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Health & Science

Too much happiness can make you unhappy, studies show

By Marta Zaraska,April 02, 2012

(Brad Walters/TWP/ )

The happier you are, the better, right? Not necessarily. Studies show that there is a darker side to feeling good and that the pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you . . . well, less happy. Too much cheerfulness can make you gullible, selfish, less successful — and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Happiness does have benefits (beyond feeling good, of course). It can protect us from stroke and from the common cold, makes us more resistant to pain and even prolongs our lives. Yet, June Gruber, a professor of psychology at Yale University who has studied happiness, warns that it’s important to experience positive moods in moderation.

She compares happiness to food: Although necessary and beneficial, too much food can cause problems; likewise, happiness can lead to bad outcomes. “Research indicates that very high levels of positive feelings predict risk-taking behaviors, excess alcohol and drug consumption, binge eating, and may lead us to neglect threats,” she says.

How else can excessive joy, or having lots of positive emotions and a relative absence of negative ones, hurt you?

First, it may hamper your career prospects. Psychologist Edward Diener, renowned for his happiness research, and his colleagues analyzed a variety of studies, including data from more than 16,000 people around the world, and discovered that those who early in their lives reported the highest life satisfaction (for example, judging it at 5 on a 5-point scale) years later reported lower income than those who felt slightly less merry when young. What’s more, they dropped out of school earlier.

Included in the studies was one involving a group of American college freshmen who in 1976 claimed to be very cheerful. Surveyed again when they were in their late 30s, they earned, on average, almost $3,500 a year less than their slightly less cheerful peers. Why? Diener suggests that people who don’t experience much sadness or anxiety are rarely dissatisfied with their jobs and therefore feel less pressure to get more education or change careers.

Psychologists point out that emotions are adaptive: They make us change behavior to help us survive. Anger prepares us to fight; fear helps us flee. But what about sadness? Studies show that when we are sad, we think in a more systematic manner. Sad people are attentive to details and externally oriented, while happy people tend to make snap judgments that may reflect racial or sex stereotyping.

Fooling the jury

In a 1994 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Northwestern University psychologist Galen Bodenhausen and his colleagues asked 94 undergraduates to participate in a simulated “students’ court.” They were told they would be making a judgment after reading about a case that occurred on a different campus. Before the “court” opened, half of the participants were induced into a positive mood (they had been instructed to think and write about an event that had made them feel particularly good), while the other half was asked to recall the mundane events of the previous day (to leave them in a neutral mood). The results were clear: Those in a happy mood were more likely to find a fellow student named “Juan Garcia” guilty of beating up a roommate than one identified as “John Garner.” The control group was pretty much equally divided between “Juan” and “John.”

That happy people are more prone to stereotypic thinking was supported in research by Joe Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia. In an experiment published in the December 2011 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, Forgas asked students to read a philosophical essay by a “Robin Taylor,” to which a photograph of the presumed author was attached. Some of the students received a picture of a middle-aged, bearded man; others of a young woman in a T-shirt. Even though the essays were identical, those students who had been induced to feel happy judged the man’s work more competent than the woman’s. Their non-induced colleagues declared both essays to be of equal quality.

Anyone who has committed a crime should hope that the jury that tries him is happy. According to Forgas, his experiments show that cheerful people are easier to deceive, couldn’t detect lies as easily as those in negative moods and couldn’t tell a thief from an honest person.

Forgas had 117 students watch specially chosen video clips to induce them into either positive or negative moods. Later they were asked to watch another film: an interrogation of people accused of the theft of a movie ticket. Some of the suspects really did steal and were lying about their action; others were honest. Yet those students who were made to feel happy did not detect guilt above chance level (50 percent). Their sad colleagues fared batter: They could spot a thief more often than chance would predict.