The Secret to Happiness

 

Laughter. Joy. Enthusiasm. Elation. These are all words that describe happiness and which are commonly felt from someone who is happy, but for some people having positive thoughts and being happy doesn’t come so easily. Depression is a common disorder affecting more than 350 million people of all ages globally. There are many characteristics of depression such as low levels of serotonin, insomnia, weight loss or gain, and self-harming thoughts, which makes it hard to study and understand. There are also many different treatments of depressions involving medications, therapies, or brain stimulation. With such a rising number of people being diagnosed with depression and being affected by it daily it’s becoming more necessary to better understand depression and the best ways to treat it.

When you think of depression you think of all the negative emotions that comes with it such as anger, guilt, sadness but no one focuses on the positive emotions that depressed people lack and that happy people have. Several researchers are now starting to focus on the lack of positive emotions called positive affect instead of the abundance of the negative emotions called negative affect. Danilo Garcia, from University of Gothenburg and his research team investigated the differences in happiness, life satisfaction, and happiness increasing strategies. They created four different affective profiles from 1,400 US residents self reported positive and negative emotions. From these profiles they found that promoting positive emotions and increasing life satisfaction could make a person happier. They also found that people in different affective profiles greatly differed in there measures of well being, such as people who were classified as being more self fulfilling had high positive affect levels, low affective levels, were happier, and showed lower levels of depressions. From these results they were able to further characterize what makes a person happy or depressed.

Dr. Silton, a professor at Loyola University Chicago, has also taken on a similar approach to learning about depression through studying low positive affect. Dr. Silton did a study involving clinically depressed participants and having them answer the Mood and Anxiety questionnaire, which would score their positive and negative affects. She found that having a low positive affect of emotions such as a lack of cheerfulness, excitation and inspiration is a characteristic of people with clinical depression and can be a possible risk factor for future depressive episodes. She also found that low positive affect is associated with left pre frontal alpha activity and negative interpretations such as thinking the worst in every situation. By discovering these characteristics in depression her and her colleagues are learning more about how to characterize depression and possible future ways to treat it better.

Both Danillo Garcia and Dr. Silton used questionaries’ to discover characteristics that defined happiness and depression by measuring people’s positive and negative affect. They both found that people with high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect showed lower levels of depression while people with low positive affect and high negative affect showed higher levels of depression. What these two researchers are doing is a new approach to understanding depression since most research has been done on the opposite end of the spectrum and focusing on the presence of negative emotions. These findings not only further help to characterize depression but they also help to further give possible ways to treat depression. By understanding that positive and negative emotions play a part in depression it could help develop new therapy techniques that could be used instead of medications.

Works cited

Peer J. "Positive emotion increases life satisfaction and creates a happy state." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 September 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130910095222.htm>.

Silton,R.l, Polnaszek, K.l, Dickson, D.A, Miller, G.A, and Heller, W. “low positive affect is associated with reduced prefrontal cortical activity in remitted depression.” 03 May 2016.

"11 Facts About Depression." DoSomething.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2016. <https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-depression>.

Pictures:

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