When Lyubomilsky arrived at Stanford's Graduate School of Social Psychology in 1989, academic research on happiness was only beginning to gain legitimacy. Ed Dinner, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will eventually become known for his work in his field, but despite his long-standing interest, he waited until he was admitted to tenure before working on the subject. Lyubomirsky was also wary of choosing happiness as a specialist. She was a woman of science that was taken seriously, and everything in the realm of “emotion” was somewhat softly thought up. Nevertheless, following a lively conversation with her advisor on the first day of Stanford graduate school in 1989, she decided to make happiness her a focus.
Lyubomirsky began with the basic question of why some people are happier than others. A few years ago, Diener published a survey of existing research. This touched on the types of behaviors that happy people seem to be prone to involve. However, studies that had sometimes contradictory findings did not provide a clear consensus. Lyubomirsky's own research has long pointed to the importance of people's thinking. Happy people tended to refrain from comparing themselves to others, had more positive perceptions of others, found ways to satisfy them with different choices, and did not linger in negative.
However, Lyubomirsky knew that she could not separate the cause and effect. Has being happy encouraged a healthy mindset or did you adopt that mindset and make people happy? Are people like mothers destined to live together, whatever their natural level of happiness? Even if we could change our mindset, the process seemed to take a long time. People spend years in therapy that tries to do it (and often fails) – and Lyubomilsky wondered if there were simpler and easier actions that could quickly enhance their sense of well-being. She decided to use it as a test.
Lyubomirsky began by studying some of the habits and practices that were commonly believed to be mood boosters. Random acts of kindness and expressions of gratitude. For six weeks each week, she had students perform five acts of kindness – for example, donate blood or help another student with paper – and they found themselves happier by the end of that period than the students in her control group. She asked another group of students to reflect once a week on what they were grateful for, such as “My Mother” and “AOL Instant Messenger.” They were happier than the control group after doing so too. Although the changes in happiness were not particularly significant in either study, Lyubomilsky found it surprising that small-scale, low-cost interventions can improve the quality of life of students. In 2005, she published a paper based on a study that claimed that people had considerable control over how happy they were.
Lyubomirsky's research came out as the field of psychology rethinks its purpose and even its purpose. When University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman took the helm of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he and his colleagues expressed concern that they took too long to concentrate on dysfunction and were not dedicated to promoting life satisfaction. He encouraged his peers to pursue “optimism, courage, work ethics, future tenacity, interpersonal skills, pleasure and insight and social responsibility, including understanding and building the most positive qualities of an individual.” He called for the field to be brought back to the realm of “making life more fulfilling and productive for all.”
