Time Essay: The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness

mc² may well = E in the known physical universe. Nothing quite that pat can be said about the cosmos of the human temperament. In the play of emotion, logic is seldom evident, and the laws of gravity and thermodynamics never. What goes up in the psyche sometimes does not come down; the boiling points of individuals and collectives alike are impossible to fix. In light of this, it is no wonder that science long shied away from studying, or attempting to explain, that most subtle and elusive of all human moods: happiness. Instead, it happily left the field to philosophers, preachers, poets—and the swarms of author-therapists who yearly vie for bestsellerdom with new formulas for attaining this desired estate.

Lately, however, science has begun to nose around in that shifty terrain it so long neglected. Tenuous scientific probes of the happiness phenomenon, as an aspect of mental health, were organized as long ago as the 1960s. Perhaps because happiness itself was all but out of style in the days of Viet Nam, urban riots and the burgeoning dope culture, the trend never took off. Only now is it becoming clear that our gladness is likely to be subjected to the same methodical research and analysis that has been lavished for generations on our madness. The signs that happyology is aborning as a discipline have come in sequences of earnest surveys, widespread drizzles of articles and now a spate of hardback tomes.

An archetype of the current genre is Happy People, by Columbia Psychology Professor Jonathan Freedman. It promises to reveal "what happiness is, who has it and why." Freedman analyzes the results of both popular surveys and casual interviews and also attempts, he says, "to present what we, as social scientists, know about happiness." Soon to be published is Optimism: The Biology of Hope, by Rutgers University Anthropologist Lionel Tiger; it explores the possible biological origins of the human sanguineness that underlies feelings of wellbeing, whatever they are called. New York Psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin has just weighed in with a study called Feelings: Our Vital Signs, which scrutinizes and tries to delineate all the familiar varieties of human feeling. Gaylin thus probes the character of a state that he calls not "happiness" but "feeling good."

A proliferation of less ambitious studies and surveys, some of them amounting to market research, has occurred in the past few years. The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research conducted a nationwide study of income and education as determinants of happiness. The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn carried out a similar but broader survey to find out whether their clients' potential consumers "were happier ... than other segments of the population." Scientific studies of worker "contentment" have been going on for years, to be sure, but are not quite the same as the new wave of investigations into the larger character of wellbeing. It may be too soon to say where these new excursions will lead, but it is not too early to inquire.