Many Americans are indifferent about marriage. In a 2019 Pew survey, 55 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, and nearly half of all adults, agreed that couples who want to stay together are “just as well off if [they] decide not to marry.” In 2007 to 2009 University of Michigan surveys, high school seniors expressed even less esteem for marriage, with only about a third agreeing that “most people will have fuller and happier lives if they choose legal marriage rather than staying single or just living with someone.” Yet it’s no secret among those of us who study such things that marriage is a major predictor of health and human flourishing. See, for example, these General Social Survey data which I extracted from more than 64,000 randomly sampled Americans since 1972 (showing, also, a COVID-related 2021 morale dip). So does marriage—what anthropologist Joseph Henrich says “may be the most primeval of human institutions”—make for happiness? Before assuming such, critical thinkers should wonder about two other possibilities. First, does marriage (especially when compared to divorce) predict health and happiness merely because it compares those in surviving happy versus failed marriages? To see if getting married predicts long-term health and well-being across all new marriages, Harvard epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele, with Ying Chen and colleagues, harvested data from 11,830 nurses who, in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, were unmarried in 1989. They identified those who married versus those who didn’t in the next four years, and then tracked their lives for 25 years. Even when including those who later divorced, those who had married were, 25 years later, healthier and less likely to have died. They were also happier, more purpose-filled, and less depressed and lonely. Ah, but what about the second possibility: Were the to-be-married nurses simply happier, healthier, and richer to begin with? Did happiness à marriage rather than marriage à happiness? Happy people do enjoy better and more stable relationships. Depressed people tend to be irritable, not fun to live with, and vulnerable to divorce. So surely happiness does predict marriage and marital stability. Yet even after controlling for preexisting health and well-being, reports VanderWeele, marriage remains “an important pathway to human flourishing. It increases physical health, mental health, happiness, and purpose.” And not just for straight folks, I would add (as Letha Dawsom Scanzoni and I explained in our 2005 book, A Christian Case for Gay Marriage). Marriage is one effective way to help fulfill the deep human need that Aristotle long ago recognized—the need to belong. Marriage mostly (though not always) works, VanderWeele suspects, because marriage provides companionship. It boosts health and longevity. And it offers sexual satisfaction. Thus, he reasons, societies’ tax, parental leave, and child-support policies should incentivize marriage. And marriage enrichment and counseling should be widely available. Indeed, mindful that all healthy close relationships support our human need to belong, society should support varied opportunities for companionship and attachment. Our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our worship places, our recreational facilities, and our schools can all work at being places of supportive connection—places where you and I feel like we belong. (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.) Photo credit: Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank/Getty Images ... View more

“Our country is in decline, we are a failing nation,” bemoaned the indicted Donald Trump. On that much, most folks concur, with 83 percent of Americans telling Gallup the country’s “state of moral values” is “getting worse.” The moral gloom is global. When psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert harvested survey responses from 12.5 million people across 60 countries and 70 years, they found that people always and everywhere have perceived morality (including kindness, honesty, and other virtues) in decline. This despite most manifestations of immorality—war, murder, child abuse, slavery—subsiding, and people reporting no change in their own morally relevant behaviors. While the world has in fact become more humane, an illusion of moral decline remains pervasive. This dark delusion of plummeting social and economic well-being crosses domains. But the truth tells a different story: Crime feels up, while crime rates have fallen. “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable,” bewailed Donald Trump. “Crime infests our cities,” echoed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.   Americans agree: Each year since 2005, 7 in 10 have told Gallup that crime has increased in the past year—a perception shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s not just Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who contends that “violent crime is at record highs.” Yet since the early 1990s violent and property crime rates have fallen by about half. And the National Crime Victimization Survey confirms that we are much safer today. Poverty seems up, while poverty has abated. In a Gates Foundation–funded survey, 87 percent of people surveyed across 24 countries believed global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. But the percent of humans living in extreme poverty has fallen by two-thirds since 1990. Life conditions seem to be worsening, while life has gotten easier. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans told Pew Research in April that “life in America today” is worse than it “was 50 years ago for people like you” . . . despite increased life expectancy, more than doubled real average income, decreased percentage of income spent on food, and today’s material blessings ranging from dishwashers and air conditioning to smartphones and streaming TV. The national economy is tanking, but my finances are okay. In a 2023 Federal Reserve survey, only 18 percent of Americans viewed the national economy as good or excellent. And nearly two-thirds told Gallup they had little or no confidence in President Biden’s management of the economy. Nevertheless, 73 percent say their own finances are doing “at least okay.” No surprise, given that unemployment is at a 50-year low, inflation has moderated, and job satisfaction and the nation’s GDP are at all-time highs. Undocumented immigrants seem a threat, despite their compartively low crime rate. “Criminal elements,” we’ve been told, are “pouring in,” while “sanctuary cities are unleashing vicious predators and bloodthirsty killers.” Half the public agrees, Gallup reports: “Americans are five times more likely to say immigrants make [crime] situation worse rather than better (45% to 9%, respectively).” This despite undocumented immigrants reportedly having a much lower incarceration rate than U.S.-born citizens. To be sure, some social and ecological indicators, such as teen mental health and the climate future, are worrisome. Nevertheless, excessive pessimism prevails. The modal American believes the Black incarceration rate increased between 2006 and 2018 (it decreased 35 percent), that the teen birth rate has been increasing (it has been decreasing), and that the high school dropout rate has increased (though it decreased). People’s dour outlook applies to the nation, but not to their own local experience. My neighborhood, my town, are safe, healthy, flourishing places, we mostly observe. But the rest of America—the America we see on TV—is a cesspool of immorality, crime, and poverty. Our national pessimism arises partly from what psychologist Cory Clark and his University of Pennsylvania colleagues call our natural “hypervigilance toward bad outcomes.” From a young age, we are attuned to possible harms and to threatening or negative information. A second, powerful contributor to our bleak outlooks is the famed availability heuristic—our human tendency to judge the frequency of events by the ease with which instances of them come to mind. Vivid, mentally available images of plane crashes, terror attacks, and school shootings lead us to fear too much the things that kill people in bunches, and too little the less dramatic threats that take lives one by one. Thus, many people fear air travel, though by distance traveled we were, in the last decade, 595 times safer on a commercial flight than in a passenger vehicle. Gut feelings, fed by vivid anecdotes, hijack evidence-based thinking. “Mass media indulge this tendency,” note Mastroianni and Gilbert, “with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly.” Journalists don’t cover planes that land, people behaving morally, or immigrants living peaceably. Moreover, say Mastroianni and Gilbert, biased exposure is compounded by biased memory: The negativity of past bad experiences fades faster than the positivity of past good experiences. Thus, relative to yesteryear’s Golden Age, we badly overestimate today’s dramatic risks, crime rates, poverty, and immorality. And believing this decline narrative, we become receptive to the politics of gloom—to demagogues who embrace dystopian pessimism and pour petrol on its festering flames. “Crime and inflation are rampant.” We are beset by “poverty and violence at home.” “Our country [is] rapidly going to hell!” “I alone can fix it.” Elect me, we hear, and I will make our nation great again. “What is the one thing wrong with the world that you would change?” the Harvard Gazette asked Steven Pinker, author of 2021’s Rationality. His answer: “Too many leaders and influencers, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and academics, surrender to the cognitive bias of assessing the world through anecdotes and images rather than data and facts.” If only we could fix that. David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.   ... View more

Despite their differences, most of today’s U.S. Republicans and Democrats have one thing in common: They despise those in the other party, with many expressing physical disgust for their political opposites, whom they also regard as plainly stupid. In a recent Pew survey, partisans regarded one another as closed-minded, dishonest, and immoral. Nearly half would be upset if their child married someone from the other party, which fewer today—less than 4 percent—are doing. (Interracial marriages are now much more common than inter-political marriages.) Moreover, with young women increasingly identifying as “liberal”—today’s growing gender divide forms a barrier to heterosexuals looking for a kindred spirit to marry. Amid today’s mutual loathing—affective polarization, political scientists call it—two centrist social psychologist teams remind us that both sides have their virtues. In 2012, Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, argued that the right and left have complementary insights: Conservatives and liberals are both rooted in respectable moral values—with conservatives prioritizing loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and liberals prioritizing care for others and fairness. So before disparaging your political opposites, Haidt advises, consider their moral foundations. Now, in 2023, Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman concur that there is wisdom on both the left and the right: “Both left and right have valid insights and helpful policies.” Societies evolved to perform two crucial tasks, note Baumeister and Bushman: amass resources, and distribute them. Political conservatives, such as U.S. Republicans—draw their support primarily from those who produce resources: farmers and ranchers, businesspeople and merchants, bankers and contractors, real estate developers and fossil fuel producers. Political progressives, such as U.S. Democrats, care more about redistributing resources, and draw their support from government workers, educators, entertainers, and lower income people who have most to gain from egalitarian income sharing. For cultures to grow and their people to flourish, both resource accumulation and shared distribution are essential, Baumeister and Bushman argue. Thus, over time, flourishing democracies—including nearly all countries that the UN ranks at the high end of life quantity and quality—have valued both aims, and their governments have tended to alternate between center-right and center-left. Even so, this leaves practical issues for debate, they add: If incentives (via profits for innovation) increase resources, but also increase inequality, then where is the optimum point for redistribution (without depleting the motivation to produce)? Should incentives for resource production include the right to pass hard-earned fortunes down to privileged children and grandchildren who played no part in creating them? What structural changes might alleviate today’s partisan extremism? In gerrymandered congressional districts, for example, the primary election becomes the main hurdle to office—which leads to more extreme candidates who need offer no appeal to the other party. In my state, Michigan, a citizen-initiated ballot proposal ended gerrymandering by defining state and congressional districts that “shall not provide disproportionate advantage to political parties or candidates.” Other states and cities have embraced ranked-choice voting, which rewards candidates (often moderates) who appeal to a broad range of voters. Other social psychologists critique their colleagues who see equivalent wisdom in both right and left, or who report that “bias is bipartisan.” It’s a false equivalence, notes John Jost, to assume that U.S. Republicans and Democrats equally convey misinformation, conspiracy thinking, intolerance, political violence, and dogmatism. Even so, grant this much, say Baumeister and Bushman: Humankind has succeeded thanks to the evolution of human cultures, which have done “two things effectively: (1) amassing resources, and (2) sharing resources through the group. Back in the evolutionary past, most adults took part in both tasks but the two tasks have grown apart, and in the modern world they pull against each other. Nevertheless, both tasks are important, indeed essential, for a flourishing society.” As a political partisan myself, Baumeister and Bushman bid me to remember: There can be wisdom across the political divide. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) Cover image credit: Orbon Alija/E+/Getty Images ... View more

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” ~Attributed to Mother Teresa A college student, heading to a new school, leaves friends behind. A close relationship is severed by death or breakup. A remote worker loves skipping the commute but misses the convivial workplace. An ostracized teen stares at her social media feeds and feels utterly alone. In such ways, reports U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, about half of Americans—an increasing number—report experiencing loneliness. With support from Brigham Young University psychologist and social connections researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the Surgeon General documents Americans’ fraying social connections. Between 2003 and 2020, time spent alone increased from 142.5 to 166.5 hours per month; in-person time with friends decreased from 30 to just 10 hours per month. Consider this: How many close friends do you have? In 1990, 27 percent of Americans answered three or fewer. By 2021, the percentage answering three or fewer increased to 49 percent. Although COVID-19 accentuated these trends, they are long-term. Aloneness need not entail loneliness. Yet a possible loneliness source is our more often living alone. From 1960 to 2022 single-person households more than doubled—from 13 to 29 percent of all households. We are also more often working alone—with working from home (WFH) reportedly soaring from 5 percent of pre-COVID workdays to nearly 30 percent, and with the WFH trend projected to endure. The Surgeon General’s concern about social isolation and loneliness stems not just from associated depressed or anxious mood, but also the broader health consequences, which are bigger than you might have guessed: Framed positively, we live longer, as well as more happily, when supported by close, caring relationships. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, the late Harriet Hall (aka “SkepDoc”) cautioned that the loneliness-mortality relationship is correlational: “The cause might be some confounding factor.” But modern epidemiological studies do control for some plausible other factors. Moreover, self-reported feelings of “secure attachment” have been in decline. And as the Surgeon General summarizes, social isolation and loneliness are known to impact health via the biology of stress, the psychology of diminished purpose and hope, and related behaviors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and unhealthy nutrition and sleep: The report concludes by offering strategies for rebuilding healthy social connections. These include designing physical and social environments that bring people together, and prioritizing cultures that value kindness and connection. Happily for me, the report’s suggestions are embodied in my historic neighborhood, with its walkable location and sidewalk-facing front porches that (much more than our former backyard-oriented house) connect me with passing neighbors—and not just me, suggests new research on neighborhood design.  Likewise, my department designed our offices to foster faculty connections, by clustering our offices in a pod (rather than yoked with our labs)—with a traffic pattern that has us often walking by one another’s open doors (as I captured below, shortly after writing these words). And we begin each department meeting with a time of sharing personal and professional updates. In my experience, the Surgeon General is right: It’s uplifting to live and work, face-to-face, among people who like and support each other. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com or check out his new essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.) Photo credit Comstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Images ... View more

By now you’ve likely heard: Teen sadness, depression, and suicide attempts have soared since 2010, especially among girls. From 2011 to 2020, suicide-related issues rose fourfold, from 0.9 percent of U.S. pediatric emergency room visits to 4.2 percent. The teen mental health decline is unprecedented. And it is substantial. Although debate over causation continues, varied studies converge in pointing to social media as a likely major culprit. And legislators have taken note, by proposing bipartisan state and congressional bills that would limit teen social media access. The CDC’s new 100-page “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBS) samples 17,232 ninth to twelfth graders from all U.S. public and private schools, and documents the malaise of today’s teen girls. But another troubled, less-discussed group also caught my eye—what the report refers to as LGBQ+ teens (transgender teens were not separately surveyed). A CDC summary document portrays the significant mental health challenges of LGBQ+ high schoolers: Poor mental health in last 30 days: Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness: Seriously considered attempting suicide: Made a suicide plan in the last year: Attempted suicide: These data replicate findings in other reports. In 2022, the Trevor Project, which studies and supports the mental health of LGBTQ youth, collected more than 34,000 reports from 13- to 24-year-old LGBTQ youth and young adults. Although the respondents were self-selected, the online survey found, exactly as did the CDC, that “45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.” What explains the sexual identity–mental health correlation? The common presumption is that the stigma and stress faced by sexual minorities exacts a toll. “We must recognize that LGBTQ young people face stressors simply for being who they are that their peers never have to worry about,” observed Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley. Digging deeper into the CDC’s YRBS data, it appears that, indeed, even with the growing acceptance of people who are gay, the stigmatization and stressors remain. Kids—and society at large—can be cruel. More findings: Did not go to school because of safety concerns: Bullied online: Bullied at school: These data prompt our sobering reflection on the struggles of LGBTQ youth. They also make us wonder: Might sexual-minority youth be less vulnerable to depression, hopelessness, and suicidal thinking if given . . . more access to mental health services? . . . a support group in a safe space? . . . greater public education about the realities of sexual orientation? Or what would you suggest? (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.) Image credit: Thomas Baker/Alamy Stock Photo. ... 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

The Washington Post reports that money can buy happiness. To emphasize the joys of wealth, it displays this glamorous couple enjoying a sumptuous private jet meal. “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right,” proclaimed a famous Lexus ad. Extreme-Photographer/E+/Getty Images The Post draws from an excellent “adversarial collaboration” (when scientists partner to test their opposing views) by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman, facilitated by Barbara Mellers. Killingsworth had questioned Kahneman’s report of an “income satiation” effect, with well-being not much increasing above annual incomes of $75,000 (in 2008 dollars, or near $100,000 today). With the exception of an unhappy minority, happiness does, they now agree, continue rising with income. A figure from Killingsworth’s PNAS article (“Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year”) illustrates: But note that, as is typical with economists’ reporting of money-happiness data, the x-axis presents log income. (Unlike a linear income x-axis, which adds equal dollar increments, a logarithmic scale—as you can see—compacts the spread.) So what if we depict these data with an x-axis of linear dollars (the actual dollars of real people)? We then see what others have found in both U.S. and global surveys: happiness indeed rises with income, even beyond $100,000, but with a diminishing rate of increased happiness as income rises from high to super high. Multiple studies show the same curvilinear money-happiness relationship when comparing poor with wealthy nations (as illustrated in this report, again scaled with actual, not log, income). Moreover, an international survey of more than 2000 millionaires from seventeen countries found that, at net worths above $1 million, more wealth is minimally predictive of happiness (though millionaires enjoy more work autonomy and time for active leisure). And, as Ed Diener and I reported in 2018, economic growth has not improved human morale (and teen girls’ morale has plummeted). In inflation-adjusted dollars, U.S. adults, albeit with greater inequality, are three times richer than 65 years ago, with bigger houses, new technologies, home air conditioning, and more per person cars and dining out. We have more money and what it buys, but no greater happiness. Nevertheless, today’s undergraduates (in the annual UCLA American Freshman survey) continue to believe—entering collegians rate this #1 among 20 alternative life objectives—that being “very well off” matters, a lot. It’s the modern American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness. For low-income people, money does buy necessities and greater freedom. Money matters. And extreme inequality is socially toxic. But as the above data show, once we have income security and more than enough for life’s essentials, each additional $20,000 of income pays diminishing happiness dividends. Finally, we need to remember that these are correlational data. If higher-income people are somewhat happier, it may be not only because money matters, but also partly because happiness is conducive to vocational and financial success (a depressed mood is enervating). What U.S. President Jimmy Carter told Americans in 1979 remains true: “Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Carter echoed William Cowper’s words from 1782: “Happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.” Happiness depends less on gratifying our escalating wants than on simply wanting what we have. And it depends more on supportive social connections that satisfy our need to belong, and on embracing a meaning-filled sense of vocation and a spirituality that offers community and hope. Money matters, but it matters less than images of luxury private jet travel might lead us to suppose. What do you think: Might these facts of life inform our conversations about lifestyle choices, public income distribution policies, and inherited wealth? (For David’s 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

At its best, psychological science transparently puts big competing ideas to the test. With varied methods and with replication of noteworthy findings, it winnows truth from the haystack of mere speculation. If the evidence supports an idea, so much the better for it. If the idea collides with a wall of fact, then it gets rejected or revised. In reality, psychology often falls short of this ideal. A noteworthy finding doesn’t replicate. Confirmation bias drives a researcher to selectively attend to supportive evidence. In rare cases, researchers have stage-managed desired results or even faked data. Yet the psychological science ideal is achievable. My social psychologist colleagues Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge exemplify this ideal as they assemble evidence regarding social media effects on teen mental health, and invite others to critique and supplement their data. “It is amazing how much I have learned, and refined my views, just by asking people to make me smarter,” Haidt has told me. The stimulus for their work is a troubling social phenomenon: As smartphones and social media use have spread among teens, teen depression has soared, especially among girls. Moreover, youth hospitalization for "attempted suicide or self-injury increased from 49,285 in 2009 to 129,699 in 2019." The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey report illustrates: Is this simultaneous increase in social media use and teen depression a mere coincidence? Given that plausible other factors such as economic trends, wars, or domestic violence seem not to account for the decade-long trend, Haidt and Twenge conjectured a plausible culprit: the shift from face-to-face relationships to screen-based relationships, with in-person time with friends dropping by more than half since 2010. More time online has also displaced sleep and play. And it has increased demoralizing social comparisons. As Cornell University’s Sebastian Deri and his colleagues found across eleven studies, most of us, in the age of selfies, perceive our friends as having more fun: Other folks seem to party more, eat out more, and look happier and prettier. Even teens not on social media are likely affected, Haidt notes. When friends are interacting online several hours a day, those not similarly engaged can feel left out and isolated. Halfpoint/iStock/Getty Images To assess their presumption of social media harm, and mindful of lingering skepticism, Haidt and Twenge assembled the available evidence from four psychological science methods: correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental. Correlational: First, they asked, do daily social media hours correlate with teen mental health? In a recent Substack essay, Haidt notes that 80 percent of 55 studies answered yes. The correlation is modest when summed across genders and all forms of screen time, but becomes telling when, as shown in these UK data, one spotlights girls’ social media exposure. Longitudinal: Second, they asked, does social media use at Time 1 predict mental health at Time 2? Among 40 longitudinal studies, Haidt reports, in 25 the answer was yes. For example, in a new study reducing social media use proved “a feasible and effective method of improving body image” among vulnerable young adults. Experimental: Third, they asked, do experiments that randomly assign participants to social media exposure produce a mental health effect? In 12 of 18 experiments, mostly done with college students and young adults, the answer was, again, yes. Moreover, among the six studies finding no effect, four involved only a brief (week or less) social media diet. Quasi-experimental: Finally, they asked, do quasi-experiments find that the timing of social media arrival predicts mental health? Was the rollout of Facebook on a campus or the arrival of high-speed internet in a community followed—at that location—by increased mental health problems? In all six studies, Haidt reports, “when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls.” Together, these correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental findings illustrate how psychological science explores life-relevant questions with multiple methods. Moreover, the diverse findings weave a compelling answer to the social media–teen mental health question. In the words of Haidt’s Substack title: “Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.” Would you agree with Haidt’s conclusion? If yes, would you also agree with recent bipartisan calls to restrict social media to those over 16? Would doing so be supportive of parents, teens, and schools—much as efforts to restrict teen smoking have effectively dropped teen smoking from nearly 23 percent in 2000 to 2 percent in 2021? Would you concur with researchers who advise parents to keep phones out of teens’ bedrooms at night? If you are a teen, does this research have any implications for your and and your friends' mental health? Should teens begin smartphone use with texting rather than with selfies and social media? Should they intentionally restrain their daily hours online? And if you don’t agree that social media are a “major cause” of teen girls’ increased depression, what would be your alternate explanation? The importance of these questions, for teens, families, and society, will drive further research and debate. In the meantime, the complementary insights gleaned from these correlational, longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies showcase, methinks, psychological science at its best. (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

It’s a big lesson of psychological science: Most of us exhibit a self-serving bias. On most subjective, socially desirable dimensions we see ourselves as better than average—as better than 90 percent of drivers, as more moral than most others, as better able to get along with others. When good things happen we accept credit, while we attribute our failures and bad deeds to external factors—to bad breaks or a situation beyond our control. In kindred research, more than a thousand studies show how a positive thinking bias produces illusory optimism. Unrealistic optimism is evident when, for example, most students perceive themselves are far more likely than their average classmate to attend graduate school, get a high-paying job, and own a nice home, while they see themselves as much less likely to suffer a heart attack, get cancer, or be divorced. The powers and perils of our self-serving pride and Pollyannaish optimism are a profound truth. But as a saying popularized by physicist Niels Bohr reminds us, “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” So now for the rest of the story. If you and I tend to overestimate our strengths and our potentials, we also tend to underestimate the good impressions we make when meeting others. In six new studies of more than 2000 university students, University of Toronto psychologists Norhan Elsaadawy and Erika Carlson found that “most people tend to underestimate how positively they are seen by the individuals they know well and by individuals they have just met.” That happy finding confirms a 2018 report by Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby and her colleagues. After meeting and interacting with someone, “People systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.” This was true for strangers meeting in the laboratory, first-year undergraduates meeting their dorm mates, and adults getting to know one another in a workshop. After all such get-acquainted conversations, people “are liked more than they know.” Elsaadawy and Carlson surmise that we underestimate the impressions we make because we, more than our conversation partners, focus on our blunders and imperfections. We’re painfully aware of what others hardly notice—our stumbling words, our nervousness, our talking too much or too little, even our bad hair that day. fjmoura/DigitalImages/Getty Images Our acute self-consciousness of our gaffes, shortcomings, and blemishes was amusingly evident in one of psychology’s elegantly simple and life-relevant experiments. At Cornell University, Thomas Gilovich and his co-researchers asked participants to wear an embarrassing T-shirt (of 1970s crooner Barry Manilow) before completing some questionnaires with several others. Asked afterwards how many of the other participants noticed their unfashionable attire, the average person guessed about half. In reality, only 23 percent noticed. The good news: Others notice our clothes, our blunders, our anxiety, even our bad hair, less than we suppose. Not only may our blunders and imperfections do us less harm than we suppose, in some situations they may help. In experiments, well-regarded people who commit a pratfall—who stumble, or spill coffee, or make a mistake—may become better liked. Our blunder can evoke empathy, humanize us, and make us seem more relatable. Perhaps, then, we can fret less about how others regard us. Assuming we are well-intentioned, the odds are that people like us, even more than we suppose. And, though painfully obvious to us, many of our flaws and failings are less obvious to others, or soon forgotten. (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

Have you ever, amid a group, found yourself caught up in something larger than yourself? Perhaps with other fans at a game? At worship? At a rock concert? With your emotions aroused and your self-awareness diminished, did you feel at one with the surrounding others? Did you experience what we social psychologists call deindividuation? In group situations, arousal + anonymity can power mob cruelty or vandalism, as in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. As one rioter lamented afterward, “I got caught up in the moment.” In other settings, socially produced arousal and loss of self enable moral elevation—a prosocial feeling of warmth and an expansion of self that bonds us to others. In Collective Effervescence, filmmaker Richard Sergay illustrates how diverse people in polarized cultures can bridge societal rifts and experience spiritual transcendence through singing. His 13-minute video, produced for the Templeton World Charity Foundation, focuses on Koolulam, an Israel-based “social-musical initiative centering around mass singing events.” In one such event, a thousand Jews, Christians, and Muslims gathered at midnight after the final day of Ramadan. Their mission: to learn and sing—in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and in three-part harmony—Bob Marley’s “One Love.” Film image courtesy Richard Sergay and Templeton World Charity Foundation Collective effervescence, so named by sociologist Emile Durkheim, engages group members in a self-transcending experience. When experiencing such behavioral and emotional synchrony, people not only feel at one with others, notes psychologist Shira Gabriel and her colleagues, they also, afterward, feel less stressed and depressed, and more purposeful. As strangers make music together, social psychological phenomena operate. These include not only the diminished self-awareness and lessened restraint that marks deindividuation, but also the reconciling power of realizing a superordinate (shared) goal. Moreover, the collective synchrony of bodies and voices engages embodied cognition—our bodily states influencing our mental states. With bodies and voices collectively forming one choral voice, participants’ emotions converge. Synchronized voices create, at least in the moment, harmonized spirits.  Even synchronous physical movements—such as walking together—facilitates conflict resolution, report psychologists Christine Webb, Maya Rossignac-Milon, and E. Tory Higgins. As walkers coordinate their steps, mutual rapport and empathy increase. The boundary between self and other softens. In some contexts, the embodied cognition experience is enhanced by combining collective singing and physical movements. “In the Western Isles of Scotland,” Scottish composer John Bell tells me, “there are tunes called ‘waulking-songs.’ These were sung as accompaniments to physical work, particularly spinning, weaving and waulking” (stretching and fluffing tweed fibers), much like sea shanty songs used by sailing ship crew members to focus and coordinate their efforts. In sub-Saharan Africa, music likewise connects voice with movement. Singing, Bell observes, is a full-bodied experience. “In South Africa, some of the ‘freedom songs’ now popular in the West, such as ‘We Are Marching in the Light of God,’ were sung by people carrying the coffins of their colleagues killed by the apartheid regime. When you look at videos of demonstrations during these years, there is a clear synchronicity between the song of the people and their physical movement. The one enables the other.” Singing the rhythmic “We Are Marching in the Light of God” (“Siyahamba” in Zulu) begs for movement, as illustrated by this Los Angeles community choir and this African Children’s choir. In the American folk tradition, Sacred Harp (a.k.a. “shape note”) music is similarly participant-centered and embodied—with a cappella singers facing one another around a hollow square, and each co-leading with hand motions, as here. So, psychological science helps explain the collective effervescence created by Koolulam events, and by other collective synchronous behaviors, from group singing to line dancing. When we synchronize our bodies and voices, we harmonize our spirits. (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

My brain—and yours—is blessed with neuroplasticity. More than other species’ brains, ours can adapt by reorganizing after damage or by building new experience-based pathways. Although neuroplasticity is greatest in childhood, adult brains also change with experience. Master pianists, ballerinas, and jugglers have enlarged brain networks that manifest their acquired knowledge and skills. Brain plasticity is also at work in those of us who experience a new world of sound, enabled by a cochlear implant (CI). For many, the initial result of CI activation is underwhelming—squeaky high-pitched sounds rather than understood speech—followed by several months of gradually increasing voice comprehension as the brain adapts. Recalibrating voices. My immediate response to CI activation was happily more rewarding. “What is your middle name?” I heard the audiologist ask my previously deaf ear (reminding me of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone words: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you”). To be sure, her words were barely—and not always—discernible. And they came with the squeaky voice of the little girl who had seemingly occupied her body. But now my plastic brain had something to work on. The ENT surgeon attributed the high-pitched voice to implant’s disproportionately high-pitched stimulation. (The cochlear wire only reaches through about 1.5 of the cochlea’s 2.5 turns—its high-frequency region—beyond which the electrodes would need to be so close that they would interfere with each other.) But with time, I am assured, my brain will recalibrate, and already that's happening. Aural rehabilitation. As pianists, ballerinas, and jugglers can train their plastic brains, so too those experiencing disabilities can, to some extent, retrain their brains. By prescribing a stroke patient to use only the “bad” hand or leg—constraint-induced therapy, it’s called—dexterity will often increase. One person who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke gradually learned, by cleaning tables with their good hand restrained, to write again and even play tennis with the affected hand. Ditto for CI recipients, who are told to anticipate up to a year of gradually improving speech perception as their plastic brain adjusts to the new input. To assist that process, I am advised to dedicate time each day to watching captioned TV, or listening to speech with just the CI. If needed, recipients can also undergo word-recognition training. Happily, I seem not to need word training. Within the first week of receiving the CI’s input, some adaption was already evident, with speech becoming increasingly intelligible. Even with the hearing aid in my other ear replaced with an earplug, I can, in a quiet room, converse with someone via the CI alone. And with the enhanced binaural hearing I can again attend department meetings and chat with folks amid a coffee hour. I also seemingly benefit from a curious phenomenon of auditory selective attention. I can listen to what sounds like a) squeaky voices with my left, CI-assisted ear, b) normal voices with my right, hearing-aid assisted ear, or c) the improved hearing from both inputs combined—yet with normal voice perception predominating. Moreover, I am experiencing . . . A new world of sound. An unanticipated outcome of my CI activation has been various objects coming to life. My implant activation has caused my silent office clock to start audibly clicking the seconds. my congregation’s tepid singing to become more vibrant. our previously inaudible garbage disposal and car—both of which I have left running overnight—to make noticeable sound. (Not that you’ve ever wondered, but a running car, when left unattended for 10 hours, drinks about a quarter tank.) What strange CI powers are these . . . to cause previously silent objects to make sound! Honestly, however, I am awestruck by those of you with normal hearing. You swim amid an ocean of inescapable sound, yet somehow manage, without constant distraction, to filter and attend to pertinent sounds, such as one particular voice. You are amazing. But then for us all, hearing is a  wonder. Imagine a science fiction novel in which alien creatures transferred thoughts from one head to another by pulsating air molecules. That is us! As we converse, we are—in ways we don’t comprehend—converting what’s in our mind into vocal apparatus vibrations that send air molecules bumping through space, creating waves of compressed and expanded air. On reaching our recipient’s eardrums, the resulting vibrations jiggle the middle ear bones, triggering fluid waves down the adjacent cochlea. These bend the hair cell receptors, which trigger neural impulses up the auditory nerve to our brain—which somehow decodes the pulsations into meaning. From mind to air pressure waves to mechanical waves to fluid waves to electrochemical waves to mind, we communicate. Mind-to-mind communication via jostling air molecules: As the Psalmist exclaimed, we are “wonderfully made.” (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

Artificial intelligence—the long-promised computer simulation of human intelligence—has arrived. A striking new example: On December 1st, OpenAI released a chatbot, ChatGPT, that you can play with here. I was introduced to this by one of my children, a computer systems engineer, who is mightily impressed (and not normally so wow’d by new technology that impresses me). He illustrated with a couple examples of his own: In this next example, the Sherlock joke, though wonderful, is familiar. But consider ChatGPT’s answer to the follow-up question: Impressive! Then I challenged Chat GPT to write some psychological science. I asked it to write me an essay explaining the difference between classical and operant conditioning. Its response would have merited an A grade from any instructor. Then I reset the conversation and asked it the same question again, and it responded with a new and equally impressive essay. Then I gave it a harder challenge (seeing if it understands a concept that a respected public intellectual and his editor miscast): Kudos to ChatGPT, which grasps that oft-misunderstood psychological concept. I also wondered if students could ask ChatGPT to improve their writing before handing in a paper: The future is here. For ideas on how you can explore and play with ChatGPT, or with OpenAI Playground, Ethan Mollick offers a variety of possibilities here. For crisp synopses of AI's history and future, see here. Or see here how Michelle Huang “trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries" so that she could "engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child.'" And then consider: How might the new AI enable creative thinking? Tutoring? Cheating? Paper or essay grading? Conversing about important topics?  (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.) Image credit: baona/E+/Getty Images ... View more

Last week, I spent 3 hours under general anesthesia (while receiving a cochlear implant). Being a curious psychological scientist, and knowing my anesthesiologist, I seized the opportunity for a simple memory test. First, the reason for my curiosity: A complete night’s sleep serves to process our day’s experiences for permanent memory storage. To sleep well is to remember. Nevertheless, the initial neural recording (the “encoding”) of memories takes a bit of waking time. Rats in experiments will therefore forget what they’ve just experienced if their memory formation gets interrupted with an electric current passed through their brain. Humans are similarly amnesic for what they experience in the moments before receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). And, as I’ve explained in my psychology texts, “Football players and boxers momentarily knocked unconscious typically have no memory of events just before the knockout.” Would the same be true for someone falling asleep, or for someone lapsing into a drug-induced temporary coma? Are you amnesic for what you were thinking or experiencing just before nodding off? To enable my experiencing an answer, my anesthesiologist alerted me to his drug administration, indicating that I would soon experience mental lights out. That was my signal to start counting the seconds out loud: “1, 2, 3, . . .” knape/E+/Getty Images On awakening 3.5 hours later, I remembered the trip into the operating room and onto the operating bed. I remembered chatting with the attending staff. I remembered the anesthesiologist connecting the bodily sensors . . . but nothing thereafter. In reality, I learned on awakening, my unremembered conscious engagement continued for about 3 minutes, including my counting to 16. A segment of my life—fully experienced but unrecorded—had vanished into the mind’s black hole. It was a weird experience. But weirder yet is what I have underappreciated until now: that I—and you—experience this fascinating phenomenon daily. An anesthesia-induced coma is not sleep (and may also be complicated by an amnesic drug effect). Nevertheless, last month when I proposed my anticipated quasi experiment to Baylor University sleep researcher Michael Scullin, he predicted my experience. The expected memory loss, he said, would be an example of (a new concept to me) mesograde amnesia.[i] We routinely but unknowingly experience mesograde amnesia as our immediate pre-sleep experience falls into oblivion. The phenomenon was demonstrated in a 1997 experiment by James Wyatt and colleagues: People failed to recall words spoken to them shortly before an EEG recording detected their transition to sleep. (The memory loss—from up to 4 minutes before sleep commenced—was, like mine on the operating table, surprisingly long.) Weirder yet, as Scullin further explained, sleep-induced mesograde amnesia implies that you and I will typically not remember our short (1- to 4-minute) awakenings during our night—a phenomenon also experimentally confirmed. Thus, university students who send a text message while briefly awake will, the next morning, often have no memory of doing so. And sleep apnea patients will experience multiple brief awakenings without remembering them. Mesograde amnesia explains one of my own recent sleep experiences. As I slipped into bed alone on a recent warm night, I pushed the blanket down to my feet. The room cooled during the night, and in the morning I awoke to find the blanket pulled up—with my having no memory of how that happened. Had my fairy godmother noticed my chill? Scullin’s memory tutorial also led to my wondering about an evening after-work experience I have at least weekly—briefly nodding off while watching a British mystery. When I snap back to consciousness, I typically need to replay about 10 minutes for which I have no memory. I’ve assumed that the program gap represents a 10-minute nap. In reality, I now realize, 4 minutes of mesograde amnesia plus 6 minutes of napping could account for the missing 10 minutes. What’s true for the sleep-experiment participants, and for me, is also true of you. Your falling asleep—at the beginning of your sleeping or napping, and again during your interrupted sleep—makes you amnesic for your immediately preceding life experience. Over time, your mesograde amnesia experiences add up to hours of your conscious life that have vanished, having gone unrecorded on your cerebral hard drive. Count it as one more example of our wonder-full lives. (For more such wonders, see my just-published How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. 😊) [i] Most amnesia is either anterograde (trouble making new memories) or retrograde (trouble accessing old memories). Mesograde (middle grade) amnesia is not clearly due to either the inability to store a new memory or retrieve the memory once stored. Some say it is produced by memory-disruptive bursts of hippocampal activity during the wake-to-sleep transition. ... View more

As President Biden approaches his 80th birthday and contemplates seeking reelection, many wonder: Does someone entering their ninth life decade have—and will they sustain—the energy, mental acuity, and drive to excel? From its early 2022 national survey (with ABC News), the Washington Post reported that “54 percent say they do not think Biden has the mental sharpness it takes to serve as president, while 40 percent say he does.” Mr. President. I empathize. I, too, turned 80 this fall. So on behalf of you and all of us octogenarians, let me shine the light of psychological science on our capacities. First, people should understand that the more we age, the less age predicts our abilities. Knowing that James is 8 and Jamal is 18 tells us much about their differences. Not so with two adults who similarly differ by a decade. Many a 80-year-old can outrun, outbike, and outthink a 70-year-old neighbor. It’s true that we 80s folks have some diminishing abilities. Like you, Mr. President, I can still jog—but not as fast or far. The stairs we once bounded up have gotten steeper, the newsprint smaller, others’ voices fainter. And in the molasses of our brain, memories bubble more slowly to the surface: We more often experience brain freezes as we try to retrieve someone’s name or the next point we were about to make. Hence your legendary gaffs. Yet with a lifetime’s accumulation of antibodies, we also suffer fewer common colds and flus than do our grandchildren. Physical exercise, which you and I regularly do, not only sustains our muscles, bones, and hearts; it also stimulates neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells and neural connections. The result, when compared with sedentary folks like your predecessor, is better memory, sharper judgment, and minimized cognitive decline. Moreover, we either retain or grow three important strengths: Crystallized intelligence. We can admit to experiencing what researchers document: Our fluid intelligence—our ability to reason and react speedily—isn’t what it used to be. We don’t solve math problems as quickly or learn new technologies as readily, and we’re no match for our grandkids at video games. But the better news is that our crystallized intelligence—our accumulated knowledge and the ability to apply it—crests later in life. No wonder many historians, philosophers, and artists have produced their most noteworthy work later in life than have mathematicians and scientists. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (“Grandma Moses”) took up painting in her 70s. At age 89, Frank Lloyd Wright designed New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. At age 94, my psychologist colleague Albert Bandura has just co-authored yet another article. Perhaps our most important work is also yet ahead? Wisdom. With maturity, people’s social skills often increase. They become better able to take multiple perspectives, to offer helpful sagacity amid conflicts, and to appreciate the limits of their knowledge. The wisdom to know when we know a thing and when we do not is born of experience. Working at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, psychologist Paul Baltes and his colleagues developed wisdom tests that assess people’s life knowledge and judgments about how to conduct themselves in complex circumstances. Wisdom “is one domain in which some older individuals excel,” they report. “In youth we learn, in age we understand,” observed the 19th-century novelist Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach. Stable emotionality. As the years go by, our feelings mellow. Unlike teens, who tend to rebound up from gloom or down from elation within an hour, our highs are less high and our lows less low. As we age, we find ourselves less often feeling excited or elated. But our lives are also less often disrupted by depression. In later life we are better able to look beyond the moment. Compliments produce less elation; criticisms, less despair. At the outset of my career, praise and criticism would inflate and deflate my head. A publication might have me thinking I was God’s new gift to my profession, while a rejection led me to ponder moving home to join the family business. With experience, both acclaim and reproach become mere iotas of additional feedback atop a mountain of commentary. Thus, when responding to the day’s slings and arrows, we can better take a big-picture, long-term perspective. Mr. President, I understand these things, as I suspect you do, too. When in my 60s, I assumed—wrongly—that by age 80, I would no longer have the energy to read, to think, to write. Instead, I take joy in entering my office each day at a place called Hope. I relish learning something new daily. I find delight in making words march up a screen. And I’m mellower, as it takes more to make me feel either ecstatic or despondent. And you? Will you, as a newly minted octogenarian, show your age? Yes, that jog up to the podium will surely slow. You will likely more often misspeak or forget a point. Your sleep will be more interrupted. But you will also benefit from the crystallized intelligence that comes with your lifetime’s experience. You can harness the wisdom that comes with age. And you can give us the gift of emotional maturity that will enable you, better than most, to navigate the “battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses.” ------------ *This essay updates a 2020 essay published at TalkPsych.com. See also Psalm 92:14 🙂 (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

This moment is both the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will henceforth be. To live is to age. But which age tends to offer the best of life, and which the worst? Should we anticipate our mid- or later-life future with hope, or with dread? When asked which life eras are the unhappiest, some say it’s the teen years: mood swings, social anxieties, parental demands, peer pressures, and career worries. Some say it’s later life, with its diminished occupational purpose, stamina, recall, and social networks—and with the Grim Reaper looming ever closer. Still others say it’s the in-between “midlife crisis” years, when people (traditionally referring to men) realize their career fantasies are not being realized, their marriage is ho-hum, and their bodies are aging. “While Diana puts on a brave face,” declared a 1991 People magazine cover, “a brooding [42-year-old] Prince Charles grapples with a midlife crisis and retreats to his old girlfriends.” Three decades ago, when authoring The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy—and Why, I surmised that, apart from happy and stressful life events, no time of life was notably happier or unhappier. Consider Ronald Inglehart’s 1991 aggregated worldwide big data: Follow-up research confirmed the life span stability of well-being, with Robert McCrae, Paul Costa, and colleagues finding “no evidence” of instability in midlife men and women, including one study with 10,000 participants. Moreover, when the Gallup Organization (in data shared with me in 2010) asked 142,682 people worldwide to rate their lives on a ladder, from 0 (“the worst possible life”) to 10 (“the best possible life”), age gave no clue to life satisfaction: Andrew Jebb and colleagues analyzed more recent Gallup data from 1.7 million people in 166 countries, and although they also found claims of a U-shaped happiness trend, they similarly observed that a midlife dip is “overblown.” Any age differences, said the researchers, are “trivial.” Amassing similar, newer cross-sectional and longitudinal data similar, University of Alberta psychologist Nancy Galambos and her collaborators (see here and here) agree: “We cannot conclude that there is a universal U shape in happiness.” But hold on. Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower and his colleagues (here and here) beg to differ, citing more than 300 studies, with data from 146 countries, that do find a U shape: “The midlife low occurs in the mid-40s.” Moreover, new data lend credence to a U-shaped happiness trajectory. A mostly British research team led by economist Osea Giuntella notes that prior research, being mostly cross-sectional, has compared people of differing ages at one point in time. When researchers compare different cohorts (groups born at different times), they also are comparing people raised in different economic, political, cultural, and educational circumstances. The Giuntella team instead harvested international data following some 500,000 people through time. Their conclusion? The midlife crisis is real: “Midlife is a time when people disproportionately take their own lives, have trouble sleeping, are clinically depressed, spend time thinking about suicide, feel life is not worth living, find it hard to concentrate, forget things, feel overwhelmed in their workplace, suffer from disabling headaches, and become dependent on alcohol.” When examining the newest Gallup World Poll survey data, Harvard epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele and his co-researchers similarly “found the classic U-shaped pattern with life evaluation being higher for younger people and older people (up through about age 80) and lower in middle life.” The Blanchflower, Giuntella, and VanderWeele findings have changed me from a confident skeptic of U-shaped life span happiness to a curious agnostic, but still believing the age effect to be modest compared to bigger happiness predictors, such as personality traits, social support, and sense of life purpose, meaning, and hope. What’s more certain and concerning is a dramatic decline in psychological well-being among younger Americans. The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented soaring of serious depression among U.S. teens and young adults. In a large survey, VanderWeele’s team similarly found not a U-shape life curve but rather lower well-being among younger Americans; or, said differently, better well-being among older Americans. So be kind to the young adults in your life (possibly yourself). And consider more good news. As Nathan DeWall and I documented in Psychology, 13th Edition, older adults become more attentive to positive news, with their brains less responsive to negative events. They experience fewer relationship stresses, including less anxiety and anger. They become more trusting. And they become more likely to remember their lives’ good rather than bad events. In later life, we also become more emotionally stable, our emotional highs less high, our lows less low. Things that used to irritate—slow traffic, poor restaurant service, a friend’s snub—no longer seem like such big deals. With age, compliments trigger less elation and criticisms less despair, as each become mere iotas of additional feedback atop a lifetime of accumulated praise and reproach. “At 70,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that ‘this, too, shall pass!’” Ergo, despite recent indications of a slight midlife dip, people’s happiness and life satisfaction is remarkably stable—with the striking exception being the dramatic recent rise in teen/young adult depression. But the best news is that later life is not to be feared. For most older adults, life seems, on balance, to be, and to have been, mostly good. (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