Happiness
So You Want to Be Happy? OK, But Consider This...
Some positive experiences are related to negative outcomes.
Posted February 25, 2017


By John W. Reich, Ph.D.
Watching what people do with their free time is interesting from a number of perspectives, but especially to a research psychologist. Playing sports, going to movies, watching television, and socializing are popular themes in the lives of most people. Even reading such stimulating magazines such Psychology Today and its fascinating blogs can be a source of pleasure. These situations reflect a major human motivation: To obtain positive experiences to achieve more happiness in life.
Actually, there are legal grounds for all of this pursuit of happiness. It is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, which states that, “they…are…endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Why might this type of behavior be of interest to a psychologist? Studies have shown that some positive experiences are not always related to positive outcomes. In fact, studies show that some positive experiences are related to negative mood, poorer quality of life and lower psychological well-being. What these perhaps surprising findings suggest is that we need to know more about what is psychologically interesting about a “positive experience.”
Let’s start with basic principles. In general, you engage in positive experiences because you want to; it is a choice you have made and that choice is, in turn, an exercise of your free will. Generally, you are not forced to play a game or a particular sport or to see a particular movie. If you are forced to do something, then it is just not as positive. Well, why not?
The key psychological principle involved here is what psychologists call exercising personal control (or a myriad of other terms: self-efficacy, locus of control, personal mastery, etc.) This way of thinking has had major influence on psychological research and practice for at least 50 years. This body of research consistently has shown that believing in and exercising one’s personal control is beneficial, at least in Western, individualist societies. A number of these studies are reviewed in two recent publications (1,2).
This concept of “perceived control”would explain why we can gain in happiness from pursuing positive experiences: Simply, we choose them. Assessing happiness specifically, Randy Larson asked participants to report on the personal control they were experiencing in their daily living (3).Those ratings of personal control correlated with his participants’ feelings of happiness, so the connection is there.
But if that is the case, how is it that some positive experiences are related to negative outcomes? A personal control model suggests that not all of our positive experiences are self-chosen. In life, things just happen to us. In this sense, we are sometimes “out of control,” and that can have negative consequences for our sense of well-being. Information on this condition comes from studies in three general categories of research on uncontrollable positive experiences.
Daily Events Outside of Our Personal Control
One standard research technique employs self-report methodology, asking participants to select from an extensive list of daily events those they have experienced recently, in this case “positive life experiences.” Here are some examples: “played a sport, game or cards with friends,” “taught a child or grandchild something new,” “an outstanding personal achievement,” “increase in the number of compliments received from others,” “received a gift from a family member,” “child(ren) did something especially nice for you.”
I listed these items here grouped by their causal origins. The first three are examples of personally caused positive events and the final three are examples of externally caused positive events. The first three are personally chosen and reflect the operation of our free will; the latter three are examples of times in our life when we are, literally, “out of control.”
As you might expect, experiencing a higher amount of controllable positive events correlates with higher positive emotions and better mental health. But the data also show that uncontrollable positive events are not only related to more positive emotions but also to higher levels of negative feelings and higher psychological distress (4,5).
This counterintuitive effect readily fits within a personal control model. When you willingly choose to engage with a positive experience, that reflects your free will, with positive benefits. But if you have no personal control over an event, if we are a passive recipient, then this low-control experience brings accompanying negative feelings. After all, you did not make it happen, so you can get no self-enhancement boost, and you cannot even be sure that it will happen again. Of course, these principles apply to events that occur to you as an individual, as an experiencing person, as opposed to events that are not individualized, such as good weather or national holidays, for instance.
Uncontrollable positive experiences are a mixed blessing because of these dual effects. Our language has the concept of bittersweet, the “bitter” because of having little personal control over the occurrence of the experience. Parents seeing their child graduate from school or leaving by getting married know this feeling well.
Uncontrollable Winnings
The second category of research involves gambling, particularly playing lotteries. Winning a lottery should be a positive experience; certainly a lot of people seem to think so. Nevertheless, it is a situation of low personal control since you cannot make yourself win. The classic study of lottery winners by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman found that winners did not rate their state of happiness nor the pleasantness of the ordinary events of their lives any different from non-winners (6). This suggests that you get no particularly significant positive boost from just dumb luck.
Ellen Langer directly created personal control in a lottery study (7). She either physically handed lottery tickets to participants, a condition of low personal control, or provided a high control opportunity for the participants by giving them the option to choose which particular lottery ticket they wanted. Follow up assessment found that compared to those who actively chose their ticket, those who were handed theirs with no choice were more likely to sell it back rather than keep it and also to sell it back at a low price. They did not values the ticket as much as someone who exercised their personal control in obtaining the ticket.
The Downside of Receiving Help
A third category of research has investigated the consequences of receiving help (as compared to giving help to someone else). If someone provides you with help, that certainly should register as a positive experience. However, studies show that being given help can have negative consequences. Holding constant a range of other variables, those who received help reported poorer mental health, greater emotional strain, higher depression, lower self-esteem, and live shorter lives than those who provide help to others (8,9). These results make perfect sense from a personal control perspective. Help someone else is a greater exercise of personal control, whereas receiving help is an experience of being passive, even if the help also has positive benefits. Being a recipient signals that, in effect, you are not “in control.”
So What Are We to Think About Uncontrollable Positive Events?
These studies give us caution in expecting where to find happiness. Yes, we are active agents in our lives, and that can lead us to creating positive events for ourselves. But many events in our lives arise from forces external to us, and even if they seem positive, they carry the message that sometimes we are not in control. Given that, then, how is it that most people get along pretty well in life while inevitably experiencing positive but uncontrollable events?
To resolve this dilemma, Fred Rothbaum, John Weisz, and Samuel Snyder have developed the concept of “secondary control” (10). Rather than being an agent attempting to make the world fit your desires, which they call “primary control,” they point out that you can bring yourself into line with your world, “secondary control.” We are flexible beings, and we can fit in with our world as it comes to us by adjusting our thoughts and feelings to adapt to experiences which just happen to us. This in and of itself is a form of personal control. When you control your own reactions to your experiences, you raise the possibility of increasing your satisfaction and happiness and counter the uncontrollability. We are capable of by adjusting and accommodating ourselves to meet the events of our lives we find them, in this case when they are uncontrollable. And that is personal power.
Gaining Better Outcomes from Your Uncontrollable Positive Experiences
Personal control theory makes some direct suggestions about how to gain more satisfaction from our uncontrollable positive experiences. Let me present three of them.
First, be aware of times when you are not in control. You can consider the event to be nothing more than a “happy accident,” – caused by luck, random chance, niceness of a friends, etc. Acknowledging the true (external) cause is an important step in understanding how events actually occur in your life. You can recognize the significant psychological fact that some things in life are not under your control. Just knowing that is “interpretive control” in the language of Rothbaum, Weisz & Snyder. Knowing is its own form of control, and acknowledging lack of control is an active, helpful mental process.
Second, other suggestions follow from personal control theory. You can engage in what Fred Bryant has called savoring (11). Positive benefits can result if you enrich the experience by replaying it, reminiscing about it, and actively linking it with your current and future goals. And of course there is the social component; you can laugh and enjoy positive thoughts, and you can share the experience with others, enhancing the emotional connections in your social network.

Research suggests a third successful technique. You can express your gratitude for having been fortunate to experience an uncontrollable positive event. Recent research on gratitude employs methods such as having a person write about the experience or to directly express gratitude to another person. Consciously experiencing or actually expressing gratitude has been shown to be related to happiness, improved optimism, and an improvement in life satisfaction (12).
Research on personal control suggests that you should evaluate your life carefully, especially when you experience positive events. Some of those events may undermine your sense of being in control of your life, and they are therefore a mixed blessing.
References
1. Reich, J. W. (2015). Mastering your self, mastering your world: Living by the serenity prayer. Ropley, UK: John Hunt Publishing, UK:
2. Reich, J. W., & Infurna, F. J. (2016). Perceived control: Theory, research and practice in the first 50 years. New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Larson, R. (1989). Is feeling "in control" related to happiness in daily life? Psychological Reports, 64, 775-784.
4. Zautra, A. J., & Reich, J. W. (1980). Positive life events and reports of well-being: Some useful distinctions. American Journal of Community Psychology, 8, 657-670.
5. Strand, E. J., Reich, J. W., & Zautra, A. J. (2007). Control and causation as factors in the affective value of positive events. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 31, 503-519.
6. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 917-927.
7. Brown, S. L., Nesse, R., Vinokur, A. D,. & Smith, D. M. (2003). Providing social support may be more beneficial than receiving it: Results from a prospective study of mortality. Psychological Science, 14, 320-327.
8. Newsom, J. T., & Schulz, R. (1998). Caregiving from the recipient's perspective: Negative reactions to being helped. Health Psychology, 17, 172-181.
9. Fisher, J. D., Nadler, A., & Whitcher-Alagna, S. (1982). Recipient reactions to aid. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 27-54.
10. Rothbaum, F., Weisz, J. R., & Snyder, S. S. (1984). Changing the world and changing the self: A two-process model of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 5-37.
11. Bryant, F. (1989). A four-factor model of perceived control: Avoiding, coping, obtaining, and savoring. Journal of Personality, 57, 773-797.
12. Emmons, R. A. (2007). Thanks: How the new science of gratitude can make you happier. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.