ShareThisBOSTON - It appears that smiling, happiness and optimism are becoming ever more a part of scientific investigations looking for links between a positive attitude and health. Over the past few months, reports are flourishing. Some are convincing.
The European Heart Journal recently published the findings of Dr. Karina Davidson, of Columbia University Medical Center, and her team, which followed 1,739 people for 10 years participating in the Nova Scotia Health Survey. Their findings: Happier people are less likely to develop heart disease than crabby ones. She is director of Columbia's Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health.
A study at the University of Kentucky, headed by psychology professor Suzanne Segerstrom, involved 124 first-year law students tracked over four years. The findings, in the March Psychological Science, noted that in each individual, optimism was reflected by strong cell-mediated immunity. Just as our bodies send cells to fight infection when we have a cut or wound, optimism helps us stay healthy.
Alzheimer's prevention was reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry recently, with a study of 951 "community-dwelling older persons without dementia from the Rush Memory and Aging Project" in areas around Chicago. Dr. Patricia Boyle and her team found that those who had a greater purpose in life had a reduced risk of both Alzheimer's and milder cognitive impairment.
To further reinforce the trend, there is a peer-reviewed publication called the Journal of Happiness Studies that reports on "the scientific understanding of subjective well-being."
Today, young people might do well to embrace the positive thinking that was the religious message of the late Norman Vincent Peale, a Presbyterian minister and writer in Manhattan who became famous in the '50s with his book "The Power of Positive Thinking."
When professor Tal Ben-Shahar, whose Ph.D. is in organizational behavior, taught at Harvard, his course on positive psychology filled lecture halls with close to 900 students.
Currently, the description of his online course at the University of Pennsylvania, talbenshahar.com, notes: "Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness, therefore, is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain: Happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak."
Your words can reveal happiness, says University of Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl and colleague Simine Vazire, from Washington University in St. Louis. They studied conversations and found that the happiest people are good talkers, but only if their conversations are substantive. Small-talkers did not figure into the happiness model.
The team recorded conversations of 79 people over a four-day period using a digital recording device that sampled 30-second conversation snippets every 12.5 minutes. These amounted to thousands of conversations, a discussion of which was recently published in Psychological Science.
Who are the happy people? Paul Taylor of Pew Research Center, in a 2008 survey, told us that the happiest are Republicans and the affluent. Also on the list are those who are married, as well as churchgoers. A recent British study, from the psychology departments at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University, tells us that money can buy happiness, but only for those who earn more than friends or colleagues.
Remember the old tune "When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you"? Whatever the research, I'd say that even if the whole world is not smiling, many who receive money to study happiness are smiling broadly.
And then what with baseball season opening, I might add that another team of researchers, at Wayne State University, by analyzing photos of baseball players, found that broad smiles -- the ones that create crow's feet -- suggest that the smilers will have longer-than-average lives.
(Rita Watson is an associate fellow at Yale's Ezra Stiles College and a daily blogger at www.ritawatson.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Providence JournalComment
