An Irishman's Diary

OUTSIDE THE Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the concept of Gross National Happiness has been slow to catch on: partly, no doubt, because happiness is notoriously hard to measure. Even so, many organisations worldwide are now attempting to measure it. And one of the latest entrants into the field – Facebook – reports surprising news.

The social networking site has taken to counting certain “positive” and “negative” words that occur in its members’ status updates, then crunching the numbers into graph form.

Initially confined to the US, the resultant index has produced mostly predictable results: big peaks of positivity for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween; smaller peaks for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and days when the Dow Jones rises; and, of course, occasional troughs for events such as bank closures or the death of Michael Jackson.

Unsurprisingly, the troughs are nothing like as deep as the peaks are high. Public despair is rarely as widespread or organised as the enforced cheerfulness of Christmas. But the shock news from Facebook is that the US appears to have been happier in 2009, post-crash, than in 2008.

I suspect we should take such findings with a pinch of salt (that’s if we can find any salt, supplies of which are suddenly very scarce). Because, apart from the fact that those surveyed were Americans, and therefore naturally upbeat, it seems to me there is an innate prejudice in favour of happy terms, not just on social networking sites, but in electronic communications generally.

If even half of these are to be believed, the internet age appears to have coincided with a massive increase in public jollity. Consider, for example, the number of abbreviations for what scientists might call “laughter events”, and the ubiquity of their use in e-mails, texts, and twitters.

A witticism that in pre-internet times and delivered in person – in the pub, say – might have earned no more than a wry smile from the listener will now often, when exchanged in print between people who can’t see each other to check if it’s really happening, result in allegedly loud laughter: “LOL”, as the recipient will insist on calling it.

Similarly, a quip that might formerly have won merely a grunt of begrudging amusement from the company might now, when delivered by the magic of electronics, render its beneficiaries prostrate with hilarity. “ROFL”, they will manage to type, just before collapsing to the floor and rolling around on it helplessly.

If the comment is so amusing that, in the old money, it might have secured an actual guffaw from a listener, you can be sure its value will be correspondingly multiplied among internet users, with as many as seven letters – ROFLMAO (the last three stand for “my ass off”) required to express its crippling comicality.

And yet, strangely, this has no corollary on the other end of the emotional spectrum.

Despite the tendency of all internet debates to eventually descend into personal abuse, with one correspondent inevitably accusing those with opposing views of Nazi tendencies, (cf “Godwin’s Law”), there seem to be far fewer abbreviations for what Facebook calls “negative” feelings.

Indeed, the prejudice towards positivity can even be witnessed in that well-named sham: the “emoticon”. These little faces serve a role in modern communications formerly the preserve of actual musculoskeletal expressions. My mobile phone, for example, allows me to contextualise verbal messages with such added hints of meaning as a wink or a frown, an arched eye-brow or a poetic look of suppressed longing. Actually, I made that last one up: it’s not available on the Nokia 6110. Nevertheless, a wide range of emotions is featured. And what are these collectively called? Yes, that’s right: “smileys”.

NEVER MINDthe Facebook index. Of more significance, to Ireland at least, is the work of a woman with the exotic name of Dr Zelda Di Blasi. That's her in the picture (left), bouncing on a trampoline. But the activity for which she is probably better known is her work with the applied psychology department in University College Cork.

Dr Di Blasi is particularly interested in the study of happiness, or “well-being and social engagement” as it’s known in her departmental research group. And in these hard times, when we’re running out, not just of salt, but of reasons to be cheerful, she has encouraging things to tell us.

Although the recession – and especially unemployment – is linked to depression, she says, only “about 10 per cent” of human happiness is dictated by everyday circumstances. Fifty per cent is biological, but the rest can be induced and maintained deliberately, using things called “happiness boosters”.

These are not products you can buy in the pub, or from that shifty character on the corner of the street. Rather, Dr Di Blasi means such things as “gratitude”, “altruism”, and “mindfulness”, daily cultivation of which “can significantly increase our levels of happiness”. UCC psychology students have tried it in experiments and it seems to work.

Such is the complexity of happiness, suggests Dr Di Blasi, that winning the lottery does not significantly increase it, just as studies of paraplegics show them to be much less unhappy that we expect. The reason is that people tend naturally to adapt to life’s events, good or bad, and revert to previous happiness levels.

There is even a phrase for this among psychologists: the acronym for which – by a happy coincidence – is a popular word in Ireland. “General Adaptation Syndrome”, the experts call it. Or “GAS”, for short.