Psychology

A New York Times interview with Yale “happiness professor” Lauri Santos, exemplifies the ways in which the happiness studies movement lets us down. Santos’s research focuses on cognition and cognitive development in dogs and monkeys. But she has been teaching a popular course on human happiness since 2018, and producing podcasts about happiness with millions of downloads.

At the end of the interview, the Times asks, “So what’s the answer? What’s the purpose of life?” Santos answers: “It’s smelling your coffee in the morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Having sex and daisies and springtime. It’s all the good things in life. That’s what it is.” In other words, she doesn’t know.

Here's an additional comment from the article: “Santos says some good and important things. But when she reaches her positive prescriptions, we find we can gain equally useful insights from greeting cards and embroidered samplers—in fact, better. At least the platitude “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” responds to the problem of suffering. “Have all the good things” doesn’t. What is the secret to enjoying the good things? What shall we say to the people who have them all, but find they aren’t enough? Between 1999 and 2019, suicide rates increased by 33 percent—and that was before the pandemic. I suspect that a lot of the people comprehended by that statistic smelled coffee, liked sex and daisies and springtime, and at least tried to love their kids.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It turns out the true happiness is not found in circumstances but in our relationship with our Creator. Only He promises “fullness of joy” (Ps. 16:11; Isa. 55:11).

According to an article in Scientific American magazine more than 40 percent of people with opioid addiction reported some type of childhood abuse or neglect, much higher than the rate for the general population. Another study showed that among those with any type of addiction, at least 85 percent have had at least one adverse childhood experience, with each additional experience raising the risk. The link is most pronounced among those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by flashbacks and other psychological disturbances that can develop in response to a shocking or terrifying event.

Just a few of these major adverse causes are: being a victim of extreme bullying, relentless daily stress in the home, "witnessing violence; losing a parent; or experiencing a life-threatening illness, accident, conflict, or disaster."

The shocking reality is that the vulnerable childhood brain is physically rewired. Growing up in a threatening and stressful environment can undermine this circuitry. Stress in early life also alters the nucleus accumbens, a part of the striatum that is key to addiction: it makes us want more of what feels good.

The victim is often in a frame of mind that is the antithesis of delayed gratification. Immediate relief by taking drugs or illicit sex is perceived as a better option than making wise, long-term choices. A positive future is too uncertain and unattainable. Overall, severe early stress can create a general sense of dread and pleasurelessness. So, if traumatized kids are exposed to drugs that amplify dopamine or activate the brain’s own opioid systems, they are highly susceptible to becoming addicted because the drugs offer the excitement and comfort they otherwise lack.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Some Christians are too quick to judge and condemn the millions of Americans who are in bondage to a number of destructive addictions. While repentance must clearly be emphasized, an understanding of how and why many get addicted will lead to greater compassion and possibly more effective ministry.

Yale psychologist June Gruber has confirmed the many positive physical, social, and psychological benefits of human happiness. But while working at the University of California-Berkeley she also started to see a dark side to happiness—or at least the pursuit of happiness.

In her clinical language she put it this way: “Happiness serves a specific function, and happiness may not always be adaptive” (that is, happiness might not be the most appropriate or helpful response).

Pursuing happiness is not always a good thing. Paradoxically, studies reviewed by Gruber and colleagues in their recent paper show that people who place the highest value on pursuing happiness tend to be less happy and more prone to depression.

Gruber says,

Setting your sights on happiness as the end goal may inadvertently be setting yourself up for disappointment. If you want to live a rich and happy life, it might be better to stop pursuing happiness so aggressively. Instead, engage in meaningful activities especially those that promote deep connections with others, while trying to [accept] your current emotional state, wherever it is.

It's always interesting listening to some folks who are trying to make sense of Christian virtues. For example, The Journal of Positive Psychology ran an article with the following headline: "Humble persons are more helpful than less humble persons: Evidence from three studies."

Humble people are helpful. Wow, you don't say? How shocking! The abstract for the article reads: "Humble participants helped more than did less humble participants even when agreeableness and desirable responding were statistically controlled." In non-technical language, this means in situations where people wanted to help for unselfish reasons, people who weren't full of themselves were more likely to actually lend a hand. The article also reports that humble people even make better bosses and employees.

So how do you explain this strange virtue? Well, not to worry. The researchers tried to examine the evidence "for the evolutionarily predicted connection between humility and helping." Christians have a simpler explanation for humility: It comes from Jesus.

In an article in Scientific American titled, "Rx for Teen Mental Health: Volunteering," Lydia Denworth writes that "helping others might help depression and anxiety." She gives three examples:

● An early experiment found that 10th graders who volunteered in an elementary school for two months showed fewer signs of harmful inflammation and lower levels of obesity compared to students who didn’t volunteer.

● A group of 14- to 20-year-olds who had been recently diagnosed with mild to moderate depression or anxiety participated in volunteer work at animal shelters, food banks, and other community organizations. They experienced a 19% reduction in depressive symptoms.

● A 2023 analysis revealed that young people who participated in community service or volunteered in the past year were more likely to be in very good or excellent health. They also tended to stay calm and in control when faced with challenges and were less likely to experience anxiety. Why? Helping others improves mood and raises self-esteem. It provides fertile ground for building social connections. It also shifts people’s focus away from negative things and can change how they see themselves.

People today may say that it shouldn’t matter what other people think about you. All that matters is what you think of you, that you live up to your standards and do what you think is right. I propose that that is utter nonsense. We are utterly dependent on others to name, bless, and affirm us.

Imagine a poet who says, “You know, I've been writing poetry for 10 years and I've let 3,000 people read my poems. Everyone has hated them. Everyone says, ‘This is stupid, this is terrible, this is bad. You must get another job.’” But the poet says, “It doesn't matter what they think. I know I'm a great poet.”

Would you say, “Well, there's a person with a great self-image?” Of course not. You’d probably say, “That’s a person on the verge of insanity. They are not functional.” And you know the reason why? Because we cannot bless ourselves. We cannot feel beautiful just because we keep saying I'm beautiful. You cannot bless yourself. You cannot name yourself. You cannot say I'm somebody. Somebody from outside has got to tell you you're beautiful. Somebody from the outside has got to tell you you're a good poet. Somebody from the outside has got to bless you. Somebody from the outside has got to name you. You can't do it yourself.

And that means you are completely dependent, or you will be completely dependent on somebody else, spiritually. Your whole being is going to rest on somebody, whether it's the critics, your parents, somebody you hope to marry, somebody you have married, or somebody else. Like sheep, we are dependent on others for our survival and flourishing.

Suzanne Gaskins is a psychologist with a background working with indigenous children in Mexico. She wanted to test their capacity for delayed gratification, so she administered what’s called The Marshmallow Test. She offered each child the choice of eating one marshmallow immediately, or waiting while she left the room for the promise of two marshmallows.

Because she’s been studying the children in this community for years and knows them generally to be proficient and high functioning, she expected many of them to be waiting when she came back. But of the six children she tested, four of them simply left the room.

Puzzled by those results, Gaskins administered a host of sixteen different tests designed to measure executive function. Even though children in this community are self-motivated and can often dress, bathe themselves, and help with chores by three years of age, about half of them failed these tests.

This led Gaskins to examine the cultural bias embedded in those traditional tests and to rethink their efficacy. When she followed up with the children who took the marshmallow test, she found that many of them simply left the room because they had other things to do than sit around waiting for a marshmallow.

“I was very surprised at my own lack of insight,” Gaskins said. “I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids and it became obvious what was wrong.”

Lucía Alcalá assisted Gaskins in administering these tests. She said, “Just because children in different communities perform differently in our tasks, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong and we need to fix it. As U.S. scholars we feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”

For decades, a social psychologist named John Bargh has conducted studies on the way words affect behavior. In one such study, undergraduate students were given a scrambled-sentence test. One version of the test was sprinkled with rude words like “disturb,” “bother,” and “intrude.” Another version was sprinkled with polite words like “respect,” “considerate,” and “yield.” The subjects thought they were taking tests measuring lan­guage ability, but they were actually being subconsciously primed by those words.

Priming is a psychological phenomenon related to stimulus and response, and words are the lead actors. The word “nurse” is recognized more quickly if it’s preceded by the word “doctor.” The same goes for “dog” and “wolf.” Why? These words are semantic primes that cause you to think in categories. If I say Empire State Building, it puts you in a New York state of mind. In the same sense, the word “please” is a politeness prime.

After taking the five-minute scrambled-sentence test, stu­dents were supposed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. However, an actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the researcher when the students arrived. The goal? Psychologist Bargh wanted to see whether the subjects who were primed with polite words would wait longer before interrupting than those who were primed with rude words.

The result? Sixty-five percent of the group primed with rude words interrupted the conversation. Those primed with polite words? Eighty-two percent of them never interrupted at all. If the test hadn't timed out at ten minutes, who knows how long they would have waited?

Possible Preaching Angle:

A few polite words. What difference do they make? In quantitative terms, they can make a 47% difference. Don’t underestimate the power of polite words.

The world began a weekly group therapy session with Frazier Crane thirty years ago. This spin-off character from Cheers played by Kelsey Grammer, emerged as an iconic counselor who masterfully blended humor and wisdom. While Grammer is an actor by trade, his years playing a therapist has given him lasting insights into the human psyche.

In an interview with The Guardian, Grammer was asked how he felt attitudes towards therapy has changed evolved over the last 30 years. After wrestling with the question for a few moments, he concluded with this:

God is probably the best therapist, without wanting to get on too big of a preachy soapbox. I just think if you have faith, you’re probably one step ahead of the storm of everyday life today. There is insanity everywhere. It’s a global phenomenon. It seems to be cooked into our governments. It’s a difficult road to navigate on your own.

In an article in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explores “How Anxiety Became Content.” He reveals that this new “genre” on social media is surging. The TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than six billion views and over 5,500 podcasts have the word “trauma” in their title. Thompson suggests that our consumption of such material may be backfiring. He writes:

Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California, said that for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. Saxbe said, “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique. That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.”

On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.

She went on to say, “I’m very pro-therapy. ... But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression. This makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress. In turn this makes them move toward a (mindset) where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.”

Why are patterns of behavior so powerful for good or bad? As Todd Rose has written in his new book, “our brains are lazy.”

On a neurological level, our reliance on norms is tied to the fact that our brains are energy hogs. Neuroscience has shown that 95 percent of our cognitive activities are unconscious, and these whirring hard drives in our skulls—roughly the size of your fists put together—consume about 20 percent of our physical energy. If you work on a tough cognitive task such as learning a foreign language or playing a musical instrument, you’re using about one hundred more calories per hour than you would watching television (unfortunately not enough to replace going to the gym). But most of your brain’s efforts go toward just keeping your body functioning normally.

Because our brains require so much fuel, norms play a critical role. Like beasts of burden, they help to carry much of our cognitive load so that we can use the executive and decision-making parts of our brains to take care of more immediate business. By providing a basic level of predictability, norms are like trusty autopilots, sparing us additional work that would otherwise cause our neurological hard drives to overheat.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As Christians we are instructed to follow the example of the Lord Jesus and his teaching and avoid the behavioral patterns of the world. With the help of the Holy Spirit, our minds can be trained to follow the norms of Christlikeness, rather than our former way of thinking in the world.

In 2021, several psychologists made an in-depth study into what drives people to political and social extremes. This can result in beliefs in a wide range of unsubstantiated and sometimes harmful conspiracy theories. The research paper was titled “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”

According to the study, bout 5% of Americans are considered "chaos-seekers." They feel marginalized and have "an intense need for social dominance; they’re angry that they’re not on top." There is a growing sense of anxiety that in a time of rapid change, ideological conflicts, and social unrest, they "feel their prospects in life have tanked. People who believe the system isn't working for them." They gravitate toward extremist views and include those on the political Right and Left.

The researchers named the model for extremism a “significance quest.” Many Americans "need to feel they matter and that their lives have purpose. These needs intensify when they feel powerless, as in times of stress and uncertainty or after a serious loss or humiliation. People will do nearly anything to restore meaning in their lives. All too often, meaning comes in extremist packaging."

Many of the people studied reported being simply bored with their lives. "People who are adrift are likelier to seek exciting, risky pursuits that give them a sense of purpose and meaning. Diehard ideologies fit the bill." The search for meaning led some to be "more sensation-seeking and more willing to support ideological violence."

The General Social Society is a gold standard poll that has been tracking Americans’ attitudes since 1972. In about three years (2018 to 2021), Americans’ happiness cratered. According to one journalist, “The graph looks like the heart rate has plunged and they’re paging everyone on the floor to revive the patient.”

For the first time since the survey began (50 years ago), more people say they’re “not too happy” than say they’re “very happy.”

The actual statistics look like this:

“Very happy”

2018 – 31%

2021 – 19%

“Not too happy”

2018 – 13%

2021 – 24%

Dr. David H. Rosmarin, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School argues that “Psychiatry Needs to Get Right with God.” That’s the title of his recent article in Scientific American, Rosmarin writes:

Nearly 60 percent of psychiatric patients want to discuss spirituality in the context of their treatment. Yet we rarely provide such an opportunity. … Of more than 90,000 active projects within the National Institutes of Health, fewer than 20 mention spirituality anywhere in the abstract, and only one project contains this term in its title.

In the wake of COVID-19, Rosmarin observed our hunger for a connection with God and the church. In the early days of the pandemic, Jeanet Bentzen of the University of Copenhagen examined Google searches for the word “prayer” in 95 countries. She identified that they hit an all-time global high in March 2020, and increases occurred in lockstep with the number of COVID-19 cases identified in each country.

In the past year, American mental health sank to the lowest point in history: Incidence of mental disorders increased by 50 percent, compared with before the pandemic, alcohol and other substance abuse surged, and young adults were more than twice as likely to seriously consider suicide than they were in 2018. Yet the only group to see improvements in mental health during the past year were those who attended religious services at least weekly (virtually or in-person): 46 percent report “excellent” mental health today versus 42 percent one year ago.

Why are so many people reluctant to give unsolicited praise to others? It may simply be that we underestimate how well a compliment will be received and overestimate the cost of giving it.

In a study published in the Psychology Bulletin, researchers asked people to approach a same-gender stranger and offer a sincere compliment. The compliment-givers felt anxious prior to the interaction because they predicted their compliment would be negatively received. But their predictions weren’t accurate. Overall, they significantly underestimated how flattered, happy, and pleased people would feel about being complimented. They also significantly overestimated how awkward or annoyed the recipients would feel.

Psychologist Erica Boothby suggests, “We should think about how we would feel if we received a compliment--and remember that others will feel the same. … A few kind words go a long way.”

The renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles told this story in a graduate class at Harvard University many years ago: “A highly regarded psychiatrist recently told me in despair: ‘I have been doing therapy with a man for 15 years. He is as angry, as self-centered, and as mean as he was the first day he walked into my office. The only difference is that now he knows why he is so angry and mean.’”

Dr. Coles pointed out that although the psychiatrist provided his client with insight as to how his childhood emotional wounding had affected his adult dysfunction, the man still hadn't changed. Coles asked, "Could we conclude that what this man needed wasn’t just information but transformation? But is transformation possible for human beings?”

More than 40 years ago, a scholar and researcher in the psychology of happiness named Philip Brickman helped publish one of the first scientific studies on happiness—a paper titled, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” The New York Times called it “the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of happiness studies.”

Not long after publishing that study, Brickman went to the University of Michigan, where he’d become the director of the Institute for Social Research. It was a prestige gig, an honor often reserved for academics at the pinnacle of their careers. He seemed destined for much greater things—scholarship, research, writing, and even changing the world. One of his closest friends said, “He wanted the world to be a more humane place.”

But on May 13, 1982, at the age of 38, Philip Brickman made his way onto the roof of Tower Plaza and jumped. It was a 26-story fall. According to those who knew him, Brickman was not a man who struggled with ongoing, intractable suicidal impulses. Depression and feelings of deep inadequacy, yes. But suicide? Not that they knew of, not until the final weeks of his life. One of his former graduate students said, “To imagine what could have driven him to do that — I almost had to imagine a different person. So, it made me wonder: Was there an underlying disorder that we just didn’t see?”

A close friend said that he envied Brickman’s family life. And on the surface, there was certainly a lot to envy: Three adorable girls, a lovely wife, an idyllic farm outside Ann Arbor. But that portrait of domestic serenity was hard won. Brickman didn’t exactly come from a family where commitment came naturally. His father was forever destabilizing the household with his extramarital affairs, and Brickman was an anxious, insecure little boy. His marriage was also fraught with unhappiness and insecurity.

His scholarship on the subject of happiness wasn’t enough. As The New York Times article said, “Philip Brickman was an expert in the psychology of happiness, but he couldn’t make his own pain go away.”

A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry reviewed data from 22 published studies and found a link between abortion and mental health difficulties. The meta-analysis of studies looked at 877,181 participants, of whom 163,831 had undergone an abortion, finding, “Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 percent increased risk of mental health problems.”

The study found increased risks of the following separate mental health effects for women who had abortions:

• Anxiety disorders (34 percent)
• Depression (37 percent)
• Alcohol use/abuse (110 percent)
• Marijuana use/abuse (220 percent)
• Suicide behaviors (155 percent)

In addition to the research above, post-abortion effects researcher Dr. David Reardon reports that at least 21 studies show a link between abortion and substance abuse. A 2003 study from Reardon’s Elliot Institute found that women having abortions were 160 percent more likely to seek psychiatric care in the 90 days afterwards than were women who had delivered their children. The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, reviewed the medical records of 56,741 California Medicaid patients and found that the frequency of psychiatric treatment was significantly higher for at least four years following abortion.