What predicts a happy life? As I explained long ago in The Pursuit of Happiness, there are some things that I might have guessed would matter. But one’s age, gender, or race, for example, matter little. Money helps to a point—better to be able to afford life’s necessities and to feel control over one’s life than not. Yet ever-increasing wealth provides diminishing well-being returns. Moreover, the last half-century’s remarkable growth in average real income and purchases (albeit with rising inequality) us has left people a bit less happy. What does matter—what best predicts whether people report being “very happy”—is close, supportive relationships. We are, as Aristotle recognized, social animals. Our ancestral history has destined us to flourish with others. For our hunter-gatherer forebears, six hands were better than two. We therefore have what today’s social psychologists, notably Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, call a “need to belong.” When supported by intimate friendships or a committed marriage, we are much likelier to declare ourselves “very happy.” When socially deprived—when exiled, ostracized, bereaved, or imprisoned in solitary confinement—we feel lonely and adrift. Social support matters. Friend number predicts happiness. “Happiness seems made to be shared,” noted the French dramatist Pierre Corneille. So it seems from answers to a question asked of Americans by the National Opinion Research Center: “Looking over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” Compared with those who could name no such intimate, those who named five or more such friends were 60 percent more likely to feel “very happy.” And then a curious thing happened on the way into the twenty-first century. Our close face-to-face relationships have waned. We’re marrying later, and less often. We’re not just more often Bowling Alone, to use political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous metaphor, but also spending less time socializing with others. The American Time Use Survey reveals that we are (in minutes per day) hanging out together less. (To replace the diminished engagement, some have created interactive online AI friends.) Decreased face-to-face social connections are most striking among teens and young adults. As my Social Psychology text co-author Jean Twenge has amply documented, today’s teens are dating less, partying less, and being with friends less. Much less. They also have fewer friends. Their decreasing time with friends is not, as some have speculated, because they are working more or doing more homework. If anything, they’re employed less and doing less homework. But, you say, being alone needn’t mean being lonely. Sometimes we savor solitude. Moreover, texting and social media posting enable social connections. Although texting enables efficient connections, hearing others humanizes them. As Juliana Schroeder, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley have found, people seem more thoughtful, competent, and likable when we hear, not just read, their voices. Moreover, teen and young adult depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, and loneliness have increased concurrently with the increasing home-bound solitude, and mainly for those spending long daily hours staring at social media screens rather than engaging with people in-person, face-to-face. In one of her informative Substack essays, Jean Twenge recently displayed Monitoring the Future survey responses of U.S. 13- to 18-year-olds, showing the percentage reporting depressive symptoms (with data from the depressing Covid years excluded). Our screens are not only a time suck from sleeping, reading, and schooling, but also from relationships. And consider other societal sources of our social malnutrition: At-home remote work. Many people love the convenience and lessened travel time and expense, but they come at the price of connecting with colleagues in the mailroom, over the coffee pot, and in office meetings. Take-out food, sometimes with contactless delivery. We love the convenience of take-out foods, albeit with less time leisurely dining out with friends. In the UK, the result has been a long-term decline in the number of people in pubs and nightclubs. Online shopping. We love the efficiency of one-click purchases and home delivery, even if putting out of business some shops where we once mingled with others and had chance conversations. Decreased attendance at churches, museums, and school sports. Fewer folks are joining others at worship places, museum galleries, and high school and small college sporting events. During the 1996–1997 college season, the NCAA Division III men’s basketball attendance at the three schools with the most attendance averaged 2467 fans per game; last year it was just 1397. I confess that I love being able to watch my school’s livestreamed out-of-town basketball games. But that convenience means that I’m less likely to enjoy being with fellow fans traveling together to cheer them on. The drains on our in-person, empathy-enabling relationships seem baked into modern life. Yet we are not helpless. We can reinvigorate the priority we give to close relationships. We can put down our phones and give conversational partners our focused attention. We can resolve to take the initiative to dine more often with friends, meet more often with colleagues, exchange confidences more often with family members. We can stick our head into coworkers’ work spaces. We can video-call relatives. We can establish sit-down family mealtimes. We can initiate micro-friendships—pleasing brief relationships with our baristas, seatmates, and ride-share drivers. Today’s digital world enriches our lives—but especially so when we retain a central place for face-to-face active listening and engagement. Sharing our lives in person with those who love and support us has two effects, observed the seventeenth-century sage Francis Bacon: “It redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.” David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. ... View more

You’ll be told that your hearing’s so murky and muddy, your case calls for special intensified study. They'll test you with noises from far and from near and you'll get a black mark for the ones you can’t hear. Then they’ll say, “My dear fellow, you’re deafer than most. But there’s hope, since you’re not quite as deaf as a post.” ~Dr. Seuss in You’re Only Old Once! Dr. Seuss could be talking to me. Although not part of the signing Deaf culture, I am—without my cochlear implant in one ear and hearing aid in the other—deaf. With the technology removed, I experience the sound of near silence. I cannot hear my wife from the adjacent pillow unless I put my “good” ear 4 inches from her mouth. Not quite as deaf as a post! My loss, which began as an unusual low frequency loss that made me a case of special intensified study, is the least of my mother’s gifts, which she inherited from her mother. Our shared experience is the result of a single gene defect, which a University of Iowa hearing geneticist identified for me during our years together on the advisory committee of NIH’s National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: “You have DFNA6/14 hearing loss caused by a mutation in WFS1.” Yet I am really not so special, for there are some 38 million American, and 4 million Canadian, adults who experience some “trouble hearing,” or who have at least a 25 decibel loss in both ears. Hearing loss is one of the great invisible disabilities. In my workplace, I have many times experienced unintended exclusion—mostly unnoticed by others. In department meetings, I have missed much of others’ input. Attending lectures, I have sat trapped in the middle of an audience, missing most of the spoken word. Hearing worsens in auditoriums with distant ceiling speakers and in uncarpeted hard-surfaced rooms with reverberating sound. Facilities designers, take note! Had I been left out in such settings because of wheelchair inaccessibility, people would be aghast, and would engineer a remedy. Hearing loss, by contrast, is unseen and thus often unremedied. Moreover, Covid-era masking made things worse, both muffling sound and precluding natural lip reading. With thanks to cartoonist Dave Coverly (www.speedbump.com). Hearing loss does nevertheless have a few compensations. Normal-hearing folks have eyelids but no earlids. I have both. When working in a noisy coffee shop, I can turn down the sound distractions. Has your sleep been disturbed by hotel hallway noise? That’s no problem for people like me. Earlier this week, my wife’s sleep was disturbed by our bedroom’s phone ringing at 1:30 a.m. I was blissfully unaware. When hearing folks witness those with hearing loss not comprehending speech, they may misattribute the problem. During his Congressional testimony regarding possible Russian election interference, former special counsel Robert Mueller on 48 occasions asked to have questions repeated. Commentators, not appreciating that he is hearing-challenged, observed that he seemed “confused,” “uncertain,” and “forgetful.” And it was all so easily avoidable in one of three ways—each of which I have experienced as a godsend: A loudspeaker nearer his ears could have given him vastly clearer sound. Real-time captioning on a table screen, like the TV captioning we use at home, could have made the spoken words instantly clear. A hearing loop surrounding the room could have magnetically transmitted the voice from each microphone directly to the inexpensive telecoil sensor that comes with most modern hearing aids and cochlear implants. (See here, here, and here for more on hearing loops, which are now in thousands of auditoriums, worship places, and airports. Full disclosure: The first site is my own informational website, and the last describes our collective advocacy to bring this technology to all of the United States.) There are other ways to support people with hearing loss: Create quieter working and eating places, with materials that absorb reverberant sound. When beginning a talk, do not ask “Can everybody hear me?” and then put down the mic. (That question can elicit but one answer.) When offered a mic, use it, held close to the mouth: 4. When hosting a group meeting, cluster seating close together (to minimize speaker-to-listener distance). 5. Enable presenters to see their PowerPoint presentation in front of them, such as with a podium laptop--to minimize their turning their back to the audience when talking through their slides. Those of us with hearing loss can also act to give ourselves ear-opening experiences: We can be “out of the closet”: “I have hearing loss, so it would help me if we could be seated in a quiet corner [or] if we could turn the music down.” When attending talks, we can sit front and center. We can equip our ears with today’s “superfecta” digital hearing aids, offering both a Bluetooth link from smartphone to hearing aids and a telecoil for hearing loop reception. (Studies indicate that those with hearing loss who resist hearing aids—often because they are unaware of what they’re missing—are at increased risk for social isolation, depression, and eventual dementia.) We can harness other hearing technologies. For example, I love my hand-held directional remote mic, such as available here. When pointed at someone in a meeting or at a noisy reception, it zooms in on their voice. When connected to my laptop, my hearing aids become in-the-ear speakers. Hear ye! Hear ye! The happy news is that today’s technologies enable people like me to escape the deafness that caused Beethoven to lament living “like an exile” and to experience social encounters with “a hot terror.” I am also spared the isolation that plagued my deaf mother’s later years. No longer must our hearing be “so murky and muddy.” Hearing is not the only vehicle for communication. ASL is also a genuine language. But for those of us who have experienced hearing, how good it is. For we are, as Aristotle discerned, “the social animal.” We need to belong. We live in relationships with others—a feature of our human nature immediately recognized in the Old Testament creation story (“It is not good that the man should be alone”). As people who need people, we can therefore celebrate the wonder of hearing—of mind-to-mind communication via vibrating air molecules. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)   ... View more

We live wonder-full lives. How blessed I am to be tasked with reporting on those wonders, and, on most days, to learn something new. Last week’s reading brought news—previously unknown to me, and also to you?—of an intriguing phenomenon, numbsense. But first, some background. One stunning psychological science revelation concerns how much more we know than we know we know. We operate with two minds—one conscious, the other below the radar of our awareness. An illustration of this dual processing comes from brain-injured patients who, though consciously blind (unable to perceive their surroundings visually), act as if they see. Walking down a hall, they avoid an unseen chair. Asked to slip an envelope into a mail slot, they—despite being unable to see or describe the slot’s location and angle—can do so. These “blindsighted” individuals suggest that the brain’s “visual perception track” is—surprise!—distinct from its “visual action track.” Even normally sighted people, when their visual cortex is deactivated with magnetic stimulation, may display blindsight—by correctly guessing the nature of unseen objects. And now the week’s news: City University of New York researchers Tony Ro and Lua Koenig have also used magnetic stimulation to deactivate people’s sense of touch, leaving them unaware of whether or where someone has touched them. Yet, like some patients who have suffered sensory cortex damage, they can display a blindsight-like “numbsense.” They can guess the location of the unfelt touch. The big lesson of blindsight and numbsense: The unconscious mind sometimes knows what the conscious mind does not. Moreover, the out-of-sight mind is the bigger workhorse. Much as a cruise ship’s work mostly happens without its captain’s attention, so most of what sustains us is accomplished by our mind’s unseen workers below decks, without engaging our conscious mind’s attention. We are smarter than we know. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com; follow him on Twitter: @DavidGMyers.) ... View more

Endings matter. That’s the consistent lesson of experiments that track people’s memories of pain. Imagine yourself in one such experiment led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman (later a Nobel laureate for founding behavioral economics). You immerse a hand in painfully cold water for one minute. You then repeat the painful experience with the other hand, which gets an additional 30 seconds in not-quite-so-cold water, which allows your discomfort to diminish somewhat. Question: Which experience would you later recall as the more painful? Although the 90-second experience exposed you to more net pain, you would—if you were like the experiment’s participants—recall it as less painful. Moreover, you would choose to repeat it over the shorter experience that ended with greater pain. This curious phenomenon—that people discount the duration of a painful experience, and instead judge it by its ending (and peak) moments of pain—has been repeatedly confirmed. After a painful medical procedure or childbirth, people overlook the pain’s duration and instead recall what is most cognitively available—the peak and end moments. Recognizing that endings matter, some physicians have applied the finding by lengthening an uncomfortable experience with gradual lessening of the pain. How ironic: If a doctor or dentist, having completed a procedure, asks if you’d like to leave now or to bear a few more minutes of diminishing discomfort, there’s a case to be made for agreeing to the tapered hurt. Although the time scale of a medical procedure and a presidency differ, the Trump era will forever be remembered by its end—when, as the Senate and House convened to ratify the 2020 electoral votes, Trump encouraged his followers to flock to D.C. for a time that “Will be wild!”; reassured them that “We will stop the steal!”; admonished them that “You will never take back our country with weakness”; directed them to “Walk down to the Capitol”; and, after they had violently stormed the Capitol building and halted proceedings, took to Twitter to reiterate his claims of election fraud and tell the rioters “We love you. You’re very special.” The resulting insurrectionist assault on the nation’s democratic house—horrifying Republicans and Democrats alike—will surely color people’s future recollections of the Trump presidency and its enablers. Psychologically speaking, the assault was a double whammy that subjected America to peak pain at the presidency’s end. The vivid scenes of rampage will be imprinted in people’s minds, lingering as the most cognitively available basis for judging the Trump era, and for comparing it to the Biden era to follow. Endings matter. ... View more

At a May 26 Rose Garden press conference, President Trump asked a face-masked reporter: “Can you take it off, because I cannot hear you.” On this matter, I can empathize with our president. At a recent dental appointment, I could understand but half my hygienist’s and dentist’s spoken words. Despite being a person with hearing loss, I normally hear them both with ease, thanks to our proximity. But when muffled by their masks and face shields, their words became indistinct. One speech researcher explains that the thicker fabrics of many home-made masks are especially likely to “significantly block the airstream, diminishing the acoustic energy.” Although I wouldn’t have it otherwise—they and other caregivers are protecting their patients, and protecting themselves from their patients—masks do impede accessibility. More than we realize, we are all natural lip readers. Even a normal-hearing friend, visiting an ice cream shop, could not make out the masked clerk’s words: “Cup or cone”? Another acquaintance, during a hospital ER visit, reporting understanding only about half of what the masked nurses and doctors said to her. In the fully masked classrooms of my campus, colleagues tell me that, for example, “I have found myself asking students to repeat their questions.” Another colleague says “I am using my outside voice,” which takes more energy (and which other colleagues report leaves them drained). Another reports that “It is frustrating to continue to ask a student to repeat something and I fear it will shut down discussion and make most classes a lecture performance—in which case I might as well go completely online.” Another has, while the weather allows, taken his class outdoors where, socially distanced, they can see facial expressions and lip-read one another, mask-free. The essential lesson: There is more to hearing than meets the ears. What our eyes see influences what our brain hears. That phenomenon, which you can experience here, is called the McGurk effect. Moreover, thanks to our powers of instantly reading facial expressions, much of our communication is nonverbal. We share our emotions through our words but also through our smiles, our tight lips, our gaping mouths. Even our emojis vary the mouth: :- ( and :- ) . One colleague explains: “It adds a barrier that feels formal and inaccessible when you can't shake someone's hand, and then you can't smile at them to say ‘but I still want to get to know you.’” Cut off from facial expression, our communication is hampered. So is face recognition. With students’ faces masked, colleagues report becoming partially face-blind. They’re not only having more difficultly immediately knowing which student is speaking, but also recognizing their obscured faces: “I cannot call on a familiar student by name, because I can't tell who anyone is.” Add to this the depletion of normal emotional display and mimicry and the natural result will be weakened social bonds, including those between teacher and student, argues German psychiatrist and psychologist Manfred Spitzer. Given that masks—and also face shields in health care—are essential to controlling the pandemic, how can we salvage hearing accessibility in a masked world? Clear hearing is helpful to everyone—our minds wander less when little cognitive effort is required--but especially for those with hearing loss. In retail contexts, where a transaction occurs with a masked person behind a clear plastic screen, a simple solution can serve most people with hearing aids. Given a microphone and an installed hearing loop, a clerk’s voice will magnetically transmit to the telecoil sensor in most aids and all cochlear implants. As I can vouch, the system also works beautifully in other venues, including auditoriums, airports, and places of worship . With the mere push of a button, my hearing aids can become in-the-ear speakers that receive PA sound and customize it for my hearing needs. But what about classrooms, where campus face-mask mandates will require teachers and students to wear mutually protective masks—and in some cases (including the classrooms of my own campus) also to speak from behind a plastic barrier? What can schools and colleges do to enable hearing accessibility while also supporting public health? Admonish clarity. Schools can admonish instructors to be mindful that their audience is experiencing some muffling of sound, without supportive lip reading. Health care workers can likewise be coached to speak more deliberately and distinctly: “Your patients, especially your older patients, are having more trouble hearing you than you suppose.” That, alas, will be only a modestly effective solution, because we soon revert to our natural speaking styles. When one experimenter asked people to act as expressive or inhibited as possible while stating opinions, the naturally expressive people—even when feigning inhibition—were less inhibited than naturally inhibited people. And inexpressive people, when feigning expressiveness, were less expressive than naturally expressive folks. It’s hard to be, for any length of time, someone you’re not. Your speaking speed and style is, once your self-consciousness subsides, irrepressible. Transparent face masks. A second solution is to equip instructors with a face mask or shield that allows people to read lips and facial expressions. One example, used by some on my campus (such as the colleague below, at left) is the ClearMask. (An alternative, germ-filtering transparent Swiss surgical mask to be available in 2021 from hmcare.ch is shown at right.) Mindful of the face’s role in communication, one colleague is hoping, with appropriate permissions, to equip all his students with face shields. Two other colleagues have, however, told me of being bothered both by breathing issues with a clear mask, and also by the altered sound of their own voice (a familiar distraction to new hearing aid wearers). Define safe distance. A third solution is to specify a safe distance at which an instructor may lower the mask while lecturing. Imagine two very different classrooms. In a small seminar, colleges would surely mandate a professor's mask wearing when seated around a table with students. When lecturing while alone as a sage on the stage of a large auditorium, the professor would be sufficiently physically distanced to make a mask superfluous. In the gradations of classrooms in between, could colleges define a minimum safe distance at which a mask could be lowered while teaching? Add PA systems. A fourth solution is to add PA systems to intermediate-size rooms. An instructor’s head-mounted mic could transmit to a class through newly installed speakers. Live captioning. Google Meet’s captioning illustrates the potential for instant, accurate captioning that rivals the speed and precision of human captioner. Not only is it, therefore, a preferred video conferencing technology for accessibility (Zoom, take note), the visual information display aids anyone whose mind has momentarily wandered. Might classrooms be similarly equipped with open captioned displays of instructors’ remarks? Hearing loops. Finally, schools could employ hearing technology. Such ranges from personal assistive technology—in which an instructor wears a mic that transmits to individual hard-of-hearing students with special receivers—to class and auditorium hearing loops that transmit to most of today’s hearing aids and cochlear implants (as I illustrate here from my Hope College campus). We want to stay healthy. And we want to hear. Let those planning for in-person, under-the-pandemic instruction aim for both—a health-protecting accessibility. [February, 2021, P.S. For data on the face mask acoustic effects, see here and here. . . and stay tuned for data on the CDC-recommended double masks. (In a recent conversation, a double-masked colleague's comments were mostly indecipherable to me.) Note: high frequency consonants, which convey so much meaning, are most impaired by dense fabric masks and, alas, clear shield masks. Perhaps the new Ford partially clear N95 mask (see here) will work better for communication, as well as not fogging up? Also, have you, too, noticed athletic coaches dutifully wearing asks, but them pulling them down when needing to communicate--at the time they're most needed, albeit in recognition that masks impair hearing accessibility?] [6/5/2021 addendum: For new evidence regarding face mask acoustics and hearing see here.) (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Climate change has arrived. Greenhouse gases are accumulating. The planet and its oceans are warming. Glaciers and Arctic ice are retreating. The seas are rising. Extreme weather is becoming ever costlier—in money and in lives. The warming Arctic and its wavier jet stream even help explain the recent polar vortex. If such threats came from a looming alien invasion, our response would be bipartisan and robust, notes Farhad Manjoo.   Even so, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, plans to lift CO 2 restrictions on coal-generated power, weakened auto fuel-economy and emissions standards, cut NASA climate monitoring, increased off-shore oil and gas drilling, and reduced clean-energy research and development. So why, given the accumulating science, is the Trump administration apparently unconcerned about climate change as a weapon of mass destruction?   Surely the availability heuristic—the coloring of our judgments by mentally available events and images—is partly to blame. Climate change is imperceptibly slow, without a just noticeable difference from one month to the next. What’s cognitively more available is our recent local weather. Thus, hot days increase people’s beliefs in global warming—as Australians understand after their recent scorching hot summer. And cold weather decreases concern—as vividly illustrated when U.S. Senator James Inhofe, during a 2015 cold spell, ridiculed global warming claims by bringing a snowball to the U.S. Senate. (Is it really so hard to grasp the distinction between local weather and global climate? We do manage, when feeling cold air on opening our refrigerator, not to misjudge our whole-house temperature.)    (C-Span [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.) President Trump has echoed Inhofe with dozens of tweets that similarly generalize from local weather:     Such wisdom brings to mind my favorite Stephen Colbert tweet:   The availability heuristic’s upside is that extreme weather experiences, as well as climate science, are driving growing public concern. Drought-caused wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves have a silver lining. After surviving Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey residents expressed increased environmentalism. And today, 74 percent of Americans say that the last five years’ extreme weather has influenced their climate change opinions.   Ergo, Americans by a 5-to-1 margin now agree that global warming is happening. By a 3-to-1 margin they believe it is human-caused. Seven in 10 now say that they are at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. And globally, across 26 countries, two-thirds of people see it as a “major threat” to their country. “The evidence the climate is changing is becoming so overwhelming people are seeing it in their regions and in their lives,” says the Obama science advisor, John Holdren. “We are really to the point where we’re seeing bodies in the street from severe flooding and severe wildfires.”   With vivid and mentally available weather tragedies occurring more often, more folks are noticing and caring. Last month, 3300 economists—including 27 Nobel laureates and all former Federal Reserve Board chairs—signed a consensus statement supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most effective climate change solution. Although the Green New Deal proposed by progressive Democrats may be more aspirational than achievable, its existence—together with the increasing climate concern of youth and young adults, and the growth in low-carbon energy sources—gives hope for a greener future.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more