PERMA

PERMA

Many scientists have researched what sustains subjective well-being over years of life. Martin Seligman has codified his research, as well as findings from others, int a five-letter acrostic: PERMA, which stand for the five foundational elements people need to be experiencing to maximize their Subjective Well-Being (SWB):

Positive Emotion: To keep the dogs of depression away, you need to be regularly experiencing positive feelings and emotions, including pleasure, gratitude for the good things in your life, and hopefulness for the future. People with sustained SWB have a willingness to enjoy the present for its own sake.

Engagement: You should be regularly involved in meaningful activities, including feeling lost in a project. It should be so meaningful that you lose track of time, of where you are, and even of who you are.

Relationships: You should have many positive relationships with family and friends and be regularly interacting with them. Having many relationships is a powerful bulwark against depression.

Meaning: This is the argument to be in constant service to something that is larger than you are, including God, a cause, an idea, or a charity – something that continually forces you out of your own experiences and into the experiences of others. There is actually a prosocial twinge to this idea: Doing good for people by serving something larger than you is another way of doing good for yourself.

Accomplishment or achievement: The idea is to achieve some goal, creating a mastery over some skill in the service of that goal – something achievable so that a sense of accomplishment is explicitly experienced. Running a marathon, especially if you've never done before, is a good example. But this category is not asking you to burn yourself out; it is simply an appeal not to be listless or unfocused, both of which are often experienced by depressed people.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Though not as severe as depression, dysthymia can stay with you for years and is still considered a mood disorder. Photo by Elena.

Happiness

What Makes You Happy?

What is the mysterious substance of happiness? What is happiness to the human brain? What are characteristics and definitions of happiness? What makes people happy and what happens when it is absent and depression comes? What makes most of us happy over the long term?

Definitions and Nature/Nurture

What exactly does it mean to be happy? How do you distinguish it from contentment, satisfaction, or even pleasure? The truth is that we don't know. The words may all be describing something similar. That's another way of saying that semantic differences aren't necessarily biological ones. Words like “contentment” and “satisfaction” are separable phenomenon only if you don't look too closely, with “pleasure” probably having the most unique distinguishing characteristics from the happy pack.

The one characteristic that holds up well regardless of how you define happiness is that everybody seems to experience it differently. The concept is so dependent on individual experience that researches have come up with a different name; the word “happiness” is not generally used. More common are the words “subjective well-being” (SWB).

How does one define happiness in scientifically meaningful fashion? Doing so requires a great deal of asking people about their feelings. This is called self-report. Admittedly, basing research on self-report is not ideal because the data is not always reliable. There are researchers who think it's doable, though – and they get the definitions.

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand, amongst other things, you own intellectual and emotional landscape. Photo of an Icelandic volcanic stone by Elena.

One such researcher is psychologist Ed Diener, who describes SWB as “people's cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives.” Diener has used this definition in a courageous attempt to codify the experience across the United States, th around the world, despite stout intellectual headwinds.

Diener created a test where you can score your happiness and compare your scores to other people's scores from all around the world. It's called the satisfaction with life scale, originally published in the “Journal of Personality Assessment”. You can find this instrument online. There are many variables that go into your subjective sense of well-being, so tests like these have to be taken with a grain of salt. As usual, there are both nature and nurture issues to consider.

A thermostat is a perfect metaphor for the nature side of happiness. Some psychologists believe that we are born with a happiness set point, or set range, like a thermostat in a home. If your happiness is normally high, but then your girlfriend breaks up with you, you will be down for a while.

But at some point your set range gets violated, your feelings get too “low”, and your mood alarm goes off. As a result, you turn on some SWB heat. Eventually, you return to your natural happiness temperature. If your happiness is too “high” - for example, if you win the lottery – the system works in reverse, eventually turning on some SWB air-conditioning. You return eventually to the same happiness you had before winning.

Happiness set points are conceived by some researchers as being more or less a permanent feature of your personality. That means that your set range is in part biologically determined – genetic, perhaps – which means that it's mostly concerned with how well you chose your parents.

There is evidence to suggest that these some psychologists might be on to something. Studies of twins reveal that the SWB scores are experienced alike, regardless of the environment in which the twins are raised.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Our intelligence is a form of self-awareness, whereby you understand your assets and limitations, your strengths and weaknesses. Photo by Elena.

The Brain

The Brain

What happens to specific regions in the brain when you feel anger and fear? Before you became angry and fearful, you had to determine if there was something to be angry and fearful, you had to determine if there was something to be angry and fearful about. This is the evaluation, appraisal, step, mediated in part by higher regions of the brain and in part by the amygdala.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of a larger complex called the limbic system. It looks like a small scorpion stuck in the middle of your head. The claws of this scorpion are the amygdalae. You have two amygdalae embedded into your brain, one on the left and one on the right.

The amygdala is the region most responsible for tagging a given sensory input with an emotional message. The amygdala helps generate emotional experiences and also helps in remembering them. It does this mostly unconsciously, out of sight of our awareness. Those talented claws take input from all five senses and return to the brain the beginnings of what may be a memorable emotional reaction.

When you experience anger and fear, signals are sent deep into your brain's interior, arriving at the thalamus, that egg-shaped structure in the middle of your brain that sits on the back of the scorpion. The signal is sent down two neural paths simultaneously once the thalamus is finished with it. One path goes directly to the amygdala, via a highway LeDoux calls the fast path. That may be the emotion part and mostly lies out of your awareness. But not for long.

The second signal is shuttled to the cortical regions necessary for you to consciously process your anger and fear. After visiting the cortex, those signals are routed back at the amygdala. That may be the feeling part – but because it has to visit more brain regions, it's a much slower signal. Not surprisingly, LeDoux calls it the slow pathway.

Emotions and their accompanying feelings have deep survival benefits. Illustration by Elena.

Because the fast pathway is obviously faster than the slow pathway, you may begin responding emotionally to something you see before you're consciously aware of even looking at it. But the emotion will be there when you do, thanks in large part to your amygdala.

This doubly stimulated almond is not alone in processing emotional responses. As the amygdala understands the meaning what you're seeing, it starts alerting some of its neurological neighbors. One neighbor that gets a lot of attention is the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus lies beneath the thalamus. It's small and thin – only about one-tenth of an inch thick. But don't let its small size fool you. The hypothalamus is also involved in handling the big emotions processed by the rest of the brain, from feelings of stress to feelings of hunger. You can artificially stimulate it and derive feelings of pleasure. You may even feel like projecting your genes into the next generation.

The hypothalamus is not just for romantic and sexual pleasure, though. If you get into a fighting mood as you view something that makes you angry or afraid, you can blame that on the hypothalamus, too. It also controls body temperature, so if your blood begins to boil, you'll know why.

Many regions of the brain are involved as you generate emotional responses. Some of these regions, such as the hypothalamus, alert the rest of the body that some kind of important deliberations are occurring and it had better pay attention.

Many of those bodily processes create chemicals and electric signals that go back to the brain, forming feedback loops. These loops inform the brain about the body's reactions, which in turn modifies the brain's experience of emotions and feelings – and even the behaviors that flow from them. That's why the brain and body are both the cause and effect of emotion, settling the controversy, or at least providing nuance to it.

Many regions of the brain are involved when experiencing anger and fear. Illustration by Elena.

Relationship between the Brain and Body

Relationship between the Brain and Body

Many attempts have been made to explain the relationship between the brain, body, and emotion, with great disagreement. One theory seeking to explain this relationship is called the James-Lange theory of emotion. The James of this duo is a reference to the famous William James of the 19th century.

The James-Lange theory says that an emotionally competent stimulus is detected first, and that triggers physiological responses. Those responses then feed back into the brain, producing the emotions and feelings we experience.

A cornerstone idea of this theory is that different stimuli elicit different bodily states. Specific emotions are experienced from the interpretations of these various states. What we feel depend of what our bodies are telling us.

Another duo of researchers in the early part of the 20th century put forth what became the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. They argue that emotions couldn't just be a reaction to what is going on in the body, and for two reasons. First, our physiological responses are just too slow. You can consciously feel some things instantly, and then your body catches up (blushing is a good example).

The second reason comes from data a little more startling. Research eventually showed that arousals were remarkably similar from one stimulus to the next, even opposing stimuli. For example, feelings of pleasure ignite similar physiological responses as feelings of stress do.

Given these contradictions, Cannon-Bard came up with another idea. They stated that an emotionally competent stimulus triggers some physiological bodily response while simultaneously triggering other activity in the brain. Different feelings then arise because of differing interpretations of similar aroused bodily responses. Your brain has to make an inference from other sources before the emotion is identified.

These days, the controversy has come to something of a truce, mostly because we have more data. Both theories have elements that were shown to be correct over the years, and both have elements that weren't.

This is all understandable. The real view turns out to be confusing. We now know that brain and body are both the cause and the effect of emotions and feelings. They work together to create the experiences, establishing an equilibrium – a bidrectionality.

A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff. Photo by Elena.

Emotions, Feelings, Appraisals

Emotions, Feelings, and Appraisals

It should be a fairly easy task to define what an emotion is You've felt dozens of them every day, from minor irritations to experiences that made you smile. Anecdotally, we are very familiar with emotions. But only anecdotally. It's an untrustworthy rope that ties the anecdotal to the neurological. You need go no further than the English language to show how difficult anecdotal experiences are to characterize.

For example, take the basic word “emotions” and try to separate it from the word “feelings.” Are both of these different from the word “motivation”? What about the word “drive”? Or “appraisal”? Are the emotions of love different from the feelings of hunger for example? How are these related to survival drives?

Certainly, context matters. There have been many attempts to settle these definitional issues – but they still haven't been settled.

Some researchers do not believe in the concept of emotions at all, except at the obscure anecdotal level. To them, what we call emotions are simply patterns of electrical stimulation involving specific neural networks recruited for some survival purpose.Different patterns accomplish different things, but they're just patterns of activity. To them, distinctions between our feeling worlds and our thinking worlds are artificial.

According to Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, “emotions are automatic, largely unconscious behavioral and cognitive responses triggered when the brain detects a positively or negatively charged significant stimulus.” A positive stimulus might be realizing that you're falling in love. A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff.

“Feelings are the conscious perceptions of emotional responses,” say Damasio and LeDoux. You become aware of various emotional responses your body and brain are cooking up in reaction to some stimulus. That awareness plus emotion equals feelings. This not the entirety of the data; it may not be the most accurate. The relationship between brain and body and the experience of emotions is fraught with controversy.

Another concept is that of evaluation, or appraisal, in emotional processing. From the appraisal comes the emotion, and then the feeling. It's a chain. However, not everybody agrees with that chain.

You do not see with your eyes; you see with your brain. Photo by Elena.