Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who teaches at the University of Bristol,  an opportunity presented itself. Why not start a course on the science of happiness, and while teaching it collect data from the students attending?

The resulting course (created with advice from one his former students, Laurie Santos) proved popular, and Hood last year published a book, The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hood explains to interviewer David Edmonds the scientific basis of happiness, some details on how to measure it, and then some of those lessons for harvesting its benefits.

Hood explains how scholarship has determined some genetic basis for happiness, how circumstances contribute to but don’t dictate happiness, and how individuals focus more on the negative than the positive, which clearly not the most nurturing environment for happiness. There is a bias towards negativity, he says, “So that’s why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.”

That sounds bad (see – negative). But there’s another bias at play, one that also favors optimism, that Hood attempts to harness. “So we tend to see the future as grim, and we have these distortions. But what’s interesting, if you ask people, ‘Do you think to yourself individually you’ll be better off in five years’ time?’ Then it seems to switch. People seem to say, ‘Yeah, I think I will be better.’ So, it’s a kind of interesting paradox that we think the world’s going to hell in a basket. And yet, as individuals, we think things can get better.”

Hood’s research interests arose around the visual development of infants, and then evolved to include intuitive theories, self-identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind magical thinking in adults. It was in relation to those that Hood first appeared on Social Science Bites, addressing the human belief in the supernatural. You can listen to that podcast, and also enjoy a lovely Alex Cagan poster built around the episode.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Professor Bruce Hood is a psychologist who several years ago introduced a new course at Bristol University. It’s called The Science of Happiness. He’s also now authored a successful book with the same name.

Bruce Hood. I normally say welcome to Social Science Bites, but with you, I have to say welcome back to Social Science Bites because you’re the first interviewee we’ve had who has appeared for the second time. Although the first time I think was 15 years ago. But Bruce Hood, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Bruce Hood: Oh my goodness. Dave, you made me feel old again. Well, thank you. I’m delighted to be back again, and obviously I love the podcast. So yeah, let’s go for it.

Dave Edmonds: So, we’re talking today about the science of happiness. It seems strange to talk about a science of happiness. Do we even have a snappy definition of what happiness is?

Bruce Hood: Well, that’s a good question. You know, when I was putting this course together right at the beginning, there were lots of things I could have called it. I was trying to attract a whole cohort of sort of young millennial types, and I wanted them to kind of understand in a very brief instance what the course was supposed to be about. So I just called it “The Science of Happiness,” which has turned out to be kind of controversial as a term because most people think of happiness as this elusive, ephemeral thing that is nebulous and you can’t even kind of describe it. But actually there is a science basis for studying emotions, and happiness to me is really a combination of feelings and emotions, but also the way that we think about the world. So, for example, happiness also includes the notion of feelings of success.

So yes, it’s a short title. It’s snappy. But it was done deliberately just to sort of convey the general theme of what I was talking about.

Dave Edmonds: Your early research was on the cognitive development of children. This seems quite a leap for you. Tell us why you turned to happiness as a research topic.

Bruce Hood: Well, out of desperation, to be honest, Dave. I was working in university sectors and like a lot of my colleagues, we’ve witnessed a sea change in the students. They’re incredibly anxious these days and they’re scoring much higher on levels of mental dysphoria. So they’re generally unhappier. That’s pretty bad. I don’t like to see unhappy students, but they’re also more difficult to teach because they’re constantly worrying about their performance then this really disrupts the whole educational process. 

So this was back in 2018 and we’ve had a bit of a crisis at Bristol University with a spate of suicides. Now look, this was not specific to Bristol, but the press descended on us and called it a toxic environment, which was really, really unfair, because literally if you’d looked around the sector, you would have found that everyone was having a problem. And I discovered that a former student of mine, Laurie Santos, who’s had this meteoric rise, who I had taught originally when I was at Harvard, she was in charge of a college in Yale. And she was also experiencing a problem, so she felt she wanted to put a course on. So I contacted Laurie, and this course in Yale, by the way, had been a phenomenal success.

She shared her notes, and my version of the course, I called it The Science of Happiness, to kind of attract people. And I put it on just to see if anyone would be interested and 600 turned up, even though it wasn’t a credit-bearing course. So that showed me that there was a real demand here. And from then on I just decided to put my effort into trying to make students happier.

So yeah, it’s a big departure from my earlier work on development. But actually I go back to my understanding my theorizing what’s going on in child development to try and provide what I think is a coherent model of what is the science or the basis of happiness.

Dave Edmonds: Before we get to the lessons to how to become happy, I’ve always thought one of the interesting aspects of happiness is, it seems to me. asymmetrical with pain. When you’re in pain, you’re very conscious that you’re in pain. It’s very present. But when you’re happy, it’s something you sort of look back on afterwards; you’ve had a pleasant conversation or an enjoyable meal, but you’re not happy in the present.

Bruce Hood: Ohh, David, that’s astute as always — nothing less I expect from you. Absolutely. In fact, I could have called the course The Science of Unhappiness because it’s really about the unhappiness that we kind of have, which is so pervasive. We’ve evolved the brain which really pays attention to when things are not going right, and just like pain. It’s a signal to tell you to change your behavior. So we don’t really notice when things are going well, just as you point out. But I wouldn’t have done so well if I kind of called the course The Science of Unhappiness, because I would have put people off. But you’re absolutely right. There is a bias towards the negativity as complacency, somewhat to when things are going right. So that’s why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.

Dave Edmonds: So we’re going to get to the lessons in a moment. One more question before we get there. Is there a hereditary basis to happiness? Do some of us just emerge from the womb happy?

Bruce Hood: Well, yes there is. There is a biological basis and so we can do a thing called behavioral genetics, which is basically a fancy way of saying is that we look at the relationship between genes and behavior by studying twins who are either identical or non-identical. You can work out the degree of relatedness, and then you can factor in how much of that is the biology and how much of that is the environment. And this is how we know that the genetics for intelligence and sexuality, these sorts of things. Optimism and happiness are pretty close to intelligence, so it’s around about 40 percent of heritability. That doesn’t mean 40 percent of your heritability is down to your parents. It means on average, if you look across a big population, it averages out to around 40 percent. Some people are very much like their parents and some people are very unlike their parents. But if you look at the population as a total, it’s only 40 percent.

Which means, that for most of us, there are other factors playing a role in what makes us happy. And I put it down to circumstances. But even then, there are additional factors which are things like how do you interpret or process events? And that’s largely down to developmental processes and society. And the way that we’ve been trained