“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” John Stuart Mill wrote that about a rule he arrived at after the autumn of 1826, when, at twenty, he put a question to himself that, by his own account, brought the whole foundation of his life down. He asked whether, if every reform he was working for were achieved at that instant, it would be a great joy to him, and something in him answered no. Decades later, in his autobiography, he said he still held to the theory that came out of it, as the best theory for anyone of no more than moderate sensibility and capacity for enjoyment, which he took to be most of mankind.
Two centuries on, the instruction mostly runs the other way. The pursuit of happiness is written into the American founding document as a right, and the paper at the centre of this piece, which opens with a line of Mill’s, notes the ever-growing number of books, popular and academic, on how to get more of it. That paper, published in 2011 in the journal Emotion by Iris Mauss, Maya Tamir, Craig Anderson and Nicole Savino, tested whether wanting happiness badly could cost a person some of it. Nobody on this side of the page is a clinician; we read papers and describe them, and a description of two studies is not advice about anyone’s mood.
A questionnaire for wanting it too much
The researchers first had to measure how much a person prizes happiness, and they say none of the existing scales captured the extreme version they had in mind, so they wrote seven statements and asked people to rate their agreement. “If I don’t feel happy, maybe there is something wrong with me.” “I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy.” “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time.” The wording is deliberately strong. The authors say the scale targets relatively extreme cases, though in the survey that follows they found no sign the effects kicked in only at the extreme, and they leave open where ordinary wanting tips into harm.
Fifty-nine women from the Denver area, average age about 38, answered those statements online at home, along with standard measures of mood balance, life satisfaction, psychological well-being and depression symptoms, plus a checklist of stressful events over the previous 18 months. Every one had been recruited because she had lived through something acutely difficult in the previous six months, so “less stressful” here means less stressful within a group that had all been through something. On average, the more a woman valued happiness, the worse she scored on all four measures.
Stress changed the picture. Among the women whose recent lives had been less stressful, valuing happiness tracked well-being steeply in the wrong direction. Among the women who had been through the most, the association vanished on every measure. The authors’ reading is that when life is plainly hard, not feeling happy has an obvious explanation, and when life is relatively easy, it does not.
A fake newspaper article and a figure skater
A survey cannot say which way that runs; unhappy people may simply come to want happiness more. So the second study tried to make people value happiness. Seventy women, average age 21, were told they were in a study about television programming. Half read what looked like a newspaper article explaining that “the happier people can make themselves feel from moment to moment, the more likely they are to be successful, healthy, and popular.” The other half read the same paragraph with every mention of happiness replaced by the phrase “making accurate judgments.”
Each woman then watched a two-minute clip chosen to make her feel one thing. The happy clip showed a figure skater winning gold, the crowd erupting, the skater celebrating with her coach. The sad clip showed a couple dancing on a night out, the wife’s sudden death, the husband coming home to an empty house. Afterwards they rated how much they liked two abstract shapes, a sideways gauge of mood, then how much joy, happiness and seven negative emotions they had felt.
The women who had read about the value of happiness tried harder to feel good, by their own account, whatever clip they watched. During the sad film that effort showed no measurable cost: their ratings did not differ reliably from the control group’s. During the happy film it did. They reported a less positive balance of feeling than the women who had read about accurate judgment, and they liked the abstract shapes less too. One participant who saw through the article was excluded, leaving 69 in the analysis.
Sixty-nine women in a single laboratory study is the entire experimental basis for the claim, and the comparison carrying it rests on the 35 who saw the skater; the 59 in the survey were all women too, from one American metro area. The paper’s own final section names two limits: that every participant was a woman living in the United States, and that the disappointment result below comes from a single sitting, not from anything followed over time. Working through the papers that cite it, we could not find one that has repeated the film-clip experiment head to head. The questionnaire, on the other hand, has been given in several other countries, and the answers did not always point the same way.
What other samples found
A 2015 study by Brett Ford, Mauss and colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General asked 786 people, nearly all students, in four cultural groups how motivated they were to pursue happiness, then dropped two of the seven statements that behaved differently from one group to the next; the five that remained held together only loosely. In the United States the motivation went with lower well-being, in Germany with nothing reliable, and in Russia and in East Asia, where the sample was drawn from Japan and Taiwan, with higher well-being. The German group was the smallest at 91, and its result did not differ reliably from the American one. The authors’ proposed reason is that in Russia and East Asia wanting happiness went together with defining it in terms of other people, while in the United States and Germany the two answers were unrelated. The paper is careful that it cannot compare the four groups’ average answers, only the patterns of association within and across them.
A Belgian survey of 683 adults published in Psychologica Belgica in 2021 found the same basic association, with valuing happiness tied to lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms; its author calls the well-being associations slight, and cautions that the study was probably overpowered.
The same Belgian study, and a 2014 paper by Lahnna Catalino, Sara Algoe and Barbara Fredrickson in Emotion, found that a different way of wanting happiness ran the opposite way. People who said they arranged their daily lives so that enjoyable things were likely to happen, a habit the researchers call prioritizing positivity, reported fewer depressive symptoms and greater life satisfaction, and in the American study, 233 community adults, more positive emotion too. Wanting to be happy, in that literature, is not the problem; auditing every feeling against the wish is.
Disappointed at a moment made for joy
That reading is the one the original paper reached first, and it rests on two questions every participant answered after her own clip: whether she had felt disappointed during it, and whether she should have enjoyed it more. Among the women who had watched the skater win, those primed to value happiness rated themselves more disappointed than the control women who had watched the same thing, by a margin that sat right at the conventional threshold. In the statistical model, once that disappointment was entered, the fake article’s effect on the emotions they reported was no longer significant, full mediation in the authors’ term, though they concede a single sitting can only hint at a mechanism. They did not test it against the drop in how much the women liked the shapes, because disappointment’s link to that measure fell just short of significance; a self-reported feeling and a rating of shapes share less of their method, or the shapes may be tracking a different route.
Wanting the gold-medal moment to deliver had turned it into a test the moment could fail.
The authors argue that trying to feel happier does not by itself necessarily lead to less happiness. The women in the happiness condition tried harder during both clips, and only the ones handed a moment that was supposed to be happy ended up feeling worse. In their reading, the damage began when the feeling was graded and found short. The paper offers no method for putting that down, only directions, the plainest of which is Mill’s: aim at something other than the feeling, and let it arrive by the way. What the paper adds to Mill is a name for a pattern some readers will know from the inside, the flat feeling on a birthday that was supposed to be the good part, and a plausible source for it other than something being wrong with you. A low mood that has lasted for weeks is a matter for a therapist or a doctor.
The grading stays. The paper can name it and cannot switch it off. What does a person do with a standard they keep applying to their own feelings?
