Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (30 page)

The emotional ‘handedness’ first observed in patients with stroke damage in only one hemisphere inspired the neuroscientist Richard Davidson, now at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, to explore how brain asymmetry influences the way we emote, even in the absence of brain damage. One of the first studies he conducted was based on an experiment that he recommends you try on your own at home.
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Stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself a question that needs a little bit of thinking, for example ‘What is the antonym for indifferent?’ Then, while you formulate the answer, quickly notice the direction of your gaze. Your eyes will move in the opposite direction from the side of the brain that is thinking about the solution. Since questions to do with language keep the left hemisphere busy, in the case of my example your eyes will most probably move to the right. A question about spatial imagery, which is a specialized function of the right hemisphere, will move your eyes to the left.

Davidson employed this charming experiment to probe emotions. When he asked people to recall negative emotions – with prompts like: ‘Picture and describe the last situation in which you cried’, or ‘For you, is anger or hate a stronger emotion?’ – their eyes would mostly turn to the left.
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This confirmed his suspicion that the right hemisphere is in general involved in the processing of negative emotions, but he needed further proof. He needed clear signs from the brain. The best technique available to him was electroencephalography, or EEG. With the help of electrodes applied throughout the scalp, EEG detects with fair precision the fast fluctuations of electrical activity across the entire brain, so you can record which part of the brain is involved during the manifestation of emotions. To elicit positive or negative emotions Davidson used short video clips that either provoked happiness and amusement, or fear, sadness and disgust.

For instance, ten-month-old babies who watched a video of an actress laughing responded with a vigorous smile and had their left hemispheres sparkling with activity. If they watched an actress cry, they would cry in return and in this case electrical activity would traverse the right side of their brain.
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Similar electrical variation was observed in adults, too. In a couple of other studies, Davidson discovered that left–right asymmetry lay behind the differences in facial expressions corresponding to positive and negative emotions. Happiness corresponded to left-sided brain activity, whereas disgust went together with activity in the right side of the brain.
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Fascinatingly, asymmetrical brain activity also lies behind the manifestation of a proper Duchenne smile, a smile that involves the contraction of the muscles around the eye. When watching films evoking positive emotions, viewers produced more authentic Duchenne smiles and their manifestation reflected asymmetrical activity in the left part of the brain.
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An important implication of Davidson’s studies was the possibility that everyone shows different default levels of left or right electrical activity in life, even in the absence of a stimulus such as the video clips he used in the lab, and that these differences influence the way we behave and feel in given circumstances, be they positive or negative. For instance, Davidson found that differences in babies’ baseline left- and right-brain activity reflect how they behave in response to separation from their mother. Babies who show higher EEG right-brain activity are more likely to weep and protest strongly if their mothers leave them alone in a room for a short period of time than are same-age babies with higher left-brain activity.
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Another confirmation of this arrived when he measured the electrical activity in the hemispheres of people who were depressed and whose despondency reduced their propensity to feel positive emotions. People with depression had indeed lower baseline activity in their left hemisphere, compared with people who were not depressed.
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But for Davidson, more remarkable than the difference in electrical activity between the two hemispheres in one individual was the difference in electrical activity in the same side of the brain across individuals – say, how two different individuals reacted to the same amusing video clip. In some cases, such disparity was huge. This means that we are all differently equipped to respond to the various circumstances in life. As I explained in chapters 3 and 4, we all react differently to trauma and to loss. The same applies to the way we react to more positive events. We all have different
emotional styles
that are the outcome of a combination of genetic differences, neural circuits and life experience.
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You might be wondering: why would the brain use only one side for positive emotions and the other for negative emotions? What is the purpose of such division of labour? Davidson speculates that it might help to minimize confusion in the way we respond to life circumstances. This brings us back to the notion of the fundamental human capacities of approach and avoidance, the strategies at our disposal to juggle pleasure and pain. When we need to shun danger, it would be disadvantageous if our tendency to approach interfered with our methods of avoidance. So, perhaps the brain confided each strategy to only one hemisphere to reduce undesirable mistakes.

It’s now or never

The American intellectual Gore Vidal once told an incredible joke while speaking on radio. It was about a visit paid to the President of France Charles de Gaulle and his wife by the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. On that occasion, Macmillan asked Madame de Gaulle what she eagerly awaited from her future retirement. Apparently, it took the French First Lady no time to say: ‘A penis.’ At first, the British gentleman didn’t know how to react to that startling answer. He tentatively went: ‘. . . I can see your point of view . . . not much time for that sort of thing nowadays.’ Later, Macmillan realized that what his hostess had said, in a heavy French accent, was simply: ‘Happiness.’
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Whether or not this funny anecdote was based on a real event, Madame de Gaulle’s answer voices a widely held attitude towards life. Indeed, when thinking about happiness, it’s easy to become long-sighted. Happiness is often regarded as a yearned-for distant trophy at the end of a long journey. We think of it as something we only achieve over time, through endurance, sacrifice and via routes filled with pain and mishaps. We think that happiness is when our lives are sorted, when we have achieved desirable long-term goals and when our circumstances finally coincide with a certain ideal existence that we have constructed for ourselves: say a good job and a devoted partner, or a family, perhaps a piece of property and economic stability, and the prospect of a healthy, carefree existence permeated with all kinds of personal and professional satisfaction. There are certainly no fixed guidelines for an ideal life. Each of us will have our own ambitions. But whatever those may be, the achievement of happiness is a huge driver behind our daily routines, something we know we need to strive for, because it happens later. When somebody asks me the question ‘Are you happy?’, I often reply with ‘Have you got a second question, please?’ That doesn’t mean that I don’t have an idea of what happiness might be. But if I am asked about how I am feeling in a given moment, I prefer to say that I am joyful or that I am experiencing pleasure.

Psychology and neuroscience have not been alone in the search for a definition of happiness and pathways leading to it. Philosophers have been coming up with answers for a much longer time. In their hands, questions about happiness inevitably metamorphosed into ethical questions such as: what is the best way to behave, or how should one live?

Philosophers’ ideas on the nature of happiness and how it is to be achieved broadly speaking adopt one of two fundamental approaches. The first of these is
hedonism
. Like most enduring philosophical teachings, it originated in ancient Greece, where it was heralded by Aristippus and later elaborated by the philosopher Epicurus. In essence hedonism is about our most immediate feelings of happiness. It is an invitation to pursue gratification and urges us to maximize pleasure and reduce pain to the minimum. In fact, hedonism resonates with our most basic goal as biological organisms, that of achieving pleasure.

The other fundamental approach to the attaining of happiness is
eudaimonia
, which literally means ‘good spirit’, but is often translated as ‘flourishing’, or a ‘life well lived’. It has to do with finding and cultivating one’s true potential virtues and then living by them. According to a eudaimonic philosophy, there are goods other than pleasure – knowledge, family, courage, kindness, honesty and so on – that are more worth pursuing.

Inevitably, a moral hierarchy has been erected, with eudaimonia gaining the moral high ground. Indeed, hedonism has a bad reputation. This is because hedonistic pleasures are often regarded as ephemeral. They come and go. They are dependent on contingencies and are prone to be unforgivably replaced by pain. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, they are only departures from other less favourable or less pleasurable circumstances. A night of drinks with friends carries the risk of hangover the day after. Eudaimonia, on the other hand, has little to do with fleeting pleasures. It is a better guarantee of stable happiness.

There was one era in history in which hedonism widely came into higher regard: the Enlightenment. Much as the Enlightenment signified the triumph of reason, it was also a fertile ground for the cultivation of pleasure, and happiness. In fact, the enlightened rehabilitation of the pursuit of pleasure had roots in the renewed faith in science. According to nature, mankind shared elementary drives with lower animals, so everyone was born to seek pleasure. Individuals were encouraged to pursue fulfilment, and pleasure was a route to self-improvement.

Earlier, I spoke about bees, their dopamine and their rewarding meadows. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Dutch-British poet and physician Bernard Mandeville wrote a long poem that used bees and their capacity to lose themselves in pleasure as a metaphor for human society. First published in 1714, it was entitled the
Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits
and used bees in much the same way as the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop would use animals to describe human types. In Mandeville’s view, the beehive was symbolic of a morally unrestrained society, a collection of individuals each driven by their own competing desires. Somehow, the summation of their deeds, each guided by self-interest, would be beneficial for the entire hive. In his words: ‘every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise’.
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Men and women, however, had the advantage of an intellect that made them select and chase pleasures with measure and sensibility. Pleasure in the Enlightenment was not about excess, but a refined form of self-gratification, the sort of attitude, one could say, that would harmoniously combine both Madame de Gaulle’s misheard and actual answer.
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In truth, hedonism and eudaimonia are not mutually exclusive. You can shape your character and develop admirable virtues while exercising the ability to enjoy pleasure. Pleasure does not always equate to selfish fleeting satisfaction and can be nurtured by higher goals. It is possible to have hedonistic motivations, achieve momentary happiness, while still keeping an eye on your long-term plans. Fleeting rewards don’t come in the way of self-improvement. In short, you can at once be hedonistic and embrace eudaimonia. By avoiding the dangerous drawbacks of pleasure, such as the obsessive chains of addiction, you can exploit the joy derived from your gratifying predilections. For life is short, but it is even shorter if spent unhappily. Basically, you don’t have to wait for your retirement to attain happiness. A life spent in anger, fear or guilt is going to be shorter than a life made of joy. Joyful moments add up and build a happier life.

Moments of joy, time spent smiling and laughing and in general in a good mood do have tangible repercussions on our well-being. Their trace can be found in our bodies.

For instance, go and find an old picture of yourself as a child or as a teenager and check if you were smiling. It might tell you how happy you are now. Two researchers in the United States browsed through the 1958 and 1960 yearbooks from a private women’s college in the San Francisco Bay area.
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They were looking for genuine smiles. As I mentioned earlier, if your eyes don’t wrinkle, you are probably smiling out of reasons other than joy. Of all the smiles examined in the yearbooks, only half were full Duchenne smiles. The study aimed to find out whether individual emotional tendencies that arise early in life contribute to building people’s adult personalities and interpersonal attitudes. To do that, they followed up the lives of the women smiling, for thirty years. It turned out that the women who in the pictures showed clear signs of joy, with a full Duchenne smile, had altogether better lives. They were more caring and sociable. They were also more likely to experience cheerfulness and sympathy. In general, they were less susceptible to recurrent negative emotions. One specific life outcome the researchers looked at was the women’s marital status. Those with a proper smile were more likely to be married by the age of 27 and still to be married at the age of 52, reporting satisfying relationships.

A similar study looked at smiling faces in pictures of US league baseball players who had played in the 1952 season. This time, researchers checked whether the presence of a genuine smile could predict a player’s longevity. Indeed, those who displayed a Duchenne smile lived on average five years longer than those with a non-Duchenne smile and eight years longer than those who did not smile at all.
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Eight years is not a negligible margin. It is worth learning to smile genuinely as a child. Renewed contraction of the orbicularis oculi
is also a sign of recovery from grief, as observed in bereaved people two years after the experience of loss.
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