The world seems to be growing weary of positive psychology. Critics are sprouting like mushrooms and recent books mocking the movement have become best-sellers. But before we jettison the whole endeavor, we should remember that positive psychology has served as an important corrective. Since its inception, psychology has focused almost exclusively on the darker regions of human nature; dysfunction, failure, and metal illness. Positive psychology shifted the focus to include greater emphasis on health and happiness and exalted states like awe and compassion.
This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing in positive psychology that cannot be criticized. Take, for example, the study of happiness. Attempting to measure human happiness is not a bad goal. The problem however is that often the measurement comes across as pretty silly. Typically people are simply asked to rate how happy they are using a single 1 to 7 scale. I don't know about you but I can't answer that question, at least not in a thoughtful way. Some of the best minds in psychology have tried to solve the measurement issue. Maybe if we control for bias, or get the right anchor or find the true average? Maybe it's not how happy people say they are but how they change over time? Or maybe there is a better way to measure happiness, one that has nothing to do with questionnaires. As a matter of fact there is.
Happiness can be measured from the eyes, or rather from contractions in the crescent-shaped muscles that surround the eyes. When we smile a genuine smile, these muscles, known as the orbicularis oculi, tend to contract, producing the branchlike wrinkles commonly known as crow's feet. The crucial point is that the oculi muscles usually contract only when we smile a genuinely happy smile. There are many different kinds of smiles--for example, polite smiles--which typically do not require the actual feeling of happiness. When we smile politely, the oculi muscles tend not to contract. That only happens when we feel genuinely happy.
Smiles of the eyes tell us all kinds of interesting things. For starters, genuine happiness is typically a fleeting state. It comes on quickly and most of the time we are only vaguely aware of it. Regardless of how fleeting it might be, though, a genuinely happy expression is a good thing. For starters, happy feelings are contagious; they tend to spread to the people around us. Laughter and smiling make people feel more valued, and this in turn makes people more willing to be helpful and cooperative. A study by economist Jörn Scharlemann and colleagues showed, for example, that people taking part in an economics game were more cooperative if, before the game, they were shown a photo of their partner smiling.
These fleeting bursts of positive feeling also help us cope with extremely aversive situations, like the death of a loved one. As I detail in my book, The Other Side of Sadness (http://www.theothersideofsadness.com/), genuine laughter and smiling are common during bereavement, even in the early weeks and months after a loss. More important, we've found that genuine laughter and smiling are strong predictors of who copes best with grief over time. That is, people who are able to show genuine positive expressions-the smiles of the eyes-even when they are struggling with the pain of grief tend to be the same people who get over their losses most quickly.
In another study, Anthony Papa and I found that when we asked NYC college students to talk about their lives soon after the 911 attacks, those who showed genuine smiles turned out to be better adjusted and had healthier networks of friends and acquaintances over the next several years. But this was especially true if we made people sad first. Before we measured the smiles, we had shown the students one of two possible film clips. One was a comedy and one an extremely sad film segment. It turned out that whether the students smiled or not after the comedy didn't matter much. What really mattered, at least in terms of long-term adjustment, was whether or not they smiled after the sad film. In other words, it was being able to crack a grin even when the chips were down that counted most.
Now that's something.
