Why are national happiness levels always flat?

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

Yesterday, I went to the British Academy, to hear Richard Easterlin, the father of happiness economics, present his latest thinking, together with Andrew Oswald of Warwick University. Easterlin asked the provocative question: does higher income raise happiness in poorer countries? His answer was ‘no, as far as the evidence goes’. He showed graph after graph of transition economies where the income has been rising sharply over the last decade, while the happiness levels remained flat.

He focused on China, a country “where the rate of economic growth has been completely unprecedented, at almost 10% a year for the last decade. If any country would show an improvement in happiness, it would be China.” But it doesn’t. Another flat line.

The only countries which showed noticeable drops and rises in happiness levels, as far as I could tell, where post-Communist countries, whose happiness levels showed a clear (and understandable) drop after the collapse of communism, and then a steady rise after that, only to flatten out again.

This famous flattening of average happiness levels despite rises in income has been called the Easterlin Paradox, and is perhaps the single most influential graph for happiness economics. It is used, over and over again, as evidence that governments should not be focusing on raising income, but instead on raising happiness.

But here’s my question: do any policies have any clear impact on national happiness levels? Perhaps the happiness flatlines we see in country after country is evidence not that we’re pursuing the wrong policies, but simply that our daily happiness levels are not very sensitive to major policy changes. Think about all the different political, economic and cultural changes over the last 50 years in the UK, and yet our happiness levels remain flat. Why is that? I suggest it’s because the measurement technique – asking people to rate their happiness between one and ten – simply isn’t good enough to pick up changes in quality of life over time. We adapt to our situation, and except in moments of extreme crisis, we always say ‘oh, about a seven’.

What do happiness economists expect? Do they think that, if governments pursue the right policies, the public will go from a seven, to an eight, until eventually, after say 30 years, we will all be shouting ‘Ten!’ before ascending in rapture unto heaven? Of course, given such a bounded numerical scale, people are going to say ‘about a seven’, even if their lives have actually got better or worse over time. We forget the bad times, and we also forget the good times. Our daily well-being is probably protected by our forgetfulness and our ability to adapt.

Happiness economists try to get around this by using country comparisons. ‘Look’, they say, ‘how Scandinavian countries are typically happier than Anglo-Saxon countries. This is because they spend more on health, education and unemployment benefits. If we did the same, we’d be happier.’ I’m personally all for higher education and health spending. But that sort of cross-country comparison completely ignores cultural differences.

To be convinced, I’d like to see examples within a particular country where particular policies have led to a clear rise or fall in national happiness levels. Do such examples exist, I asked. “Yes”, Easterlin replied. “There are clear links between employment and happiness levels in countries. Unemployment in the US has dropped markedly in the last three years, and happiness levels in 2010 were at their lowest for many years.”

At that point, the head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, who was listening attentively in the audience, joined the debate. He said: “One of the things we’re trying to figure out is the adaptation effects. There’s a new paper out by Angus Deaton, which looks at the effect of the recession of US happiness levels, and it shows that happiness levels are already back to their pre-crisis levels, despite unemployment still being much higher than it was. There’s even evidence that people adapt quite quickly to traumas like losing an arm. So what does that mean for public policy?”

It’s worth having a look at the paper O’Donnell mentioned, because it is quite damning for happiness economics. It finds, for example, that subjective well-being measurements seem only very slightly correlated with the doubling of unemployment in the US, while there are clear spikes on Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Deaton notes that subjective well-being levels seem to be very correlated with stock market levels, and that perhaps they are driven by the same short-term sentiment factors, like headlines, holidays or the weather, rather than serious policy changes.

He writes: “While it is conceivable that, as is sometimes argued for the stock market, the SWB measures are giving an accurate take on expected future well-being, it seems more plausible that, like the stock market, they have actually very little to do with well-being. As McFadden suggests in comments on this paper, we may be looking at “cognitive bubbles” that are essentially irrelevant for any concept of well-being that we care about…[SWB measurements] still have a long way to go in establishing themselves as good time-series monitors for the aggregate economy. In a world of bread and circuses, measures like happiness that are sensitive to short-term ephemera, and that are affected more by the arrival of St Valentine’s Day than to a doubling of unemployment, are measures that pick up the circuses but miss the bread.”

Strong words – and interesting that O’Donnell should have picked up on them. It shows, I would suggest, the Civil Service’s own queries about the mission they have been set by the Coalition Government – but it also shows how seriously O’Donnell is taking this mission, and his own interest in it.

I would suggest that empirical studies of what factors lead to flourishing can and should influence policies. I’m just not convinced by broader arguments based on national happiness levels. The measuring instrument is simply too blunt to be of any real use to policy makers.

What Theodore Zeldin did next

Posted on September 17, 2011 by

One of the pioneers of the history of emotions is Theodore Zeldin, who wrote the five-volume History of French Passions way back in 1973, and then brought the history of the emotions into the mainstream with An Intimate History of Humanity, in 1994. So some of you may be wondering what he’s working on at the moment. The answer is he’s set up a foundation in Oxford, called the Oxford Muse, ‘to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life’. The unusual illustrations on the site are Zeldin’s own creations.

The foundation’s main project is promoting conversations around the world. Zeldin has come up with a format he calls ‘a feast of strangers’, which sounds a bit like a cannibal potluck, but is really an event wherein people turn up, get fed, and get paired off with a stranger for an hour and a half, then given a menu of topics to discuss, course-by-course. Over soup, you might be asked to discuss ‘how have your priorities changed over the years?’; while the fish course asks you to consider ‘when have you felt isolated?’

Speed dating it ain’t. For an hour and a half, it’s just you and the Other, going through the ‘process’ of deep conversation, finding out about each other, sharing, listening. Not sure I could take it. But perhaps that’s Zeldin’s point: we have erected more and more barriers to proper conversation, have walled ourselves in with iphones and headphones, have dwindled the resources of our attention, and our capacity to trust, share with and listen to others. You can hear a Radio 4 show from last week about the conversation project here.

The conversation menu format is often used in the School of Life’s philosophy meals, although they charge punters for the privilege, and allow them to change partner every course, which is contrary to Zeldin’s ‘deep conversation’ process. And they gather people who are quite similar and Bloomsbury-esque, while Zeldin wants us to converse deeply with people who are very different to us. Zeldin himself has taken his format all over the UK – Lewisham, Stratford, even an in-house session in IKEA, and all over the world. This month, he is organizing conversations in Beijing and Shanghai. He’s also experimenting with the format, like this conversation on wheels….

The remarkable rise of Alcoholics Anonymous

Posted on September 9, 2011 by

My name’s Jules, and I’m not an alcoholic. But I did meet a friend of mine last night who is a recovering alcoholic, and talking to him about Alcoholics Anonymous made me think about this fascinating movement, and the key role its played in the history of self-help and mental health over the last 75 years.

AA came out of a Protestant movement in the 1920s called the Oxford Group, which was hugely popular and influential for a couple of decades, before rapidly disappearing. The Oxford Group (actually nothing to do with Oxford) was a form of Protestant revivalism, which encouraged self-examination, sharing or confessing your faults to your local group, and then spreading the word to others. In true Protestant fashion, the Oxford Group stripped Christianity down to its bare essentials and adapted it for the 20th century. The Group seemed designed for modern mass media, with its simple messages, slogans and mnemonics (one of its slogans was ‘a spiritual radiophone in every home’, which sounds quite Huxlerian). And it tapped in to the modern urge – perhaps the narcissistic urge – to tell your story to a group, to share the inmost core of your being, and receive the group’s acceptance for your most shameful secrets.

Later new religious movements like the Landmark Forum, the Work, or Erhard Seminar Training would take these basic dynamics of introspection and group confessional, and strip them even further of their religious trappings, by taking away any mention of God or Jesus. But they kept the idea of the sudden conversion, the instant liberation from bad habits, which also appeals to the modern hurried sensibility: a new you, in just 24 hours!

Like Scientology today, the Oxford Group made a big thing of its connections to the wealthy and successful – the implication being that membership of the Group could give you an intro to attractive social and business connections (rather like some middle managers are attracted to Freemasonry or the Rotary Club for the networking opportunities they seem to promise).

But despite its rapid success, the Oxford Group had obvious flaws. It was corrupted by power and money. It had a charismatic and very visible leader, the Lutheran pastor Frank Buchman, who often seemed to be on an ego trip, and who made serious errors of judgement like flirting with the Nazi Party and imagining what it would be like if Hitler or Mussolini converted to the Oxford Group and established a ‘dictatorship of God’ with the Group’s slogans blaring from every home’s radio. And the Group had an odious ethos of social climbing and donation-seeking – Buchman encouraged Group members to travel first class, in order to network, and public talks would sometimes end with solicitation for funds – although none of this money was ever spent on the poor or the needy.

The birth of AA

One Oxford group in the US helped an alcoholic called Ebby Thacher, in the early 1930s, who in turn tried to bring religion to a drinking buddy, Bill Wilson. Bill also converted, but still occasionally relapsed into alcoholism. He managed to finally kick the habit at a rehab centre when he had a religious experience after being given the hallucinogenic Atropa Belladonna, or deadly nightshade (research into using hallucinogenics to cure addictions is only now coming back into the mainstream of respectable science – see this article.)

Bill then traveled to Akron, Ohio in 1935, where he stayed with an Oxford Group member and alcoholic called Bob Smith. Bill worked with Bob for a month, and he too managed to kick the habit. Over the next few years, the two developed the format of Alcoholics Anonymous: first the 12 Steps, then the 12 Traditions. AA members say the 12 steps stop them from killing themselves, and the 12 traditions stop them from killing each other. They’re really interesting principles, which have stood the test of time without any major revisions.

The first and second steps involve the Lutheran admission that ‘we are powerless and our lives have become unmanageable’ and therefore need help from ‘a Power greater than ourselves’. This is very different from the Stoic idea, for example, that the power and responsibility to help yourself is always yours alone. In AA, the alcoholic’s first step is admitting they have a disease which they on their own can’t solve – they need the help of a Higher Power. It’s not self-help, so much as other-help.

Who or what is this Higher Power? The 12 Steps define it as ‘a God of your own understanding’. Bob Wilson noticed more alcoholics were attracted to and helped by AA if it didn’t make a big thing of religious dogma, but allowed people to bring their own definitions of God – which could simply be the Higher Power of the group or movement (some AA members define God as Group Of Drunks, implying that ‘God’ is really human consciousness organizing itself to heal itself).

Most important was the idea of people helping each other up, and sharing their stories – AA took the group confessional format of the Oxford Group, and added the idea of having a sponsor who could guide the new recruit through the 12 steps. They also added the idea of ‘making amends’ – going round apologizing to those you’ve wronged in the past (this is the conceit behind the sitcom My Name Is Earl). And, importantly, they focused on one key sin or disease – alcoholism. They gave their members a sense of collective identity through their battle with their illness. They took something that was private and shameful, and made it into a collective struggle and source of group pride: ‘It’s been ten years since I had a drink’ etc.

That laid a template for self-organized mental health support groups for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug addiction, sex addiction, really every kind of personal problem (there’s even a 12-step programme for online gaming addiction, called OLGA). Even if these groups don’t all use the 12-step programme, they still use the idea of a group self-organized to combat a particular problem, who share their stories with each other and encourage each other on.

My AA friend said he found the group dynamic particularly therapeutic: when you share your stories and listen to others’ stories, you realize your problems are not unique, that you’re not a uniquely dysfunctional freak (as you secretly feared), that many others have similar problems. It de-personalizes the problem, makes you less attached to it, makes you able to see it as a collective battle with an external enemy (alcoholism, depression, social anxiety etc) to be fought with intelligence and organization. In some ways, this is like Christians sharing stories of the Devil and self-help tips on how to resist his evil snares – except that, while AA kept the idea of the Higher Power, it turned the Enemy of alcoholism into a disease, rather than a supernatural evil force. They also abandoned any mention of Hell or damnation – if you fall, you just get up, and try again.

Behind the Christian roots of AA, there are older, Socratic ideas: the idea of examining yourself to find any defects or vices, and also the Serenity Prayer, which was introduced into AA in the 1940s, and is now read at the end of every meeting: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.” Bill Wilson wrote that this prayer summed up the ethos of AA, though to me it seems a bit different from the Lutheran idea of being powerless to help yourself without the intercession of a Higher Power. It’s interesting, though, the way someone came across the Serenity Prayer and it was then introduced into the ‘ritual’ of the AA meeting. That’s how religions are created – objects and ideas are found, then bolted on, and you can see different ideas and traditions stuck together.

Like every vibrant young spiritual movement, within a few years AA found itself immersed in internal arguments over how the movement should develop. At that point, in 1946, Bill Wilson wrote and published the 12 Traditions (somewhat reminiscent of the 12 foundations of the New Jerusalem mentioned in Revelations). These 12 traditions fixed AA into a system that Wilson called ‘benign anarchy’. As my AA friend put it, “it’s like a terrorist organization: each cell is separate and they don’t know much about each other”. There’s little central authority, no requirement for membership other than the desire to stop drinking, and a group could be just two people, like the original group.

Wilson obviously learnt from the mistakes of the Oxford Group – first of all, he protected AA from the corrupting influence of money. Every AA group is self-supporting, with no outside financial contributions, so it hasn’t become a machine for sucking in money, as the Oxford Group did and other groups like Landmark and Scientology arguably have done. No AA member is allowed to lend its name to other causes, and it avoids the temptation to seek political influence through its success, as the Oxford Group did. And because it’s anonymous, no member can use the movement as a platform for self-promotion, as Frank Buchman used the Oxford Group. As the 12th tradition puts it: ‘Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.’ Bill Wilson’s full name was only revealed after his death and, rather poignantly, he himself stopped going to AA meetings, because fellow members always wanted him to talk about how he set up the group, rather than giving him the opportunity to unburden himself of his problems.

The 12 traditions are a masterpiece of organizational design, and seem to have kept AA preserved from the corrupting influences that have brought down so many other movements: all of which follow a sadly predictable arc of hype, wealth and power followed by disintegration (think of, say, EST, or the Secret, or Landmark and so on). Today, the movement has over 2 million members, and over 100,000 groups worldwide. I’m told you can find a meeting happening at any hour of the day in New York. And on some flights, you might even hear an announcement on the intercom, inquiring if there is a ‘friend of Bill’ on-board. From an outsider’s perspective, AA seems to me to be one of the more successful self-help movements of the 20th century – though, obviously, the lingering whiff of religion still puts some people off.

Schooling the emotions

Posted on August 18, 2011 by

After the riots in England earlier this month, emotions and education have loomed large in resulting social commentaries.  One chief constable, Chris Sims of the West Midlands police, said of the Birmingham rioters that they were “not an angry crowd, but a greedy crowd”. Whether the problem is supposed to be greed or anger, or indeed despair, selfishness, rage, envy, ennui, or mindless criminality, it would seem that emotions are at the heart of this new social disorder. And, for many, it is education that can provide the cure.

David Cameron says his renewed attempt to fix the “broken society” and to reverse the current “moral collapse” will involve improving education (in as-yet unspecified ways). The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, speaking in the House of Lords, said that our national educational philosophy had become too “instrumentalist”and should be directed instead towards building “virtue, character and citizenship”. Williams, for one, wants to use the riots as an occasion to rethink the entire “content and ethos of our educational institutions.”

It is yet to be seen what specific initiatives will be proposed, but it is likely that they will relate, one way or another, to the idea that schools should be in the business of training the emotions as well as the intellect.

The aim to teach “emotional literacy” in schools came under the banner of ‘SEAL’ (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) under the previous UK government. We do not know exactly what will come next, but over the last couple of years, several of us at Queen Mary have been thinking about these issues in broader historical, artistic and educational contexts as part of a project entitled ‘Embodied Emotions’.

Working with a local primary school, we have combined classroom workshops with interdisciplinary academic seminars to investigate the whole area of emotional literacy and the primary school curriculum.

"Chimpanzee disappointed and sulky" from Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

I’ve written up a provisional report of one aspect of my historical work on the ‘Embodied Emotions’ project, which involved taking historical images (such as the “disappointed and sulky” chimp pictured) into the classroom as a way to stimulate discussion of feelings, emotions and expressions – with some quite intriguing results. The report, entitled ‘Feeling Differently’, links my experiences at Osmani School to wider scientific, educational and philosophical debates about expression, the emotions and the intellect.

This is just one of the historical aspects of the project – another will be an historical study of ideas about emotional education since the late 18th century, which I am still researching.

Download the ‘Feeling Differently’ Report

Thomas Dixon.

Is there more to well-being than economics?

Posted on July 28, 2011 by

The Office of National Statistics published the findings of its national survey into well-being this week. The report is the result of 175 events across the country, attended by 2,500 people, as well as emails, postcards, tweets and blog comments, to try and find out what really matters to the English and Welsh public. The findings are not exactly earth-shattering: apparently what really matters to us is health, contact with family and friends, relations with our spouse and partner, job satisfaction and economic security, and the environment.

But let’s dig a bit deeper to see if we can find out what really matters.

One problem with the report, of course, is that it’s the product of a rather haphazard method of canvassing public opinion. In a public debate, you’re going to have all kinds of opinions expressed, and it is some person’s job to decide if the opinion is worth noting, and if so, how. It would be good to be able to see the actual responses behind the report – after all, they’re of historical interest, as they have now led to an official national definition of well-being which will in turn become the goal of our entire society – but the ONS tells me that alas they’re not available.

This means that, inevitably, there is a large dose of mediation or subjectivity from the ONS. It is not simply reflecting back the public’s opinions, rather it is, inevitably, filtering those responses, picking out themes and shaping them into a narrative. So this is far more of a subjective exercise than, say, measuring GDP. The ONS is, in effect, getting into the business of selecting what values are important for us. This is quite an extension of its job remit.

For example, the report notes that “there were considerably more contributions concerning belief or religion, in particular Christianity, than we had expected”. If that’s the case, why wasn’t ‘religion’ put as one of the things that really matters to people? Presumably because ONS staff did not deem it appropriate to measure our religiosity (and, by implication, for government policies to encourage religiosity). But the consequence is that we end up with an official definition of well-being that leaves out religious belief – despite the fact that many people appeared to say it really mattered to them.

And it’s telling that the ONS should equate religion with belief – as if some people hold these rather quaint things called ‘beliefs’, while the social scientist, naturally, relies on the empirical evidence and objective data. Yet when Aileen Simkins of the ONS says, on Radio 4, that any national measure of well-being has “got to include equality…it’s got to include sustainability”, one might ask ‘why does it got to?’ Is she not also asserting moral beliefs or dogma? They happen to be beliefs that I share, but nonetheless, such assertions are dogmatic rather than scientific or objective.

The ONS insists that one of the most important things to the public is ‘the environment’. It thinks that measuring national well-being might help our society to avert the ‘looming environmental crisis’. But actually, the report admits that most of the answers related to the environment related to concern about local green spaces, rather than concern about climate change. ‘The environment’ is rather a grand term for what appears to be the public’s fondness for parks.

Nonetheless, ONS staff say that any measure of national well-being has ‘got to include sustainability’, when actually, and unfortunately, environmental sustainability in a wider sense does not seem to matter to the majority of people. So the ONS is making a value judgement. I happen to think it’s a good value judgement – but still, the ONS is making moral judgements, rather than objectively measuring public sentiments. Is it the job of the ONS to make moral judgements about what is good for us?

The 27 page report has large quotes on every page. The quotes are unattributed, but presumably are from the ONS-organized debates. And they clearly give the report a certain angle. On the first page, for example, appears the quote: “I think well-being is related to having a fair distribution of wealth, greater social mobility and being able to slow the pace of life.” Why was this quote, out of all the opinions expressed, given such a prominent position in the report? Who chose it, and why?

All the quotes in the report reflect a general philosophy that there is more to life than money and possessions. However, we also read in the report that young people said that what really mattered to them were ‘clothes, make up, alcohol and fast food’. So what the ONS is actually presenting is, on the whole, an older person’s philosophy of well-being. To be precise, it’s presenting us with an older liberal‘s view of well-being. It says ‘all the age groups highlighted the importance of equality and fairness’. Really? Did young children really say that what mattered to them was equality? I’d be surprised if anyone under the age of 10 could even spell equality. I suspect that the ONS staff’s own moral beliefs are being presented as universal.

The report balanced responses from the general public with responses from an advisory committe. If you look at the advisory committee, almost all its members are either economists, statisticians or bureaucrats (a few are businessmen). There’s not a single priest, rabbi, imam, philosopher, historian, novelist or artist – no one from the Humanities, in other words. These are precisely the people who might question the ability of social science to quantify how meaningful or flourishing a life is with its questionnaires and ten-point scales. It shows a startling confidence in social science, that in trying to answer the millennia-old question ‘what is well-being?’, the ONS should see fit only to consult other economists and social scientists. When did economists suddenly become experts in the meaning of life?

What the initiative to measure national well-being shows is an incredible optimism in statistics and economics, and their ability to quantify not just our most intimate feelings, but even the objective quality and value of our lives. And what seems strange to me is that we should retain this incredible optimism in social science when we’re still in the middle of the Credit Crunch – a crisis caused by an excessive faith in the accuracy and objectivity of social science. Rather than pause to wonder if perhaps we have relied too much on social science and its ability to guide us to positive outcomes, instead we rush to give even more power to economists and social scientists.

Next Spring, the Economic and Social Research Council is holding a conference on measuring well-being. I really hope they don’t confine the conversation to economists and social scientists. Because there is a very real danger that we will end up with an official definition of General Well-Being that is just as narrow and reductive as GDP.

[Picture by Jesus Solana from Wiki Commons. For more articles on this topic, go to www.politicsofwellbeing.com]

Love Objects

Posted on July 20, 2011 by

Sally Holloway was one of the speakers at our series of Lunchtime Seminars at Queen Mary during 2010-11. Her PhD research at Royal Holloway, University of London, explores the role of material objects in eighteenth-century love and courtship. In this post, she reflects on the ways that expressions of love and desire, today conveyed via text messages or social networking sites, were once embodied in more tangible physical form. Sally writes:

When eighteenth-century suitors embarked on the search for a spouse, they entered into a world of emotionally-invested objects such as ribbons, rings, hair-work bracelets and portrait miniatures. When given as a gift, these objects acted as an embodiment of a suitor’s intentions, providing an important form of language and socially recognised custom. As the ballad ‘Faint Heart never won fair Lady’ wisely advised c. 1682-92:

Win her with Fairings and sweetening Treats,
Lasses are soonest o’ercome this way;
Ribbons and Rings will work most strange feats,
and bring you into favour and play.

William Ward after George Morland, ‘The Pledge of Love’, mezzotint, London, 1788. British Museum.

The purpose of these gifts was to conduct vulnerable parties through the process of courtship, from its early stages to a formal betrothal, culminating in a church wedding. The affection and obligation represented by gifts meant that they could be summoned in court as evidence of commitment in contract or spousal litigation and ‘breach of promise’ suits, demonstrating the important role they played in embodying emotional ties.

Objects such as silhouettes and portrait miniatures provided couples with a constant reminder of one another’s image, encouraging them to regularly gaze at each other during their separation. William Ward’s mezzotint ‘The Pledge of Love’ (1788) depicts a young woman seated beneath a tree, holding a love letter in her hand. She is completely absorbed in the process of looking at a miniature suspended on a ribbon around her neck. The inscription reads,

The lovely Fair with rapture views
This token of their love
Then all her promises renews
And hopes he’ll constant prove.

A 19th-century enamelled patch box: 'Who opens this must have a kiss'

Individuals thus directed their romantic longing towards representations of loved ones, demonstrating the cultural importance given to gazing at objects sent by lovers. Gifts such as scent bottles were inscribed with messages reading ‘Think of Me’ to encourage lovers to gaze at tokens while thinking about their relationship, whilst others were painted with phrases such as ‘Who opens this, Must have a Kiss’ and ‘Esteem the Giver,’ demonstrating the role of objects in encouraging the development of intimacy.

Physically handling objects was a further crucial stage in fostering the development of love, encouraging intimacy through the sense of touch. As the French materialist Georges Buffon (1707-1788) argued in his Natural history, general and particular (1780), if humans ‘are desirous of knowing ourselves, we must cultivate this sense, by which alone we are enabled to form a dispassionate judgment concerning our nature and condition.’ The ritualised process of touching gifts is satirised in Isaac Cruikshank’s ‘The Illustrious Lover’ (1804), where the Duke of Cumberland isolates himself with a wide collection of tokens to celebrate his love for Mrs. Powell. He holds a red cotton ribbon to his mouth, enjoying the transporting properties of its texture and smell. The print underlines the agency of objects as sites of emotion, emphasising the central role played by touching gifts in the development of romantic love.

Isaac Cruikshank's ‘The Illustrious Lover' (1804) suggested the level of emotional arousal that a love token might excite

This brief analysis of the rituals surrounding love tokens demonstrates the inherent possibilities offered by a material history of emotion. Such histories reveal practices which would otherwise remain unknown to us, taking the history of the emotions below the level of literacy. When studying courtship, these practices include the gazing at and touching of gifts, which were fundamental in shaping the experience of romantic love for eighteenth-century suitors.

 

Sally Holloway

 

Managing the Pain of Separation, Depression and Anxiety through Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century

Posted on July 12, 2011 by

Girls reading a love-letter.

In May this year Polly Bull, a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, gave a fascinating lunchtime seminar about her research at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. We invited her to write a post for our blog summarising some of her research on the history of reading as an emotional self-help strategy, and she kindly accepted. Polly writes:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the practice of reading could be a method for managing difficult emotions. One example of this self-mastery was the simultaneous reading by lovers or friends who were physically separated by distance as a means to remain connected. Anne Lister (1791-1840), land-owner, traveller, and diarist, had a long-term love affair with Marianna Lawton, who was married to Charles Lawton, causing much life-long heartfelt distress for Lister. The distance between the two women because of the marriage meant that maintaining the relationship was difficult. One strategy they developed for managing the pain of separation was to read the same thing at the same time each day. In 1821, Lister wrote in her diary:

‘Settled that M–& I are, every morning at 10 ¾ , to read a chapter in the new testament & asked her to begin next Monday. She first proposed at Newcastle our reading something, the same thing & at the same hour every day–& we have agreed on the new testament and the hour named.’

Religious reading was helpful for managing low spirits. Anna Larpent (1758-1832), wife to the Examiner of Plays and diarist, read assiduously from all genres throughout her life, recording her thoughts and comments in her diary, while reflecting on her spirituality. Textual consumption of God’s word was a crucial aspect of daily devotion, particularly first thing in the morning and in the evening before bed. This reading often served to manage Larpent’s distress in times of low-spiritedness. She wrote in 1792:

‘..I then red [sic] to myself—the 12 first Chapters of St. John, with attention with an humble confidence in the revelations of God by his son J. Ch. My mind was sooth. I felt the truth & comfort of the Word of God.’

Her personal religious practices were necessary for Larpent’s mental well-being. She relied upon her faith and her devotional print consumption to soothe her mind. She wrote in 1795:

‘…worked the rest of the morning in an inconceivable state of depression. Inconceivable to all but myself—but really such horror of mind as I at times suffer from, would sink me into despair were it not for the support of Religion & trust in the Almighty.’

While Larpent spoke of depression as low spirits rather than a clinical state as it might be understood today, it is no doubt that she was extremely despondent at these times, describing her mood as a ‘horror of mind’. She feared that she would ‘sink…into despair’. Knowing this of herself, she turned to her religion, especially her solitary, devotional reading at morning and night, for ‘support’.

Besides the reading of the bible and religious texts, Larpent used novels and history books as means to calm her thoughts during anxious times. For example, early in 1790 when her youngest son George became ill, Larpent wrote of her severe anxiety and how she was able to read a novel to calm her worries when the worst danger was passed. It firstly distracted her and then amused her. She also wrote of reading the Female Quixote years later when her son’s wife was ill, as well as studying a history book.

‘My mind disturbed & anxious concerning Charlotte’s state. I felt the necessity of mental exertion. I began the 9th Ch. Of Mitford’s history of Greece Alexander’s reign…’

Read 45 & part of 46. chap. of Mitford’s Greece. Also looked over the Female Quixote merely to divert my mind from numbness of Charlotte, but it was too absurd.

Larpent said her mind was ‘disturbed & anxious’, requiring ‘mental exertion’. She also spoke of the need to ‘divert’ her mind. In both cases she described her upset mental state and how it could be calmed through the process of reading secular work, both fiction and non-fiction.

The above instances have shown that reading was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a method for easing the pain of physical separation between lovers, providing spiritual comfort for ‘horrors of mind’, as well as ‘mental exertion’ and diversion during times of anxiety. Difficult emotions were thus managed through the practice of print consumption.

Polly Bull

An ‘Emotional’ Conference

Posted on June 21, 2011 by

Four images showing a male having his face stimulated by electricity in an experiment on the electro-physiological expression of passions. Photograph, Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, 19th C (Wellcome Images). French neurologist Duchenne's experiments on the 'expression' of emotion was the topic of Johannes Buchholtz's talk which was part of the panel on 'Nineteenth-Century Science and the Production of Emotion'.

After months of planning, last week it was finally time for the Centre’s one-and-a-half day conference on the theme ‘Mastering the Emotions: Control, Contagion and Chaos, 1800 to the Present Day’. This international and interdisciplinary gathering of scholars with a passion for emotions brought together speakers from across Europe as well as from North and South America and Australia.

As you will have gathered from yesterday’s posts by Mark and Chris, we were treated to a fascinating mix of topics and approaches reaching across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Despite such a diverse range of papers, however, a number of themes seemed to re-occur, explicitly or implicitly, throughout the two days. These were questions of self-hood, of the relationship between the individual and society, of how different conception of ‘the emotions’ shape ideas about ‘personality’, ‘rights’, and ‘human nature’. These are vexing questions, not least because they are loaded with moral implications. What does it mean to talk about normal and abnormal – or pathological – emotions? What kind of value judgments are being weaved into systems of knowledge when claims are made about an individual’s emotions and personality from what can be ‘seen’ on a brain scan, or from what can be ‘revealed’ by the numerical result of a psychometric test? What are the implications when gendered ideas about ‘innate’ emotional responses are coded into law?

To speak about the emotions is to speak about the personal, the intimate. In the modern period, theories about the emotions have, as our speakers reminded us last week, been deployed to explain a range of human ‘behaviours’: from ‘self-mutilation’, to ‘criminality’, to the creation and reception of artistic objects, to ‘adolescence’, acting and performance, ‘attempted suicide’, and political espionage (to name a few of the themes). Such theories of emotions have been, and are, biological as well as social; historical and contemporary. Questions about what it means to be human seem to be at the heart of scholarly research into the emotions, whether such research is carried out within history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, politics, or neuroscience.

To sum up, ‘Mastering the Emotions’ proved to be an engaging and thought-provoking event. We want to thank all the speakers and delegates for their participation, and we hope that you all enjoyed the conference as much as we did! A special thanks to our keynote speakers, Allan Young and Sally Shuttleworth, who took time out of their busy schedules to come to Queen Mary and speak about their research. We would also like to thank everyone else who made this conference a possibility: first and foremost Tiffany Watt-Smith who has worked tirelessly for months to make this event come together, as well as the other members of the conference committee, Jade Shepherd and Elsa Richardson, and the the Centre steering committee, particularly Thomas Dixon and Rhodri Hayward. Last but not least we want to thank the Wellcome Trust for its support, and the Morgan Arms for serving up an excellent post-conference dinner!

Jen Wallis & Åsa Jansson

 

Image from the Wellcome Library, London: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk

Schadenfreude and cruelty

Posted on June 20, 2011 by

If emotions were Twitter feeds then schadenfreude would surely be ‘trending’ high right now. From Cheryl Cole’s surprise ejection from American X-factor to Manchester United’s drubbing at the hands of Barcelona, schadenfreude is the emotion of the moment or, at least, the term hacks are most likely to reach for to describe that warm fuzzy feeling we get on hearing of the comeuppance of celebrities of dubious talent and overpaid premiership footballers.

Given the inherent unfairness of the capitalist system, the popularity of schadenfreude should not surprise us. Look on it as nature’s way of compensating us for the wealth and fame showered on the underserving few.

What is less easily explained, however, was the reluctance of social psychologists to reach for the term following the death of Osama Bin Laden. This was the starting point of a fascinating talk given by Allan Young, Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine at McGill University, at our recent conference on ‘Mastering the Emotions’.

Usually defined as ‘the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’, schadenfreude would appear to be an apt description of the collective joy that erupted on streets of America the night the White House announced it had finally got its man. But writing in the New York Times the day after Bin Laden’s death, Jonathan Haight, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, chose to describe the frenzied celebrations as a form of ‘collective effervescence’ – Durkheim’s term for the joy experienced by individuals when they participate in group rituals for the communal good. According to Young, Haight’s eschewal of schadenfreude spoke volumes, pointing to the way that the term has been reduced by purveyors of ‘social brain’ theory to the neural equivalent of ‘empathic cruelty’.

Now nobody likes to be thought of as both empathic and cruel but one of the key findings from the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics is that such traits may be hard-wired into each and every one of us as part of a mechanism of ‘altruistic punishment’ that may have once conferred an evolutionary advantage. In a famous experiment conducted by Dominique de Quervain and his colleagues at the University in Zurich in 2004 involving a scenario known as the ‘trust’ game, player A is given a sum of money and offered the choice of advancing all or a portion of it to player B. If player A decides to trust B by advancing all of his money, the investigator quadruples his gift to B, and if B then sends half the money back both players are better off. However, if B violates A’s trust, then one minute after B makes his decision, A is given the option of punishing B by revoking the investigator’s top-up gift. In one variant A also has to reduce the amount he pays himself.

To their surprise, when the researchers scanned player A’s brain they found that a region known as the dorsal striatum lit up in anticipation of inflicting the punishment on player B. In other words, punishers were empathically mirroring the imagined (anticipated) distress of the cheaters and, at the same time, experiencing pleasure. Not only that but the more intense the punishment doled out to cheaters the more the punisher’s dorsal striatum lit up.

You don’t need to be a neurobiologist to realise that these findings are somewhat disturbing. After all, if we’re all hard-wired for altruistic punishment the implication is that ‘normal’ people may not be that far removed from psychopaths. Young’s suggestion, if I understand him correctly, is that such findings are also uncomfortable for social psychologists as it undermines enlightenment conceptions of human nature as both rational and perfectible. Instead, schadenfreude becomes an epiphenomenon of the brain, an ignoble reminder of our base beginnings when cruelty was its own reward, hence, presumably, Haight’s avoidance of the term.

I do not have space here to do justice to the rest of Young’s talk, suffice to say that he argues that the evolutionary narrative of the social brain has clear affinities with Adam Smith’s account of the moral underpinnings of capitalist social relations. However, Young argues that the thinker who comes closest to anticipating the notion of ‘empathic cruelty’ and confronting its implications for human nature is Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

For Nietzsche the model of altruistic punishment makes no sense as, unlike Smith, Nietzsche does not see suffering as a form of economic exchange. It is not convertible like coins, transferable form one hand to another. Instead Nietzsche solves the riddle by arguing that the punisher’s gratification comes not from seeing the cheater suffer but from the visceral proof it gives him of his own power. In other words it is the punisher’s thirst for knowledge about himself and his world that explains the bond between empathy and cruelty.

Nietzsche’s solution is appealing as it seems to go the heart of the emotional displays that followed Bin Laden’s death. After all, what were they about if not visceral proof of American power and celebration of that fact? At the same time, Nietzsche’s solution accounts for the popular everyday usage in which schadenfreude is emotional shorthand for the affirmation we get from seeing those we consider undeserving of their elevated status being pulled down a peg or two.

The difference is that while the latter type of schadenfreude is generally considered a bit of harmless fun, the former type often strikes us as excessive and malicious. The hope, on this side of the Atlantic at least, is that schadenfreude isn’t reducible to mere affect and that while we may be hard-wired for empathic cruelty our capacity for reflection means we can also sometimes rise above it.

Mark Honigsbaum