember those are college students, not prisoners.\u201d No good guard ever intervened to stop the activities of the bad guards. No good guard ever arrived a minute late, left a minute early, or publicly complained. In a sense, then, it\u2019s the good guard who allowed such abuses to happen. The situation dictated their inaction, and their inaction facilitated evil. But because evil is so fascinating, we have been obsessed with focusing upon and analyzing evildoers. Perhaps because of the tragic experiences of the Second World War, we have neglected to consider the flip side of the banality of evil: Is it also possible that heroic acts are something that anyone can perform, given the right mind-set and conditions? Could there also be a \u201cbanality of heroism\u201d? The banality of heroism concept suggests that we are all potential heroes waiting for a moment in life to perform a heroic deed. The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in time. By conceiving of heroism as a universal attribute of human nature, not as a rare feature of the few \u201cheroic elect,\u201d heroism becomes something that seems in the range of possibilities for every person, perhaps inspiring more of us to answer that call. Even people who have led less than exemplary lives can be heroic in a particular moment. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, a young man named Jabar Gibson, who had a history of felony arrests, did something many people in Louisiana considered heroic: He commandeered a bus, loaded it with residents of his poor New Orleans neighborhood, and drove them to safety in Houston. Gibson\u2019s \u201crenegade bus\u201d arrived at a relief site in Houston before any government sanctioned evacuation efforts. The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the \u201cheroic elect,\u201d a myth that reinforces two basic human tendencies. The first is to ascribe very rare personal characteristics to people who do something special\u2014to see them as superhuman, practically beyond comparison to the rest of us. The second is the trap of inaction\u2014sometimes known as the \u201cbystander effect.\u201d Research has shown that the bystander effect is often motivated by diffusion of responsibility, when different people witnessing an emergency all assume someone else will help. Like the \u201cgood guards,\u201d we fall into the trap of inaction when we assume it\u2019s someone else\u2019s responsibility to act the hero. In search of an alternative to this inaction and complicity with evil, we have been investigating the banality of heroism. Our initial research has allowed us to review example after example of people who have done something truly heroic, from individuals who enjoy international fame to those whose names have never even graced the headlines in a local newspaper. This has led us to think more critically about the definition of heroism, and to consider the situational and personal characteristics that encourage or facilitate heroic behavior. Heroism is an idea as old as humanity itself, and some of its subtleties are becoming lost or transmuted by popular culture. Being a hero is not simply being a good role model or a popular sports figure. We believe it has become necessary to revisit the historical meanings of the word, and to make it come alive in modern terms. By concentrating more on this high watermark of human behavior, it is possible to foster what we term \u201cheroic imagination,\u201d or the development of a personal heroic ideal. This heroic ideal can help guide a person\u2019s behavior in times of trouble or moral uncertainty. What is heroism? Frank De Martini was an architect who had restored his own Brooklyn brownstone. He enjoyed old cars, motorcycles, sailing, and spending time with his wife, Nicole, and their two children. After the hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, De Martini, a Port Authority construction manager at the Center, painstakingly searched the upper floors of the North Tower to help victims trapped by the attack. De Martini was joined by three colleagues: Pablo Ortiz, Carlos DaCosta, and Pete Negron. Authors Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn piece together the movements of De Martini and his colleagues in their book, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers. The evidence suggests that these four men were able to save 70 lives, moving from problem to problem, using just crowbars and flashlights\u2014the only tools available. There are indications that De Martini was becoming increasingly concerned about the structural integrity of the building, yet he and his men continued to work to save others rather than evacuating when they had the chance. All four men died in the collapse of the tower. These were not men who were known previously as larger-than-life heroes, but surely, most of us would call their actions on September 11 heroic. But just what is heroism? Heroism is different than altruism. Where altruism emphasizes selfless acts that assist others, heroism entails the potential for deeper personal sacrifice. The core of heroism revolves around the individual\u2019s commitment to a noble purpose and the willingness to accept the consequences of fighting for that purpose. Historically, heroism has been most closely associated with military service; however, social heroism also deserves close examination. While Achilles is held up as the archetypal war hero, Socrates\u2019 willingness to die for his values was also a heroic deed. Heroism in service to a noble idea is usually not as dramatic as heroism that involves immediate physical peril. Yet social heroism is costly in its own way, often involving loss of financial stability, lowered social status, loss of credibility, arrest, torture, risks to family members, and, in some cases, death. These different ways of engaging with the heroic ideal suggest a deeper, more intricate definition of heroism. Based on our own analysis of many acts that we deem heroic, we believe that heroism is made up of at least four independent dimensions. First, heroism involves some type of quest, which may range from the preservation of life (Frank De Martini\u2019s efforts at the World Trade Center) to the preservation of an ideal (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s pursuit of equal rights for African Americans). Second, heroism must have some form of actual or anticipated sacrifice or risk. This can be either some form of physical peril or a profound social sacrifice. The physical risks that firefighters take in the line of duty are clearly heroic in nature. Social sacrifices are more subtle. For example, in 2002, Tom Cahill, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, risked his credibility as a career scientist by calling a press conference to openly challenge the EPA\u2019s findings that the air near Ground Zero was safe to breathe in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. His willingness to \u201cgo public\u201d was challenged by the government and by some fellow scientists. Like Cahill, whistleblowers in government and business often face ostracism, physical threat, and the loss of their jobs. Third, the heroic act can either be passive or active. We often think of heroics as a valiant activity, something that is clearly observable. But some forms of heroism involve passive resistance or an unwillingness to be moved. Consider Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale\u2019s actions before his execution by the British army. There was nothing to be done in that moment except to decide how he submitted to death\u2014with fortitude or with fear. The words he uttered in his final moments (borrowed from Joseph Addison\u2019s play Cato), \u201cI regret that I have but one life to give for my country,\u201d are remembered more than two centuries later as a symbol of strength. Finally, heroism can be a sudden, one time act, or something that persists over a longer period of time. This could mean that heroism may be an almost instantaneous reaction to a situation, such as when a self-described \u201caverage guy\u201d named Dale Sayler pulled an unconscious driver from a vehicle about to be hit by an oncoming train. Alternatively, it may be a well thought-out series of actions taking place over days, months, or a lifetime. For instance, in 1940, a Japanese consul official in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, signed more than 2,000 visas for Jews hoping to escape the Nazi invasion, despite his government\u2019s direct orders not to do so. Every morning when Sugihara got up and made the same decision to help, every time he signed a visa, he acted heroically and increased the likelihood of dire consequences for himself and his family. At the end of the war he was unceremoniously fired from the Japanese civil service. What makes a hero? Our efforts to catalogue and categorize heroic activity have led us to explore the factors that come together to create heroes. It must be emphasized that this is initial, exploratory work; at best, it allows us to propose a few speculations that warrant further investigation. We have been able to learn from a body of prior research how certain situations can induce the bystander effect, which we mentioned earlier. But just as they can create bystanders, situations also have immense power to bring out heroic actions in people who never would have considered themselves heroes. In fact, the first response of many people who are called heroes is to deny their own uniqueness with statements such as, \u201cI am not a hero; anyone in the same situation would have done what I did,\u201d or, \u201cI just did what needed to be done.\u201d Immediate life and death situations, such as when people are stranded in a burning house or a car wreck, are clear examples of situations that galvanize people into heroic action. But other situations\u2014such as being witness to discrimination, corporate corruption, government malfeasance, or military atrocities\u2014not only bring out the worst in people; they sometimes bring out the best. We believe that these situations create a \u201cbright-line\u201d ethical test that pushes some individuals toward action in an attempt to stop the evil being perpetrated. But why are some people able to see this line while others are blind to it? Why do some people take responsibility for a situation when others succumb to the bystander effect? Just as in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies, the situation and the personal characteristics of each person caught up in the situation interact in unique ways. We remain unsure how these personal characteristics combine with the situation to generate heroic action, but we have some preliminary ideas. The case of Sugihara\u2019s intervention on behalf of the Jews is particularly instructive. Accounts of Sugihara\u2019s life show us that his efforts to save Jewish refugees was a dramatic finale to a long list of smaller efforts, each of which demonstrated a willingness to occasionally defy the strict social constraints of Japanese society in the early 20th century. For example, he did not follow his father\u2019s instructions to become a doctor, pursuing language study and civil service instead; his first wife was not Japanese; and in the 1930s, Sugihara resigned from a prestigious civil service position to protest the Japanese military\u2019s treatment of the Chinese during the occupation of Manchuria. These incidents suggest that Sugihara already possessed the internal strength and self-assurance necessary to be guided by his own moral compass in uncertain situations. We can speculate that Sugihara was more willing to assert his individual view than others around him who preferred to \u201cgo along to get along.\u201d Also, Sugihara was bound to two different codes: He was a sworn representative of the Japanese government, but he was raised in a rural Samurai family. Should he obey his government\u2019s order to not help Jews (and, by extension, comply with his culture\u2019s age-old more not to bring shame on his family by disobeying authority)? Or should he follow the Samurai adage that haunted him, \u201cEven a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge\u201d? When the Japanese government denied repeated requests he made for permission to assist the refugees, Sugihara may have realized that these two codes of behavior were in conflict and that he faced a bright-line ethical test. Interestingly, Sugihara did not act impulsively or spontaneously; instead, he carefully weighed the decision with his wife and family. In situations that auger for social heroism, the problem may create a \u201cmoral tickle\u201d that the person can not ignore\u2014a sort of positive rumination, where we can\u2019t stop thinking about something because it does not sit right with us. Yet this still leaves the question, \u201cWhat prompts people to take action?\u201d Many people in similar positions recognize the ethical problems associated with the situation and are deeply disturbed, but simply decide to ignore it. What characterizes the final step toward heroic action? Are those who do act more conscientious? Or are they simply less risk averse? We don\u2019t know the answer to these vital questions\u2014social science hasn\u2019t resolved them yet. However, we believe that an important factor that may encourage heroic action is the stimulation of heroic imagination\u2014the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, to struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and to consider one\u2019s actions and the consequences. By considering these issues in advance, the individual becomes more prepared to act when and if a moment that calls for heroism arises. Strengthening the heroic imagination may help to make people more aware of the ethical tests embedded in complex situations, while allowing the individual to have already considered, and to some degree transcended, the cost of their heroic action. Seeing one\u2019s self as capable of the resolve necessary for heroism may be the first step toward a heroic outcome. How to nurture the heroic imagination Over the last century, we have witnessed the subtle diminution of the word \u201chero.\u201d This title was once reserved only for those who did great things at great personal risk. Gradually, as we have moved toward mechanized combat, especially during and after the Second World War, the original ideals of military heroism became more remote. At the same time, our view of social heroism has also been slowly watered down. We hold up inventors, athletes, actors, politicians, and scientists as examples of \u201cheroes.\u201d These individuals are clearly role models, embodying important qualities we would all like to see in our children\u2014curiosity, persistence, physical strength, being a Good Samaritan\u2014but they do not demonstrate courage or fortitude. By diminishing the ideal of heroism, our society makes two mistakes. First, we dilute the important contribution of true heroes, whether they are luminary figures like Abraham Lincoln or the hero next door. Second, we keep ourselves from confronting the older, more demanding forms of this ideal. We do not have to challenge ourselves to see if, when faced with a situation that called for courage, we would meet that test. In prior generations, words like bravery, fortitude, gallantry, and valor stirred our souls. Children read of the exploits of great warriors and explorers and would set out to follow in those footsteps. But we spend little time thinking about the deep meanings these words once carried, and focus less on trying to encourage ourselves to consider how we might engage in bravery in the social sphere, where most of us will have an opportunity to be heroic at one time or another. As our society dumbs down heroism, we fail to foster heroic imagination. There are several concrete steps we can take to foster the heroic imagination. We can start by remaining mindful, carefully and critically evaluating each situation we encounter so that we don\u2019t gloss over an emergency requiring our action. We should try to develop our \u201cdiscontinuity detector\u201d\u2014an awareness of things that don\u2019t fit, are out of place, or don\u2019t make sense in a setting. This means asking questions to get the information we need to take responsible action. Second, it is important not to fear interpersonal conflict, and to develop the personal hardiness necessary to stand firm for principles we cherish. In fact, we shouldn\u2019t think of difficult interactions as conflicts but rather as attempts to challenge other people to support their own principles and ideology. Third, we must remain aware of an extended time-horizon, not just the present moment. We should be engaged in the current situation, yet also be able to detach part of our analytical focus to imagine alternative future scenarios that might play out, depending on different actions or failures to act that we take in the present. In addition, we should keep part of our minds on the past, as that may help us recall values and teachings instilled in us long ago, which may inform our actions in the current situation. Fourth, we have to resist the urge to rationalize inaction and to develop justifications that recast evil deeds as acceptable means to supposedly righteous ends. Finally, we must try to transcend anticipating negative consequence associated with some forms of heroism, such as being socially ostracized. If our course is just, we must trust that others will eventually recognize the value of our heroic actions. But beyond these basic steps, our society needs to consider ways of fostering heroic imagination in all of its citizens, most particularly in our young. The ancient Greeks and Anglo Saxon tribes venerated their heroes in epic poems such as the Iliad and Beowulf. It is easy to see these stories as antiquated, but their instructions for the hero still hold up. In these stories, the protagonist often encounters a mystical figure who attempts to seduce the hero away from his path. In our own lives, we must also avoid the seduction of evil, and we must recognize that the seduction will probably be quite ordinary\u2014an unethical friend or coworker, for instance. By passing a series of smaller tests of our mettle, we can cultivate a personal habit of heroism. Epic poems also often tell of the hero visiting the underworld. This metaphorical encounter with death represents an acceptance and transcendence of one\u2019s own mortality. To this day, some forms of heroism require paying the ultimate price. But we can also understand this as a hero\u2019s willingness to accept any of the consequences of heroic action\u2014whether the sacrifices are physical or social. Finally, from the primeval war stories of Achilles to Sugihara\u2019s compelling kindness toward the Jewish refugees in World War Two, a code of conduct served as the framework from which heroic action emerged. In this code, the hero follows a set of rules that serves as a reminder, sometimes even when he would prefer to forget, that something is wrong and that he must attempt to set it right. Today, it seems as if we are drifting further and further away from maintaining a set of teachings that serve as a litmus test for right and wrong. But in a digital world, how do we connect ourselves and our children to what were once oral traditions? Hollywood has accomplished some of these tasks. The recent screen version of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s The Lord of the Rings brought us a classic story that is based on the epic tradition. Yet how many of us have stopped and talked with our children about the deeper meanings of this tale? As the sophistication of video gaming grows, can the power of this entertainment form be used to educate children about the pitfalls of following a herd mentality? Could these games help children develop their own internal compass in morally ambiguous situations? Or perhaps even help them think about their own ability to act heroically? And as we plow ahead in the digital era, how can the fundamental teachings of a code of honor remain relevant to human interactions? If we lose the ability to imagine ourselves as heroes, and to understand the meaning of true heroism, our society will be poorer for it. But if we can reconnect with these ancient ideals, and make them fresh again, we can create a connection with the hero in ourselves. It is this vital, internal conduit between the modern work-a-day world and the mythic world that can prepare an ordinary person to be an everyday hero. Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, a two-time past president of the Western Psychological Association, and a past president of the American Psychological Association. The idea of the banality of heroism was first presented in an essay he wrote for Edge (www.edge.org), where he was one of many scholars who replied to the question, \u201cWhat idea is dangerous to you?\u201d Zeno Franco is a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto, California. He recently completed a three year U.S. Department of Homeland Security Fellowship."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@717af1215eaf41e3b92322ad9b5627af", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "Scaling Up Kindness", "The Banality of Heroism"], "excerpt": "different <b>code</b>s: He was a sworn representative of the Japanese", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@717af1215eaf41e3b92322ad9b5627af"}, "score": 0.10375911}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@41dfb5f5dd0f4d0d92da0673b9f92c34", "_score": 0.06846326, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Reading: To Pause and Protect", "html_content": "To Pause and Protect By Maureen O'Hagan This essay originally appeared in Mindful magazine. Reprinted with kind permission of The Foundation for a Mindful Society. All rights reserved. On a Tuesday afternoon this spring, nearly two dozen cops from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, ambled into foreign territory: a yoga studio. They were here for a unique course in mindfulness, one that proponents say could help transform policing. As they settled in, they joked and jabbed with the ease of colleagues who have worked together for years. They piled up mats and pillows with the excessiveness of those who haven\u2019t spent much time in savasana, some building nests that looked like La-Z-Boys. On one side of the room sat an officer who recently had to confront a man hacking down a door with a Japanese sword\u2014he was \ufb01ghting off imaginary attackers. On the other side of the room was a former Marine sniper who had served in Iraq, with a haloed grim reaper tattooed on his arm. Now, in this peaceful room, with the daylight dimmed by mauve curtains, these members of the Hillsboro Police Department were being asked to contemplate a raisin. \u201cPress on the raisin,\u201d the instructor said in a soothing monotone. \u201cIs it soft, rough, or smooth? Is there a stickiness?\u201d Everyone was engaging mindfully with their raisin\u2014or so it seemed. \u201cWe all knew what was crossing each other\u2019s minds,\u201d Officer Denise Lemen says later. \u201cWe all wanted to start shouting out one-liners.\u201d If they\u2019d so much as glanced at each other, they would have burst out laughing. Or worse. \u201cBeing able to go there, and focus, is hard,\u201d Lemen continues. \u201cIn my mind, I\u2019m like, it\u2019s a frickin\u2019 raisin.\u201d (Except she didn\u2019t use the word \u201cfrickin\u2019.\u201d) You may know the raisin exercise. You may recognize it as challenging. What you may not realize is just how difficult it is to run this exercise for cops\u2014and how much it took to get them here. These officers have responded to homicides and suicides; they\u2019ve removed children from abusive parents and slapped cuffs on drunk drivers; they\u2019ve chased down robbers and been taunted by hostile gangbangers. They think of themselves as warriors. And now a shriveled old grape was making them feel like they were losing control. \u201cIt was probably the most difficult thing I\u2019ve done in a long time,\u201d says Officer Lisa Erickson. Yet, as uncomfortable as this class would get, the two dozen officers signed up because they knew something had to change. Their profession is tough. In Hillsboro, things were even worse. In fact, you might say that Hillsboro\u2019s \ufb01nest came to mindfulness the same way a drug addict comes to treatment: they hit rock bottom. Lieutenant Michael Rouches likes to say that when he joined the Hillsboro police force some 20 years ago, \u201cwe were 24 miles away from Portland but light years away from its progressiveness.\u201d In those days, Hillsboro was all about agriculture\u2014the kind of town where kids were sometimes let out of school to help with the berry harvest. Back then, one of the larger employers was Carnation, the powdered-milk company. In Rouches\u2019 time here, the population has doubled, to 93,000 residents. There\u2019s still agriculture\u2014including vineyards of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes\u2014 and a sizeable Latino population supporting it. But now it\u2019s mainly known as the center of Oregon\u2019s \u201csilicon forest,\u201d where the drivers are biotech and high tech. Genentech, a company that makes blockbuster hormone therapy and cancer drugs, has a packaging-and-distribution facility here. Intel, the chipmaker, has 18,000 employees in Hillsboro, its largest site in the country. Those industries have attracted well-educated workers from around the globe. For the city\u2019s 120 sworn officers, policing here is challenging, as it is everywhere. As cops like to say, it\u2019s 80% boredom and 20% sheer terror. \u201cThis job,\u201d says Officer Stephen Slade, \u201cwill break you down and crush your soul.\u201d Think about it. Cops take people to jail. They\u2019re not happy. Cops give people tickets. They\u2019re not happy. They arrest the husband who is beating his wife\u2014only to have the wife jump on them because she doesn\u2019t want him locked up. \u201cEveryone hates you,\u201d Slade continues. A hulking 6-foot-5, he\u2019s on the SWAT team and is called out in some of the most volatile situations. Twice in 10 months he was shot at. As he talked, he jostled his leg up and down, nonstop, for almost an hour. Everyone knows this job gets to you, says Sergeant Deborah Case. But you can\u2019t act like it. \u201cOur culture is such that we\u2019re supposed to suck it up and not be impacted,\u201d she says. And most police institutions still don\u2019t do a heck of a lot to address these issues. At the police academy, Case says, they talk about stress-reduction strategies for maybe 15 minutes. \u201cYou\u2019re told to de-stress by working out,\u201d says Lemen. A lean and \ufb01t K-9 officer, she does CrossFit and triathlons. \u201cIt\u2019s weird,\u201d she muses. \u201cI\u2019m still kind of stressed out\u2026.\u201d \u201cWe deny ourselves the experience of being human,\u201d says Case. \u201cIt\u2019s going to leach out somewhere.\u201d That \u201csomewhere\u201d might be among their colleagues or while talking to law-abiding citizens. It might be on the street, where some officers are so amped that things escalate more than they should. Or it might be at home, where officers say they have trouble decompressing completely. That\u2019s what happened in late January in Hillsboro. Police were called to the home of Officer Timothy Cannon. The 13-year-veteran had been drinking heavily and was out of control, according to news reports. He was holed up in the house with his wife, his daughter, and a cache of weapons. Over the next hour or so, 10 officers, including SWAT team member Slade, tried to coax him out. He told them he wouldn\u2019t surrender, then threatened to shoot them, according to a transcript of the dispatch call. A \ufb01erce gun battle ensued, with as many as 100 shots \ufb01red. Cannon ultimately surrendered and was charged with 11 counts of attempted murder. No one was seriously injured\u2014at least physically. But to the department, it was devastating. \u201cWe are so impacted by the toxicity of our profession,\u201d says Lieutenant Richard Goerling, \u201cso consumed by our jobs, we don\u2019t know what to do.\u201d Figuring out what to do has been Goerling\u2019s longtime crusade\u2014and it\u2019s what has led this suburban police department to some cutting-edge work. Ask Brant Rogers\u2014the soothing-voiced instructor with the raisins\u2014how he got involved with the Hillsboro police department and he\u2019ll laugh. A rail-thin 6-foot-8, he had the idea several years ago to offer a yoga class for police and \ufb01re\ufb01ghters. \u201cI \ufb01gured I\u2019d just put it out there,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t know if anybody would show up. \u201cAnd sure enough, nobody showed up.\u201d Cops and \ufb01re\ufb01ghters, it turned out, were not interested in yoga. Except for one: Goerling. A member of the Coast Guard reserves with an MBA, he\u2019s a little bit unusual for a cop. \u201cI\u2019m a contrarian in the business,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause somebody needs to be.\u201d Some years back, Goerling began noticing how many of his colleagues were suffering from lower-back pain. He knew that elite athletes, including Shaquille O\u2019Neal, were practicing yoga and thought it could help. So he went to Rogers for lessons. Then he started \u201csneaking in plugs for yoga\u201d when he talked to his aching colleagues. As he got to know Rogers better, he learned more. Rogers is an instructor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts, which began in 1979. From the moment he and Goerling began talking, Rogers recalled, they were \u201con the same wavelength.\u201d Goerling took Rogers\u2019 MBSR course and began a practice of mindfulness, which he continues today. With a busy lifestyle, he found his four-times-a-week swimming habit to be a great place to practice. \u201cYou\u2019re focused on sliding through the water, the sound of your breath in the water,\u201d he says. \u201cYou \ufb01nd moments to be present in the moment you\u2019re in.\u201d Goerling found that his mindfulness practice helped him be more patient at home, that it helped him deal with the stressors of his management position as a watch commander supervising two teams of 24 officers in total and as leader of the newly formed crisis intervention team, which focuses on responding more effectively to the needs of the mentally ill in crisis. It didn\u2019t take long for him to begin to wonder how this could apply to policing itself. For instance: could mindful breathing help officers when they had to drive \u201ccode 3\u201d to a call, with lights and sirens? Would being \u201cpresent\u201d help them handle calls involving people with mental illness? Would it help them with their own stress level? He was certain it was worth a try. \u201cI began looking into how we build resilience so police officers can go through trauma\u2014whether it\u2019s acute or cumulative. How can they come out and be stronger?\u201d Goerling was also dedicated to the idea that when police are well themselves, they are able to treat citizens with greater empathy, which forges a greater connection with the whole community. He saw how improving emotion regulation and increasing self-awareness and attunement to others could both protect officers and help them be more effective on the streets. Goerling began mentioning MBSR to his colleagues, but initially many of them saw it as a little too touchy-feely\u2014something akin to the dreaded yoga. \u201cI don\u2019t do yoga,\u201d Megan Hewitt still insists. \u201cI don\u2019t understand yoga and I don\u2019t want to do yoga.\u201d Goerling was undeterred. He began inviting Rogers to training events. Rogers remembers one vividly: a simulation of a Columbine-like shooting in a big empty warehouse. \u201cPeople were dressed up like they were wounded, screaming, frantic,\u201d he recalls. \u201cPolice cars were going with lights and sirens. Officers began jumping out of their cars and started running toward the warehouse. Gunshots were going off, and C-4 charges. \u201cI was like, what am I doing here?\u201d At the end, Rogers said Goerling introduced him this way: \u201cHe said, \u2018We have a mindfulness teacher here. How wild and crazy is that?\u2019\u201d One officer came up and shook Rogers\u2019 hand\u2014 a sign, to him, that the team was open. \u201cWe\u2019re all human beings,\u201d Rogers says. \u201cNo matter what we\u2019re doing, we suffer, and this is a path out of the suffering.\u201d Well, maybe not so fast. One or two officers may have been curious. The rest? It would take something more than a handshake to convince them. In the past few years, the military has begun seriously testing a variety of mind-\ufb01tness programs, like MBSR, with its troops. Where once military training focused mostly on wartime skills and physical \ufb01tness, the Pentagon is beginning to see the bene\ufb01ts in training soldiers to focus their minds through practices like meditation. In 2009, a study published in the journal Joint Forces Quarterly gave Goerling something to work with. Marine reservists were trained before deployment in mindfulness practice, and a series of later tests showed that those who spent more time engaging in mindfulness saw improvements in their cognitive performance and felt less stressed than their colleagues. This wasn\u2019t the touchy-feely-hippie stuff cops loathed. These were warriors. \u201cThe anecdotal and scienti\ufb01c evidence was just remarkable,\u201d Goerling says. \u201cYou just couldn\u2019t ignore it.\u201d He went to the police chief and got the go-ahead to put together a class, taught by Rogers, at city expense. But before the program was launched, the department got a new police chief. And just like that, the MBSR course was dead. \u201cBasically, he had no use at all for mindfulness meditation,\u201d Goerling says. \u201cIt was just a bunch of voodoo.\u201d The new chief would face far bigger problems. As his tenure wore on, his relationship with officers grew more and more strained. By 2013, there were two unfair labor practice complaints \ufb01led by the union and a lawsuit against the department \ufb01led by one of its own officers. Morale was tanking. \u201cIt de\ufb01nitely was a hurricane,\u201d the chief would later tell the local newspaper. Meanwhile, it was clear that at least some officers were straying. One sergeant was disciplined after buying two gallons of maple syrup\u2014expensing it to the city\u2014then pouring some on a transit station bench. He later explained that was his way of preventing loitering. And of course, there was the incident with Officer Cannon. \u201cThat was the incident that snapped the organization,\u201d Goerling says. Six weeks later, the chief resigned. The city hired an interim, Ron Louie, who had served as Hillsboro\u2019s chief from 1992 to 2007. Louie, who in his retirement was teaching a class on \u201ctactical communication\u201d at Portland State University, was the son of Chinese immigrants. As a rookie cop in Palo Alto in the 1970s, he was among a handful of officers selected for an experimental program: they were sent off to a monastery, where psychologists trained them in a new way to handle difficult calls. \u201cInstead of walking into a crisis, taking out the baton, and throwing everybody in jail, we\u2019d communicate,\u201d says Louie. \u201cRemember, this was a new thing in the seventies.\u201d Today, much of what he learned is widely accepted. Still, when cops confront bad guys, the \ufb01rst thing on their minds isn\u2019t always reasoned discussion. It\u2019s maintaining control. \u201cMost cops yell commands like crazy,\u201d Louie says. \u201cDrop the knife! Drop the knife! Drop the #*$% knife!\u201d Louie was interested in Goerling\u2019s ideas. The department was clearly in need of some help, and with a six-month interim appointment, he had nothing to lose. \u201cOne of the \ufb01rst things he did when he became chief,\u201d Goerling recalls, \u201cwas to call me and say, let\u2019s make this mindfulness thing happen.\u201d What resulted was a nine-week class called Mindfulness-Based Resiliency Training, taught mostly by Rogers but with other experts brought in. Rogers would teach meditation, breathing, and other mindfulness techniques and throw in a little yoga, too. Officers would have homework, including readings and daily mindfulness practices, and would eventually engage in a daylong silent retreat. A few officers, like Sergeant Case, who had already taken an MBSR course from Rogers at Goerling\u2019s suggestion, decided to go through it again. The \ufb01rst time around, most of the bene\ufb01ts she noticed were in her personal life\u2014in particular, when trying to get back on a horse after being thrown from the bucking animal. \u201cEvery time I\u2019d get back on, my whole body would shake,\u201d Case says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t control the physical elements of the stress, no matter how badly I wanted this. \u201cThere\u2019s already shame attached to fear in my profession,\u201d she continues. \u201cMindfulness practice allowed me to accept the feeling and not judge it\u2014 accept it and move forward instead of getting stuck.\u201d If this could help with such a powerful emotion as fear\u2014that \u201cbody wash of terror,\u201d as Case calls it\u2014then she \ufb01gured it could also help deal with the stresses of police work. Many officers remained skeptical. Goerling wasn\u2019t going to order anyone to sign up. Instead, he asked for volunteers, taking care to pitch the class as the stuff of warriors. \u201cIt\u2019s the graduate school of tactical breathing,\u201d he told them in an email. That was something Slade, the SWAT team member, understood. As a sniper, you\u2019re taught to control your breath, to squeeze the trigger during the few-seconds pause after you\u2019ve fully exhaled. You have to keep your eye on a target. You have to sit still for hours. Maybe mindfulness, being \u201cpresent\u201d in the moment, would be useful for that. It might also help ease stress, as studies have shown. \u201cMaybe this will help me,\u201d he thought. He agreed to sign up. On the third day of mindfulness class, Chief Louie looked around the room approvingly. There were members of the hostage-negotiating team, the K-9 team, and a team that focuses on calls involving mental health problems. There were civilian employees of the police department, too. \u201cWe have the best and the brightest in here,\u201d he said. Goerling hopes that these 24 officers will spread the word, and that, as time goes on, the whole force (121 sworn officers and 41 professional staff) can go through Rogers\u2019 MBSR class. Rogers has had to adjust his teaching for the audience. He tries to use the language of cops\u2014forget Buddhist and Sanskrit terms\u2014sprinkling his discussion with terms like \u201ctactical\u201d and \u201cstrategy\u201d and \u201csituational awareness.\u201d The typical MBSR lingo, about being \u201cpresent in the moment,\u201d wasn\u2019t necessarily going to resonate here. Instead, he tells them, \u201cPay attention to what\u2019s happening around you. Notice the thoughts\u2026.\u201d Language choices aside, the upshot of mindfulness training is to help police decrease reactivity and increase thoughtful responsivity; to be assertive rather than aggressive. Without a doubt, this is the heart of good police work. Officers with these skills will be better able to relate to the wife who doesn\u2019t want her abusive husband arrested, better able to communicate and think clearly under stress. In a nutshell: better able to help the people in their communities whom they have sworn to serve and protect. To get the message through to police, Rogers takes care to liken this mental \ufb01tness work to the physical \ufb01tness activities that law-enforcement culture has long embraced. \u201cOver time, the shape and size of the brain is changing,\u201d he tells the officers. \u201cYou\u2019re reshaping how the mind works, just like you\u2019re reshaping the body.\u201d Every week Rogers takes the class through a 30- to 40-minute body-scan meditation. When you get distracted, he tells them, just notice that, without judgment. Then bring your thoughts back to the body. \u201cEach time you do that, that\u2019s a rep,\u201d he says. At one point in class, he \ufb02exes his arm like he\u2019s doing bicep curls. Practicing mindfulness, he says, is like building \u201cmuscle memory. It\u2019s like doing reps.\u201d All this is great conceptually. But as Slade points out, you\u2019re asking this of police officers. As he and the others lie down in Rogers\u2019 studio with their eyes closed, he can\u2019t help thinking, \u201cAnybody can burst in that door and take full advantage of us. Part of me is saying, you\u2019ve got to stay on high alert because you never know. \u2026\u201d Out on the street, he adds, \u201cMy life depends on it.\u201d Goerling says that\u2019s called \u201chypervigilance.\u201d And it\u2019s not healthy, it\u2019s not sustainable, and it\u2019s not protective. The mindfulness class \u201cisn\u2019t about being relaxed,\u201d he says. \u201cIt isn\u2019t about eliminating stress. It\u2019s about being aware of what stress is doing and mitigating its impact.\u201d Like the others, Officer Eric Russell, the tattooed former Marine sniper, came to the class with a dose of skepticism. The homework alone requires that something\u2019s got to give\u2014like sacri\ufb01cing an hour at the gym, for instance. \u201cIt really is a big investment,\u201d he says. \u201cA blind investment.\u201d Still, he\u2019s determined to be open-minded. If there\u2019s something that will give him an edge out on the streets, then he\u2019s all for it. He thinks about what he has to juggle every time he gets in his police car. There\u2019s an earpiece where he hears the voice of the dispatcher. There\u2019s a police radio in the car, which may or may not be tuned to the same channel. There\u2019s a computer screen that spits out information about calls and suspects. Then there\u2019s the regular car radio, which he can tune to his favorite radio station. And then there\u2019s the driving, sometimes with lights and sirens. \u201cAs officers, we spend so much time \ufb01ne-tuning this craft of multitasking,\u201d he says. The mindfulness class seems to be asking him to do just the opposite: to \u201csit here and focus on one concept.\u201d He pauses for a moment, thinking further about what goes on in the police car. \u201cIt\u2019s a catastrophe waiting to happen,\u201d he concedes. \u201cMaybe now I can acknowledge that the distractions are taking place but focus on one thing.\u201d Lemen, too, is giving it a shot. As a K-9 officer, she says, \u201cI\u2019ve been taught that my stress runs down-leash to my dog. If my dog is a little calmer, maybe I\u2019ll be a little more successful. Maybe because I\u2019m doing this mindful stuff, maybe that will help me not be so amped up.\u201d As she was going through her daily routine of putting on her bulletproof vest, belt, gun, and boots, she realized something: she could put on her uniform in a mindful way, rather than letting her mind race. That would be good practice. Engaging mindfully with routine daily tasks, she reasoned, could help her in the \ufb01eld, when things are much, much more complicated. Goerling has a hypothesis: \u201cThe outcome of the police/citizen encounter, every single one, is in large part dependent on how well I am as a police officer. If I\u2019m not physically well, that creates some problems. If I\u2019m not emotionally well, holistically well, I\u2019m not going to regulate my emotions very effectively. I\u2019m not going to listen very effectively. I\u2019m not going to be empathetic.\u201d Mindfulness, he believes, is \u201cwhere emotional intelligence and wellness come together.\u201d If officers are trained in mind work, if they practice it, they\u2019ll feel better. They\u2019ll police better. And that\u2019s good for the community. This isn\u2019t just about tiny Hillsboro, Oregon, either. If Goerling had his way, officers wouldn\u2019t be driving around in the police cars that Russell described. \u201cHow do we design a cockpit that is less demanding on the cognition of police officers?\u201d he wonders. Where else can we make cops\u2019 work easier? Can his officers\u2014a group who was brave enough to go through this unusual class\u2014play a role in shaping police work across the country? \u201cMy vision is that we become the epicenter of positive cultural change in law enforcement,\u201d says Goerling. \u201cBecause of our perfect storm of where we are, because of how screwed up things are, a lot of good things are happening.\u201d Maureen O\u2019Hagan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle Times reporter."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@41dfb5f5dd0f4d0d92da0673b9f92c34", "start_date": "2014-10-14T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 6: Mindfulness", "Real-World Applications of Mindfulness", "To Pause and Protect"], "excerpt": "could mindful breathing help officers when they had to drive \u201c<b>code</b> 3\u201d", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@41dfb5f5dd0f4d0d92da0673b9f92c34"}, "score": 0.06846326}], "access_denied_count": 0}

https://courses.stage.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/search/?query=Thought

{"took": 9, "total": 75, "max_score": 0.9683906, "results": [{"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@dc836868e224494886330db7708098da", "_score": 0.9683906, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question 1: Multiple Choice", "capa_content": " Scientific evidence for neuroplasticity suggests that people can train their minds for happiness. Which of the following does Dacher refer to as a \u201ctoxic thought\u201d--a mental habit that gets in the way of happiness? Optimism Perfectionism Satisficing Positive expectations "}, "content_type": "CAPA", "problem_types": ["multiplechoiceresponse"], "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@dc836868e224494886330db7708098da", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "Problem Set #11", "Problem Set #11"], "excerpt": "refer to as a \u201ctoxic <b>thought</b>\u201d--a mental habit that gets in the way of", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@dc836868e224494886330db7708098da"}, "score": 0.9683906}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@211ca6c2cca347e89b1499322939a17f", "_score": 0.6778734, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question 3: Multiple Choice", "capa_content": " Which of the following is a way to boost gratitude among students, according to Jeffrey Froh and Giacomo Bono in their article \u201cHow to Foster Gratitude in Schools\u201d? Shield students from the true costs of the gifts they receive. Encourage students to appreciate the thought behind gifts they receive. Emphasize that their academic success is entirely a product of their own effort. Offer them extrinsic goals, like monetary rewards, for getting better grades. "}, "content_type": "CAPA", "problem_types": ["multiplechoiceresponse"], "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@211ca6c2cca347e89b1499322939a17f", "start_date": "2014-10-28T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 8: Gratitude", "Problem Set #14", "Problem Set #14"], "excerpt": "the gifts they receive. Encourage students to appreciate the <b>thought</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@problem+block@211ca6c2cca347e89b1499322939a17f"}, "score": 0.6778734}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4b295a8b1c7b42ed83425381d4da93aa", "_score": 0.42133817, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "When it comes to happiness, sometimes it can feel like we're our own worst enemies, slipping into thought patterns that bring us anguish and anxiety but are difficult to avoid. In this next video, Dacher identifies some of these \"toxic\" patterns of thought--including perfectionism, materialism, social comparisons, and \"maximizing\"--along with some alternate mental habits that are better for our happiness. As he explains toward the start of this video, developing these healthier thought patterns has been a goal of many important traditions, from Buddhism to the field of cognitive behavioral therapy. This video orients you to the benefits of these more positive mental habits; the rest of the week will help you better understand how to cultivate them. As you watch this video, consider: Are you especially prone to any of these \"toxic\" thought patterns? Can you think of times when you've experienced any or all of them? What makes you more susceptible to them, and what helps you avoid or overcome them? Please share your thoughts in the discussion beneath this video. Then move on to the reading in the next unit, which elaborates on the provocative concept of \"maximizing.\" Following that, an essay by neuropsychologist and best-selling author Rick Hanson explains how we can avoid some of these toxic thought patterns and \"trick\" our brains for happiness. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4b295a8b1c7b42ed83425381d4da93aa", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "Toxic Thoughts vs. Training the Mind for Happiness", "The Fundamentals of Training the Mind for Happiness"], "excerpt": "worst enemies, slipping into <b>thought</b> patterns that bring us anguish", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@4b295a8b1c7b42ed83425381d4da93aa"}, "score": 0.42133817}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079", "_score": 0.3354884, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The Fundamentals of Training the Mind for Happiness", "transcript_en": "So in this section we\u2019re going to talk about training your mind for happiness. Disciplining the mind and watching out for the obstacles to happiness and thinking about particular patterns of belief or ways of looking at the world that are good for health and happiness. Of course, this is really an old tradition when you consult the great wisdom of, for example, Buddhism. There are a lot of different exercises that are about sort of watching out for the problematic patterns of thought and cultivating more healthy ways of construing the world. If you look to more recent developments on this thesis, this idea that really training our mind and really cultivating more healthy patterns of thought and watching out for toxic patterns of thought is foundational to the cognitive revolution that has shaped so many therapeutic practices that we see today. You have probably heard about that there are certain attritional patterns for successes and failures that give rise to prolonged episodes of depression when we kind of look to internal, global, permanent enduring stable characteristics to make sense of our faults. That really is a pattern of thought that gives rise to depression. This idea that the construal processes of the mind are at the heart of social adaptation is found in cognitive behavioral approaches to anxiety, where you look to the patterns of thought, the patterns of rumination, the tendency to catastrophize or to think that danger is always looming. As we work on these patterns of thought, we find our anxiety drops. It\u2019s a very deep idea in many different traditions to train our mind for happiness. We also find that there is a clear evidence of the benefits of a resilient mind or training our mind in different kinds of studies as people respond to trauma. So Shelly Taylor of UCLA made this very important discovery in 1984 that people, when diagnosed of diseases we show this profound resilience. We see this way of recons truing the disease as a way to adapt. George Bonanano, out of Columbia University, has shown time and time again people respond with incredible sort of shifts in thinking and patterns of resilience to every imaginable trauma, from forms of abuse to losing a spouse in the middle of life. We have these resilient patterns of thought. So what we really hope is that in this section, we zero in on what are those healthy patterns of thought that may be good for happiness and health. Now, the one way to think about this is first of all, we should be mindful and alert to toxic patterns of thought that can really cost us in terms of happiness. So let\u2019s look at a few of those, and see if these ring true for you. A first one that has really captivated a lot scholarship is the real perils of perfectionism. The sense that I can always be perfect is really an obstacle to my own happiness. Carol Dweck, at Stanford University has devoted decades of her career to really documenting in her work on mindsets that you may have heard about that we have in readings at the Greater Good Science Center. That really, when parents and teachers praise their kids for being perfect, right the kids feel alienated and anxious. By contrast, when you praise kids for just trying hard and putting effort into some things they feel motivated. There are studies that show that if you know you get individuals and this work early in the field by Tory Higgins for example, to kind of think about their ideal aspirations in a sort of oppressive way, it makes them dejected and anxious. By we have to watch out for these perfectionistic ideals. And Steve Hinshaw colleague here at UC Berkeley has written in the \u201ctriple bind\u201d that really there is an epidemic of perfectionism in particular for young women, who today\u2019s expectations say they should not only be beautiful and smart but powerful and athletic and sort of changing the world\u2019s circumstances and that can be too much in terms of perfectionism. A second toxic though, and Sonja Lyubormirsky has really done the excellent work on this is to always be comparing ourselves to others. Right, the perils of social comparison, of keeping up with the Jones\u2019s. And we know from studies that happier people tend to define their happiness on their own terms and not compare themselves to others and think about how they\u2019re always falling short. Yet another thing we should be mindful of as a peril or potential toxic thought is really comes out of Tom Gilovich\u2019s work on really thinking about how we devote resources either to material objects and commodities versus experiences with others. We\u2019ve learned time and time again that if we orient the mind towards experience, we fare well in terms of happiness. If we orient the expenditure of money or what we\u2019re interested in or pursuing to material objects, it costs us in terms of our personal happiness. On this kind of theme, one of the great discoveries in this new science of happiness on potential toxic thoughts was that of Barry Schwartz and his colleagues at Swarthmore, where Barry was really interested in how we approach our experiences of pleasure, right. Going out for dinner, having a drink with friends, seeing a play, taking a walk in the woods. And what Schwartz has done is really differentiate two different ways of looking at our experiences. One approach is to maximize pleasure, for every instant we try to get as much happiness out of it as possible. Another approach is what he calls satisficing; it\u2019s kind of an economic term, which is to find delight in what\u2019s given to us. To take pleasure in what we get. And he measured this with a really innovative scale. So let me give you a couple items from this measure of maximizing versus satisficing. So if you\u2019re a maximizer, you would agree with the following statement: when I am in the car listening to music, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing. Even if I am satisfied with what I am already listening to. You\u2019re always looking for opportunities to maximize more pleasure. And as you might imagine, what Schwartz and colleagues find, that mindset of always wanting more happiness, trying to maximize our pleasure, costs us in terms of happiness. So maximizers, when identified with this scale, when they purchase things they have more regret. They have less satisfaction with life. They tend to be more depressed. When they do well in a circumstance they actually feel less satisfied. And they\u2019re actually less optimistic about what the future holds. As we kind of round out our discussion of these toxic thoughts, and the sort of ways we can train our mind for happiness and greater contentment and delight in our current circumstances. It really is important to sort of bring to bear on this question the literature of optimism. Really pioneered by Marty Seligman and Chris Peterson over the years. So optimism, as defined in the scientific literature, as the expectation that you would have that the future is socially desirable, good, and pleasurable. So for example, somebody who scores higher on optimism would endorse the item that in uncertain times, which is part of life, I often expect the best. By contrast, somebody who is more pessimistic would endorse the item such as, if something can go wrong for me, it definitely will, right? I\u2019m sure that this seems pretty intuitive to you, and over the past couple of decades Seligman and Peterson and a lot of their colleagues time and time again have documented that there are a lot of benefits to this more half full, optimistic mindset. What we find in the scientific literature is optimistic people who have those positive expectations about their future; they just feel greater subjective well being. They report greater happiness. They report higher levels on a daily basis of positive emotions. If you study their neurophysiology as Chris Oveis has at UC San Diego, you find that they have higher levels of activation in the Vagus nerve in a calm state. There have been famous studies showing from Harvard that if you measure optimism from a young man\u2019s life in 1945, 35 years later, controlling for a lot of factors, they feel healthier. They report better health. There are actually studies finding that in the political realm, if you code how optimistic acceptance speeches are in 20th presidential candidates, about 90 percent of the time that proves to be the winning candidate. That there is this social contagious value to optimism. That is why, for example, some of the happiness practices, like writing about a kind of optimistic sense of self in the future, really have shown, and this is the work of Laura King, to bring about happiness and health benefits."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "Toxic Thoughts vs. Training the Mind for Happiness", "The Fundamentals of Training the Mind for Happiness"], "excerpt": "patterns of <b>thought</b> and cultivating more healthy ways of construing", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@f53ee2d04c7747eb81adc7beae3df079"}, "score": 0.3354884}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@fc81b62443454b58b61741d97932f1f7", "_score": 0.32301968, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question: Can You Be Grateful and Not Be Happy? ", "html_content": "According to the way Dr. Emmons defines gratitude, do you think it's possible to be a grateful person and not be happy? Please give the question some thought; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections with your classmates on the discussion board under this video. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@fc81b62443454b58b61741d97932f1f7", "start_date": "2014-10-28T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 8: Gratitude", "Intro to Gratitude and Happiness", "Robert Emmons: The Power of Gratitude"], "excerpt": "question some <b>thought</b>; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@fc81b62443454b58b61741d97932f1f7"}, "score": 0.32301968}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@bb2a675121184750a7a089724ca5bc49", "_score": 0.32301968, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question: How Is Gratitude Related to Other Course Concepts?", "html_content": "In light of what you have learned about gratitude so far, how does gratitude seem related to other concepts we have already covered in the course, particularly the skill of mindfulness? Please give these questions some thought; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections with your classmates on the discussion board under this video. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@bb2a675121184750a7a089724ca5bc49", "start_date": "2014-10-28T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 8: Gratitude", "The Psychological Benefits of Gratitude", "Psychological Benefits of Gratitude"], "excerpt": "questions some <b>thought</b>; if you feel so inspired, share your", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@bb2a675121184750a7a089724ca5bc49"}, "score": 0.32301968}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@d5999a063f9640d69436cf201f778e0a", "_score": 0.3004725, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question: How Do You Define Happiness?", "html_content": "In light of the many different views on happiness that Dacher covered, consider: How do you define happiness? On what do you base that definition? Does it stem from your first-hand experience of what makes you happy, or from your general observations about what you think constitutes happiness for most people? Please give these questions some thought; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections with your classmates on the discussion board under this video. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@d5999a063f9640d69436cf201f778e0a", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What is Happiness?", "Philosophical Views on Happiness"], "excerpt": "some <b>thought</b>; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections with", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@d5999a063f9640d69436cf201f778e0a"}, "score": 0.3004725}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@3b0142fb342c494ab281e79e35a04564", "_score": 0.28290865, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "The War on Compassion", "transcript_en": "You know it\u2019s interesting when you think about the case that we\u2019re making here that compassion is not only a basic pathway to happiness but part of our evolved human nature, you know this view of compassion as being essential to who we are is actually not a prevalent one in many different parts of our western thought. In fact if you cast your net broadly and think about how some of the great thinkers have thought about who we are, there\u2019s a lot of skepticism about the place of compassion in human affairs so for example Sigmund Freud as you\u2019ll recall, thought of the human mind as kind of this basic mixture of thanatos and eros or the desire for destruction and sex and wrote in another place that the fact that we have this rule thou shalt not kill makes it certain that we\u2019ve descended from an endlessly long chain or generation of murders, suggesting that kind of murderous tendencies are in our blood. If you move over to political philosophy and you look at one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century Ayn Rand, in 1964 in sort of making the case for libertarianism said, \u201cIf any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.\u201d If you move over to probably one of the most influential thinkers in political theory, Niccolo Machiavelli, you find in his early 16th century writings, him saying that \u201cOf mankind, we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.\u201d You see this throughout even the great moral philosopher Immanuel Kant really put it in a pointed way that \u201cSympathy, even though it\u2019s good natured, is always blind and always weak.\u201d And this thinking encapsulates kind of a derogatory stance towards this very important sentiment or moral emotion, compassion, that we\u2019ve been talking about. Not only that, but you can start to think about how this broader kind of war on compassion or skepticism towards kindness really has tentacles in different parts of our culture. Let\u2019s just a step back and think about some basic facts, for example as Atul Gawande writes in The New Yorker, the United States is really the only industrialized culture one of only a few that routinely practices solitary confinement where prisoners are kept in small cells for 23-24 of hours a day and not allowed human contact. You think about the United States where one could argue there\u2019s this war on compassion as having one of the harshest criminal justice systems in industrialized cultures--so, over 2 million people in prison, we have some of the longest sentences in industrialized cultures. You could think about it worldwide and the absence or deficit of compassion seen in what many people starting with Amartya Sen more recently Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof have talked about, kind of the millions of women who are missing because of their being enslaved into the sex trafficking industry. And even scientifically, there have been some studies in young people in the United States showing over the past 30 years this is Sara Konrath showing actually feelings of empathy and compassion have declined a bit, so we really should be concerned about this at the broader cultural level. Not only that but the skepticism towards compassion, and I\u2019m hoping you\u2019re getting a feel for this in this class as it\u2019s developing, really rubs up against who we are as species, and the very simple notion that has started to take hold in the last 20-30 years and Darwin was really one of the first to articulate it is that we are a compassionate sympathetic species, that some of the most important shifts in our evolution both our neurophysiological evolution and our social evolution revolve around sympathy and compassion. There\u2019s a real simple flat-footed reason for why this is and it has to do with a couple of physical shifts in our evolution. As we started to walk upright, our pelvises narrowed, the birth canal narrowed. As we became the great practitioners of language and poetry and gossip and all these great things we engaged our frontal lobes and our heads grew and you all know this but we are born prematurely. And you know if you compare how dependent we are as a species compared to our primate relatives the chimps and bonobos who navigate space earlier in development feed themselves earlier in development are independent earlier in development. Out babies by contrast take 7, 20, 30 40 years to reach the age of independence and they needed us to survive. So really, the emerging consensus in evolutionary thought is it\u2019s really take care or die when it comes to the human species, so this skepticism towards compassion really misses the boat when we think about who we\u2019ve be designed to be as a species."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@3b0142fb342c494ab281e79e35a04564", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "What is Compassion and Why Does it Matter?", "The War on Compassion"], "excerpt": "many different parts of our western <b>thought</b>. In fact if you cast your", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@3b0142fb342c494ab281e79e35a04564"}, "score": 0.28290865}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@7c2e29814df741eca1a60f457c65db57", "_score": 0.26918307, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Question: What Will You Take Away from Week 1?", "html_content": "From the material we covered in Week 1, what felt like it had the greatest practical implications for your life? How might you start to change your daily routines, thought patterns, or ways of relating to others based on something you learned in this first week of the course? What material had this effect on you? Please share your response below and see what your fellow students are taking away from this first week. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer. We'll see you in Week 2!"}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@7c2e29814df741eca1a60f457c65db57", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What Does--and Doesn't--Make Us Happy?", "Discussion: Reflections on Week 1"], "excerpt": "change your daily routines, <b>thought</b> patterns, or ways of relating to", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@7c2e29814df741eca1a60f457c65db57"}, "score": 0.26918307}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6c29c907298e4772aa4c9f0b420755b4", "_score": 0.26918307, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, and he is largely credited with bringing the ancient practice of mindfulness into a modern, secular context. Over the past 35 years, the MBSR program has grown exponentially, implemented and emulated in a wide variety of settings; you'll learn about many of these applications of mindfulness later in the week. In these two videos, Dr. Kabat-Zinn offers a basic definition of mindfulness. In simple and straightforward terms, he demystifies the practice and elucidates how it is really a way of being that can be practiced anytime, anywhere, not only in rarefied moments or settings. As you watch, consider: What are some patterns of thought that distract you from being mindful of the present moment? Do you see yourself as the \"star of your own movie,\" and how might that detract from your happiness and the way you experience the world?"}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6c29c907298e4772aa4c9f0b420755b4", "start_date": "2014-10-14T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 6: Mindfulness", "What is Mindfulness?", "Jon Kabat-Zinn videos"], "excerpt": "are some patterns of <b>thought</b> that distract you from being mindful of", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6c29c907298e4772aa4c9f0b420755b4"}, "score": 0.26918307}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@df7b7c5d9669470680e4238526c20296", "_score": 0.24885283, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "What Is Compassion?", "transcript_en": "In this section we\u2019re going to talk about what compassion is both from a scientific and kind of a deeper cultural perspective. You know, one of the questions that motivates this definitional work on thinking about what compassion is, is to try to understand why people so routinely act in kind fashion whether it be volunteering or giving money away or helping out a stranger in need or really more extreme forms of heroism that we\u2019ll talk about towards the end of this section. And social science takes this perspective where they think about there being really multiple motives to sort of guiding kind or altruistic behavior. So, as you\u2019ve learned we can help people because of empathy. Another reason that we can help is because we gain in our social status, that people tend to sort of esteem others who are generous and kind and that will motivate helping. Very often as we\u2019ll learn later in this class, we will help and be kind and cooperate through feelings of gratitude, through feelings  of a sense that others have given to us and we reciprocate in kind as a very powerful motivator of kindness and altruistic action. But really social science has really zeroed in on compassion as one of the primary drivers of kind and altruistic and cooperative behavior. So what do we mean by compassion? Well, what we mean by compassion is really the feeling that you have when you witness someone else who is suffering or who is in need, and then you have this motivation to help them, to ameliorate their condition or to enhance their welfare. Now, that definition helps us distinguish compassion, when you feel concern over someone's welfare and have the desire to help them, with other kinds of states. For example empathy, really, is where you understand what someone feels or you may actually show the same emotions as they have. So if someone\u2019s in physical pain and you have an empathic response, you too feel physical pain, but you don\u2019t necessarily feel concern. There\u2019s a whole other scientific literature on the incredible tendency for people to mimic each other\u2019s behaviors, right. So we mimic or imitate yawns and laughs and tones of voice and face scratching and postural movements, eyebrow movements, gaze activity, but that again is something that\u2019s really separate from the feeling of concern about somebody\u2019s welfare with compassion. And then finally, in the philosophical literature, there\u2019s a lot of discussion about pity, but we can really separate pity, which is the feeling of concern for someone that you feel is inferior to you from compassion where there isn\u2019t this sense of superiority or inferiority, right. So we can separate pity from compassion. Now, it\u2019s really interesting when we take a step back as Karen Armstrong, the great historian of religion and spiritual concepts did, where she made the case that about 2,500 years ago as there was this explosion of thought and writing and scholarship about human nature and happiness and what is the good life, Armstrong really suggested that a lot of the great ethical and spiritual traditions that you may be acquainted with really think of compassion as really one of the primary pathways to human happiness and the good life. Let me give you some illustrative quotes. This runs of course throughout Christianity where we see for example in Matthew 7:12, \u201cIn everything therefore, treat people the same way you want to treat you, for that is the law.\u201d There\u2019s sort of this sense of fundamental caring. If you go to Buddhism, and we\u2019ve already seen the Dalai Lama\u2019s idea that to be happy you have to practice compassion, here\u2019s another illustrative quote: \"Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill  nor cause another to kill.\u201d And this is very much in keeping with the Buddhist philosophy of no harm, right that in your actions you practice kindness and no harm. If you go to Islamic traditions you see Mohammad writing a little bit later, \u201cHurt no one, so that no one may hurt you.\u201d Again, a fundamental emphasis on compassion. And then Daoism which we encountered earlier of Lao Tzu, there you find you find the quote, \u201cHe is kind to the kind, he is also kind to the unkind.\u201d And throughout these great traditions you see this prioritization and emphasis on compassion. So, when you think about this feeling of concern for the welfare of others and the desire to lift them up as our definition of compassion, what\u2019s really remarkable - and this begins to raise interesting questions about how central compassion is to who we are as a species - what\u2019s fascinating is the historical evidence of how prevalent and powerful compassion is in the most unlikely of contexts. This has really been documented eloquently by Jonathan Glover, who is a historian who wrote this wonderful book I\u2019d recommend called \"Humanity.\" And Glover surveys the sort of first hand accounts of what war was like and what battle was like in a lot of the 20th century's wars: the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the world wars and the like. And what he finds is with remarkable regularity, soldiers feel and are really overwhelmed by what he called sympathy breakthroughs, that when they encounter face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their adversaries, their lives are on the line, instead of pulling the trigger, they often sort of break down with sympathy and weeping in a sense of common humanity. That sort of observation raises this interesting question that we\u2019ll tackle in this section which is: well, why are we compassionate? Why are we so frequently kind and generous? If you go back to early evolutionary thought which guides some of the science, you find really contrasting answers. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, published his theory of evolution in the same outlet as Charles Darwin and at the same time. He really felt that evolution didn\u2019t have a lot to say about compassion or sympathy, that really evolution was about sort of physical structures in human beings and out in nature, but these moral sentiments like compassion or sympathy were put into human beings by God. Thomas Huxley, who was known as Charles Darwin's bulldog and was kind of a popularizer of Charles Darwin, was kind of a cynical guy and he said you know, there is no way that evolution would have crafted or sort of created or designed compassion into the human nervous system. It really is a cultural product. It's a set of norms that people as part of societies agree to. Now here\u2019s what\u2019s fascinating and what\u2019s really fun to encounter in reading deeply about what Darwin thought about human beings. In The Descent of Man from 1871, Charles Darwin made the case that sympathy, or compassion, is our strongest instinct. And I\u2019ll quote, because \u201csympathy will have been increased through natural selection for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish the best and raise the greatest number of offspring.\u201d So what Darwin is offering is a really straightforward approach to why we\u2019re sympathetic and compassionate as a kind of evolutionary adaptation - because it helps us get along in communities, it helps us take care of those offspring who are the carriers of our genes, lots of good evolutionary reasons for being sympathetic and compassionate. So what about happiness? Well, you\u2019re going to start to see a lot of different data on how cultivating compassion helps with physical health and the condition of your brain and other effects, but one of things that scientists have documented, Hooria Jazaieri is that a simple training exercise where you practice loving kindness, where you\u2019re just thinking compassionate thoughts towards others and towards yourself over time, actually pretty dramatically increases your own personal happiness, suggesting that the Dalai Lama was on to something when he said that compassion is the pathway to happiness."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@df7b7c5d9669470680e4238526c20296", "start_date": "2014-09-23T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 3: Kindness & Compassion", "What is Compassion and Why Does it Matter?", "What Is Compassion and Why Does It Matter?"], "excerpt": "years ago as there was this explosion of <b>thought</b> and writing and", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@df7b7c5d9669470680e4238526c20296"}, "score": 0.24885283}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@86260043daf4425dae1d7deda1249f71", "_score": 0.24037799, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Welcome to the Science of Happiness", "html_content": "Welcome to \"The Science of Happiness\"! We're honored and excited to have you join us. Whether you're here to gain insights into your emotional makeup, identify skills to help you thrive at home or at work, connect with a global community of students, or simply learn about cutting-edge research from psychology and neuroscience, we hope you'll find what you're looking for in \"The Science of Happiness.\" In this first sequence, we'll provide an overview of the course's content, structure, objectives, and components. We'll also give you the opportunity to answer some fun and thought-provoking questions about yourself, which should set the stage for an even richer journey throughout this course. To get started, please watch the two introductory videos below. One features many of the students who have already taken \"The Science of Happiness\"; the other is a welcome video from the course's co-instructors, Dacher Keltner and Emiliana Simon-Thomas. In the second video, watch closely to see if you can spot Dacher in the photo of his high school basketball team--and look for a cameo by the Dalai Lama. After you've watched both videos, please introduce yourself on the course discussion board and even post a video of yourself telling us what makes you happy. Then move on to the next unit to take the first of our Emotion Check-Ins--and you'll be on your way to the Science of Happiness! "}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@86260043daf4425dae1d7deda1249f71", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "Welcome to the Course!", "Welcome to the Science of Happiness"], "excerpt": "the opportunity to answer some fun and <b>thought</b>-provoking questions", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@86260043daf4425dae1d7deda1249f71"}, "score": 0.24037799}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@1f511f840e684db2bc4a05a28ef33e0d", "_score": 0.24037799, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "Just because our activities can increase our happiness doesn't mean we'll always pick the right activities for happiness. Surely we've all had moments when we thought that something--an experience, a privilege, a possession--would make us happier, only to discover we were wrong. Happiness researchers have undertaken a rigorous scientific campaign to learn more about the roots of happiness. We\u2019re going to explore their rich and sometimes surprising findings throughout this course. But perhaps just as useful as understanding what does make us happy is understanding what doesn't make us happy. That knowledge can save us from wasting time and energy pursuing happiness down the wrong paths. So before we turn to the sources of happiness, in this subsection, we're going to focus on obstacles to happiness. First, in the video below, Emiliana will explain some of the psychological tendencies that make it harder for us to be happy. Then, later in this subsection, we'll identify some of the specific myths that often lead us astray from happiness--the things we often think will make us happy, though research suggests otherwise. As you watch this video of Emiliana, consider how flaws in your own \"affective forecasting\"--a term she defines in the video--have caused you to look for happiness in the wrong places. Then click to the next unit to learn more about affective forecasting and to watch a video of Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, a happiness expert who coined the term."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@1f511f840e684db2bc4a05a28ef33e0d", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "What Does--and Doesn't--Make Us Happy?", "What Doesn't Make Us Happy? "], "excerpt": "had moments when we <b>thought</b> that something--an experience, a", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@1f511f840e684db2bc4a05a28ef33e0d"}, "score": 0.24037799}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5c5740e6e06044ebb252ef82a30934a3", "_score": 0.24037799, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "Cooperation may be good for our happiness, health, and relationships, but it isn't always easy to achieve. Indeed, despite our great tendency to cooperate, conflict is still an inevitable part of life, as Dacher details in this next video. Fortunately, research has also suggested that we possess a strong drive to make peace and reconcile in the wake of conflict. Here, Dacher shares examples of some of our deeply rooted peacemaking behaviors--evidence that we need not be condemned to cycles of violence, stress, and unhappiness. As you watch, consider: In what areas of life do you experience or observe frequent conflict? What are some subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways that you see these conflicts get effectively resolved? Do you think that you, and the people around you, possess effective strategies for resolving conflicts? Afterward, move on to two readings that elaborate on some points Dacher makes in this video: first, an essay by famed Stanford University researcher Robert Sapolsky, in which he explores the deep evolutionary roots of peacemaking; then, an essay by Dacher that explains how the emotion of embarrassment, often thought to be trivial or undesirable, might actually be \"a peacemaking force that brings people together.\""}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5c5740e6e06044ebb252ef82a30934a3", "start_date": "2014-09-30T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 4: Cooperation & Reconciliation", "Peacemaking & Reconciliation", "Navigating Conflict"], "excerpt": "that explains how the emotion of embarrassment, often <b>thought</b> to be", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@5c5740e6e06044ebb252ef82a30934a3"}, "score": 0.24037799}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@491fd19cd69445c7a8bb23d405d5f936", "_score": 0.24037799, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "Mindfulness is often associated with the concept of \"mind-body health,\" and this next video explains why. In it, Emiliana covers research documenting a wide range of physical health benefits associated with mindfulness, ranging from how we experience pain to how our body ages to the strength of our immune system to the toll stress takes on our body. Then, in the following unit's video, she zeroes in on the effects mindfulness has on a particular body part: the brain. She discusses the fascinating science of \"neuroplasticity,\" which suggests that, rather than being fixed and immutable, our brains can actually change over time due to our experiences, activities, and even patterns of thought. As you watch these two videos, consider: How does the research described by Emiliana challenge or corroborate some of your own presumptions about the links between our minds and our bodies and brains? After next unit's video, you'll find two readings and a video featuring Shauna Shapiro that elaborate on the encouraging implications of studies documenting neuroplasticity. "}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@491fd19cd69445c7a8bb23d405d5f936", "start_date": "2014-10-14T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 6: Mindfulness", "Benefits of Mindfulness for Mind, Brain, and Body", "Mindfulness & Physical Well-Being"], "excerpt": "even patterns of <b>thought</b>. As you watch these two videos, consider: How", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@491fd19cd69445c7a8bb23d405d5f936"}, "score": 0.24037799}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b", "_score": 0.23221427, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Social Connection and Happiness", "transcript_en": "I like to start this next section on the relationship between social connection and happiness with a quote by Brene Brown what she says is connection is why we're here that's what gives us meaning and purpose in life another interesting set of thinkers in the space are Ed Diener and Marty Seligman and Ed Diener and Marty did a a research paper called very happy people and what they did is they looked around and interviewed and surveyed people about their levels of happiness and other aspects of their life and properties of their personality and what they found you know overall was that very happy people tended to have rich and satisfying relationships and the spend little time alone relative to people with average levels of happiness and what they sort of claim is a social relationships form a necessary but not sufficient condition for high happiness in other words you can't only have social relationships but if you don't have strong social relationships you're not likely to end up a person who would be characterized as very happy another study that looked at the relationship between social connection and happiness interviewed people about how many friends they have and then ask them how happy they were and it turns out that having more friends is a great predictor of subjective well-being also known as happiness another thinker in this space is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi took some high and and Csikszentmihalyi is famous for having come up with a term called flow and flow is a topic that we'll cover later in the course but one of the studies that he did showed that when when you ask people what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and how it contributes to their happiness the things that are most strongly related to feeling happy is talking with friends another research group looked at people in a cafe in sort of naturalistic observations as Cassie Mogilner and what she did is she had people do a little task that sort of made them think more about time they think more about money and what happens when people thought about time they spent more time socializing when they thought about money they spent more time working and then the crux is the people that spent more time socializing reported greater happiness when they were walking out the cafe so again spending time investing resources in connecting with people is something that that is associated with greater happiness finally Dan Kahneman and a researcher from Princeton when he developed a method for measuring wellness your positive emotions and emotional states in general called The Daily reconstruction method he asked people to recount experiences in their day and talk about how they made them feel with regards to positive emotion negative emotion and a couple other dimensions and what he found was the things the activities experiences that were most highly associated with positive emotion was number one intimate relations but number two socializing so again time and time again when you ask people what makes them happier when you look at when people are happiest tends to be when they are around other people when they're engaged and meaningful social interactions one of the last little pieces of literature we're gonna look to in in looking at or when thinking about happiness and social connection is the impact the deleterious impact of isolation and loneliness turns out that loneliness has all kinds of negative impacts on health and well-being measure both physiologically and through questionnaires in survey methods for example people who are lonely show decreased inflammatory control or hyper inflammation in their bodies a worsened immune responses and difficulty sleeping another little piece of the story that's really interesting has to do with what it feels like in in the brain and to actually be socially excluded and researchers at UCLA Matt Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger have been studying this issue and shown that when people are actively excluded from the game their brains light up regions that are the same regions that light up when when they feel pain when they're undergoing physical physically painful experiences so again being isolated being alone is is associated with with states that really don't know contribute substantially to happiness"}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b", "start_date": "2014-09-16T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 2: The Power of Social Connection", "Intro to Week 2", "Links between Social Connections and Happiness"], "excerpt": "more about money and what happens when people <b>thought</b> about time they", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@7e332052f2d54224b6ae72e6e05da34b"}, "score": 0.23221427}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2010d07841504386a1dbf99a908a09c8", "_score": 0.23221427, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Misconceptions about \u201cTraining the Mind\u201d", "transcript_en": "Now I\u2019d like to talk through with you some of the misconceptions about mind training and optimism and thinking in these more positive ways. And one of them is well, and you might have thought this yourself: this stuff is impossible. I am who I am. I was born this way. I have a certain genetic disposition. I have certain life experiences, and my parents, and that\u2019s just who I am and it\u2019s not, it\u2019s not changeable. Well hopefully, some of the other evidence we\u2019ve shared with you about neuroplasticity should begin to challenge that way of thinking. Actually, we are very malleable and our experiences throughout life continue to shape and inform how we see the world and who we are. So, so that is a misconception. We are not immutable. We are not fixed in stone. Another misconception is that mind training and mediation and mindfulness is a form of brainwashing. It\u2019s some kind of way to manipulate people into being acquiescent or just accepting circumstances in life that are suboptimal or unjust. And I\u2019d like to argue again that that\u2019s actually not true. Now brainwashing is really an attempt to change the thoughts and beliefs of a person against there will. And right here and right now that\u2019s all up to you. We\u2019re giving you evidence that\u2019s been reported by science. It\u2019s been empirically validated. And letting you choose, try things, and see what works. If it doesn\u2019t work, set it aside and pursue something different. This is not an exercise in brainwashing whatsoever. Another interesting thought about this is that perhaps there\u2019s some risk for what we might call over-optimism. And Danny Kahneman, who we talk about later in the course, writes about this, \u201cOne of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles.\u201d But \u201cpervasive optimistic bias\u201d can be detrimental. \u201cMost of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be\u201d And this way of thinking and the science behind it inspired Barbara Ehrenreich to write a book called \u201cBright-Sided\u201d which really details the pitfalls of being overly optimistic. And what are these? Well these are not actually attending to what\u2019s really in front of you. And when I say that you should think again about what mindfulness is meant to do. Mindfulness is not meant to put on blinders, to shut yourself to what\u2019s going on, but rather to be more attuned to what\u2019s really happening. To put your mind and your body in the same place in space and time. So mindfulness shouldn\u2019t be an exercise that leads you to being overly optimistic and shutting out important details. Some of the examples of over optimism you might\u2019ve heard about in popular culture is the secret. This idea that you only have to tell the universe that you want something in order to get it. There is no evidence to support that this kind of overly optimistic wishful thinking actually works. There is the risk of myopic faith: that things will work out as hoped if you believe, even in the face of or while refusing to acknowledge contrary evidence. Mindfulness is actually, and the training of your mental habits, are ways to actually be more aware of all the evidence that\u2019s available to you at any given time. Not to be someone who ignores or again puts on blinders against really important evidence that should inform any decision or life choice that you\u2019re in the moment of trying to make. And again, why I feel comfortable sort of invalidating these misconceptions is because this course is very purposefully and intentionally based on science, right? And our material is meant to convey a balanced view, positive emotions and negative emotions are important. You\u2019re being optimistic but also realistic is very important. Being pro-social as well as what we\u2019ll think about more, self-compassionate are equally important to your own happiness in the long term. We\u2019re only presenting you with work that\u2019s rigorous, research tested, and the principles are coming from these kind of thinking processes. And again, all of the exercises that we\u2019ve provided for you are voluntary. Try them out, see how you like them, see how you feel. Give them a good chance. Don\u2019t dismiss them outright if they feel hokey or silly. But give them a chance and see how they challenge you and see if they can potentially impact your own happiness."}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2010d07841504386a1dbf99a908a09c8", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "Toxic Thoughts vs. Training the Mind for Happiness", "Misconceptions about \u201cTraining the Mind\u201d"], "excerpt": "And one of them is well, and you might have <b>thought</b> this yourself:", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@2010d07841504386a1dbf99a908a09c8"}, "score": 0.23221427}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@8119352cc3064bc4a036ebca7e35c182", "_score": 0.21534646, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Intro to Video", "html_content": "Maintaining focus, achieving flow, setting the right kind of goals--they're all healthy habits to cultivate, yet they can seem easier said than done. That's especially true these days, when we must contend with the barrage of information and technological distractions that often prevent us from developing these mental habits of happiness. What can we do to defend ourselves against them? In the next video, Christine Carter offers some answers. Dr. Carter, as you may recall from her article earlier this week, is a sociologist at the Greater Good Science Center and the author of the forthcoming book The Sweet Spot. That book offers strategies for finding peace of mind amidst the busyness of modern life. Here Dr. Carter zeroes in on some thought patterns that can exacerbate the stresses and anxieties caused by having too many demands on our time and attention. Instead, she offers some straightforward solutions for avoiding or mitigating these sources of stress. As you watch, consider: Do you suffer from \"The Overwhelm,\" as Dr. Carter calls it (quoting author Bridget Schulte)? And do you have any of the mental habits that make The Overwhelm worse? Which of Dr. Carter's suggestions feels like the best fit for your personality and lifestyle?"}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@8119352cc3064bc4a036ebca7e35c182", "start_date": "2014-10-21T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness", "How Goal Setting Can Foster Happiness", "Christine Carter: Mental Habits & The Overwhelm"], "excerpt": "busyness of modern life. Here Dr. Carter zeroes in on some <b>thought</b>", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@8119352cc3064bc4a036ebca7e35c182"}, "score": 0.21534646}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6fd96c54f74845d8bef093426a48f00c", "_score": 0.21534646, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "What Ideas Have Resonated Most Deeply with You?", "html_content": "In these final units of \"The Science of Happiness,\" we want to give you the opportunity to share your reflections about which material from the course has resonated most deeply with you. What topics, ideas, and scientific findings most engaged you? What are the ideas that you will take away from this course and start applying to your own life? How have you already started to apply these ideas to your life, or how might you do so in the future? Please give these questions some thought; if you feel so inspired, share your reflections with your classmates on the discussion board under this video. To encourage more back-and-forth discussion, consider reading previous posts, upvoting great ones, and commenting on them before adding your own response. You don't have to participate in every discussion, and you're free to pose your own questions for other students to answer. We also encourage you to share some of your parting thoughts with your instructors and classmates in a short video, if you are so inclined."}, "content_type": "Text", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6fd96c54f74845d8bef093426a48f00c", "start_date": "2014-11-04T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 9: Finding Your Happiness Fit and the New Frontiers", "Synthesis and Farewell", "Enduring Lessons from the Course"], "excerpt": "questions some <b>thought</b>; if you feel so inspired, share your", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@html+block@6fd96c54f74845d8bef093426a48f00c"}, "score": 0.21534646}, {"_index": "courseware_index", "_type": "courseware_content", "_id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cf8fb5d33e8e4526849af45c4b9e6354", "_score": 0.20004661, "data": {"course": "course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015", "org": "BerkeleyX", "content": {"display_name": "Why We Need the Science of Happiness Today", "transcript_en": "So why else should we study happiness? Why should you take this class? Well at the Greater Good Science Center, we believe and why we offered this class is that the topics you're going to learn about and the practices that bring happiness really countervail some alarming trends that social scientists have documented in the past thirty years of American society. For example, one thing that's really clear is in the last 30 years, people in the United States have become more lonely as part of our fast paced culture. Data suggests that we have one third fewer close friends than we did a generation ago, that a quarter of people in survey data report that they have no close friends at all, more people are spending time with strangers as opposed to close friends. There is this epidemic of loneliness that we've documented in social sciences in the last 30 years. Loneliness is really costly for individuals. It's related to increased stress. It's related to reduced happiness, to sleep dysfunction, to problems, as you'll learn, in your immune system in your neurophysiological profile. We think that the substance of this course is a corrective to that trend of loneliness. A second reason why you should study happiness really with this particular focus that we'll be taking on in this class is it's been pretty well documented that there's been this rise in narcissism and self focus and self aggrandizement, and this sense that \"I'm kind of the center of the universe'. In the past 30 years there has been pretty well documented in cross sectional survey data a rise in narcissism and a rise in sort of the sense that material goods are really the pathway to happiness when in fact that proves to be an illusion. There's been kind of a decrement, at least in self report data, in the past 30 years in how connected or empathetic people are to other people's concerns. And again, we see the focus in this class, this new science of happiness, countering those cultural trends that have really taken place in the last thirty years. Finally, a lot of what you're going to learn about in this class about gratitude, kindness, generosity, compassion, cooperation, mindfulness, and forgiveness is that a lot of these great themes counter yet another trend that most Americans are concerned about right now, which is the rise in inequality. We've learned from different social science traditions that really the only incomes that have risen in the past 30 years are those of the top one percent. They have grown in the last 30 years by 278%, the middle class has either flatlined or grown modestly 35-40%. We know that CEOs earn 1-200 times their workers they manage today. In 1979, that ratio was only 30 times. Americans care a lot about inequality for very good reasons, because as you'll learn in certain parts in this class, inequality costs a certain culture in terms of its happiness, its physical health, how well kids are doing, the conditions of their immune system, whether they're getting along on school playgrounds. And yet again, we have good data that suggest that themes that you'll learn in this class, themes like gratitude, themes like kindness or altruism or volunteerism or compassion are really important antidotes to excessive inequality, which seems to be running through our culture. Yet another good reason to dive deep into this material of human happiness. What we're doing next is we would like you to think about the following thought experiment, which is a famous thought experiment in the philosophical tradition of thinking about happiness, which is: Imagine you had some kind of device, it attached to your belt, it would tap into your neurophysiology, you could press a button and it would make you happy as much as you'd want to be happy, whenever you want to be happy, would you press that button knowing what you know now? And why or why not?"}, "content_type": "Video", "id": "block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cf8fb5d33e8e4526849af45c4b9e6354", "start_date": "2014-09-09T09:00:00+00:00", "content_groups": null, "course_name": "The Science of Happiness", "location": ["Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness", "Why Does Happiness Matter?", "Why We Need the Science of Happiness Today"], "excerpt": "like you to think about the following <b>thought</b> experiment, which is a", "url": "/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015/jump_to/block-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x-2+1T2015+type@video+block@cf8fb5d33e8e4526849af45c4b9e6354"}, "score": 0.20004661}], "access_denied_count": 0}

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