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AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST DECADE "/BEHAVIOR Special Issue on Happiness, Excellence, and Optimal Human Functioning ,.».rt*.:*- r. •#. - Sunrise, Sunset Gaylord Hassan Journal of ihe Americon Psychological Associalion January 2000 Volume 55 Number 1 ISSN 0003-066X ISBN 1-55798-704-1

January 2000 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST Volume 55 Number 1 Special Issue: Positive Psychology Guest Editors: Martin E. P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Positive Psychology: An Introduction Martin E. P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi The Evolution of Happiness David M. Buss 15 Individual Development in a Bio-Cultural Perspective Fausto Massimini and Antonella Delle Fave 24 Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index Ed Diener 34 The Future of Optimism Christopher Peterson 44 The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People David G. Myers 56 Editor Raymond D. Fowler Managing Editor Melissa G. Warren Section Editors James L. Pate History of Psychology and Obituaries Lyle E. Bourne, Jr. Science Watch Patrick H. DeLeon Psychology in the Public Forum Denise C. Park Science Watch Associate Editors William Bevan Kenneth J. Gergen Bernadette Gray-Little

Journal of the American Psychological Association On the cover: Sunrise, Sunset; Sun Series #3, 1980, by Gaylord Hassan. Oil on canvas, 60 inches by 48 inches. Copyright by Gaylord Hassan. Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Direct inquiries to VAGA, (212) 736-6767. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci 68 Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom Barry Schwartz 79 Adaptive Mental Mechanisms: Their Role in a Positive Psychology George E. Vail/ant 89 Psychological Resources, Positive Illusions, and Health Shelley E. Taylor, Margaret E. Geoffrey M. Reed, Julienne E. and Tara L. Gruenewald Kemeny, 99 Bower, Emotional States and Physical Health Peter Salovey, Alexander J. Rothman, Jerusha B. Detweiler, and Wayne T. Steward 110 Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence Paul B. Baltes and Ursula MI Staudinger 122 William C. Howell J. Bruce Overmier Cheryl B. Travis Samuel M. Turner Production Editors Cara B. Abrecht Stefanie Lazer Kurt Pawlik Gary R. VandenBos

States of Excellence David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow 137 Creativity: Cognitive, Personal, Developmental, and Social Aspects Dean Keith Simonton 151 The Origins and Ends of Giftedness Ellen Winner 159 Toward a Psychology of Positive Youth Development Reed W. Larson 170 Announcements 184 Calendar 186 Instructions to Authors 190 Electronic mail for the American Psychologist may be sent to [email protected]. The paper in this journal meets or exceeds EPA guidelines for recycled paper. Since 1986, this journal has been printed on acid-free paper. APA The American Psychological Association, founded in 1892 and incorporated in 1925, is the maj or psychological organization in the United States. The purpose of the APA is to advance psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare. It attempts to accomplish these objectives by holding annual meetings, publishing psychological journals, disseminating psychological literature, and working toward improved standards for psychological training and service. Copyright © 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. APA Board of Directors President Patrick H. DeLeon, PhD, MPH, JD Washington, DC President-Elect Norine G. Johnson, PhD Independent practice, Quincy, MA Past President Richard M. Suinn, PhD Colorado State University Recording Secretary Ronald F. Levant, EdD Nova Southeastern University Treasurer Gerald P. Koocher, PhD Harvard Medical School Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President Raymond D. Fowler, PhD American PsychologicalAssociation Catherine Acuff, PhD Center for Mental Health Services, Rockville, MD Laura H. Barbanel, EdD City University of New York, Brooklyn College J. Bruce Overmier, PhD University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Ruth Ullmann Paige, PhD Independent practice, Seattle, WA Nathan W. Perry, Jr., PhD University of Florida George P. Taylor, PhD Independent practice, Atlanta, GA APA Staff Executive Editor Susan Knapp Director, Journals Program Demarie S. Jackson Manager, Journal Production Susan J. Harris Supervisors, Journal Production Susan E. Bailey and Kelly A. McCabe Advertising Sales Manager Jodi Ashcraft AP Publications Coordinator Yvonne G. Cassells The American Psychologist (ISSN 0003-066X) is published monthly in one volume per year by the American Psychological Association, Inc., 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242. Subscriptions are available on a calendar-year basis only (January through December). The 2000 rates follow: Nonmember Individual: $198 Domestic, $238 Foreign, $265 Air Mail. Institutional: $400 Domestic, $488 Foreign, $515 Air Mail. Write to Subscriptions Department, American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242. Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Subscriptions Department, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242.

Positive Psychology An Introduction Martin E. P. Seligman Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi University of Pennsylvania Claremont Graduate University A science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions promises to improve quali~.' of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless. The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance are ignored or explained as transformations of more authentic negative impulses. The 15 articles in this millennial issue of the American Psychologist discuss such issues as what enables happiness, the effects of autonomy and self-regulation, how optimism and hope affect health, what constitutes wisdom, and how talent and creativity come to fruition. The authors outline a framework .['or a science of positive psychology, point to gaps in our knowledge, and predict that the next century will see a science and profession that will come to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish. E ntering a new millennium, Americans face a historr ical choice. Left alone on the pinnacle of economic and political leadership, the United States can continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of its people and those of the rest of the planet. Such a course is likely to lead to increasing selfishness, to alienation between the more and the less fortunate, and eventually to chaos and despair. At this juncture, the social and behavioral sciences can play an enormously important role. They can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound while being understandable and attractive. They can show what actions lead to well-being, to positive individuals, and to thriving communities. Psychology should be able to help document what kinds of families result in children who flourish, what work settings support the greatest satisfaction among workers, what policies result in the strongest civic engagement, and how people's lives can be most worth living. Yet psychologists have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living. They have come to understand quite a bit about bow people survive and endure under conditions of adversity. (For recent surveys of the history of psychology, see, e.g., Benjamin, 1992; Koch & Leary, 1985; and Smith, 1997.) However, psychologists know very little about how normal people flourish under more benign conditions. Psychology has, since World War II, become a science largely about healing. It concentrates on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning. This almost exclusive attention to pathology neglects the fulfilled individual and the thriving community. The aim of positive psychology is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities. The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about valued subjective experiences: well-being, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the future); and flow and happiness (in the present). At the individual level, it is about positive individual traits: the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level, it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic. Two personal stories, one told by each author, explain how we arrived at the conviction that a movement toward positive psychology was needed and how this special issue of the American Psychologist came about. For Martin E. P. Seligman, it began at a moment a few months after being elected president of the American Psychological Association: The moment took place in my garden while I was weeding with my five-year-old daughter, Nikki. I have to confess that even though I write books about children, I'm really not all that good with children. I am goal oriented and time urgent, and when I'm weeding in the garden, I'm actually trying to get the weeding done. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air, singing, and dancing around. I yelled at her. She walked away, then came back and said, Editor's note. Martin E. P. Setigman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi served as guest editors Ibr this special issue. Author's note. Martin E. P. Seligman, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Martin E. P. Seligman, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3813 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3604. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. January 2000 ° American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association. lnc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Voh 55. No. 1. 5 14 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.5

Martin E. P. Seligman Photo by Bachrach "Daddy, I want to talk to you." "Yes, Nikki?" "Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch." This was for me an epiphany, nothing less. I learned something about Nikki, about raising kids, about myself, and a great deal about my profession. First, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining. Nikki did that herself. Rather, I realized that raising Nikki is about taking this marvelous strength she has--I call it "seeing into the soul"--amplifying it, nurturing it, helping her to lead her life around it to buffer against her weaknesses and the storms of life. Raising children, I realized, is vastly more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, whal they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these strengths. As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent 50 years mostly enduring wet weather in my soul, and the past 10 years being a nimbus cloud in a household full of sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to my grumpiness, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change. However, the broadest implication of Nikki's teaching was about the science and profession of psychology: Before World War II, psychology had three distinct missions: curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent. The early focus on positive psychology is exemplified by work such as Terman's studies of giftedness (Terman, 1939) and marital happiness (Terman, Buttenwieser, Ferguson, Johnson, & Wilson, 1938), Watson's writings on effective parenting (Watson, 1928), and Jung' s work concerning the search for and discovery of meaning in life (Jung, 1933). Right after the war, two events--both economic--changed the face of psychology: In 1946, the Veterans Administration (now Veterans Affairs) was founded, and thousands of psychologists found out that they could make a living treating mental illness. In 1947, the National Institute of Mental Health (which, in spite of its charter, has always been based on the disease model and should now more appropriately be renamed the National Instilute of Mental Illness) was founded, and academics found out that they could get grants if their research was about pathology. This arrangement has brought many benefits. There have been huge strides in the understanding of and therapy for mental illness: At least 14 disorders, previously intractable, have yielded their secrets to science and can now be either cured or considerably relieved (Seligman, 1994). The downside, however, was that the other two fundamental missions of psychology--making the lives of all people better and nurturing genius--were all but forgotten. It wasn't only the subject matter that was altered by funding, but the currency of the theories underpinning how psychologists viewed themselves. They came to see themselves as part of a mere subfield of the health professions, and psychology became a victimology. Psychologists saw human beings as passive foci: Stimuli came on and elicited responses (what an extraordinarily passive word!). External reinforcements weakened or strengthened responses. [)rives, tissue needs, instincts, and conflicts from childhood pushed each of us around. Psychology's empirical locus shifted to assessing and curing individual suffering. There has been an explosion in research on psychological disorders and the negative effects of environmental stressors, such as parental divorce, the deaths of loved ones, and physical and sexual abuse. Practitioners went about treating the mental illnesses of patients within a disease framework by repairing damage: damaged habits, damaged drives, damaged childhoods, and damaged brains. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi realized the need for a positive psychology in Europe during World War II: As a child, I witnessed the dissolution of the smug world in which I had been comfortably ensconced. I noticed with surprise how many of the adults I had known as successful and self-confident became helpless and dispirited once the war removed their social supports. Without jobs, money, or status, they were reduced to empty shells. Yet there were a few who kept their integrity and purpose despite the surrounding chaos. Their serenity was a beacon that kept others from losing hope. And these were not the men and women one would have expected to emerge unscathed: ]'hey were not necessarily the most respected, better educated, or more skilled individuals. This experience set me [hinking: What sources of strength were these people drawing on? 6 January 2000 ° American Psychologist

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Reading philosophy and dabbling in history and religion did not provide satisfying answers to that question. I found the ideas in these texts to be too subjective, to be dependent on faith or to be dubious assumptions; they lacked the clear-eyed skepticism and the slow cumulative growth that I associated with science. Then, for the first time, I came across psychology: first the writings of Jung, then Freud, then a few of the psychologists who were writing in Europe in the 1950s. Here, I thought, was a possible solution to my quest--a discipline that dealt with the fundamental issues of life and attempted to do so with the patient simplicity of the natural sciences. However, at that time psychology was not yet a recognized discipline. In Italy, where I lived, one could take courses in it only as a minor while pursuing a degree in medicine or in philosophy, so I decided to come to the United States, where psychology had gained wider acceptance. The first courses I took were somewhat of a shock. It turned out that in the United States, psychology had indeed became a science, if by science one means only a skeptical attitude and a concern for measurement. What seemed to be lacking, however, was a vision that justified the attitude and the methodology. I was looking for a scientific approach to human behavior, but I never dreamed that this could yield a value-free understanding. In human behavior, what is most intriguing is not the average, but the improbable. Very few people kept their decency during the onslaught of World War II; yet it was those few who held the key to what humans could be like at their best. However, at the height of its behaviorist phase, psychology was being taught as if it were a branch of statistical mechanics. Ever since, I have struggled to reconcile the twin imperatives that a science of human beings should include: to understand what is and what could be. A decade later, the "third way" heralded by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and other humanistic psychologists promised to add a new perspective to the entrenched clinical and behaviorist approaches. The generous humanistic vision had a strong effect on the culture at large and held enormous promise. Unfortunately, humanistic psychology did not attract much of a cumulative empirical base, and it spawned myriad therapeutic self-help movements. In some of its incarnations, it emphasized the self and encouraged a self-centeredness that played down concerns for collective well-being. Future debate will determine whether this came about because Maslow and Rogers were ahead of their times, because these flaws were inherent in their original vision, o1" because of overly enthusiastic followers. However, one legacy of the humanism of the 1960s is prominently displayed in any large bookstore: The "psychology" section contains at least 10 shelves on crystal healing, aromatherapy, and reaching the inner child for every shelf of books that tries to uphold some scholarly standard. Whatever the personal origins of our conviction that the time has arrived for a positive psychology, our message is to remind our field that psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best. Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger. It is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play. And in this quest for what is best, positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, faith, self-deception, fads, or hand waving; it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents to those who wish to understand it in all its complexity. What foregrounds this approach is the issue of prevention. In the past decade, psychologists have become concerned with prevention, and this was the presidential theme, of the 1998 American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco. How can psychologists prevent problems like depression or substance abuse or schizophrenia in young people who are genetically vulnerable or who live in worlds that nurture these problems? How can psychologists prevent murderous schoolyard violence in children who have access to weapons, poor parental supervision, and a mean streak? What psychologists have learned over 50 years is that the disease model does not move psychology closer to the prevention of these serious problems. Indeed, the major strides in prevention have come largely from a perspective focused on systematically building competency, not on correcting weakness. Prevention researchers have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, and the capacity for flow and insight, to name several. Much of the task of prevention in this new century will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to understand and learn how to foster these virtues in young people. Working exclusively on personal weakness and on damaged brains, however, has rendered science poorly January 2000 ° American Psychologist 7

equipped to effectively prevent illness. Psychologists need now to call for massive research on human strengths and virtues. Practitioners need to recognize that much of the best work they already do in the consulting room is to amplify strengths rather than repair the weaknesses of their clients. Psychologists working with families, schools, religious communities, and corporations, need to develop climates that foster these strengths. The major psychological theories have changed to undergird a new science of strength and resilience. No longer do the dominant theories view the individual as a passive vessel responding to stimuli; rather, individuals are now seen as decision makers, with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, or in malignant circumstances, helpless and hopeless (Bandura, 1986; Seligman, 1992). Science and practice that rely on this worldview may have the direct effect of preventing many of the major emotional disorders. They may also have two side effects: They may make the lives of clients physically healthier, given all that psychologists are learning about the effects of mental wellbeing on the body. This science and practice will also reorient psychology back to its two neglected missions-- making normal people stronger and more productive and making high human potential actual. About This Issue The 15 articles that follow this introduction present a remarkably varied and complex picture of the orientation in psychology--and the social sciences more generally--that might be included under the rubric of positive psychology. Of course, like all selections, this one is to some extent arbitrary and incomplete. For many of the topics included in this issue, the space allotted to an entire issue of the American Psychologist would be needed to print all the contributions worthy of inclusion. We hope only that these enticing hors d'oeuvres stimulate the reader's appetite to sample more widely from the offerings of the field. As editors of this special issue, we have tried to be comprehensive without being redundant. The authors were asked to write at a level of generality appealing to the greatly varied and diverse specialties of the journal's readership, without sacrificing the intellectual rigor of their arguments. The articles were not intended to be specialized reviews of the literature, but broad overviews with an eye turned to cross-disciplinary links and practical applications. Finally, we invited mostly seasoned scholars to contribute, thereby excluding some of the most promising young researchers--but they are already preparing to edit a section of this journal devoted to the latest work on positive psychology. There are three main topics that run through these contributions. The first concerns the positive experience. What makes one moment "better" than the next? If Daniel Kahneman is right, the hedonic quality of current experience is the basic building block of a positive psychology (Kahneman, 1999, p. 6). Diener (2000, this issue) focuses on subjective well-being, Massimini and Delle Fave (2000, this issue) on optimal experience, Peterson (2000, this issue) on optimism, Myers (2000, this issue) on happiness, and Ryan and Deci (2000, this issue) on self-determination. Taylor, Kemeny, Reed, Bower, and Gruenwald (2000, this issue), and Salovey, Rothman, Detweiler, and Steward (2000, this issue) report on the relationship between positive emotions and physical health. These topics can, of course, be seen as statelike or traitlike: One can investigate either what accounts for moments of happiness or what distinguishes happy from unhappy individuals. Thus, the second thread in these articles is the theme of the positive personality. The common denominator underlying all the approaches represented here is a perspective on human beings as self-organizing, self-directed, adaptive entities. Ryan and Deci (2000) focus on self-determination, Baltes and Staudinger (2000, this issue) on wisdom, and Vaillant (2000, this issue) on mature defenses. Lubinski and Benbow (2000, this issue), Simonton (2000, this issue), Winner (2000, this issue), and Larson (2000, this issue) focus on exceptional performance (i.e., creativity and talent). Some of these approaches adopt an explicit developmental perspective, taking into account that individual strengths unfold over an entire life span. The third thread that runs through these contributions is the recognition that people and experiences are embedded in a social context. Thus, a positive psychology needs to take positive communities and positive institutions into account. At the broadest level, Buss (2000, this issue) and Massimini and Delle Fave (2000) describe the evolutionary milieu that shapes positive human experience. Myers (200(I) describes the contributions of social relationships to happiness, and Schwartz (2000, this issue) reflects on the necessity for cultural norms to relieve individuals of the burden of choice. Larson (2000) emphasizes the importance of voluntary activities for the development of resourceful young people, and Winner (2000) describes the effects of families on the development of talent. In fact, to a degree that is exceedingly rare in psychological literature, every' one of these contributions looks at behavior in its ecologically valid social setting. A more detailed introduction to the articles in this issue follows. Evolutionary Perspectives The first section comprises two articles that place positive psychology in the broadest context within which it can be understood, namely that of evolution. To some people, evolutionary approaches are distasteful because they deny the importance of learning and sell:determination, but this need not be necessarily so. These two articles are exceptional in that they not only provide ambitious theoretical perspectives, but--mirabile dictu--they also provide uplifting practical examples of how a psychology based on evolutionary principles can be applied to the improvement of the human condition. In the first article, David Buss (2000) reminds readers that the dead hand of the past weighs heavily on the present. He focuses primarily on three reasons why positive states of mind are so elusive. First, because the environments people currently live in are so different from the ancestral environments to which their bodies and minds have been adapted, they are often misfit in modern sur8 January 2000 • American Psychologist

roundings. Second, evolved distress mechanisms are often functional--for instance, jealousy alerts people to make sure of the fidelity of their spouses. Finally, selection tends to be competitive and to involve zero-sum outcomes. What makes Buss's article unusually interesting is that after identifying these major obstacles to well-being, he then outlines some concrete strategies for overcoming them. For instance, one of the major differences between ancestral and current environments is the paradoxical change in people's relationships to others: On the one hand, people live surrounded by many more people than their ancestors did, yet they are intimate with fewer individuals and thus experience greater loneliness and alienation. The solutions to this and other impasses are not only conceptually justified within the theoretical framework but are also eminently practical. So what are they? At the risk of creating unbearable suspense, we think it is better for readers to find out for themselves. Whereas Buss (2000) bases his arguments on the solid foundations of biological evolution, Fausto Massimini and Antonella Delle Fave (2000) venture into the less explored realm of psychological and cultural evolution. In a sense, they start where Buss leaves off: by looking analytically at the effects of changes in the ancestral environment and by looking specifically at how the production of memes (e.g., artifacts and values) affect and are affected by human consciousness. They start with the assumption that living systems are self-organizing and oriented toward increasing complexity. Thus, individuals are the authors of their own evolution. They are continuously involved in the selection of the memes that will define their own individuality, and when added to the memes selected by others, they shape the future of the culture. Massimini and Delle Fare make the point--so essential to the argument for positive psychology-that psychological selection is motivated not solely by the pressures of adaptation and survival, but also by the need to reproduce optimal experiences. Whenever possible, people choose behaviors that make them feel fully alive, competent, and creative. These authors conclude their visionary call for individual development in harmony with global evolution by providing instances drawn from their own experience of cross-cultural interventions, where psychology has been applied to remedy traumatic social conditions created by runaway modernization. Positive Personal Traits The second section includes five articles dealing with four different personal traits that contribute to positive psychology: subjective well-being, optimism, happiness, and selfdetermination. These are topics that in the past three decades have been extensively studied and have produced an impressive array of findings--many of them unexpected and counterintuitive. The first article in this set is a review of what is known about subjective well-being written by Edward Diener (2000), whose research in this field now spans three decades. Subjective well-being refers to what people think and how they feel about their lives--to the cognitive and affective conclusions they reach when they evaluate their existence. In practice, subjective well-being is a more scientific-sounding term for what people usually mean by happiness. Even though subjective well-being research relies primarily on rather global self-ratings that could be criticized on various grounds, its findings are plausible and coherent. Diener's account begins with a review of the temperament and personality correlates of subjective wellbeing and the demographic characteristics of groups high in subjective well-being. The extensive cross-cultural research on the topic is then reviewed, suggesting interesting links between macrosocial conditions and happiness. A central issue is how a person's values and goals mediate between external events and the quality of experience. These investigations promise to bring psychologists closer to understanding the insights of such philosophers of antiquity as Democritus or Epictetus, who argued that it is not what happens to people that determines how happy they are, but how they interpret what happens. One dispositional trait that appears to mediate between external events and a person's interpretation of them is optimism. This trait includes both little optimism (e.g., "I will find a convenient parking space this evening") and big optimism (e.g., "Our nation is on the verge of something great"). Christopher Peterson (2000) describes the research on this beneficial psychological characteristic in the second article of this set. He considers optimism to involve cognitive, emotional, and motivational components. People high in optimism tend to have better moods, to be more persevering and successful, and to experience better physical health. How does optimism work? How can it be increased'? When does it begin to distort reality? These are some of the questions Peterson addresses. As is true of the other authors in this issue, this author is aware that complex psychological issues cannot be understood in isolation from the social and cultural contexts in which they are embedded. Hence, he asks questions such as the following: How does an overly pessimistic culture affect the well-being of its members? And conversely, does an overly optimistic culture lead to shallow materialism? David Myers (2000) presents his synthesis of research on happiness in the third article of this section. His perspective, although strictly based on empirical evidence, is informed by a belief that traditional values must contain importanl elements of truth if they are to survive across generations. Hence, he is more attuned than most to issues that are not very fashionable in the field, such as the often-found association between religious faith and happiness. The other two candidates for promoting happiness that Myers considers are economic growth and income (not much there, after a minimum threshold of affluence is passed) and close personal relationships (a strong association). Although based on correlational survey studies of self-reported happiness, the robustness of the findings, replicated across time and different cultures, suggests that these findings ought to be taken seriously by anyone interested in understanding the elements that contribute to a positive quality of life. In the first of two articles that focus on self-determination, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci (2000) discuss January 2000 • American Psychologist 9

another trait that is central to positive psychology and has been extensively researched. Self-determination theory investigates three related human needs: the need for competence, the need for belongingness, and the need for autonomy. When these needs are satisfied, Ryan and Deci claim personal well-being and social development are optimized. Persons in this condition are intrinsically motivated, able to fulfill their potentialities, and able to seek out progressively greater challenges. These authors consider the kinds of social contexts that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and those that stand in the way of personal growth. Especially important is their discussion of how a person can maintain autonomy even under external pressures that seem to deny it. Ryan and Deci's contribution shows that the promises of the humanistic psychology of the 1960s can generate a vital program of empirical research. Is an emphasis on autonomy an unmitigated good? Barry Schwartz (2000) takes on the subject of self-determination from a more philosophical and historical angle. He is concerned that the emphasis on autonomy in our culture results in a kind of psychological tyranny--an excess of freedom that may lead to dissatisfaction and depression. He finds particularly problematic the influence of rational-choice theory on our conception of human motivation. The burden of responsibility for autonomous choices often becomes too heavy, leading to insecurity and regrets. For most people in the world, he argues, individual choice is neither expected nor desired. Cultural constraints are necessary for leading a meaningful and satisfying life. Although Ryan and Deci's (2000) self-determination theory takes relatedness into account as one of the three components of personal fulfillment, Schwartz's argument highlights even further the benefits of relying on cultural norms and values. Implications for Mental and Physical Health One of the arguments for positive psychology is that during the past half century, psychology has become increasingly focused on mental illness and, as a result, has developed a distorted view of what normal--and exceptional--human experience is like. How does mental health look when seen from the perspective of positive psychology? The next three articles deal with this topic. Beethoven was suicidal and despairing at age 31, yet two dozen years later he composed the "Ode to Joy," translating into sublime music Schiller's lines, "Be embraced, all ye millions .... " What made it possible for him to overcome despair despite poverty and deafness? In the first article of this section, the psychiatrist George Vaillant (2000) reminds readers that it is impossible to describe positive psychological processes without taking a life span, or at least a longitudinal, approach. "Call no man happy till he dies," for a truly positive psychological adaptation should unfold over a lifetime. Relying on the results obtained from three large samples of adults studied over several decades, Vaillant summarizes the contributions of mature defenses--altruism, sublimation, suppression, humor, anticipation--to a successful and joyful life. Even though Vaillant still uses the pathocentric terminology of defenses, his view of mature functioning, which takes into full account the importance of creative, proactive solutions, breaks the mold of the victimology that has been one legacy of psychoanalytic approaches. It is generally assumed that it is healthy to be rigorously objective about one's situation. To paint a rosier picture than the facts warrant is often seen as a sign of pathology (cf. Peterson, 2000; Schwartz, 2000; and Vaillant, 2000, in this issue). However, in the second article of this section, Shelley Taylor and her collaborators argue that unrealistically optimistic beliefs about the future can protect people from illness (Taylor et al., 2000). The results of numerous studies of patients with life-threatening diseases, such as AIDS, suggest that those who remain optimistic show symptoms later and survive longer than patients who confront reality more objectively. According to these authors, the positive effects of optimism are mediated mainly at a cognitive level. An optimistic patient is more likely to practice habits that enhance health and to enlist social support. It is also possible, but not proven, that positive affective states may have a direct physiological effect that retards the course of illness. As Taylor et al. note, this line of research has enormously important implications for ameliorating health through prevention and care. At the beginning of their extensive review of the impacts of a broad range of emotions on physical health, Peter Salovey and his coauthors (Salovey et al., 2000) ruefully admit that because of the pathological bias of most research in the field, a great deal more is known about how negative emotions promote illness than is known about how positive emotions promote health. However, as positive and negative emotions are generally inversely correlated, they argue that substituting the former for the latter can have preventive and therapeutic effects. The research considered includes the direct effects of affect on physiology and the immune system, as well as the indirect effects of affect, such as the marshalling of psychological and social resources and the motivation of health-promoting behaviors. One of the most interesting sets of studies they discuss is the one that shows that persons high in optimism and hope are actually more likely to provide themselves with unfavorable information about their disease, thereby being better prepared to face up to realities even though their positive outcome estimates may be inflated. Fostering Excellence If psychologists wish to improve the human condition, it is not enough to help those who suffer. The majority of "normal" people also need examples and advice to reach a richer and more fulfilling existence. This is why early investigators, such as William James (1902/1958), Carl Jung (1936/1969), Gordon Allport (1961), and Abraham Maslow (1971), were interested in exploring spiritual ecstasy, play, creativity, and peak experiences. When these interests were eclipsed by medicalization and "physics envy," psychology neglected an essential segment of its agenda. As a gesture toward redressing such neglect, the last section of this issue presents six articles dealing with 10 January 2000 ° American Psychologist

phenomena at the opposite end of the pathological tail of the normal curve--the end that includes the most positive human experiences. Wisdom is one of the most prized traits in all cultures; according to the Old Testament, its price is above rubies (Job 28:18). It is a widespread belief that wisdom comes with age, but as the gerontologist Bernice Neugarten used to say, "You can't expect a dumb youngster to grow up to be a wise senior." Although the first president of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall, tried to develop a model of wisdom in aging as far back as 1922 (Hall, 1922), the topic has not been a popular one in the intervening years. Recently, however, interest in wisdom has revived, and nowhere more vigorously than at the Max Planck Institute of Berlin, where the "Berlin wisdom paradigm" has been developed. Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger (2000) report on a series of studies that has resulted in a complex model that views wisdom as a cognitive and motivational heuristic for organizing knowledge in pursuit of individual and collective excellence. Seen as the embodiment of the best subjective beliefs and laws of life that have been sifted and selected through the experience of succeeding generations, wisdom is defined as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatic issues of existence. The second article in this section, by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow (2000), deals with excellence of a different sort. In this article, the authors review the large literature concerning children with exceptional intellectual abilities. If one asked a layperson at what point in the distribution of intelligence the largest gap in ability is found, the modal answer would probably be that it is the gifted people in the top 1% or 2% who differ most in ability from the rest of the population. As the authors point out, however, one third of the total ability range is found within the top 1%--a child with an IQ of 200 is quite different and needs a different educational environment from a gifted student with "only" an IQ of 140. Lubinski and Benbow consider issues of how to identify, nurture, counsel, and teach children in these high ability ranges, arguing that neglecting the potentialities of such exceptional children would be a grievous loss to society as a whole. One of the most poignant paradoxes in psychology concerns the complex relationships between pathology and creativity. Ever since Cesare Lombroso raised the issue over a century ago, the uneasy relationship between these two seemingly opposite traits has been explored again and again (on this topic, cf. also Vaillant, 2000, in this issue). A related paradox is that some of the most creative adults were reared in unusually adverse childhood situations. This and many other puzzles concerning the nature and nurture of creativity are reviewed in Dean K. Simonton's (2000) article, which examines the cognitive, personality, and developmental dimensions of the process, as well as the environmental conditions that foster or hinder creativity. For instance, on the basis of his exhaustive historiometric analyses that measure rates of creative contributions decade by decade, Simonton concludes that nationalistic revolts against oppressive rules are followed a generation later by greater frequencies of creative output. The topics of giftedness and exceptional performance dealt with in the previous two articles are also taken up by Ellen Winner (2000). Her definition of giftedness is more inclusive than the previous ones: It relates to children who are precocious and self-motivated and approach problems in their domain of talent in an original way. Contrary to some of the findings concerning creative individuals just mentioned, such children tend to be well-adjusted and to have supportive families. Winner describes the current state of knowledge about this topic by focusing on the origins of giftedness; the motivation of gifted children; and the social, emotional, and cognitive correlates of exceptional performance. As is true of most other contributors to this issue, this author is sensitive throughout to the practical implications of research findings, such as what can be done to nurture and to keep giftedness alive. Developing excellence in young people is also the theme of Reed Larson's (2000) article, which begins with the ominous and often replicated finding that the average student reports being bored about one third of the time he or she is in school. Considering that people go to school for at least one fifth of their lives, this is not good news. Larson argues that youths in our society rarely have the opportunity to take initiative, and that their education encourages passive adaptation to external rules instead. He explores the contribution of voluntary activities, such as participation in sport, art, and civic organizations, to providing opportunities for concentrated, self-directed effort applied over time. Although this article deals with issues central also to previous articles (e.g., Massimini & Delle Fave, 2000; Ryan & Deck 2000: Winner, 2000), it does so from the perspective of naturalistic studies of youth programs, thereby adding a welcome confirmatory triangulation to previous approaches. Challenges for the Future The 15 articles contained in this issue make a powerful contribution to positive psychology. At the same time, the issues raised in these articles point to huge gaps in knowledge that may be the challenges at the forefront of positive psychology. What, can we guess, are the great problems that will occupy this science for the next decade or two? The Calculus of Well-Being One fundamental gap concerns the relationship between momentary experiences of happiness and long-lasting wellbeing. A simple hedonic calculus suggests that by adding up a person's positive events in consciousness, subtracting the negatives, and aggregating over time, one will get a sum that represents that person's overall well-being. This makes sense, up to a point (Kahneman, 1999), but as several articles in this issue suggest, what makes people happy in small doses does not necessarily add satisfaction in larger amounts; a point of diminishing returns is quickly reached in many instances, ranging from the amount of income one earns to the pleasures of eating good food. January 2000 • American Psychologist 11

What, exactly, is the mechanism that governs the rewarding quality of stimuli? The Development of Positivity It is also necessary to realize that a person at time N is a different entity from the same person at time N + 1; thus, psychologists can't assume that what makes a teenager happy will also contribute to his or her happiness as an adult. For example, watching television and hanging out with friends tend to be positive experiences for most teenagers. However, to the extent that TV and friends become the main source of happiness, and thus attract increasing amounts of attention, the teenager is likely to grow into an adult who is limited in the ability to obtain positive experiences from a wide range of opportunities. How much delayed gratification is necessary to increase the chances of long-term well-being? Is the future mindedness necessary for serious delay of gratification antagonistic to momentary happiness, to living in the moment? What are the childhood building blocks of later happiness or of long-lasting well-being? Neuroscience and Heritability A flourishing neuroscience of pathology has begun in the past 20 years. Psychologists have more than rudimentary ideas about what the neurochemistry and pharmacology of depression are. They have reasonable ideas about brain loci and pathways for schizophrenia, substance abuse, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Somehow, it has gone unobserved (and unfunded) that all of these pathological states have their opposites (LeDoux & Armony, 1999). What are the neurochemistry and anatomy of flow, good cheer, realism, future mindedness, resistance to temptation, courage, and rational or flexible thinking? Similarly, psychologists are learning about the heritability of negative states, like aggression, depression, and schizophrenia, but they know very little of the genetic contribution of gene-environment interaction and covariance. Can psychologists develop a biology of positive experience and positive traits? Enjoyment Versus Pleasure In a similar vein, it is useful to distinguish positive experiences that are pleasurable from those that are enjoyable. Pleasure is the good feeling that comes from satisfying homeostatic needs such as hunger, sex, and bodily comfort. Enjoyment, on the other hand, refers to the good feelings people experience when they break through the limits of homeostasis--when they do something that stretches them beyond what they were--in an athletic event, an artistic performance, a good deed, a stimulating conversation. Enjoyment, rather than pleasure, is what leads to personal growth and long-term happiness, but why is that when given a chance, most people opt for pleasure over enjoyment? Why do people choose to watch television over reading a challenging book, even when they know that their usual hedonic state during television is mild dysphoria, whereas the book can produce flow? Collective Well-Being This question leads directly to the issue of the balance between individual and collective well-being. Some hedonic rewards tend to be zero-sum when viewed from a systemic perspective. If running a speedboat for an hour provides the same amount of well-being to Person A as reading from a book of poems provides to Person B, but the speedboat consumes 10 gallons of gasoline and irritates 200 bathers, should the two experiences be weighed equally? Will a social science of positive community and positive institutions arise? Authenticity It has been a common but unspoken assumption in the social sciences that negative traits are authentic and positive traits are derivative, compensatory, or even inauthentic, but there are two other possibilities: that negative traits are derivative from positive traits and that the positive and negative systems are separate systems. However, if the two systems are separate, how do they interact? Is it necessary to be resilient, to overcome hardship and suffering to experience positive emotion and to develop positive traits? Does too much positive experience create a fragile and brittle personality? Buffering As positive psychology finds its way into prevention and therapy, techniques that build positive traits will become commonplace. Psychologists have good reason to believe that techniques that build positive traits and positive subjective experiences work, both in therapy and perhaps more importantly in prevention. Building optimism, for example, prevents depression (Seligman, Schulman, DeRubeis, & Hollon, 1999). The question is, how? By what mechanisms does courage or interpersonal skill or hope or future mindedness buffer against depression or schizophrenia or substance abuse? Descriptive or Prescriptive Is a science of positive psychology descriptive or prescriptive? The study of the relations among enabling conditions, individual strengths, institutions, and outcomes such as well-being or income might merely result in an empirical matrix. Such a matrix would describe, for example, what talents under what enabling conditions lead to what kinds of outcomes. This matrix would inform individuals' choices along the course of their lives, but would take no stand on the desirability of different life courses. Alternatively, positive psychology might become a prescriptive discipline like clinical psychology, in which the paths out of depression, for example, are not only described, but also held to be desirable. Realism What is the relationship between positive traits like optimism and positive experiences like happiness on the one hand, and being realistic on the other? Many doubt the possibility of being both. This suspicion is well illustrated 12 January 2000 • American Psychologist

in the reaction attributed to Charles de Gaulle, then President of the French Republic, to a journalist's inquiry: "Mr. President, are you a happy man?" "What sort of a fool do you take me for?" Is the world simply too full of tragedy to allow a wise person to be happy? As the articles in this issue suggest, a person can be happy while confronting life realistically and while working productively to improve the conditions of existence. Whether this view is accurate only time will tell; in the meantime, we hope that you will find what follows enjoyable and enlightening to read. Conclusions We end this introduction by hazarding a prediction about psychology in the new century. We believe that a psychology of positive human functioning will arise that achieves a scientific understanding and effective interventions to build thriving in individuals, families, and communities. You may think that this is pure fantasy. You may think that psychology will never look beyond the victim, the underdog, and the remedial, but we want to suggest that the time is finally right for positive psychology. We well recognize that positive psychology is not a new idea. It has many distinguished ancestors, and we make no claim of originality. However, these ancestors somehow failed to attract a cumulative, empirical body of research to ground their ideas. Why didn't they attract this research, and why has psychology been so focused on the negative? Why has psychology adopted the premise--without a shred of evidence-that negative motivations are authentic and positive emotions are derivative? There are several possible explanations. Negative emotions and experiences may be more urgent and therefore may override positive ones. This would make evolutionary sense. Because negative emotions often reflect immediate problems or objective dangers, they should be powerful enough to force people to stop, increase their vigilance, reflect on their behavior, and change their actions if necessary. (Of course, in some dangerous situations, it is most adaptive to respond without taking a great deal of time to reflect.) In contrast, when people are adapting well to the world, no such alarm is needed. Experiences that promote happiness often seem to pass effortlessly. Therefore, on one level, psychology's focus on the negative may reflect differences in the survival value of negative versus positive emotions. Perhaps, however, people are blinded to the survival value of positive emotions precisely because they are so important. Like the fish who is unaware of the water in which it swims, people take for granted a certain amount of hope, love, enjoyment, and trust because these are the very conditions that allow them to go on living. These conditions are fundamental to existence, and if they are present, any number of objective obstacles can be faced with equanimity and even joy. Camus wrote that the foremost question of philosophy is why one should not commit suicide. One cannot answer that question just by curing depression; there must be positive reasons for living as well. There are also historical reasons for psychology's negative focus. When cultures face military threat, shortages of goods, poverty, or instability, they may most naturally be concerned with defense and damage control. Cultures may turn their attention to creativity, virtue, and the highest qualities in life only when they are stable, prosperous, and at peace. Athens in the 5th century B.C., Florence in the 15th century, and Victorian England are examples of cultures that focused on positive qualities. Athenian philosophy focused on the human virtues: What is good action and good character? What makes life most worthwhile? Democracy was born during this era. Florence chose not to become the most important military power in Europe, but to invest its surplus in beauty. Victorian England affirmed honor, discipline, valor, and duty as central human virtues. We are not suggesting that American culture should now erect an aesthetic monument. Rather, we believe that the nation--wealthy, at peace, and stable--provides the world with a historical opportunity. Psychologists can choose to create a scientific monument--a science that takes as its primary task the understanding of what makes life worth living. Such an endeavor will move all of the social sciences away from their negative bias. The prevailing social sciences tend to view the authentic forces governing human behavior to be self-interest, aggressiveness, territoriality, class conflict, and the like. Such a science, even at its best, is by necessity incomplete. Even if utopianly successful, it would then have to proceed to ask how humanity can achieve what is best in life. We predict that positive psychology in this new century will allow psychologists to understand and build those factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish. Such a science will not need to start afresh. It requires for the most part just a redirecting of scientific energy. In the 50 years since psychology and psychiatry became healing disciplines, they have developed a highly transferable science of mental illness. They developed a usable taxonomy, as well as reliable and valid ways of measuring such fuzzy concepts as schizophrenia, anger, and depression. They developed sophisticated methods-- both experimental and longitudinal--for understanding the causal pathways that lead to such undesirable outcomes. Most important, they developed pharmacological and psychological interventions that have allowed many untreatable mental disorders to become highly treatable and, in a couple of cases, even curable. These same methods and in many cases the same laboratories and the next generation of scientists, with a slight shift of emphasis and funding, will be used to measure, understand, and build those characteristics that make life most worth living. As a side effect of studying positive human traits, science will learn how to buffer against and better prevent mental, as well as some physical, illnesses. As a main effect, psychologists will learn how to build the qualities that help individuals and communities, not just to endure and survive, but also to flourish. January 2000 • American Psychologist 13

REFERENCES Allport, G. W. (1961). Pattern and growth in personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson. Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55, 122-136. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thoughts and action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Benjamin, L. T., Jr. (Ed.). (1992). The history of American psychology [Special issue]. American Psychologist, 47(2). Buss, D. M. (2000). The evolution of happiness. American Psychologist, 55, 15-23. Diener, E. (2000). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist, 55, 34-43. Hall, G. S. (1922). Senescence: The last half of life. New York: Appleton. James, W. (1958). Varieties of religious experience. New York: Mentor. (Original work published 1902) Jung, C. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. New York: Harcourt. Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes of the collective unconscious: Vol. 9. The collective works of C. G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1936) Kahneman, D. (1999). Objective happiness. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwartz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations ofhedonic psychology (pp. 3-25). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Koch, S., & Leary, D. E. (Eds.). (1985). A century of psychology as science. New York: McGraw-Hill. Larson, R. W. (2000). Toward a psychology of positive youth development. American Psychologist, 55, 170-183. LeDoux, J., & Armony, J. (1999). Can neurobiology tell us anything about human feelings? In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwartz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 489-499). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2000). States of excellence. American Psychologist, 55, 137-150. Maslow, A. (1971). The farthest reaches of human nature. New York: Viking. Massimini, F., & Delle Fave, A. (2000). Individual development in a bio-cultural perspective. American Psychologist, 55, 24-33. Myers, D. G. (2000). The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American Psychologist, 55, 56-67. Peterson, C. (2000). The future of optimism. American Psychologist, 55, 44 -55. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55, 68-78. Salovey, P., Rothman, A. J., Detweiler, J. B., & Steward, W. T. (2000). Emotional states and physical health. American Psychologist, 55, 110- 121. Schwartz, B. (2000). Self-determination: The tyranny of freedom. American Psychologist, 55, 79-88. Seligman, M. (1992). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. New York: Freeman. Seligman, M. (1994). What you can change & what you can't. New York: Knopf. Seligman, M., Schulman, P., DeRubeis, R., & Hollon, S. (1999). The prevention of depression and anxiety. Prevention and Treatment, 2, Article 8. Available on the World Wide Web: http://journals.apa.org/ prevention/volume2/pre0020008a.html Simonton, D. K. (2000). Creativity: Cognitive, personal, developmental, and social aspects. American Psychologist, 55, 151-158. Smith, R. (1997). The human sciences. New York: Norton. Taylor. S. E., Kemeny, M. E., Reed, G. M., Bower, J. E., & Gruenewald, T. L. (2000). Psychological resources, positive illusions, and health. American Psychologist, 55, 99-109. Terman, L. M. (1939). The gifted student and his academic environment. School and Society, 49, 65-73. Terman, L. M., Buttenwieser, P., Ferguson, L. W., Johnson, W. B., & Wilson, D. P. (1938). Psychological factors in marital happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill. Vaillant, G. E. (2000). Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, 55, 89-98. Watson, J. (1928). Psychological care of infant and child. New York: Norton. Winner, E. (2000). The origins and ends of giftedness. American Psychologist, 55, 159-169. 14 January 2000 • American Psychologist

The Evolution of Happiness David M. Buss University of Texas at Austin An evolutionary perspective offers novel insights into some major obstacles to achieving happiness. Impediments include large discrepancies between modern and ancestral environments, the existence of evolved mechanisms "designed" to produce subjective distress, and the fact that evolution by selection has produced competitive mechanisms that function to benefit one person at the expense of others. On the positive side, people also possess evolved mechanisms that produce deep sources of happiness: those for mating bonds, deep friendship, close kinship, and cooperative coalitions. Understanding these psychological mechanisms--the selective processes that designed them, their evolved functions, and the contexts governing their activation--offers the best hope for holding some evolved mechanisms in check and selectively activating others to produce an overall increment in human happiness. H appiness is a common goal toward which people strive, but for many it remains frustratingly out of reach. An evolutionary psychological perspective offers unique insights into some vexing barriers to achieving happiness and consequently into creating conditions for improving the quality of human life. These insights are based on a deeper understanding of the human mind, how the selective process designed it, and the nature of the evolved functions of its component parts. Current mechanisms of mind are the end products of a selective process, a sieve through which features passed because they contributed, either directly or indirectly, to reproductive success. All living humans are evolutionary success stories. They each have inherited the mechanisms of mind and body that led to their ancestors' achievements in producing descendants. If any one of their ancestors had failed along the way to survive, mate, reproduce, and solve a host of tributary adaptive problems, they would not have become ancestors. As their descendants, people hold in their possession magical keys--the adaptive mechanisms that led to their ancestors' success. What evolved psychological mechanisms do humans possess, how are they designed, and what functions were they designed to carry out? At this point in evolutionary psychological science, psychologists can provide only a few provisional answers. This article offers several reflections on these issues, grounded in recent conceptual and empirical advances, with the explicit acknowledgment of their tentative and interim nature. The article starts by examining some impediments to happiness and then offers suggestions for how these obstacles might be overcome. Barriers to Improving Quality of Life An evolutionary analysis leads to several key insights about barriers that must be overcome to improve the quality of human life. These include discrepancies between modem and ancestral environments, evolved mechanisms that lead to subjective distress, and the fact that selection has produced competitive mechanisms. Discrepan_cies Between Modern and Ancestral Environments Modem living has brought a bounty of benefits to present day humans. Medical technology has reduced infant mortality in many parts of the world to a fraction of what it undoubtedly was in ancestral times. People have the tools to prevent many diseases that afflicted their Stone Age forebears and to ameliorate the distressing symptoms of many others. The psychological pain of depression and anxiety can be reduced with lithium, Prozac, and other psychotropic drugs. Modern technology gives people the power to prevent the pain inflicted by extremes of cold and heat, food shortages, some parasites, most predators, and other Darwinian (1859) "hostile forces of nature." In many ways, people live in astonishing comfort compared with their ancestors. At the same time, modem environments have produced a variety of ills, many unanticipated and only now being discovered. Although people have the tools and technology to combat food shortages, they now vastly overconsume quantities of animal fat and processed sugars in ways that lead to clogged arteries, heart disease, diabetes, and other medical ailments (Nesse & Williams, 1994; Symons, 1987). Depletion of the ozone layer may lead to skin cancer at rates that were unlikely to have afflicted their ancestors. The ability to synthesize drugs has led to heroin addiction, cocaine abuse, and addiction to a variety of prescription drugs. Evolutionary psychological analysis suggests several other ways in which modern psychological environments cause damage. Consider the estimate that humans evolved in the context of small groups, consisting of perhaps 50 to 200 individuals (Dunbar, 1993). Modem humans, in contrast, typically live in a massive urban metropolis surI thank April Bleske, Joshua Duntley, Barry Friedman, Martie Haselton, Steve Pinker, Cindy Rehfues, and Del Thiessen for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David M. Buss, Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. 1, 15-23 DO[: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.15 15

David M. Buss rounded by thousands or millions of other humans. Ancestral humans may have had a dozen or two potential mates to choose from. Modern humans, in contrast, are surrounded by thousands of potential mates. They are bombarded by media images of attractive models on a scale that has no historical precedent and that may lead to unreasonable expectations about the quality and quantity of available mates. Ancestral humans lived in extended kin networks, surrounded by genetic relatives such as uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, cousins and grandparents. Modem humans typically live in isolated nuclear families often devoid of extended kin. Ancestral humans relied on their friends and relatives to seek justice, to correct social wrongs, to deal with violence inflicted on them from others. Modem humans rely on hired police and a legal system whose labyrinth makes the horror of Kafka' s The Trial look like a tea party. ~ It is reasonable to speculate that these large discrepancies between ancestral and modern environments create unanticipated psychological problems and reduce the quality of life. Some empirical evidence supports this proposition. The modern barrage of attractive images of other humans provides an instructive example. The evolutionary psychologist Doug Kenrick and his colleagues have provided evidence that these images may create psychological and social problems. In a series of studies on contrast effects, they discovered that men exposed to multiple images of attractive women subsequently rated their commitment to their regular partner as lower, compared with men exposed to average looking women (Kenrick, Gutierres, & Goldberg, 1989; Kenrick, Neuberg, Zierk, & Krones, 1994). Women exposed to multiple images of dominant, highstatus men showed a similar decrement in commitment to and love of their regular partner, compared with women exposed repeatedly to less dominant men. These sex-linked contrast effects were precisely predicted by Kenrick's evolutionary psychological framework. Repeated exposures apparently affect self-concept as well. Women subjected to successive images of other women who are unusually attractive subsequently feel less attractive themselves, showing a decrease in self-esteem (Gutierres, Kenrick, & Partch, 1999). Men exposed to descriptions of highly dominant and influential men show an analogous diminution in self-concept. These effects are sex-linked in ways precisely predicted by evolutionary psychological hypotheses. The effects suggest that the discrepancy between modern and ancestral environments in exposure to media images may lead to dissatisfactions with current partners and reductions in self-esteem. They may interfere with the quality of close relationships and hence with the quality of life. A second example is more speculative. Depression is one of the most common psychological maladies of modern humans, and it afflicts roughly twice as many women as men (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1987). There is some evidence that rates of depression are increasing in modern life. Five studies comprised of 39,000 individuals living in five differenl areas of the world revealed that young people are more likely than older people to have experienced at least one major episode of depression (Nesse & Williams, 1994, p. 220). Moreover, the incidence of depression appears to be higher in more economically developed cultures (Nesse & Williams, 1994). Why would rates of depression be rising in modem environments, despite the greater abundance of creature comforts and the presence of technological solutions to former ancestral maladies of life? Nesse and Williams (1994) offer one hypothesis: Mass conmmnications, especially television and movies, effectively make us all one competitive group even as they destroy our more intimate social networks .... In the ancestral environment you would have had a good chance at being the best at something. Even if you were not the best, your group would likely value your skills. Now we all compete with those who are the best in the world. Watching these successful people on television arouses envy. Envy probably was useful to motivate our ancestors to strive for what others could obtain. Now few of us can achieve the goals envy sets for us, and none of us can attain the fantasy lives we see on television. (Nesse & Williams, 1994, p. 220). According to this analysis, the increase in depression stems from self-perceived failures resulting in erroneous comparisons between people's lives and the lives they see depicted so ghtmorously in the media. A related explanation of an increase in depression invokes the fact that modem living conditions of relative anonymity and isolated nuclear families deprive people of the intimate social support that would have characterized ancestral social conditions (Nesse & Williams, 1994, p. The American legal system, of course, carries many blessings as well. It probably prevents or lowers the incidence of certain types of homicide, such as blood feuds, that are prevalent in many tribal societies and cultures lacking third-party legal systems (see Chagnon, 1992; Keeley, 1996). 16 January 2000 • American Psychologist

221). In modern America, for example, kin members often scatter in the pursuit of better jobs and promotions, yielding a social mobility that removes the social support of extended kin and makes social bonds more transient. If psychological well-being is linked with having deep intimate contacts, being a valued member of an enduring social group, and being enmeshed in a network of extended kin, then the conditions of modern living seem designed to interfere with human happiness. These are just a few examples that suggest that some discrepancies between modem and ancestral conditions impede a high quality of life. Other possibilities include the lack of critical incidents by which people might establish true friendships (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996), the sense of powerlessness modern humans feel in large anonymous organizations compared with the small social hierarchies of the past (Wenegrat, 1990), and the increased opportunities for casual sex lacking in deep intimacy, that might lead people to feel emotionally empty (Buss, 1994). These discrepancies between modern and ancestral environments may interfere with the quest for a high quality of life. Adaptations That Cause Subjective Distress A second inapediment to human happiness is that people have evolved an array of psychological mechanisms that are "designed" to cause subjective distress under some circumstances (e.g. Seligman, 1971). These include psychological pain (Thomhill & Thornhill, 1989), varieties of anxiety (Marks & Nesse, 1994), depression (Price & Sloman, 1987), specific fears and phobias (Marks, 1987), jealousy (Daly, Wilson, & Weghorst, 1982; Symons, 1979), and specific forms of anger and upset (Buss, 1989). These are all proposed to be evolved psychological mechanisms designed to solve specific adaptive problems, such as sexual coercion (psychological pain), inhabiting a subordinate position in the social hierarchy (depression), spousal infidelity (jealousy), and strategic interference (anger). 2 If these hypotheses are correct, they suggest that part of the operation of the normal psychological machinery inevitably entails experiencing psychological distress in certain contexts. The emotion of jealousy provides an illustration. Much empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that sexual jealousy is an evolved psychological mechanism designed to combat the adaptive problem of threat to valued long-term mateships (Daly et al., 1982; Symons, 1979). Jealousy, according to this hypothesis, functions to alert a person to a mate's possible or actual infidelity and motivates action designed to prevent infidelity or deal with defection. Its design features include sex-linked activators, with men becoming more jealous in response to the threat of sexual infidelity and women becoming more jealous in response to emotional infidelity--hypotheses supported by psychological, physiological, and cross-cultural data (Buss et al., 1999; Buss, Larsen, Westen, & Semmelroth, 1992; Buunk, Angleitner, Oubaid, & Buss, 1996; Daly et al., 1982; Geary, Rumsey, Bow-Thomas, & Hoard, 1995; Wiederman & Allgeier, 1993). Subjectively, jealousy is typically an extremely distressing emotion, a passion dangerous to the self and to others (Buss, 2000). It can create the torment of sleepless nights, cause a person to question his or her worth as a mate, create anxiety about losing a partner, and play havoc with social reputation. Jealousy can lead to an obsessive vigilance that crowds out all other thoughts and to terrifying violence that threatens the safety and well-being of the partner. Despite the manifold unhappiness jealousy creates, jealousy has a crystalline functional logic, precise purposes, and supreme sensibility. It exists today in modern humans because those in the evolutionary past who were indifferent to the sexual contact that their mates had with others lost the evolutionary contest to those who became jealous. As the descendants of successful ancestors, modem humans carry with them the passions that led to their forebears' success. The legacy of this success is a dangerous passion that creates unhappiness, but the unhappiness motivated adaptive action over human evolutionary history (Buss, 2000). Anger and upset, according to one evolutionary psychological hypothesis, are evolved psychological mechanisms designed to prevent strategic interference (Buss, 1989). These negative emotions function to draw attention to the interfering event, alert a person to the source of strategic interference, mark the interfering events for storage in and retrieval from memory, and motivate action designed to eliminate the interference or to avoid subsequent interfering events. Because men and women over evolutionary time have faced different sources of strategic interference, they are hypothesized to get angry and upset about different sorts of events. Empirical evidence supports these hypotheses, suggesting that women get more upset about sexual aggression (Buss, 1989), various forms of sexual harassment (Studd, 1996), and the horror of rape (Thornhill & Thornhill, 1989). Men, in contrast, tend to respond with more anger and upset than women when a potential mate leads them on or a current partner withholds sex (Buss, 1989). These and many other findings support the hypothesis that many apparently negative emotions may in fact be quite functional for humans, helping them to solve adaptive problems of social living (see Buss, 2000). Nonetheless, the subjective experience can be extremely painful and disturbing, reducing the quality of life a person experiences. The negative emotions are not limited to sexual skirmishing. People experience distress when someone blocks their ascension in the social hierarchy, when they suffer a slide in status, when a friend betrays them, when their coalition is weakened, when their team loses, when their health is impaired, when they are threatened with violence, when a sibling is favored over them by a parent, when they are victimized by malicious gossip, when a partner rejects them, when tragedy befalls a loved one, and when a child 2 Strategic interference occurs when a person's goals, or methods of achieving goals~ are impeded or blocked (Buss, 1989). January 2000 • American Psychologist 17

dies. Human anguish in modem minds is tethered to the events that would have caused fitness failure in ancestral times. Adaptations Designed for Competition A third impediment to happiness stems from the competition inherent to evolution by selection. Reproductive d/fferentials caused by design differences make up the engine of evolutionary change. Selection operates on differences, so one person's gain is often another person's loss. As Symons (1979) observed, "the most fundamental, most universal double standard is not male versus female but each individual human versus everyone else" (p. 229). The profound implication of this analysis is that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms designed to inflict costs on others, to gain advantage at the expense of others, to delight in the downfall of others, and to envy those who are more successful at achieving the goals toward which they aspire. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker provided an example using the German word Schadenfreude, a word that appears not to have a direct counterpart in the English language. Nonetheless, When English speakers hear the word Schadenfreude for the first time, their reaction is not "Let me see ... Pleasure in another's misfortunes... What could that possibly be? I cannot grasp the concept; my language and culture have not provided me with such a category." Their reaction is, "You mean there's a word for it? Cool!" (Pinker, 1997, p. 367; italics in original) Ambrose Bierce even defined happiness as "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others" (quoted in Pinker, 1997, p. 390). Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that people do take pleasure in the "downfall of tall poppies" (Feather, 1994, p. 2). Across a series of studies, Feather (1994) discovered several important conditions under which people take pleasure in the fall of tall poppies. First, when the high status of a tall poppy was made salient, participants reported more happiness with the other's fall from grace. Second, when the success of a tall poppy was not perceived to be deserved, participants reported more pleasure with his or her fall than when the tall poppy was perceived to deserve the initial success. Third, envy was the most common emotional experience participants felt toward a tall poppy, especially if the other person's success was in a domain important to the participant, such as academic achievement among students. Do people have adaptations to feel especially good about themselves when superseding or subordinating others (Gilbert, 1989)? Are envy and depression reliable consequences of being relatively low in the social hierarchy (Gilbert, 1989; Price & Sloman, 1987)? Given the apparent universality of status hierarchies in all groups and all cultures worldwide, escape from relative ranking may prove exceedingly difficult. If a person's happiness depends in part on another's misery or failure, then how can people design lives to improve the quality of all, not just those who happen to get ahead? These vexing questions become salient with the recognition that evolution has produced some psychological mechanisms that are inherently competitive. Because differential reproductive success is the engine of the evolutionary process, one person's gain is often another person's loss. Consider two women competing to attract a particular desirable man as a husband. Research has shown that in addition to various self-enhancing attraction tactics, women also derogate their rivals (Buss & Dedden, 1990; Schmitt & Buss, 1996). Some women will call a rival promiscuous, spread rumors about how easy she is to get into bed, denigrate aspects of her face, body, and clothing style, and sometimes falsely tell others that she has contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Men are no less vicious in their derogation tactics. The content of gossip, in short, is adaptively targeted and undoubtedly affects success on the mating market. It can simultaneously create psychological anguish and ruin the reputations of victims. The outcome is inherently competitive--one person's success on the mating market is typically another person's loss. As Gore Vidal noted, "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail" (quoted in Pinker, 1997, p. 390). Some psychological mechanisms also produce predictable forms of conflict between the sexes. Men's evolved desire for sexual variety, for example, sometimes prompts sexual overtures that are sooner, more persistent, and more aggressive than women want (Buss, 1994). Simultaneously, women's strategies of imposing a longer courtship delay, requiring signs of emotional involvement, and delaying sex interfere with men's short-term sexual strategy (Buss, 1994). Both sexes deceive each other in ways well predicted by evolutionary theories (e.g., Tooke & Camire, 1991). Jealousy provides another instructive example of competition and conflict (Buss, 2000). Jealousy is activated by perceived or real threats to romantic relationships--by a rival who is encroaching, a partner who is threatening defection, or both. Jealousy can undermine self-esteem, making a person feel "hurt, threatened, broken hearted, upset, insecure, betrayed, rejected, angry, possessive, envious, unhappy, confused, frustrated, lonely, depressed, resentful, scared, and paranoid" (Buss, 2000). Jealousy motivates conflict with partners, fights with rivals, and in some cases extreme violence. Despite the extensive suffering it creates, it served our ancestors well in the competitive currency of reproduction. Nonjealous men risked being cuckolded and spending a life devoted to nurturing a rival's children. Nonjealous women risked the diversion or loss of a partner's commitment to a female rival. Jealousy evolved to serve a variety of functions, including deterring a mate from straying, backing off interested rivals, and perhaps even communicating commitment to a partner (Buss, 2000). These competitive functions have come at the cost of conflict. Three Additional Evolutionary Tragedies of Happiness These various obstacles to improving human happiness obviously do not exhaust the evolved impediments to wellbeing. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker (1997) de18 January 2000 • American Psychologist

scribed several other tragedies of happiness. One is the fact that humans seem designed to adapt quickly to their circumstances, putting us on a "hedonic treadmill" (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999, p. 286). Americans today have more cars, color TVs, computers, and brand-name clothes than they did several decades ago, but Americans are no happier now than they were then (Myers & Diener, 1995). Reports of lottery winners suggest that individuals quickly adjust to their new riches and may be no happier than they were before (some even report increased conflicts with others). Happiness may track modern manifestations of ancestral signals of evolutionary fitness (Ketelaar, 1995), but people seem to adjust quickly to any gains they experience, creating the hedonic treadmill where apparent increments in rewards fail to produce sustained increments in personal happiness. A second tragedy of human unhappiness stems from the fact that evolved mechanisms are designed to function well on average, although they will necessarily fail in some instances--what may be called instance failure (Cosmides & Tooby, 1999). For example, mechanisms of mate guarding are designed to ward off rivals and keep a partner from straying (Buss & Shackelford, 1997). Presumably, mate-guarding mechanisms evolved because, on average, they succeeded in successful mate retention. An individual woman or man, however, might fail to keep a partner, thus producing a cascade of psychological anguish and social humiliation, even though mate-guarding mechanisms have succeeded on average over the relevant sample space of evolutionary time. Instance failures may even be more frequent than successes over evolutionary time, as long as the net benefit of the strategy has exceeded its costs. A third tragedy of human emotions is the asymmetry in affective experience following comparable gains and losses (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). The pain people experience when they lose $100, for example, turns out to be affectively more disagreeable than the pleasure they experience when they win $100. Losses sting more keenly; the joy produced by comparable gains is more muted. As the former tennis star Jimmy Connors observed, "I hate to lose more than I like to win" (cited by Ketelaar, 1995). Evolved emotions, in short, may have been well designed to keep people's ancestors on track in the currency of fitness, but in some ways they seem designed to foil people's efforts to promote long-term happiness. Improving Human Happiness Given the obstacles to well-being--discrepancies between modern and ancestral environments, evolved emotional mechanisms designed to cause subjective distress, and the existence of psychological mechanisms that are inherently competitive--it is clear that an evolutionary perspective does not offer easy or facile solutions to the problems of improving psychological well-being and the quality of life. In fact, they reveal how difficult such solutions will be to achieve. Nonetheless, evolutionary psychology does provide insights into how some of the more unpleasant and damaging features of the human condition might be ameliorated. Closing the Gap Between Modern and Ancestral Conditions Modern humans cannot go back in time and live the lives of their Stone Age forebears, nor would an uninformed or uncritical move in that direction be inherently desirable, given that modern technology has eliminated many of the hostile forces of nature that formerly made life brutish, painful, and short. Nonetheless, the gap between former and modem conditions might be closed on some dimensions to good effect. Increase closeness of extended kin. If being deprived of extended close kin leads to depression in modern environments (L. Cosmides, personal communication, September 17, 1989), individuals can take steps to remain in closer proximity or to maintain greater emotional closeness to existing kin. Modern electronic communication, including E-mail, telephone, and video conferencing, might be exploited to this end when physical proximity is not possible. With people living longer, opportunities to interact with grandparents and grandchildren expand, offering the possibility of strengthening the network of extended kin. Develop deep friendships. According to Yooby and Cosmides (1996), people may suffer a dearth of deep friendships in modern urban living. It's easy to be someone's friend when times are good. It's when you are really in trouble that you find out who your true friends are. Everyone has experienced fair-weather friends who are there only when times are good, but finding a true friend, someone that you know you can rely on when the going gets tough, is a real treasure. The problem is that when times are good, fair-weather friends and true friends may act pretty much alike. It's difficult to know who your true friends are when the sailing is smooth. Because fair-weather friends can mimic true friends, the adaptive problem is how to differentiate those who are deeply engaged in your welfare from those who will disappear during your time of deep need (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Selection should fashion assessment mechanisms to make these differentiations. The strongest tests, the most reliable sources of evidence of friendship, come from the help you receive when you are desperately in need. Receiving help during these times is a far more reliable litmus test than help received at any other time. Intuitively, people do seem to have special recall for precisely these times. People take pains to express their appreciation, communicating that they will never forget the sacrifices made by those who helped them in their darkest hour. Modern living, however, creates a paradox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Humans generally act to avoid episodes of treacherous personal trouble, and in modern living, many of the hostile forces of nature that would have put people in jeopardy have been harnessed or controlled. Laws deter stealing, assault, and murder. A police force performs many of the functions previously performed by January 2000 • American Psychologist 19

friends. Medical science has eliminated or reduced many sources of disease and illness. People live in an environment that in many ways is safer and more stable than the environment inhabited by their ancestors. Paradoxically, therefore, people suffer from a relative scarcity of critical events that would allow them to accurately assess who is deeply engaged in their welfare and to differentiate them from fair-weather friends. The loneliness and sense of alienation that many feel in modem living, a lack of a feeling of deep social connections despite the presence of many seemingly warm and friendly interactions, may stem from the lack of critical assessment events that tell them who is deeply engaged in their welfare (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Several strategies may help to close this gap between modem and ancestral conditions to deepen social connectedness (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). First, people should promote reputations that highlight their unique or exceptional attributes. Second, they should be motivated to recognize personal attributes that others value but have difficulty getting from other people. This involves cultivating a sensitivity to the values held by others. Third, they should acquire specialized skills that increase irreplaceability. If people develop expertise or proficiency in domains that most others lack, they become indispensable to those who value those competencies. Fourth, they should preferentially seek out groups that most strongly value what they have to offer and what others in the group tend to lack; in short, they should find groups in which their assets will be most highly cherished. Fifth, they should avoid social groups where their unique attributes are not valued or where these qualities are easily provided by others. A sixth strategy involves the imposition of critical tests designed to deepen the friendship and test the strength of the bond (see also Zahavi, 1977; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Although it would be foolish to subject oneself to a life-or-death situation merely to test the strength of a friendship, more modest tests are possible. Some friends may fail the tests, in which case they are deemed fairweather friends. Those who pass the tests and provide help during these critical times make the transition to true friends marked by deep engagement. Reducing Subjective Distress If humans have evolved psychological mechanisms that function to produce subjective distress, one can design a social environment to reduce the likelihood of facing the adaptive problems that trigger psychological anguish. Although these problems are probably impossible to avoid completely, several strategies might lower the likelihood of their occurrence. Selecting a mate who is similar-Reducing jealousy and infidelity. One strategy is to select a long-term mate or marriage partner who is similar to you on dimensions such as values, interests, politics, personality, and overall "mate value." A large body of empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that discrepancies between partners in these qualities lead to increased risk of infidelity, instability of the relationship, and a higher likelihood of eventual breakup (Buss, 2000; Hill, Rubin, & Peplau, 1976; Kenrick & Keefe, 1992; Thiessen & Gregg, 1980; Walster, Traupmann, & Walster, 1978; Whyte, 1990). Selecting a mate who is similar, conversely, should lower the likelihood of infidelity, and hence the agony experienced as a result of jealousy. Because jealousy appears to be an evolved emotion designed to combat threats to relationships, anything that reduces its activation should reduce the subjective pain people experience (Buss, 2000). Furthermore, assortative mating decreases the chance of divorce, and hence the sequelae caused by divorce--anguish experienced by the parties involved as well as by any children from the union. Anything that leads to a higher divorce probability increases the odds of creating stepchildren. Evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that stepchildren experience physical abuse and even homicide at rates 40 to 100 times greater than children residing with their genetic parents (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Selecting a mate who is similar lowers the odds of breaking up and hence decreases the odds of producing stepchildren who are at increased risk of abuse. Extended kin-Reducing incest, child abuse, and spousal battering. Incest, child abuse, and wife battering may be greater now because modem humans live in isolated nuclear families, protected in a shroud of privacy. Having kin in close proximity has been discovered to offer a protective factor against some of these forms of abuse, notably wife battering (Figueredo, 1995). Although no studies have yet been conducted on the protective properties offered by extended kin for incest and child abuse, it is not unreasonable to expect that they will yield a similar effect. Education about evolved psychological sex differences. Evolutionary psychology offers a precise metatheory about sex differences--the sexes are predicted to differ only in the domains in which they have faced different adaptive problems (Buss, 1995). Many such differences have been documented. Men more than women, for example, infer greater sexual interest when they observe a smile, which may lead to unwanted sexual advances that cause subjective distress in women (Abbey, 1982; Buss, 1994). This male bias in mind reading, however, can be shown to disappear under certain evolutionarily predicted conditions (Haselton & Buss, 2000). Education about the fact that men's and women's minds house somewhat different psychological mechanisms, and that the differences can be deactivated under certain conditions, may help to reduce the frequency of strategic interference. Managing Competitive Mechanisms Perhaps the most difficult challenge posed by our evolved psychological mechanisms is managing competition and hierarchy negotiation, given that selection has fashioned powerful mechanisms that drive rivalry and status striving. Status inequality produces a variety of negative consequences, such as the impairment of health (Wilkinson, 1996). One potential method of reducing such inequalities is to promote cooperation. 20 January 2000 • American Psychologist

Evolutionists have identified one of the key conditions that promote cooperation--shared fate (Sober & Wilson, 1998). Shared fate occurs among genes within a body, for example--when the body dies, all the genes it houses die with it. Genes get selected, in part, for their ability to work cooperatively with other genes. A similar effect occurs with individuals living in some kinds of groups. When the fate of individuals within the group is shared--for example, when the success of a hunt depends on the coordination among all members of the hunting party, or when defense against attack is made successful by the cooperation of a group's members--then cooperation is enhanced. Knowledge of the evolutionary psychology of cooperation can lead to an improved quality of life for all cooperators. Axelrod (1984), an evolutionary political scientist, suggested several ways in which this can be done. First, enlarge the shadow of the future. If two individuals believe that they will interact lYequently in the extended future, they have a greater incentive to cooperate. If people know when the "last move" will occur and that the relationship will end soon, there is a greater incentive for people to defect and not cooperate. Enlarging the shadow of the future can be accomplished by making interactions more frequent and making a commitment to the relationship, which occurs, for example, with wedding vows. Perhaps one reason that divorces are so often ugly, marred by unkind acts of mutual defection, is that both parties perceive the last move and a sharply truncated shadow of the future. A second strategy that Axelrod (1984) recommends is to teach reciprocity. Promoting reciprocity not only helps people by making others more cooperative, it also makes it more difficult for exploitative strategies to thrive. The larger the number of those who follow a tit-for-tat reciprocity strategy, the less successful it will be to attempt to exploit others by defecting. Essentially, the cooperators will thrive through their interactions with each other, whereas the exploiters will suffer because of a vanishing population of those on whom they can prey. A third strategy for the promotion of cooperation is to insist on no more than equity. Greed is the downfall of many, exemplified by the myth of King Midas, whose lust for gold backfired when everything he touched, even the food he wanted to eat, turned to gold. The beauty of a tit-for-tat strategy is that it does not insist on getting more than it gives. By promoting equity, tit-for-tat succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others. A final strategy for promoting cooperation is to cultivate a personal reputation as a reciprocator. People live in a social world where the beliefs others hold about them-- their reputations--determine whether others will befriend or avoid them. Reputations are established through people's actions, and word about people's actions spreads. Cultivating a reputation as a reciprocator will make others seek them out for mutual gain. A reputation as an exploiter will foster social shunning. Exploiters risk vengeance and retribution from their victims. The combined effect of these strategies will create a social norm of cooperation, where those who were formerly exploiters are forced to rehabilitate their bad reputations by becoming cooperators themselves. In this way, cooperation will be promoted throughout the group. By promoting cooperation, some evolved mechanisms designed to yield competitive advantage lie dormant. 3 Humans have within their menu of evolved strategies those that unleash treachery as well as those that produce harmony. By exploiting our knowledge of the conditions that promote cooperation, people might be able to mitigate some of the destruction inflicted by competition. The Fulfillment of Desire A fourth strategy for raising human happiness involves exploiting knowledge of evolved desires (Buss, 2000). Just as humans have evolved adaptations that create subjective distress, they have evolved desires whose fulfillment brings deep joy. Studies of private wishes reveal an evolutionary menu of motivations designed to achieve goals historically correlated with fitness. These include the desire for health, professional success, helping friends and relatives, achieving intimacy, feeling the confidence to succeed, satisfying the taste tot high-quality food, securing personal safety, and having the resources to attain all these things (King & Broyles, I997; Petrie, White, Cameron, & Collins, in press). Success at satisfying these desires brings episodes of deep happiness, even if people might habituate to their constant occurrence. The fulfillment of mating desires provides another path. One of the most consistent findings in studies of well-being is the link to marriage (Diener et al., 1999). Married women and men are significantly happier than single women and men, even when other variables such as age and income are statistically controlled. Moreover, among married people, those who have succeeded in fulfilling their desire for a spouse who embodies the personality characteristics of agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience tend to be more emotionally and sexually satisfied with their marriages than those who fail to marry spouses with these qualities (Botwin, Buss, & Shackelford, 1997). In addition to fulfilling major desires, evolution has equipped people with a host of mechanisms designed to allow people to bathe themselves in aesthetic pleasure. People can design environments to exploit evolved affective mechanisms that signal adaptive affordances. Landscape preferences provide a perfect illustration (Kaplan, 1992; Orians & Heerwagen, 1992). Research supports the hypothesis that humans have evolved specific habitat preferences that mimic certain aspects of the ancestral savanna terrain. People like natural over human-made environments, habitats with running water and terrain to house game. They like places where they can see without being seen (a "womb with a view"). They like environments that provide resources and safety, prospect and refuge, lush vegetation and fresh fruit. As noted by Orians and Heer3 An obvious exception is when people form cooperative groups to compete more effectively with other groups, as occurs in sports, warfare, and political coalitions (e.g., Alexander, 1979, 1987). January 2000 • American Psychologist 21

wagen, "It may be difficult for many of us, with the year-round supplies of a wide array of fruits and vegetables in our supermarkets, to understand the importance of the first salad greens of the season to people throughout most of human history" (1992, p. 569). Appreciating the beauty of a blossom, the loveliness of a lilac, or the grace of a gazelle are all ways in which people can, in some small measure, fill their daily lives with evolutionarily inspired epiphanies of pleasure. Having adequate resources to fulfill desires (Diener & Fujita, 1995), making progress toward fulfilling them (Cantor & Sanderson, 1999), achieving a state of "flow" in the process of achieving them (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and succeeding in fulfilling them in particular domains such as mating (Botwin et al., 1997) provide a few of the evolutionary keys to increasing human happiness. Conclusions Evolutionary psychology yields insight into some of the major obstacles to achieving a high quality of life--discrepancies between modern and ancestral conditions, the existence of evolved mechanisms designed to produce psychological pain, and the inherently competitive nature of some evolved mechanisms. Given these circumstances and constraints, improving the quality of life will not be easily or simply achieved. Knowledge of evolutionary obstacles, however, provides a heuristic for discovering places to intercede. The human menu of evolved strategies is large and varied, and modern humans have the power to create conditions to activate some strategies while leaving others dormant. This article perforce has neglected or only obliquely touched on many of the complexities of human happiness, such as the finding that individual differences in dispositional happiness appear moderately heritable (Tellegan et al., 1988), that perpetual states of happiness would almost certainly have been maladaptive (Barkow, 1997), and that repeated short-term pleasures sometimes produce enduring long-term pain (Solomon, 1980). Comprehensive theories of human happiness will have to explain adaptively patterned phenomena such as why winners of competitions experience a hedonic and hormonal boost (Mazur & Booth, in press) and why women's feelings of well-being appear to peak during the late follicular phase of the ovulatory cycle, when fertility and chance of conception are maximal (Sanders, Warner, Backstrom, & Bancroft, 1983). A more complete theory must also explain why some sources of happiness and subjective distress differ profoundly for men and women, for parents and children, and for the same individuals at different stages of life as they confront predictably different adaptive problems (Buss, 1999). Future work could profitably include an account of the evolutionary psychology of hedonic trade-offs inherent in some activities, such as an extramarital affair that produces the immediate reward of sexual gratification, but a more distant and uncertain future risk of marital disruption and reputational damage. As a species, humans have conquered many of the external hostile forces of nature that formerly threatened bodily survival. They have created environments that are relatively friction free; they have reduced infant mortality, polio, and malaria; conquered food shortages through agriculture; reduced the destructive impact of extremes of temperature and climate; and eliminated most predators. 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Individual Development in a Bio-Cultural Perspective Fausto Massimini Antonella Delle Fave Universitgz degli Studi di Milano Universit?l 1ULM, Milano, and Universitgt degli Studi di Milano Biological and cultural inheritance deeply influence daily human behavior. However, individuals actively interact with bio-cultural information. Throughout their lives, the), preferentially cultivate a limited subset of activities, values, and personal interests. This process, defined as psychological selection, is strictly related to the quality of subjective experience. Specifically, cross-cultural studies have highlighted the central role played by optimal experience or flow, the most positive and complex daily experience reported by the participants. It is characterized by high involvement, deep concentration, intrinsic motivation, and the perception of high challenges matched by adequate personal skills. The associated activities represent the basic units" of psychological selection. Flow can therefore influence the selective transmission of bio-cultural in)Cor - mation and the process of bio-cultural evolution. Watch well over your seed-things and children! Speak wisely to these our new children! Henceforth they shall be your first speakers, And the peace-making shield of your people. --Zuni creation myth T he primary role of psychology, as stated by the editors of this special issue, should be the formalization of models of healthy behavior, which could be fruitfully applied to the study of human development and used in intervention programs in the fields of psychic maladjustment and psychopathology. We share this opinion, as emphasized in previous works (Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Carli, 1987). In this article we want to analyze the basic features of humans that led to the development of culture and consciousness, the two basic pillars of our history. We adopt a developmental perspective, considering human psychological processes as an emergent adaptive trait that brought about deep changes in both the ecosystem and the evolution of our species. We propose a model of healthy behavior that can shed new light on the potentially constructive role of individuals in their biocultural context. As our theoretical guidelines we refer to concepts coming from two main fields concerned with the study of living systems. The first is the natural selection paradigm, the formalization of which had an enormous impact on the development of biological and social sciences in the 20th century. Specifically, the key concept of phenotypic variation as the basic substrate for biological selection and evolution has been fruitfully applied to the study of social and cultural systems. The second field we refer to analyzes living systems as open and self-organizing units, intrinsically oriented toward complexity and neg-entropy (i.e., order and integration), thanks to the continuous exchange of information with the environment. These concepts have been used in biology, as well as in the study of social systems (Khalil & Boulding, 1996; Maturana, 1975; Monod, 1972; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Biology, Culture, and Individuals: Three Interacting Systems Biology and Human Evolution Biological inheritance obviously influences human behavior. This influence has been stressed and investigated by a growing number of studies conducted within the framework of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. In this perspective, the major part of human individual and social behavior has evolved in order to ensure survival and reproduction in our ancestors' environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; Symons, 1990). The differential replication and transmission of behavioral sequences is related to the enhancement of inclusive fitness (Alexander, 1987; Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992: Buss, 1989; Trivers, 1972; Wilson, 1976). Social learning, altruism, and the development of moral norms are also explained in this perspective (Flinn, 1997; Grinde, 1996; O'Neill & Petrinovich, 1998). Psychopathology is analyzed in terms of maladaptive traits, inertia of previously adaptive behavioral patterns, or both (Stevens & Price, 1996). Geographical variations in human behavior and social organization are explained as strategies that have evolved to cope with the demands of radically different natural environments (Foley, 1992; Kaplan & Hill, 1992). Of course, we do not deny the fundamental influence of the biological inheritance system in shaping human behavior. In our opinion, however, this perspective is reductionist at two levels. First, the role of culture's develFausto Massimini, Dipartimento di Scienze Precliniche "L.I.T.A. Vialba,' Facolth di Medicina e Chirurgia. Universith degli Studi di Milano, Italy; Antonella Delle Fare, Istituto di Scienze Umane-Universit/t IULM, Milano, and Dipartimento di Scienze Precliniche 'L.I.T.A. Vialba,' Facolth di Medicina e Chirurgia. Universith degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fausto Massimini, Dipartimento di Scienze Precliniche 'L.I.T.A. Vialba' via G. B. Grassi, 74, 20157 Milano, Italy. Electronic mail may be sent to fausto.massimini@ unimi.it. 24 January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by Ihe American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No, I. 24-33 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.l.24

Fausto Massimini opment and cultural learning in human history is not adequately evaluated. As a great number of interdisciplinary studies show, far from being simply an epiphenomenon of biological traits, culture does have a dramatic impact on human behavior. As a consequence, with the passage of time, individuals have had to cope with environmental demands that have become very different from those related to the ancestral EEA. Second, a strictly evolutionary perspective does not leave much hope for the actualization of cultural values such as peaceful and cooperative relations, equality, and tolerance. Every unit of human behavior is enacted under the ultimate pressure of inclusive fitness. Social interaction is basically manipulative; deception is common; strong social hierarchy and sexual stratification are the rule. In this picture, several widespread and accepted behaviors stemming from culture would have no reasons to exist. International child adoption would not be promoted. Disabled people would have few chances to survive and to reproduce. Males' mating strategy would be aimed at maximizing inclusive fitness, thus supporting polygamy in all human communities. We think that a biologically grounded model leaves no room for the system of values focused on democracy and individual rights that has been laboriously developed in several cultures, at least during the last three centuries. These values are the inspiring guidelines of many societies. If we disregard them as epiphenomenal and subject to biological fitness, how can we build a psychological model based on human development as a growth toward individual complexity and cultural integration, shaping human beings as full-fledged members of mankind? Culture and Human Behavior The adaptation strategy of our species is based on social learning and on the production and use of artifacts, material or symbolic. This strategy was supported by specific biological features, namely the upright position, the opposing thumb, and the impressive growth of brain structures in both mass and complexity. In particular, humans evolved specific psychic processes, defined by Crook (1980) as awareness of external world (subjective self-awareness) and awareness of one's own internal state (objective selfawareness). From a different perspective, Edelman (1989, 1992) distinguished between primary consciousness (an adaptive trait shared by various species) and higher order consciousness, defined as the uniquely human ability to remember, make plans, and set goals on the basis of memorization and selective retrieval of information acquired through experience. Humans started to manipulate the environment, to build artifacts, and to create social norms and roles. This set of products, which can be labeled as culture, promoted our species' settlement in various ecological niches. The symbolic representations of the external world and of individuals themselves were formalized by means of descriptions and behavioral rules stored in the individual central nervous system (intrasomatic level) and in material tools, books, and artistic and religious artifacts (extrasomatic level). The horizontal and vertical transmission of cultural information by means of verbal language, social learning, and artifacts contributed to the development of cultural systems (Cloak, 1975). Survival became more and more dependent on the acquisition of cultural information, and life became an unceasing learning process (Tomasello, Kruger, & Rather, 1993). The influence of culture on human behavior is a main issue in cross-cultural psychology. From cognition to social behavior and human development, behavioral differences among individuals can often be traced back to different cultural contexts (see Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998, for a synthetic overview of the state of the art). The study of culture-specific models of human behavior has been recently promoted by cultural psychology (Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990) and indigenous psychologies (Kim & Berry, 1993). Several efforts have been made to formulate suitable definitions and models for culture. Dawkins (1976) used the term meme to define the basic cultural unit, subjected to differential replication according to its biological fitness. According to bio-cultural theories (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Durham, 1982, 1991; Richerson & Boyd, 1978; Ruyle, 1973), human behavior is influenced by a dual inheritance system based on genes and memes. In contrast with Dawkins' perspective, culture is described as an evolving system that progressively gains autonomy from biological pressures. Memes are submitted to differential replication, under biological or cultural pressures, or both; this process leads to selection and evolution of cultures. It is impossible here to go into the detailed mechanisms of cultural selection and evolution and the various interaction patterns between genes and memes. Following Durham (1991), we briefly point out two main issues. First, culture ew~lves as an autonomous system, thanks to the creation of secondary values, stemming not from individual January 2000 • American Psychologist 25

Antonella Delle Fare ontogeny (like the primary ones) but from social history. Memes' differential replication can consequently depend upon criteria that are purely cultural, autonomous from the biological fitness of the group. Moreover, the factors influencing the selection of genes and memes are different. The former is the differential survival and reproduction of the carriers (that which Durham calls selection by consequences); the latter is the assumption of the cultural meaning and usefulness of memes (selection according to consequences), which can precede the actual evaluation of memes' transmission outcomes. Second, memes' differential reproduction can interact with biological fitness in three different ways: enhancing it, decreasing it, or being neutral in respect to it. As concerns the first issue, meme selection and organization in cultural systems have been analyzed by studying constitutions as sets of cultural information that regulate individual and group behavior (Calegari & Massimini, 1978; Massimini & Calegari, 1979). Constitutions comprise the basic social values, which can be defined as assumptions on what is desirable for the individual and for the group in a specific culture (Calegari & Massimini, 1976; Rokeach, 1974). The analysis detected 11 recurring groups of norms, which were treated as units of a cultural network. Each unit deals with a major problem that society has to solve in order to survive and reproduce in time. The units can be grouped into four categories, according to the issues they deal with: (a) bio-cultural reproduction (work, property, income), (b) cultural reproduction (education, information exchange, participation, decision making), (c) prescription (legal system, status), and (d) evaluation and justification (individual values, social values). Within the cultural network, the units are connected by mutual influences. Each culture develops specific solutions to the problems represented in the units according to its meme selection history. Cultural networks have also been detected in orally transmitted instruction sets (Massimini, 1982). From another perspective, Pocklington and Best (1997) studied selection and replicative success of memes in a corpus of texts posted to a Internet-hased news system, in which they looked for sets of repeatedly co-occurring words, their variation, and their persistence. Further studies are indeed needed in the field. Memes are differentially replicated and transmitted by means of imitative behavior, oral communication, and artifacts' reproduction, through choice or imposition. New memes can be introduced in a cultural system by means of inventions or acquisition from other social groups. The same unit of behavior can be regulated by several meme variants. These variants compete for differential replication and transmission at two levels: within culture and between cultures. Within a community, the introduction of a new meme or the competition among variants of the same meme can explain the historically frequent phenomenon of village fission and the subsequent emergence of new habits, languages, and cultural systems. Debates in the sciences and humanities can be translated in terms of meme competition. Political parties are expressions of differemial meme replication. Changes in the content or number of articles in a constitution are manifestations of meme selection. At the intercultural level, societies may fruitfully exchange and borrow memes. We have to admit, though, that the most frequent event in human history has been competition and imposition of memes from one culture to another One. Only one example, however systematically recurring, will be reported here: Wars, mostly grounded in cultural beliefs and values, are the very basic leitmotiv of the interaction among societies. Given the cultural relativity of memes' fitness, which is based on assumptions about their value within a specific society, cultural evolution is a process of change in neutral terms: Change per se does not necessarily mean improvement, but fitness enhancement. Given the possibility of memes spreading through imposition, some cultures can dominate others because of the cultural fitness of their memes (i.e., ability to survive and reproduce in respect with other memes' variants and not because of the absolute desirability of the values they convey). For example, during the second millennium BC, patriarchal warfare societies defeated and suppressed more egalitarian and peaceful cultures and settled in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Mediterranean area. These cultures were based on agricultural and trading economy, gender equality, and a religious system centered on Mother Goddess and fertility rituals (Eisler, 1987; Gimbutas, 1991). They disappeared not because of the low desirability of their value system but because of their lack of artifacts and know-how related to war. In the last four centuries, cultural extinction has been repeatedly caused by means of violent colonization, wild modernization, and supremacy of technological power. This lorm of meme selection through imposition inhibits the differentiation process, which is a basic feature of living systems, be they species or cultures. 26 January 2000 • American Psychologist

As concerns the interactions between memes and genes, culture often contributes to enhance the biological fitness of the group; food and housing habits, parenting practices, and healing systems are generally aimed to enable and improve human biological survival and reproduction. However, human history is interspersed with cases of competition between biological and cultural fitness (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Massimini, Inghilleri, & Delle Fave, 1996). Intraspecific violence and biological suppression due to religious, political, and economic reasons; gulags and concentration camps; religious celibacy; female infanticide; family size reduction; and child abuse are only some examples of this phenomenon. As concerns memes' interaction with the ecosystem, the changes of a culture in time are often adaptive responses to ecological modifications. However, in most parts of the world today, the artificial environment has gradually overcome and is often substituted for the natural one, sometimes with devastating effects on the ecological niche and on the survival of a great number of living species (Brown, Flavin, & French, 1998). Subjective Experience and Psychological Selection It is very difficult to independently evaluate the influence of biological, environmental, and cultural factors on phenotypic behavior (Altman & Chemers, 1980). Studies deriving some concepts from the living system theory (Miller, 1970) called for a circular causal relationship between individual behavior, biology, and culture (Massimini, 1982-; Richerson & Boyd, 1978). Moreover, concerning culture, memes first stem from individuals, who are the actual inventors of ideas, artifacts, and value systems (Durham, 1991). Each piece of cultural information was originally an individual solution to a specific problem and has enormous implications for the potential role of each human being in the construction of society, as other scholars have often clearly stated (see, e.g., Jung, 1932/1972) and as we discuss in the following pages. Being both reproducer and transmitter of bio-cultural information units, each human being actively influences the survival and replication of biological and cultural pools. This influence is again based on a selective process, which has been defined as psychological selection of bio-cultural information (Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini, 1985). The process is shaped by two specific human features: the subjective-objective awareness and the limited amount of attention resources (Csikszentmihalyi, 1978). Individuals cannot pay attention to all occurring environmental stimuli at the same time. Thus, they have to select a subset of this information--daily activities, situations, and social contexts--to be involved in. As a wide range of studies have pointed out, the main factor directing psychological selection is the quality of experience. Individuals preferentially invest their attention in environmental opportunities associated with positive and rewarding states of consciousness, in particular with optimal experience, or flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1978; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). Optimal experience is characterized by the perception of high environmental challenges, matched with adequate personal skills. Individuals report high levels of affect, concentration, and involvement. They perceive loss of selfconsciousness, control of the situation, focused attention, positive feedback about the quality of their performance, and clear ideas about the aims of the activity. They also report being intrinsically motivated, not pursuing external rewards, the enjoyment being provided by the situation or the activity itself (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Specific research tools have been developed to analyze the quality of experience. The experience sampling method provides on-line information about its daily fluctuations (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987; Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott, 1977). The Flow Questionnaire (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Delle Fave & Massimini, 1988) investigates the psychological features of flow and associated activities or situations. Several cross-cultural studies, which gave rise to a data bank comprising about 4,000 participants, showed the recurrence of optimal experience in its basic features, regardless of gender, age, or cultural context of the participants (Massimini et al., 1996). Flow can be associated with the most varied activities, provided that they are valid opportunities for action, engagement, and high investment in personal skills. Thus, creative and complex activities--be they work, sports, arts, hobbies, or social interactionsIare frequently reported as sources of flow, whereas repetitive and simple tasks are seldom quoted. Optimal experience promotes individual development. To replicate it, a person will search for increasingly complex challenges in the associated activities and will improve his or her skill accordingly. This process has been defined as cultivation; it fosters the growth of complexity not only in the performance of flow activities but in individual behavior as a whole. The lifelong process of psychological selection, centered on the preferential replication of optimal experience and associated activities, results in the individual's lije theme (Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie, 1979). It can be described as a set of activities, social relations, and life goals uniquely cultivated and pursued by each individual. In this perspective, optimal experience represents the basic unit of psychological selection. To replicate it, individuals cultivate related opportunities for action, which become the components of their life theme. Being rooted in the subjective evaluation of environmental opportunities, psychological selection leads to individual differentiation within the social group, emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual's developmental trend. Like biology and culture, psychological selection operates as an evolution mechanism. In time, it brings changes in behavior, and it takes part in the progressive differentiation of the individual as a living system. This approach shows interesting connections with the model developed by Edelman (1989, 1992) in the field of neuroscience. Edelman applies the Darwinian paradigm to brain development, describing it as the result of an unceasing selection process. Cells of the nervous system grow, January 2000 • American Psychologist 27

migrate, and die during ontogenesis on the basis of environmental selective pressures. Synaptic connections among neurons and neuronal groups enhance or decrease their efficiency throughout life according to the adaptiveness of the behavior their activity supports. This model is extremely close to the psychological selection paradigm: Both perspectives describe individual behavior as strongly influenced by environmental forces, which are independent of genetic information. Both models emphasize individual variation, thus underlining the uniqueness of each nervous system and of each participant in his or her interaction with the environment. Both maintain the role of contextual pressures in promoting the differential reproduction of behavioral traits on the basis of their adaptive features. In our perspective, however, adaptation does not have only a biological meaning. It also has to be described in cultural terms. In order to fit in their social context, individuals have to reproduce culturally adaptive behaviors. Moreover, individuals are autonomous entities who actively select environmental information. Their behavior is not aimed simply at bio-cultural adaptation. They build their personalized life project, pursuing differentiation and meanings, as researchers such as Maslow (1968) and Frankl (1978) have pointed out. In our perspective, individuals are the sole authors of their developmental trend, built on the preferential reproduction of those memes that are related to optimal experiences. As in biology and culture, development at the psychological level means growing in complexity (i.e., internal order and integration of the living system). For humans, it can be translated into the harmonization of the individual life theme and cultural opportunities for action. Moreover, given the interdependence of individuals and culture, the growth of complexity involves constructive information exchange with the environment. In order to foster authentic development, psychological selection has to promote a creative and satisfied individual, who is integrated in the cultural environment and committed to the replication of its basic social values. However, the outcomes of the process depend on the type of activities a person associates with flow and on the features of his or her life theme. Social contexts do not always provide meaningful opportunities for action, selfexpression, and individual growth. On the one hand, modernization and technological development bring about enormous advantages in terms of biological survival, daily life comforts, and the amount of time available for education and leisure; but on the other hand, they bring excessive automation, constraints on work creativity and personal initiative, and a high investment of attention in the use and consumption of artifacts. The gradual loss of traditional know-how and skills implies an increasing dependence of individuals on ready-made solutions to meet daily needs. Thus, during ~heir leisure time, people more and more look for challenging and complex activities, such as handicrafl, arts, creative writing, adventure travels with limited equipment and facilities, and high-risk sport performances. The data we gathered with the Flow Questionnaire are consistent with these considerations. For example, few blue- and white-collar workers quote work as a source of optimal experience; more associate flow with socialization and leisure activities. These, especially for urbanized samples, are often represented by traditional skills, such as gardening, knitting, and do-it-yourself projects. Conversely, artisans, farmers, teachers, social workers, and professionals frequently report their complex and challenging work activity as a source of flow, also underlining its positive impact on the quality of life (Delle Fave & Massimini, 1988, 1991). As we have previously stated, one of the basic features of flow experience is the participant's engagement in the task at hand (Delle Fave & Bassi, 1998), in terms of high levels of concentration, alertness, active participation, and perception of the importance of the activity. Engagement can be related to the complexity of the challenge an individual is facing, and it has several implications in the process of personal growth. Any activity that requires engagement also entails the cultivation of individual skills, a process that can become a lifelong commitment. Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), a well-known Italian man of letters, devoted his life to writing poems, literary and philosophical essays, and treatises. In one of his most famous poems, (1828/1972, p. 55) "A Silvia," he defines his daily work "gli studi leggiadri.., e le sudate carte," the graceful studies and the hard, laborious papers. In one sentence, he synthetically described the joys and torments of complex, highly challenging activities. This same dedication has been stated by a group of musicians and music students interviewed by means of the Flow Questionnaire (Massimini & Delle Fave, 1995). For these participants, music involves daily commitment, hard work, and perseverance--in one word, engagement; 72% reported studying and playing music as the most important source of optimal experience in their daily life. These findings are consistent with the data coming from people devoted to challenging activities, such as surgeons, mountain farmers, mathematicians, and university students. These individuals very frequently associated flow experience with their engaging work or study tasks. Flow is actively pursued by individuals, but it can also be considered a conquest. It arises out of the constant engagement in skill cultivation; it is not an easy and automatic state, which is one of the reasons why neither repetitive and executive jobs nor passive leisure entertainment, such as watching TV (Delle Fave & Massimini, 1994; Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), are included as flowinducing situations. Nevertheless, some studies conducted with the Flow Questionnaire allowed us to detect the phenomenon of mimetic flow. Some activities can be perceived as sources of optimal experience; they can be actively cultivated but eventually turn out to be poor in complexity potential, which is an essential feature of authentic flow activities and a prerequisite for individual development. Moreover, such activities do not toster the participant's constructive integration in the culture. This is true, for example, of drug addiction (Delle Fave, 1996b). Individuals report a flowlike experience in the first period of drug intake. However, the 28 January 2000 ° American Psychologist

experience is chemically induced, thus artificial. The individual is passive, disengaged from reality, increasingly dependent on drugs and unable to pursue other challenges, and physically weak and marginalized from the social context. Thus, apparent psychological well-being turns out to have a negative effect on bio-cultural fitness and individual development. The same can be said for antisocial activities, such as stealing, which have sometimes been quoted as sources of flow within specific samples. Challenge, engagement, and focus of attention are there; individuals also underline the enjoyment in performing the activity itself, regardless of material rewards. But again, this behavior causes marginalization instead of individual's integration in the cultural context. Psychological Selection and Individual Development: Some Applications Flow experience and psychological selection can be used as the two basic constructs to build a model of optimal psychological functioning and behavioral development. The cultivation of complex opportunities for action fosters personal growth as well as individual active integration in the cultural context. This model can be used in social and psychological intervention programs. Adolescents Young people are exposed to various sources of mimetic flow in the modernized urban settings of most countries. The intake of psychoactive substances and the misuse and abuse of technological artifacts such as computers, cars, and weapons are only some examples of the apparently complex activities teenagers are attracted to. In most cases, there is a misinterpretation of risk behavior as challenging behavior. No connections with individual development and integration in the social context can be found in such practices. On the contrary, school and learning activities are often described as low-challenging situations. Many Western countries are facing problems such as students' poor performance and students who drop out from high schools. However, building an individual as an adult member of a social group entails an enormous amount of cultural information that children and adolescents are expected to learn from family and school. Several studies have dealt with the structure of educational systems and the quality of experience associated with learning (Csikszentmihalyi, 1982; Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1993). In Western countries, studying is a mandatory activity for adolescents; however, the contents and the way they are taught are sometimes unfit to capture the attention of the students. Nevertheless, learning can be a very rich source of engagement, personal satisfaction, and meaningful information (Delle Fave & Bassi, 1998). Its effectiveness as a source of optimal experience can facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge and the active participation of the individual in the process of cultural selection. In our opinion, this is one of the most important issues to deal with in order to enable schools to effectively act as an arena for life skills training and individual development. For similar reasons, adolescents should be encouraged to engage in structured leisure activities that offer high challenges, potential skills improvement, and developmental chances in terms of cultural integration. Disablement The extreme behavioral flexibility that characterizes humans at the biological level has also been detected at the psychological level in studies concerning the quality of experience of disabled persons. In the case of congenital or early infancy deficits, the behavioral constraints do not present obstacles to the process of active psychological selection. Persons born blind reported flow experiences and the building of complex life challenges that enable them to effectively take part in the process of memes' replication, transmission, and creative modification (Delle Fave & Maletto, 1992; Negri, Massimini, & Delle Fave, 1992). As for handicaps that occur later in life, studies have been conducted on persons who became blind, paraplegic, or tetraplegic after athletic, work, or road accidents (Delle Fave, 1996a). The results again emphasize the flexibility of human behavior. After a major trauma that imposes dramatic changes in the daily life and in the access to environmental opportunities for action, individuals can develop a strategy defined as transformation of flow. Where possible, they keep cultivating former flow activities. Otherwise, as often happens, they manage to identify new and unexpected sources of concentration and involvement, sometimes in areas very different from their previous interests. These results fit very well in the framework of biocultural evolution and psychological selection. Behavioral flexibility emerges as a crucial feature for adaptation in the continuously changing environment, be it the ecological niche or the cultural context. At the psychological level, this flexibility enables the individual to pursue developmental goals despite biological constraints. Rehabilitation programs should maximize these individual resources. Psychopathology The framework of psychological selection can be fruitfully applied in psychotherapy. The administration of flow-related procedures to persons undergoing psychological treatment proved to be useful for the on-line investigation of individual interaction with the everyday environment (Delespaul, 1995; deVries, 1992). Positive and negative outcomes of this relationship in terms of quality of experience can be detected. Negative states of consciousness, characterized by disruption of attention, disengagement, mood instability, and inability to concentrate, which are typical features of several mental disorders, can be related to specific daily situations. Individuals' descriptions of daily opportunities for flow allow the therapist to build a strategy based on individual psychological selection. This can promote a factual developmental process, its aim being not just the recovery from symptoms but the cultivation of meaningful life challenges and the social integration of the individual. The potentials of this approach have been ob January 2000 • American Psychologist 29

served both in clinical case studies (Delle Fave & Massimini, 1992) and in psychiatric interventions developed within international cooperation programs. A therapeutic approach centered on subjective experience and directed toward the cultural reintegration of the individual has been successfully used in the reorganization of two psychiatric structures in Managua, Nicaragua, and in Berbera, Somalia (Inghilleri, 1999). American intervention, supervised by one of the authors, was focused on the rehabilitation of psychotic patients who had been segregated in the Managua psychiatric hospital for decades. A group of them were treated by means of exposure to environmental challenges; specifically, they were recruited for collective work in coffee plantations. This activity, familiar to most of the participants, represented a traditional cultural skill as well as a collaborative group task. The engagement in the work led to a drastic reduction in drugs and a gradual relocation of the participants in their own families and cultural context (Massimini, Terranova, & Inghilleri, 1985). Social Maladjustment Social maladjustment comprises several categories of phenomena, and it involves individuals of all ages. From street children to abandoned elderly persons, from homeless persons to drug addicts, the problem is present under various forms in every society. Maladjusted individuals are exposed to risks at two different levels. First, their potential development through the building of a complex life theme is often seriously limited. Second, marginalization prevents them from taking active part in the process of memes' differential replication and transmission. Data have been collected on the flow experience and life theme among homeless persons, drug addicts, and adolescents living in residential institutions. In all cases, individuals report developmental difficulties at both the personal and the cultural levels. The framework of psychological selection and cultural evolution can provide useful guidelines for interventions. The quality of experience has to be evaluated as the key criterion for a successful rehabilitation program. Individuals should be offered opportunities for action according to their personal skills and preferential allocation of psychic resources. However, the ultimate goal of intervention has to be the social reintegration of individuals by fostering the cultivation of culturally adaptive activities and life goals. A good application of these theoretical assumptions comes from the work of Child Workers in Nepal (CWIN). This nongovernmental social organization, located in Kathmandu, is involved in socialization and rehabilitation programs for children exposed to labor exploitation, street life, and social and psychological risk factors (CWIN, 1995; Sattaur, 1993). CWIN strategy effectively fosters individual and cultural development, as we could see in recent visits. Street and labor-bonded children are hosted for some months in CWIN centers. In the meantime, contacts are established with their parents to facilitate family reunion and their reintegration in the original social context. Attention is given primarily to promote adjustment to the social context and acquisition of social values: the awareness of child and human fights and the importance of education, health care, and social equity. Thanks to this new cultural equipment, CWIN children can behave as the core active agents of meaningful cultural changes. Rehabilitation programs are individualized and focused on psychological selection and life theme. Children are encouraged to express their life expectations and to tollow their intrinsic motivation in cultivating the activities offered in the centers. These activities represent culturespecific opportunities for action, such as traditional skill training, religious practices, meditation, arts, and handicraft. Far too often international intervention programs in developing countries are unrelated to the local culture, being built on Western standards instead. Unfortunately, this still-common practice arbitrarily introduces radically unconnected memes in a structured social system. Thus, these memes have few, if any, chances of integration with the local ones, or they can even disrupt the cultural evolution process. CWIN regularly organizes village-centered advocacy programs on children's issues; to be effective and long lasting, any cultural change requires the commitment of all members of the society. Moreover, it should not undermine the system's stability in the short run, but foster the growth of cnlture complexity in the long run. The abolition of child labor and street life is not expected to be suddenly realized. Biological speciation is a slow, gradual, time-consuming process, eventually giving rise to well-adapted organisms. The same principle can be applied to cultural evolution, and it is one of the pillars of CWIN's careful, exemplary intervention. Bicultural Integration Cultures often meet in violent ways through wars, land disputes, and religious and ethnic conflicts. Sadly, human history is full of such events, which can result in the imposition of memes by the victors on the vanquished. In other cases, especially in recent times, migration forces individuals to adapt to cultural contexts that are often remarkably different from their original ones. The various outcomes of prolonged exposure to a cultural system other than one's own have been extensively studied in crosscultural psychology (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). The key role of psychological selection in coping with the acculturation process arises from data collected by means of Flow Questionnaires in Arizona among Navajos and in Thailand. The two populations are examples of a successful bicultural strategy, leading to the balanced integration of traditional culture with strong modernizing Western influences. Both groups developed specific strategies in pursuing this goal, in line with their culture history (see Delle Fave & Inghilleft, 1996; Inghilleri & Delle Fave, 1996). From the perspective of psychological selection, we expect that any society exposed to rapid modernization has to promote the bicultural development of its members as individuals in order to successfully evolve in time. Navajo and Thai participants reported both traditional and modernized activities as sources of optimal experience. The activities 30 January 2000 • American Psychologist

ranged from work to leisure and from social and family interactions to religious practices; they were meaningful components of life theme. The participants were able to achieve a complex integration of memes stemming from two cuRural pools at the psychological level, that is, in the daily selection of environmental information. Unfortunately, not every contact between cultures provides such encouraging outcomes. When traditional societies meet cultures more powerful at the technological and economical level, the most frequent result is assimilation, which involves wild modernization and the loss of entire pools of original knowledge. On the other hand, any effort to rely solely on ancient tradition would ultimately lead to culture seclusion and the risk of extinction in today's era of globalization. Bicultural selection turns out to be the most adaptive strategy, especially when it is grounded in individual daily behavior, in that it allows the individuals' integration in a changing environment. Moreover, this strategy promotes the growth in complexity of the original culture, thanks to the introduction of new memes actively selected and transmitted together with the traditional ones by the individuals. Psychological Selection and flio-Cultural Evolution After this excursus through the selective processes shaping human behavior, we present some final remarks. The individual is the very center of cultural change, as an autonomous agent of memes' differential replication and transmission. Moreover, each human being actively contributes to the building of culture, not just within his or her own limited context but within the whole human environment. This process is particularly clear nowadays when social systems continuously interact and exchange information throughout the planet. As we have previously discussed, the subjective perception of a positive, complex, and intrinsically rewarding state of consciousness, namely flow, fosters the reproduction and transmission of the associated cultural instructions. Flow requires engagement. It is based on involvement in the activity for the sake of the experience and not of extrinsic rewards; it promotes the individual's development and cultural integration. It is hard to believe that such a complex state of consciousness can be associated with harmful and deviant behavior. Nevertheless, there are mimetic cases that can be misinterpreted as optimal experience and that are too often exploited by charismatic leaders and totalitarian ideologies to support deviance, culture clash, and imposition of power. Moreover, today's leading cultures are centered mainly on extrinsic reward: Modernization, accumulation and consumption of artifacts, and emphasis on economic and material goals are the most striking and recurring features of social systems. The impact of artifacts on natural environment has created serious problems for the biological survival of our species and of the living systems on earth, thus posing a crucial need for social awareness and intervention programs. Yet, we have evidence that people do not associate flow with money, power, or interpersonal conflict. Flow sheds light on the most constructive, cooperative, creative, and complex aspects of human beings. The constitutions of most soeieties include citizens' rights, protection and education of children, freedom of faith and expression, and gender and social equality among their basic cultural values. There is a growing effort in the world to build democratic systems, which apparently contrast both the biological tendency to social hierarchy and the intercultural conflict among memes (Somit & Peterson, 1996). Moreover, human history is interspersed with striking examples of complexity and individual development in people, such as Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa. Their lives show a distinctive pattern of selective meme replication, aimed to foster intercultural integration and cooperation beyond cultural selfish reproduction and competition. How can we classify these individuals? Are they inspiring yet isolated exceptions of people who confirm the rule of meme competition in cultural systems? As opponents of cultural conflicts, are they only unaware supporters of species' biological fitness? What about Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Ken SaroWiwa in Nigeria, and the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and persecuted people who risk their life in many countries for the sake of people's freedom and of human rights? Are they only edifying, unmatchable examples, or can they become effective models for common people's behavior and authentic development? How can we finally categorize the countless nurses, teachers, physicians, and religious and social workers who daily and silently devote their life for the sake of mankind? All of these examples, from the very famous to the anonymous ones, show that individuals can build a life theme centered not only on personal and culture-specific challenges and goals, but also on concerns for other human beings, regardless of their biological and cultural inheritance. Common people involved in socially relevant occupations have witnessed that this concern is a very strong source of optimal experience in their daily life. Thanks to the great complexity of the issues and the skills required to deal with them, an individual can choose to devote a conspicuous amount of his or her psychic resources to cultivating the related activities. We do not mean that life themes focused on other jobs, challenges, or goals are less valuable or meaningful. Instead, we would like to emphasize that every human activity can be performed either from a strictly individual perspective or from a broader one. This extended world outlook should not be confined to personal biological and cultural fitness, but should include mankind as a global living system, whose elements share the same ecological niche and resources, the same biological structure and needs, and the same potentials for growth and development. To be effective, the process has to occur in each cultural context--although fragmentation and meme competition seem paradoxically increasing today--in spite of, or because of, closer cultural relationships. Globalization is becoming a more and more concrete reality, but it is based on the westernization of knowledge and on a system of January 2000 • American Psychologist 31

economical relationships that emphasizes and promotes inequality (Chossudovsy, 1997; Sen, 1992). In these terms, the aim is not to support the development of mankind. Any cultural change, in order to be defined as positive, has to enhance the real complexity of a culture, which entails the improvement of integration among the various components of the culture itself, considered as a dynamic living system. Moreover, the change has to ensure a fruitful exchange with the environment; cooperation and reciprocity between social systems, rather than conflicts, foster cultural evolution in its constructive meaning. There are still many obstacles to this goal, but there have been several accomplishments up to now. The great world religions are involved in building an ecumenical perspective, one of the most remarkable achievements in this century if we consider that the most relevant values for cultural and individual development are shared by different religious systems. Apart from the extreme positions of integralism, all religions promote the development of the cooperative and altruistic components of human beings (Massimini & Delle Fave, 1991). What lesson can be drawn from the evolutionary history of humans, at the three levels of biology, culture, and psychology? It has often been stated that humans do not learn anything from their past. This should mean that cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is blind and centered on meme selection and transmission only from the perspective of cultural fitness (i.e., the power of meme reproduction). But the specific pattern of brain (and mind) development has made humans self-aware beings. Individuals can reflect upon their actions, make plans for the future, and remember (and learn) from past experiences. They are the ultimate creators of culture. They have the power to direct memes' selection from their subjective perspective, pursuing the replication of positive and complex experiences. They look for meaningful life themes, which are not restricted to simple survival or passive acceptance of social norms, regardless of their absolute value. To bequeath a constructive inheritance to the next generations, human beings should be encouraged to invest their limited, and thus precious, psychic resources in opportunities for action that represent real sources of development, not only for the individual but for the natural and cultural environment (ultimately made up of other living beings, humans or not). We hope that we have succeeded in exemplifying some of the ways to pursue this goal. The present historical period is replete with ethnic conflicts, culture clashes, and maladaptive outcomes of wild artifacts' reproduction. Nonetheless, there is a growing awareness of the intrinsic value of diversity and cooperation at the individual as well as the social level. 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Subjective Well-Being The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index Ed Diener University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign One area of positive psychology analyzes subjective wellbeing (SWB), people's cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives. Progress has been made in understanding the components of SWB, the importance of adaptation and goals to feelings of well-being, the temperament underpinnings of SWB, and the cultural influences on well-being. Representative selection of respondents, naturalistic experience sampling measures, and other methodological refinements are now used to study SWB and could be used to produce national indicators of happiness. F or millennia thinkers have pondered the question, what is the good life? They have focused on criteria such as loving others, pleasure, or self-insight as the defining characteristics of quality of life. Another idea of what constitutes a good life, however, is that it is desirable for people themselves to think that they are living good lives. This subjective definition of quality of life is democratic in that it grants to each individual the right to decide whether his or her life is worthwhile. It is this approach to defining the good life that has come to be called "subjective well-being" (SWB) and in colloquial terms is sometimes labeled "happiness." SWB refers to people's evaluations of their lives--evaluations that are both affective and cognitive. People experience abundant SWB when they feel many pleasant and few unpleasant emotions, when they are engaged in interesting activities, when they experience many pleasures and few pains, and when they are satisfied with their lives. There are additional features of a valuable life and of mental health, but the field of SWB focuses on people's own evaluations of their lives. Throughout the world, people are granting increasing importance to SWB. Inglehart (1990) proposed that as basic material needs are met, individuals move to a postmaterialistic phase in which they are concerned with selffulfillment. Table I presents means from an international college sample of 7,204 respondents in 42 countries, signifying how students in diverse countries view happiness (see Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998, for more information about this sample). Mean values are presented for how frequently the respondents reported thinking about SWB and for how important they believed SWB is. As can be seen, even in societies that are not fully westernized, students reported that happiness and life satisfaction were very important, and they thought about them often. Although there was a trend for respondents in the most westernized nations to grant SWB greater importance, mean levels of concern about happiness were high in all of the countries surveyed. Among the total sample, only 6% of respondents rated money as more important than happiness. Furthermore, fully 69% rated happiness at the top of the importance scale, and only 1% claimed to have never thought about it. Of the respondents, 62% rated life satisfaction at the top of the importance scale, and only 2% reported never having thought about it. As people throughout the world fulfill more of their basic material needs, it is likely that SWB will become an even more valued goal. Thus. although SWB is not sufficient for the good life (e.g., Diener, Sapyta, & Suh, 1998), it appears to be increasingly necessary for it. I briefly describe selected findings on SWB. Because this article can present only a broad overview, readers are referred to other reviews of the field (e.g., Diener, 1984; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999; Myers, 1992). Myers (2000, this issue) discusses several correlates of SWB. Readers interested in the connections of SWB to psychological phenomena such as emotion, the biology of pleasure, and self-report judgment processes are referred to Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz (1999), Parducci 1995), and Strack, Argyle, and Schwarz (1991). Defining and Measuring SWB People's moods and emotions reflect on-line reactions to evenls happening to them. Each individual also makes broader judgments about his or her life as a whole, as well as about domains such as marriage and work. Thus, there are a number of separable components of SWB: life satisfaction (global judgments of one's life), satisfaction with important domains (e.g., work satisfaction), positive affect (experiencing many pleasant emotions and moods), and low levels of negative affect (experiencing few unpleasant emotions and moods). In the early research on SWB, researchers studying the facets of happiness usually relied on only a single self-report item to measure each construct. My sincere thanks are extended to the following individuals for their perceptive comments: Frederick Kanfer, Eva Pomerantz, Harry C. Triandis, Alexander Grob, Larry Seidlitz, Andrew Clark, M. Joseph Sirgy, Howard Berenbaum, Ulrich Schimmack, Robert Biswas-Diener, Carol Diener, Eunkook Sub, Jonathan Lavav, and Daniel Kahneman. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ed Diener, Depamnent of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61821. Electronic mail may be sent to ediencr @ s.psych.uiuc.edu. 34 January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol 55. No. 1. 34 43 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.34

Ed Diener For example, Andrews and Withey (1976) asked respondents, "How do you feel about your life as a whole?" Respondents were provided with a 7-point response scale ranging from delighted to terrible. Recent measures of SWB, however, contain multiple items. For example, the PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Scale; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) measures both positive and negative affect, each with 10 affect items, and the Satisfaction With Life Scale assesses life satisfaction with items such as "In most ways my life is close to my ideal" and "So far I have gotten the important things I want in life" (Pavot & Diener, 1993). Although the psychometric properties of these scales tend to be strong, they provide only one approach to assessing SWB. In the past decade, researchers have used additional types of assessment to obtain a better gauge of long-term feelings. In the naturalistic experience-sampling method (ESM), for example, researchers assess respondents' SWB at random moments in their everyday lives, usually over a period of one to four weeks. Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) found that one-time self-reported life satisfaction, ESM measures of life satisfaction, reports by friends and relatives, and people's memories of positive versus negative life events intercorrelate at moderate-to-strong levels. Moum (1996) found that low life-satisfaction reports predicted suicide over the following five years. Lucas, Diener, and Suh (1996) found that SWB measures showed discriminant validity from other related constructs, such as optimism. Thus, there is reason to believe that the existing measures of SWB have some degree of validity (see Diener, 1994, for a review). Nevertheless, when and how the various measures differ have not been explored systematically. For example, Thomas and Diener (1990) found only a modest relation between global and on-line mood reports, but researchers do not yet understand what different factors influence the two types of measures. Despite the encouraging findings, SWB measures can be contaminated by biases. For example, Schwarz and Strack (1999) demonstrated in a series of studies that global measures of life satisfaction can be influenced by mood at the moment of responding to the scale and by other situational faclors. They also found that the ordering of items and other artifacts can influence reports of SWB. Eid and Diener (1999) found, however, that situational factors usually pale in comparison with long-term influences on wellbeing measures. Another potential problem is that people may respond to SWB scales in socially desirable ways. If they believe that happiness is normatively appropriate, they may report that they are happier than other types of assessments may indicate. Although single-occasion self-reports of SWB have a degree of validity, and interesting conclusions have emerged from studies using them, the artifacts mentioned above suggest caution. For this reason, in the future researchers should more frequently combine other types of measures with one-time scales. Although based on selfreport, the naturalistic ESM can circumvent some memory and other biases that occur in more global reports. Because people are randomly signaled at many points in time and their moods in their natural life settings are recorded, a more fine-grained record of their experience of well-being is obtained. ESM yields information on how SWB varies across situations and time. Kahneman (1999) argued that ESM ought to be the primary measure of SWB, and Stone, Schiffman, DeVries, and Frijters (1999) reviewed work in this area. Additional methods, such as physiological measures, reports by informants, and memory and reaction-time measures, also should be included in complete assessments of SWB. Although SWB is by definition subjective, experience can manifest itself in physiology and other channels; self-report is not the only way to assess experience. Because different methods of measuring SWB can produce different scores, a battery of diverse measures will produce the most informative composite. Although each of the alternative measures has its own limitations, the strengths of the different types of measures are often complementary to each other. For example, in the memory measure developed by Sandvik et al. (1993), respondents are asked to generate as many positive and as many negative events from their lives as they can during a short timed period. Thus, with this method researchers can assess individual differences in the relative accessibility of memories for good and bad events and thereby can determine the valence-related structure of how respondents recall their lives. In addition to using diverse assessment methods, researchers need to use measures of both pleasant and unpleasant affect, because both are major components of SWB. Bradburn and Caplovitz (1965) discovered that these two types of emotions, formerly believed to be polar opposites, form two separable factors that often correlate with different variables. Indeed, their findings provided a major January 2000 • American Psychologist 35

Table 1 Importance of Subjective Well-Being to College Students How often do you think about? How important is? Nation Life satisfaction Happiness Life satisfaction Happiness Money Argentina 5.63 5.62 6.67 6.78 4.46 Australia 5.27 5.51 6.59 6.66 4.44 Bahrain 5.25 5.14 6.08 6.21 5.01 China 4.20 4.43 5.67 5.91 4.82 Germany 5.43 5.27 6.62 5.95 4.11 Greece 5.52 5.54 6.73 6.77 4.89 Hungary 5.43 5.59 6.43 6.57 4.30 India 4.74 5.20 5.75 5.97 4.81 Indonesia 5.17 5.78 6.16 6.63 4.89 Japan 4.27 4.74 6.02 6.31 4.70 Lithuania 5.31 5.38 6.18 6.62 5.23 Singapore 5.06 5.24 6.25 6.59 4.80 SIovenia 5.56 5.22 6.78 6.62 4.60 South Africa 5.53 5.75 6.44 6.61 5.00 Tanzania 4.46 4.61 5.06 5.45 5.17 Turkey 5.16 5.63 6.25 5.75 5.25 United States 5.19 5.45 6.39 6.58 4.68 Note. The 1 to 7 "How often do you think about?" scale was anchored by 1 (never), 4 (sometimes), several times a day ar more). Importance ratings were reported on a 1-7 scale, where 1 was whatsoever and 7 was extraordinarily important and valuable. and 7 (very much, of no importance impetus to study positive well-being, rather than assuming that it is only the absence of ill-being. Good life events and extraversion tend to correlate with pleasant emotions, whereas neuroticism and negative life events covary more strongly with negative emotions. Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson (l 999) reviewed evidence indicating that separate biological systems subserve pleasant and unpleasant affect. Thus, it is desirable to measure them separately because different conclusions often emerge about the antecedents and consequences of these two types of affect. Although researchers can combine positive and negative affect into an "affect balance" or global "happiness" score, they may lose valuable information about the two types of affect. In defining happiness, it is common sense to combine the frequency and intensity of pleasant emotions. That is, the people considered to be the happiest are those who are intensely happy more of the time. The findings of my colleagues and I contradict this commonsense notion, however. How much of the time a person experiences pleasant emotions is a better predictor than positive emotional intensity of how happy the person reports being (Diener, Sandyik, & Pavot, 1991). Further, emotional intensity forms a factor that is independent of SWB (Larsen & Diener, 1985). Thus, feeling pleasant emotions most of the time and infrequently experiencing unpleasant emotions, even if the pleasant emotions are only mild, is sufficient for high reports of happiness. Although most people report being above neutral in mood the majority of the time (Diener & Diener, 1996), intense positive moments are rare even among the happiest individuals (Diener et al., 1991). Instead, happy people report mild-to-moderate pleasant emotions most of the time when alone or with others and when working or at leisure. One lesson from these findings is that if people seek ecstasy much of the time, whether it be in a career or a love relationship, they are likely to be disappointed. Even worse, they may move to the next relationship or job, seeking intense levels of happiness, which in fact are rarely long-lasting and are not necessary for happiness. People need to understand that intense experiences are not the cornerstone of a happy life. Furthermore, according to some theories of adaptation, such as that of Parducci (1995), highly pleasurable experiences may have the disadvantage of serving as a contrast point against which to compare other positive experiences, thus making the mild events less pleasurable. Processes Underlying SWB: Adaptation, Goals, and Temperament In a classic 1971 article, Brickman and Campbell suggested that all people labor on a "hedonic treadmill." As they rise in their accomplishments and possessions, their expectations also rise. Soon they habituate to the new level, and it no longer makes them happy. On the negative side, people are unhappy when they first encounter misfortune, but they soon adapt and it no longer makes them unhappy. On the basis of this reasoning, Brickman and Campbell proposed that people are destined to hedonic neutrality in the long run. Although an early study by Brickman, Coates, and 36 January 2000 • American Psychologist

Janoff-Bulman (1978) on lottery winners and people with spinal cord injuries produced equivocal support for the notion of a hedonic treadmill, later data have accumulated to support adaptation. For example, Silver (1982) found that persons with spinal cord injuries were extremely unhappy immediately after the accident that produced their disability but quickly began to adapt. She found that within a matter of only eight weeks, positive emotions predominated over negative emotions in her respondents. During this period, respondents experienced a downward trend in unpleasant emotions and an upward trend in pleasant emotions, suggesting a return toward the baseline conditions of mood experienced by most people. Researchers have also accumulated evidence that many life circumstances correlate with SWB at only modest levels, again supporting the idea of adaptation. For example, Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers (1976) estimated that 10 resources, including income, number of friends, religious faith, intelligence, and education, together accounted for only 15% of the variance in happiness. Campbell et al. and later investigators (e.g., Diener, Sandvik, Seidlitz, & Diener, 1993) have found small positive correlations within countries between income and SWB-- rich people on average are slightly happier than poor people (Diener, Horwitz, & Emmons, 1985). In a similar vein, Diener, Wolsic, and Fujita (1995) found that a highly prized possession among college students, physical attractiveness, predicted only small amounts of variance in respondents' reports of pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction. Perhaps even more striking, a number of studies showed that objective physical health, even among the elderly, is barely correlated with SWB (e.g., Okun & George, 1984). Further studies revealed that people adapt to most conditions very quickly. For example, Suh, Diener, and Fujita (1996) found that in less than three months, the effects of many major life events (e.g., being fired or promoted) lost their impact on SWB. Stone and Neale (1984) examined the effects of a negative life event. They identified 17 men who experienced a severe, negative life event during participation in a daily mood study. The authors reported that "same-day associations were observed, but there was no strong evidence of changes in next-day mood. The results offer no support for 2-day or longer effects of daily, negative events" (Stone & Neale, 1984, p. 137). A concrete instance of this phenomenon from the laboratory of Randy Larsen (personal communication, 1990) is noteworthy. One of Larsen's participants in a study of mood suffered from cancer and was receiving chemotherapy treatments. During the study, physicians informed the participant that his cancer was in remission, and his mood skyrocketed. In two days, however, his affect returned to its former baseline! However, Winter, Lawton, Casten, and Sando (1999) found that marriage and widowhood were still producing heightened and lowered SWB, respectively, six to eight months after the event. Brickman and Campbell' s ( 1971) basic idea has stuck: People do react strongly to good and bad events, but they then tend to adapt over time and return to their original level of happiness. A societal manifestation of adaptation is contained in Myers's (2000) discussion of income and SWB over the past five decades. Income has risen dramatically in many nations since World War II, and yet SWB has been virtually flat in the United States and other highly developed countries (Oswald, 1997). Apparently, people's desires increase as their incomes rise, and they therefore adapt to higher levels of income, with no net increase in SWB. This interpretation is supported by Clark's (1998) finding that recent changes in pay predicted job satisfaction, whereas mean levels of pay did not. Brickman and Campbell's (1971) theory has been refined in several ways. First, people may not adapt back to neutrality but may instead return to a positive set point. Diener and Diener (1995) noted that most SWB reports are in the positive range, above the neutral points of the scales. The means in Table 2 indicate this pattern--most nations average above 5.5, the midpoint of the scale. Cacioppo et al. (1999) suggested that there is a "positivity offset," meaning that there is a weak approach tendency in the absence of stimulation. Thus, the Table 2 Mean Life Satisfaction and Income Across Nations Nation Life satisfaction PPP 1992 Bulgaria 5.03 22 Russia 5.37 27 Belarus 5.52 30 Latvia 5.70 20 Romania 5.88 12 Estonia 6.00 27 Lithuania 6.01 16 Hungary 6.03 25 Turkey 6.41 22 Japan 6.53 87 Nigeria 6.59 6 Korea (South) 6.69 39 India 6.70 5 Portugal 7.07 44 Spain 7.15 57 Germany 7.22 89 Argentina 7.25 25 China (PRC) 7.29 9 Italy 7.30 77 Brazil 7.38 23 Chile 7.55 35 Norway 7.68 78 Finland 7.68 69 United States 7.73 1 O0 Netherlands 7.77 76 Ireland 7.88 52 Canada 7.89 85 Denmark 8.16 81 Switzerland 8.36 96 Note. The life satisfaction question asked respondents how satisfied they were with their "liFe as a whole these days." Response options ranged from 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (satisfied), and purchasing power parity (PPP) could range from 0 to 100. PRC = People's Republic of China. January 2000 • American Psychologist 37

set point first postulated by Brickman and Campbell actually might be in the positive range because humans are predisposed to feel predominantly pleasant affect if nothing bad is happening. Another refinement of the hedonic treadmill idea is that the baseline level of happiness to which people return is influenced by their temperament. One reason to integrate personality with the concept of adaptation is that personality predispositions appear to be one of the strongest factors influencing long-term levels of SWB. As noted by La Rochefoucauld (1940), "happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune" (p. 23). Studies on adopted-away separated twins show that about half of the variance in current SWB in American society is due to heritability (Tellegen et al., 1988). The partial heritability of happiness is supported by research on early temperament that suggests that emotional reactivity emerges early in life and is moderately stable over time (e.g., Goldsmith, 1996). Further, in an ESM study in which respondents' moods were recorded in various naturally occurring situations, Diener and Larsen (1984) found that participants' average moods showed a substantial amount of consistency across both situations and time, suggesting that SWB is not a result only of situational factors. Although people's moods fluctuate from moment to moment, there is a strong degree of stability in mean levels of mood experienced, even over a period of years (e.g., Magnus & Diener, 1991) and across varying life circumstances (Costa, McCrae, & Zonderman, 1987). Laboratory studies also demonstrate that happy and unhappy people react differently to the same stimuli. For example, Rusting and Larsen (1997) demonstrated that extraverted individuals (those who appear to react more strongly to rewards) responded more intensely to positive than to negative pictures in a laboratory situation, whereas neurotic individuals reacted more strongly to negative photos. The dynamic equilibrium model of Headey and Wearing (1992) combines adaptation with personality. They proposed that people maintain levels of pleasant affect and unpleasant affect that are determined by their personalities. Advantageous and disadvantageous events move individuals temporarily away from their personal baselines, but over time they return to them. For example, Winter et al. (1999) found that recent marriage affected positive affect (but not negative affect) and that recent widowhood affected negative affect (but not positive affect). In support of the idea of adaptation, however, they found that long-term marriage and widowhood did not influence levels of positive and negative effect. Headey and Wearing maintained that the separate baselines for positive affect and negative affect are determined by personality predispositions to extraversion and neuroticism, respectively. For example, Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, and Shao (1998) found that extraversion correlated with positive affect in virtually all of the 40 nations they examined. Headey and Wearing argued that events and circumstances do influence happiness, but in the long-term, the impact of personality will also exert itself. Scientists are exploring why people adapt to conditions. Parducci (1995) offered a judgment theory of adaptation based on the fact that people's satisfaction with events depends on the distribution of events in this domain that they have experienced in the past. Parducci maintained that people react favorably to events that are better than the comparison point provided by the context of their past outcomes in this area, and they react negatively to events that are lower than this comparison point. Another interpretation of adaptation is offered by Kahneman (1999), who argued that people in good circumstances may be objeclively happier than people in bad circumstances, but they may require greater levels of pleasure to declare themselves happy. Thus, people do not so much totally habituate to their conditions, according to Kahneman's view, as they adapt their expectations to the amount of pleasure they desire and the relative amount of happiness they report. Another reason that people may adapt to new circumstances is that they change their expectancies and goals. Emmons (1986), Cantor and Sanderson (1999), and others have shown that making progress toward goals is related to SWB. Diener and Fujita (1999) found that having resources (e.g., money, physical attractiveness, or social skills) in areas related to one's goals is a more accurate predictor of happiness than having resources that are less related to one's important goals. My colleagues and I have also found that people feel better on days when they make progress toward ends that they value highly than they do on days when they are successful at achieving ends that they value less (Oishi, Diener, Sub, & Lucas, 1999). In another study, Oishi, Schimmack, and Diener (1999) found that high sensation seekers were more satisfied with days when they experienced pleasure and high arousal emotions, whereas low sensation seekers preferred contentment. Although some goals, such as seeking excitement, may be influenced by one's temperament, other goals are likely to be much more flexible. Thus, one determinant of people's adaptation to conditions often might be the extent to which they alter their goals when new circumstances prevail. Thus, goal flexibility may be a key to SWB in adverse circumstances. Although the reasons for adaptation are not fully understood, it is clear that people do not habituate completely to all conditions. Frederick and Loewenstein (1999) concluded that people adapt rapidly to some circumstances (e.g., imprisonment), adapt slowly to other conditions (e.g., the death of a loved one), and adapt little or not at all to other conditions (e.g., noise and sex). Diener, Diener, and Diener (1995) reported substantial differences between nations in SWB, even though there has been ample time for people to adapt to the circumstances in these societies. Mehnert, Kraus, Nadler, and Boyd (1990) found that individuals who were born with disabilities reported somewhat lower levels of SWB than did persons without physical disabilities, and this differential was especially large for those with multiple handicaps. This indicates that people do not necessarily completely adapt to all circumstances, even after many years. Although personality is undoubtedly an important contributor to long-term levels of wellbeing, it is an exaggeration to conclude that circumstances have no influence. People's set points appear to move up or 38 January 2000 • American Psychologist

down, depending on the favorability of long-term circumstances in their lives. National and Cultural Patterns of SWB A discussion of how societal variables influence SWB is available in Diener and Suh (in press). Table 2 presents the mean levels of life satisfaction for selected nations from the World Values Survey (World Values Study Group, 1994), conducted with representative samples of approximately 1,000 respondents per nation between 1990 and 1993. The purchasing power parity figure is the percentage of purchasing power (based on a standard "basket" of goods) that the average person in each country can buy with his or her yearly income, compared with the average purchasing power of individuals in the United States. The correlation between mean purchasing power income and mean life satisfaction was .62 across all nations in the survey. The finding that wealthier nations have higher levels of reported well-being has been replicated several times (see Diener & Suh, 1999). One reason that wealthy nations may be happier is that they are more likely to fulfill basic human needs for food, shelter, and health, as well as to have better human-fights records (Diener et al., 1995). There were countries that were unexpectedly high or low in life satisfaction even after income was controlled. For example, mean levels of SWB in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were higher than predicted by their wealth, and life-satisfaction rates in Eastern European nations and Russia were low, even after controlling for the incomes there. The higher-than-expected scores in Latin American nations may have been due to cultural factors, whereas the lowerthan-expected scores in former communist countries may have been due to the political and economic turmoil occurring in these nations during the years of the survey. Japan appeared as an outlier, with high income and relatively low SWB. This is perhaps because Japan is a highly regulated society with strong conformity pressures and very high expectations. The poorest nations in the survey--China, India, and Nigeria--did not show the extremely low SWB responses that characterized earlier studies of the poorest societies. Perhaps this is because levels of income are rising in these nations, and at the same time people there have lower expectations than in the West. The same general patterns in the World Values Survey were found in earlier surveys (see Diener et al., 1995, for analysis of the earlier surveys)- much variance in SWB is accounted for by the wealth of nations, but culture and political turmoil also have an influence. In accord with the U.S. findings reported by Myers (2000), Diener and Oishi (in press) found that happiness has not increased regularly over the years in the nations where repeated surveys have been conducted, even though income has increased dramatically in most of these countries. Why does the wealth of nations correlate with mean levels of life satisfaction, whereas changes in income in the wealthiest nations produce no increases in happiness? A likely explanation is that there is a common set of economic desires around the world, and national income is highly correlated with whether these desires can be met. Because of global communication, it appears that the standard is set now by the wealthiest nations. People in China, India, and Nigeria want cars, refrigerators, VCRs, and the other possessions that they see on television. In other words., it may be that most people around the world now want many of the things that people in the West possess, and their life satisfaction is influenced to some degree by whether they are making progress toward obtaining these goods. Overall, increases in income in the wealthiest nations, however, do not raise levels of SWB because it is the rising living standard in these nations that influences people's level of desires. As income increases in the wealthiest nations, so does the evaluative standard. One noteworthy finding is that variables often correlate differently with life satisfaction in dissimilar cultures. Individualistic cultures are those that stress the importance of the individual and his or her thoughts, choices, and feelings. In contrast, in collectivist cultures, people are more willing to sacrifice their desires to the will of the group. Diener and Diener (1995) found that self-esteem correlated more strongly with life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist societies. Thus, even a variable that seems intrinsically of great importance to westerners, self-respect, is not highly correlated with life satisfaction in some cultures. Another interesting national difference in the correlates of mental health was discovered by Eunkook Suh (1999). He found substantial differences in whether "congruence"--acting consistently across situations and in accord, with one' s "self"--predicts life satisfaction in South Korea versus in the United States. Suh discovered that congruence was much less important to SWB in Korea. Again, a variable that many western psychologists have viewed as crucial to mental health may be more culture bound than than they have believed. Suh et al. (1998) also found large differences in whether people in different cultures rely on their feelings when making life-satisfaction judgments. When deciding how satisfied they are, people in individualistic nations find it natural to consult their affect, and feeling pleasant emotions frequently is a reasonable predictor of life satisfaction in these societies. In contrast, people in collectivist cultures tend to more often consult norms for whether they should be satisfied and to consider the social appraisals of family and friends in evaluating their lives. Thus, people differ markedly across societies in the factors they consider to be relevant to life satisfaction, perhaps because culture can have a pervasive influence on people's values and goals. An interesting pattern reveals itself when individualistic and collectivistic nations are compared in terms of different indicators of well-being. In individualistic nations, there are reports of higher life satisfaction, and yet suicide rates also tend to be higher (Diener, 1996). Similarly, there are elevated rates of marital satisfaction in individualistic nations, and at the same time the divorce rates are high. It seems that people in individualistic societies say they are happy with their circumstances, yet they more often change them. How can these seemingly contraJanuary 2000 • American Psychologist 39

dictory findings be explained? It may be that when people in societies with more freedom are satisfied with their marriages or jobs, they stay with them, but individualists are more likely to change their circumstances when they are dissatisfied. People in collectivist societies are more likely to remain in bad marriages or bad jobs for the sake of others and because of norms, and marriage and job satisfaction thus are on average lower in these cultures even though divorce rates and job turnover are also low. Thus, people in a collectivist society may be more likely to sacrifice their personal happiness to do their duty. The sense of satisfaction from doing the right thing, however, may feel more rewarding when doing the right thing is congruent with a person's own desires and does not require explicit sacrifices. The pattern of SWB findings across cultures may also be explained in part by levels of social support. The extended families in collectivist societies are more likely to interfere with people "following their bliss" but may also provide greater social support in troubled times. Fewer people in collectivist societies "do their own thing," but fewer individuals are left to fend for themselves. Although researchers cannot explain the paradoxical cultural findings with certainty, these findings do present a challenge to both individualistic and collectivist cultures. How can a society allow individuals the freedom to choose lives that are rewarding and spouses that are to their liking, and nevertheless ensure that families are cohesive enough to offer stable support? How can a society encourage people to attribute successes internally and still not feel failures too sharply? And how can a society permit individuals to do what they want and yet convince them to act in ways that are responsible to their families, friends, and communities'? Summary SWB researchers formerly focused on who is happy (see Diener et al., 1999)--whether it be the married, the wealthy, spiritual individuals, or other demographic groups. The recent focus, however, has been on when and why people are happy and on what the processes are that influence SWB. Temperament and personality appear to be powerful factors influencing people's SWB, in part because individuals usually adapt to some degree to good and bad conditions. People do not seem to completely adapt to all conditions, but as of yet researchers have only a rudimentary understanding of when and why adaptation is more or less complete. People's values and goals seem intimately tied to what events are perceived as good and bad, and therefore a plausible hypothesis is that goal change is an inherent component of adaptation. Cultural and societal factors influence SWB in several ways. First, some countries are better able to meet people's basic needs, such as for food, clean water, and health, and these nations evidence higher levels of SWB. Another effect of culture is to alter the correlates of SWB by influencing people's goals and values. Finally, variations in cultural influences on mean levels of SWB appear to result from variations in optimism and positivity, social support, coping patterns, and the degree of regulation of individual desires. The pervasiveness of societal influences on mean levels of SWB raises the question of how American culture is faring. A National Index of SWB I propose that the United States needs indicators of SWB that can be used to track happiness over time. Ideally, these indicators would include ESMs of nationally representative samples of respondents. National ESM surveys could provide valuable information on how frequently and intensely people feel satisfied and happy in various life circumstances and across types of situations. The SWB of individuals from various age groups, regions, occupational categories, and income levels could be compared, and policymakers and corporate leaders would therefore be more likely to consider SWB in their decisions. As long as national indicators focus on the production of goods and services, it is those factors that leaders are likely to consider. If a national indicator of SWB were available, policies could be judged partly by how they influenced happiness. Ideally, the national SWB indicators would include various components of SWB, such as pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, life satisfaction, fulfillment, and more specific states such as stress, affection, trust, and joy. The "Eurobarometer" surveys conducted in European nations could serve as a model for an index that could be implemented in the United States and conducted by either the federal government or a private survey agency such as Gallup. One value of national indicators is that researchers could determine which segments of society are least happy and perhaps fashion policies to aid them. An important basic question to ask before specific policies aimed at improving SWB are considered is whether SWB is so dependent on temperament that policies cannot affect it. Despite the effects of adaptation, life circumstances do matter to SWB; happiness is not completely based on inborn temperament. The data for the least satisfied nation in the World Values Survey, Bulgaria, sho~ + that fully 60% of respondents were below the midpoint of the scale on life satisfaction, and 40% were below neutral for affect balance, meaning that they reported more negative than positive emotions. Further, findings on people with multiple disabilities, young widows, and people chronically exposed to noise indicate that humans do not completely adapt to all conditions. Conditions do matter to SWB, and some nations are superio? to others when it comes to happiness. Furthermore, measures focused on specific domains, such as work or health, are more likely to be sensitive to changes in circumstances than are measures of life satisfaction, which is dependent on so many factors that any single area is likely to have a small impact. Thus, it is not a fruitless endeavor to monitor and enhance SWB--conditions in a society can influence it. A fundamental question related to monitoring SWB is whether it is desirable to increase SWB; is it really a good thing? For example, some might worry that too much satisfaction will leave people unmotivated or that pleasant emotions will cause a shallow form of hedonism. All the evidence to date, however, suggests that these concerns are 40 January 2000 • American Psychologist

unfounded--people high in SWB on average have a number of desirable qualities. There is some evidence that happy people participate more in community organizations, are more liked by others, are less likely to get divorced, tend to live slightly longer, perform better at work (e.g., Staw, Sutton, & Pelled, 1994; Veenhoven, 1988), and earn higher incomes (Diener, Nickerson, Lucas, & Sandvik, 2000). These findings are correlational, and psychologists have little understanding of why happy people might on average exhibit more desirable behaviors. Nevertheless, happy individuals seem on average to be more productive and sociable. Thus, high levels of SWB might be beneficial for a society, and no evidence indicates they would be harmful. A national index of SWB would help inform postmaterialist Amerian society about the desirable balance of work, relationships, recreation, and spirituality. Although wealthy nations are on average happier, it is important to recognize that recent increases in income in the richest nations have not benefited SWB. Furthermore, only small advantages in SWB accrue to the most affluent members of wealthy societies. Thus, it may be that little can be gained in terms of SWB by individuals making more money. Another implication of the static levels of SWB in the United States is that people's expectations must remain at realistic levels. At the individual level, people must realize that feelings of wealth depend as much on the level of one's desires as on objective income. Lasting happiness may come, in part, from activities such as working for one's goals (e.g., Emmons, 1986), participating in close social relationships (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Myers, 2000), experiencing renewable physical pleasures (Scitovsky, 1982), experiencing mental pleasures (Kubovy, 1999), and being involved in "flow" activities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). According to this view, further economic growth in the wealthiest societies may provide SWB to the extent that it enhances rewarding work activities in pursuit of meaningful goals. Quality of work life is likely to be at least as important to SWB as is income. Similarly, policies that foster close relationships and meaningful activities are likely to be more successful at enhancing SWB than policies designed exclusively to improve efficiency. To the extent that higher incomes allow people to engage in more rewarding activities, they will improve SWB. However, higher productivity could decrease levels of SWB if it requires long hours of boring work, high levels of stress, and little leisure time. If national indicators of SWB were available on an annual basis, it would provide fascinating information that potentially could enlighten policy making, as well as individual choices. A host of interesting questions could be answered, such as the following: Are religious people happier? Are the effects of poverty on SWB moderated by the level of basic services, such as health and education, that are available? Do children of diw)rce suffer lower levels of SWB on a long-term basis? How is the rate at which people are able to save money related to SWB? Do ethnic minorities in some places have higher SWB than others? Does the relation of income to SWB depend on consumption, on how people spend their incomes? The above questions are meant to convey that a national SWB index might be used to answer questions from a broad spectrum of political viewpoints, not only queries raised by the political left or right. Ideally, a national index would include a panel component that followed the same individuals over time. An advantage of a national indicator of SWB would be that it would make clear in which domains people, are more and less satisfied, thus suggesting where interw:ntions might be most needed. Further, a national index would provide an educational function, alerting people to the factors that influence their SWB. Conclusion Psychologists' knowledge of SWB is rudimentary; a stronger scientific base is necessary to make unequivocal recommendations to societies and individuals about how to increase happiness. I hope, however, that the above review makes it clear that scientific knowledge about SWB is possible and desirable. Societies need to afford the same importance to SWB as they do now to economics: tracking the phenomenon, supporting research to understand it, and educating people about it. To create a better society where happiness is ubiquitous, a major scientific effort to understand quality of life is needed. If psychologists' institute a national survey to track SWB, it is more likely that it will become an outcome variable that is considered in policy decisions. 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The Future of Optimism Christopher Peterson University of Michigan Recent theoretical discussions of optimism as an inherent aspect of human nature converge with empirical investigations of optimism as an individual difference to show that optimism can be a highly beneficial psychological characteristic linked to good mood, perseverance, achievement, and physical health. Questions remain about optimism as a research topic and more generally as a societal value. Is the meaning of optimism richer than its current conceptualization in cognitive terms? Are optimism and pessimism mutually exclusive? What is the relationship between optimism and reality, and what are the costs of optimistic beliefs that prove to be wrong? How can optimism be cultivated? How does optimism play itself out across different cultures? Optimism promises to be one of the important topics of interest to positive social science, as long as it is approached in an even-handed way. O ver the years, optimism has had at best a checkI ered reputation. From Voltaire's (1759) Dr. Pangloss, who blathered that we live in the best of all possible worlds, to Porter's (1913) Pollyanna, who celebrated every misfortune befalling herself and others, to politicians who compete vigorously to see who can best spin embarrassing news into something wonderful, socalled optimism has often given thoughtful people pause. Connotations of naivete and denial have adhered to the notion. In recent years, however, optimism has become a more respectable stance, even among the sophisticated. Research by a number of psychologists has documented diverse benefits of optimism and concomitant drawbacks of pessimism. Optimism, conceptualized and assessed in a variety of ways, has been linked to positive mood and good morale; to perseverance and effective problem solving; to academic, athletic, military, occupational, and political success; to popularity; to good health; and even to long life and freedom from trauma. Pessimism, in contrast, foreshadows depression, passivity, failure, social estrangement, morbidity, and mortality. These lines of research are surprisingly uniform, so much so that an optimism bandwagon has been created, within psychology as well as the general public (Gillham, in press). We see an interest in how optimism can be encouraged among the young and how pessimism can be reversed among the old. The future of optimism appears rosy indeed. Or does it? I begin this article with a review of what psychologists have learned about optimism, but my eventual purpose is to discuss its future both as a research interest of psychologists and as a social value. I believe that these futures are entwined, perhaps too much so. Optimism as a research topic has flourished in the contemporary United States precisely while people in general have become more hopeful about the future. The danger of this coupling is twofold. First, some of the documented benefits of optimism--at least as typically studied--may be bounded. Optimism in some circumstances can have drawbacks and costs, although researchers rarely look for these qualifying conditions. Second, even if it needs to be contextualized, optimism as a research topic deserves to be more than a fad. A sophisticated optimism can be quite beneficial to individuals in trying circumstances, and it behooves psychologists to learn as much as possible about the topic right now, when society supports this interest, so that these lessons can be deployed in other times and places where they can do the most good. I also comment on the recent call for a "positive" social science. To paraphrase Seligman (1998), psychology should be as focused on strength as on weakness, as interested in resilience as in vulnerability, and as concerned with the cultivation of wellness as with the remediation of pathology. A close look at optimism provides some insights into how to guide this redirection of psychology so that it does justice to the mandate and avoids the "everything is beautiful" approach of humanistic psychology in the 1960s. A positive psychology should not hold up Dr. Pangloss or Pollyanna as role models. What Is Optimism? A useful definition of optimism was offered by anthropologist Lionel Tiger (1979): "a mood or attitude associated with an expectation about the social or material future-- one which the evaluator regards as socially desirable, to his [or her] advantage, or for his [or her] pleasure" (p. 18). An important implication of this definition, one drawn out by Tiger, is that there can be no single or objective optimism, at least as characterized by its content, because what is considered optimism depends on what the individual regards as desirable. Optimism is predicated on evaluation--on given affects and emotions, as it were. Contemporary approaches usually treat optimism as a cognitive characteristic--a goal, an expectation, or a causal Lisa Bossio, Serena Chen, and Fiona Lee made helpful comments on a previous version of this article. This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grant P50-HL061202-01. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christopher Peterson, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 East University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-I 109. Electronic mail may be sent to chrispet @umich.edu. 44 January 2000 * American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. I. 44 55 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.44

Christopher Peterson Photograph by Christopher Peterson attribution--which is sensible so long as we remember that the belief in question concerns future occurrences about which individuals have strong feelings. Optimism is not simply cold cognition, and if we forget the emotional flavor that pervades optimism, we can make little sense of the fact that optimism is both motivated and motivating. Indeed, people may well need to feel optimistic about matters. We should not be surprised that optimism and pessimism can have defensive aspects as well as ego-enhancing ones (cf. Norem & Cantor, 1986). Along these lines, we can ask whether people can be generically optimistic, that is, hopeful without specific expectations. Although at odds with conventional definitions, the possibility of free-floating optimism deserves scrutiny. Some people readily describe themselves as optimistic yet fail to endorse expectations consistent with this view of themselves. This phenomenon may merely be a style of self-presentation, but it may additionally reflect the emotional and motivational aspects of optimism without any of the cognitive aspects. Perhaps extraversion is related to this cognitively shorn version of optimism. Optimism as Human Nature Discussions of optimism take two forms. In the first, it is posited to be an inherent part of human nature, to be either praised or decried. Early approaches to optimism as human nature were decidedly negative. Writers as diverse as Sophocles and Nietzsche argued that optimism prolongs human suffering: It is better to face the hard facts of reality. This negative view of positive thinking lies at the heart of Freud's influential writings on the subject. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud (1928) decided that optimism was widespread but illusory. According to Freud, optimism helps make civilization possible, particularly when institutionalized in the form of religious beliefs about an afterlife. However, optimism comes with a cost: the denial of our instinctual nature and hence the denial of reality. Religious optimism compensates people for the sacrifices necessary for civilization and is at the core of what Freud termed the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. Freud proposed that optimism is part of human nature but only as a derivative of the conflict between instincts and socialization. He thought some individuals--Freud mentioned the educated and in particular neurologists--did not need the illusion of optimism, although the masses were best left with their "neurosis" intact and the belief that God was a benevolent father who would shepherd them through life and beyond. Only with this belief and its associated fear that God would retaliate against them if they transgressed would people be law-abiding. According to Freud, a rational prohibition against murder is not compelling to the masses. It is more persuasive to assert that the prohibition comes directly from God. As psychodynamic ideas became popular, Freud's formula equating (religious) optimism and illusion had widespread impact. Although no mental health professional asserted that extreme pessimism should be the standard of health--pessimism of this sort was presumably due to fixation at an early psychosexual stage--most theorists pointed to the accurate perception of reality as the epitome of good psychological functioning: "The perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there" (Jahoda, 1958, p. 6). Similar statements were offered by the entire gamut of influential psychologists and psychiatrists from the 1930s through the 1960s: Allport, Erikson, Fromm, Maslow, Menninger, and Rogers, among many others (see Snyder, 1988, and Taylor, 1989, for thorough reviews). Never mind that one cannot know what is "actually there" in the future until it happens, and never mind that Freud in the first place acknowledged that an illusory belief was not necessarily a false one. "Reality testing" became the defining feature of the healthy individual, and psychotherapists took as their task the need to expose people to reality, however painful it might be. Only the most modest expectations about the future could pass muster as realistic, and anything else was regarded as denial (cf. Akhtar, 1996). Matters began to change in the 1960s and 1970s in light of research evidence showing that most people are not strictly realistic or accurate in how they think. Cognitive psychologists documented an array of shortcuts that people take ',as they process information. Margaret Marlin and David Stang (1978) surveyed hundreds of studies showing that language, memory, and thought are selectively positive. For example, people use more positive words than negative words, whether speaking or writing. In free recall, people produce positive memories sooner than negative ones. Most people evaluate themselves positively, and in particular more positively than they evaluate others. Apparently, in our minds, we are all children of Lake Wobegon, all of whom are above average. January 2000 • American Psychologist 45

The skeptical advocate of a harsh reality could dismiss findings like these as demonstrating little except how widespread optimistic illusions are, but it proved more difficult to dismiss results showing that psychologically healthy people in particular showed the positivity bias. Richard Lazarus (1983) described what he called positive denial and showed that it can be associated with well-being in the wake of adversity. Aaron Beck (1967) began to develop his influential cognitive approach to depression and its treatment, a cornerstone of which was the assertion that depression was a cognitive disorder characterized by negative views about the self, experience, and the future--that is, by pessimism and hopelessness. Early in the course of his theory development, Beck was still influenced by the prevailing view of mental health as grounded in the facts of the matter, because he described people with depression as illogical. By implication, people who are not depressed are logical--that is, rational information processors--although there was no good reason for this assumption. Part of cognitive therapy is designing experiments to test negative views, but Beck's procedures are geared toward guaranteeing the results of these experiments, and cognitive therapists never attempt to falsify the occasionally positive view that a person with depression might bring to therapy (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). In any event, Beck (1991 ) more recently backed off from this view of people who are not depressed being logical to allow that they can bring a positive bias toward their ongoing experience and expectations for the future. Anthony Greenwald's (1980) statement likening human nature to a totalitarian regime was another turning point in how optimism was regarded by psychologists. According to Greenwald, the self can be regarded as an organization of knowledge about one's history and identity. This organization is biased by information-control strategies analogous to those used by totalitarian political regimes. Everyone engages in an ongoing process of fabricating and revising his or her own personal history. The story each of us tells about ourselves is necessarily egocentric: Each of us is the central figure in our own narratives. Each of us takes credit for good events and eschews responsibility for bad events. Each of us resists changes in how we think. In sum, the ego maintains itself in the most self-flattering way possible, and it has at its disposal all of the psychological mechanisms documented by Matlin and Stang (1978). Another turning point in the view of optimism was Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown's (1988) literature review of research on positive illusions. They described a variety of studies showing that people are biased toward the positive and that the only exceptions to this rule are individuals who are anxious or depressed. Taylor (1989) elaborated on these ideas in her book Positive Illusions, where she proposed that people's pervasive tendency to see themselves in the best possible light is a sign of well-being. She distinguished optimism as an illusion from optimism as a delusion: Illusions are responsive, albeit reluctantly, to reality, whereas delusions are not. The strongest statement that optimism is an inherent aspect of human nature is found in Tiger's (1979) book Optimism: The Biology of Hope. He located optimism in the biology of our species and argued that it is one of our most defining and adaptive characteristics. Tiger proposed that optimism is an integral part of human nature, selected for in the course of evolution, that is developing along with our cognitive abilities and indeed the human capacity for culture. Tiger even speculated that optimism drove human evolution. Because optimism entails thinking about the future, it first appeared when people began to think ahead. Once people began anticipating the future, they could imagine dire consequences, including their own mortality. Something had to develop to counteract the fear and paralysis that these thoughts might entail, and that something was optimism. By this view, optimism is inherent in the makeup of people, not a derivative of some other psychological characteristic. Tiger went on to characterize optimism as easy to think, easy to learn, and pleasing--what modern evolutionary psychologists describe as an evolved psychological mechanism (Buss, 1991). Optimism as an Individual Difference At the same time optimism as human nature was being discussed in positive terms by theorists like Lazarus, Beck, Taylor, and Tiger, other psychologists who were interested in individual differences began to address optimism as a characteristic people possess to varying degrees. These two approaches are compatible. Our human nature provides a baseline optimism, of which individuals show more versus less: "In dealing with natural systems the shortest analytical distance between two points is a normal curve" (Tiger, 1979, p. 162). Our experiences influence the degree to which we are optimistic or pessimistic. There are numerous treatments of optimism as an individual difference. A definitive history of their antecedents is beyond the scope of this article (see Peterson & Park, 1998, for a more thorough discussion), but certainly we should acknowledge several intellectual precursors, starting with Alfred Adler's (1910/1964, 1927) fictional finalism, based on Vaihinger's (1911) "as-if' philosophy. Kurt Lewin's (1935, 1951) field theory and George Kelly's (1955) personal construct theory provided influential frameworks for understanding how beliefs--optimistic, pessimistic, o1 somewhere in between--channeled people's behavior. Julian Rotter's (1954, 1966) social learning theory and especially his generalized expectations (locus of control and trust) legitimized an approach to personality in terms of broad expectancies about the future. Also important in leading to psychology's interest in optimism as an individual difference was the waning of traditional stimulus-response (S-R) approaches to learning and their replacement with cognitive accounts emphasizing expectancies (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). According to S-R accounts, learning entails the acquisition of particular motor responses in particular situations. Learning by this view entails the forging of associations between stimuli and responses, and the more closely these are linked 46 January 2000 • American Psychologist

together in experience (contiguity), the more likely learning is to occur. Under the sway of behaviorism, learning was thought to have no central (cognitive) representation. Used in arguments against S-R views of learning were findings that the associations acquired in conditioning are strengthened not by contiguity per se but by contingency: the degree to which stimuli provide new information about responses (Rescorla, 1968). S-R theory stresses only temporal contiguity between the response and the reinforcer, viewing the individual as trapped by the momentary cooccurrences of events. If a response is followed by a reinforcer, it is strengthened even if there is no real (causal) relationship between them. In contrast, the contingency view of learning proposes that individuals are able to detect cause-effect relationships, separating momentary noncausal relationships from more enduring true ones (Wasserman & Miller, 1997). So, learning at its essence entails the discovery of "what leads to what" (Tolman, 1932). Because learning of this sort necessarily extends over time, it is sensible to view it in central (cognitive) terms. Although there is disagreement about the fine detail of these central representations, it is clear that contingency learning is a critically important psychological process linked to subsequent motivation, cognition, and emotion. Most theorists in this tradition have opted to regard the representation of contingency learning as an expectation to explain how it is generalized across situations and projected across time. As explained later, most approaches to optimism as an individual difference adopt this approach, in which optimism is regarded as a generalized expectation that influences any and all psychological processes in which learning is involved. I briefly survey several of the currently popular approaches to optimism as an individual difference. It is no coincidence that each has an associated self-report questionnaire measure that lends itself to efficient research. The correlates of these cognates of optimism have therefore been extensively investigated. Research is uniform in showing that optimism, however it is measured, is linked to desirable characteristics: happiness, perseverance, achievement, and health. Most studies have been cross-sectional, but the demonstrated correlates are usually interpreted as consequences of optimism. Relatively little attention has been paid to the origins of this individual difference and in particular to the distinct possibility that its putative outcomes are alternatively or additionally its determinants. Relatively little attention has been paid to the larger web of belief in which optimism resides (Quine & Ullian, 1978). Further, relatively little attention has been paid to why optimism has such a wide array of correlates. Indeed, optimism is what I call a Velcro construct, to which everything sticks for reasons that are not always obvious. Dispositional optimism. Michael Scheier and Charles Carver (1992) have studied a personality variable ~they identify as dispositional optimism: the global expectation that good things will be plentiful in the future and bad things, scarce. Scheier and Carver's overriding perspective is in terms of how people pursue goals, defined as desirable values. To them, virtually all realms of human activity can be cast in goal terms, and people's behavior entails the identification and adoption of goals and the regulation of actions vis-h-vis these goals. Therefore, they refer 1:o their approach as a self-regulatory model (Carver & Scheier, 1981). Optimism enters into self-regulation when people ask themselves about impediments to achieving the goals they have adopted. In the face of difficulties, do people nonetheless believe that goals can be achieved? If so, they are optimistic: if not, they are pessimistic. Optimism leads to continued efforts to attain the goal, whereas pessimism leads to giving up. Scheier and Carver (1985) measured optimism (vs. pessimism) with a brief self-report questionnaire called the Life Orientation Test (LOT). Representative items from this test, with which respondents agree or disagree, include the following: ]1. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best. 2. If something can go wrong for me it will. [reversescored] Positive expectations are usually combined with (reversescored) negative expectations, and the resulting measure is investigated with respect to health, happiness, and coping with adversity (e.g., Carver et al., 1993; Scheier & Carver, 1987; Scheier et al., 1989; Strack, Carver, & Blaney, 1987). Results show that dispositional optimism is linked to desirable outcomes and in particular to active and effective coping (Scheier, Weintraub, & Carver, 1986). Explanatory style, Martin E. P. Seligman and his colleagues have approached optimism in terms of an individual's characteristic explanatory style: how he or she explains the causes of bad events (Buchanan & Seligman, 1995). Those who explain bad events in a circumscribed way, with external, unstable, and specific causes, are described as optimistic, whereas those who favor internal, stable',, and global causes are described as pessimistic. The notion of explanatory style emerged from the attributional reformulation of the learned helplessness model (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). Briefly, the original learned helplessness model proposed that after experiencing uncontrollable aversive events, animals and people become helpless--passive and unresponsive--presumably because they have "learned" that there is no contingency between actions and outcomes (Maier & Seligman, 1976). This learning is represented as a generalized expectancy that future outcomes will be unrelated to actions. It is this generalized expectation of response-outcome independence that produces later helplessness. Explanatory style was added to the helplessness model to better account for the boundary conditions of human helplessness following uncontrollability. When is helplessness general, and when is it circumscribed? People who encounter a bad event ask "why?" Their causal attribution determines how they respond to the event. If it is a stable (long-lasting) cause, helplessness is thought to be chronic. If it i:~ a pervasive (global) cause, helplessness is thought to be widespread. If it is an internal cause, self-esteem is thought to suffer. January 2000 • American Psychologist 47

All things being equal, people have a habitual way of explaining bad events--an explanatory style--and this explanatory style is posited to be a distal influence on helplessness following adversity (Peterson & Seligman, 1984). Explanatory style is typically measured with a self-report questionnaire called the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), which presents respondents with hypothetical events involving themselves and asks them to provide "the one major cause" of each event if it were to happen to them (Peterson, Semmel, von Baeyer, Abramson, Metalsky, & Seligman, 1982). The respondents then rate these provided causes along dimensions of internality, stability, and globality. Ratings are combined, although bad-event ratings and good-event ratings are kept separate. Explanatory style based on bad events is usually independent of explanatory style for good events. Explanatory style based on bad events usually has more robust correlates than explanatory style based on good events, although correlations are typically in the opposite directions (Peterson, 1991). A second way of measuring explanatory style is with a content analysis procedure--the Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE)--that allows written or spoken material to be scored for naturally occurring causal explanations (Peterson, Schulman, Castellon, & Seligman, 1992). Researchers identify explanations for bad events, "extract" them, and present them to judges who rate them along the scales of the ASQ. The CAVE technique makes possible after-the-fact longitudinal studies, so long as spoken or written material can be located from early in the lives of the individuals for whom long-term outcomes of interest are known. Remember that the generalized expectation of response-outcome independence is hypothesized as being the proximal cause of helplessness, even though research in this tradition has rarely looked at this mediating variable. Rather, researchers measure explanatory style and correlate it with outcomes thought to revolve around helplessness: depression, illness, and failure in academic, athletic, and vocational realms. Invariably, an optimistic explanatory style is associated with good outcomes (Peterson & Park, 1998). As explanatory style research has progressed and theory has been modified, the internality dimension has become of less interest. It has more inconsistent correlates than do stability or globality, it is less reliably assessed, and there are theoretical grounds for doubting that it has a direct impact on expectations per se (Peterson, 1991). Indeed, internality may well conflate self-blame and self-efficacy, which would explain why it fares poorly in empirical research. In a modification of the helplessness reformulation, Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy (1989) emphasized only stability and globality. The most important recent chapter in helplessness research was the reframing of explanatory style by Seligman (1991) in his book Learned Optimism, in which he described how his lifelong interest in what can go wrong with people changed into an interest in what can go right (cf. Seligman, 1975). Research on helplessness was transformed into an interest in what Seligman called optimism, although he could have called it mastery, effectance, or control. His terminology is justified by the central concern in helplessness theory with expectations, but it is worth emphasizing yet again that these expectations tend not to be explicitly studied. Peterson, Maier, and Seligman (1993) asserted that everything learned about helplessness (pessimism) informs what we know about optimism, but this statement is glib. Optimism is not simply the absence of pessimism, and well-being is not simply the absence of helplessness. Research on learned optimism (i.e., optimistic explanatory style) will not be as substantial as it might be if it remains focused on the constructs of original interest to helplessness theory. I return to this point later in this article. On one level, the Scheier and Carver approach is congruent with the Seligman approach. LOT correlates and ASQ/CAVE correlates are strikingly similar, and measures of the two constructs tend to converge when they are-- rarely--examined together in the same study. However, a closer look reveals some critical differences. The LOT is a pure measure of expectation, very close to the dictionary definitions of optimism and pessimism. An optimistic expectation leads to the belief that goals can be achieved, although it is neutral with respect to how this will happen. In contrast, the ASQ measure reflects causality, so it is additionally influenced by people's beliefs about how goals are brought about. Said another way, optimistic explanatory style is more infused with agency than is dispositional optimism. Hope, These two visions of optimism--expectation and agency--are integrated in a third approach, C. Rick Snyder's (1994) ongoing studies of hope. Snyder traced the origins of his thinking to earlier work by Averill, Catlin, and Chon (1990) and Stotland (1969), in which hope was cast in terms of people's expectations that goals could be achieved. According to Snyder's view, goaldirected expectations are composed of two separable components. The first is agency, and it reflects someone's determination that goals can be achieved. The second is identified as pathways: the individual's beliefs that successful plans can be generated to reach goals. The second component is Snyder's novel contribution, not found in other formulations of optimism as an individual difference. Hope so defined is measured with a brief self-report scale (Snyder et al., 1996). Representative items, with which respondents agree or disagree, include the following: I. I energetically pursue my goals. [agency] 2. There are lots of ways around any problem. [pathways] Responses to items are combined by averaging. Scores have been examined with respect to goal expectancies, perceived control, self-esteem, positive emotions, coping, and achievement, with results as expected (e.g., Curry, Snyder, Cook, Ruby, & Rehm, 1997; Irving, Snyder, & Crowson, 1998). Issues in Optimism Let me turn to the future of optimism and focus on issues that deserve attention, by both psychologists and citizens in 48 January 2000 • American Psychologist

general. I also draw out some of the implications of these issues for how we might conduct positive social science. To set the stage for this discussion, I introduce a distinction between two types of optimism (Tiger, 1979). Little Optimism Versus Big Optimism Little optimism subsumes specific expectations about positive outcomes: for example, "I will find a convenient parking space this evening." Big optimism refers to-- obviously-larger and less specific expectations: for example, "Our nation is on the verge of something great." The big-versus-little optimism distinction reminds us that optimism can be described at different levels of abstraction and, further, that optimism may function differently depending on the level. Big optimism may be a biologically given tendency filled in by culture with a socially acceptable content; it leads to desirable outcomes because it produces a general state of vigor and resilience. In contrast, little optimism may be the product of an idiosyncratic learning history; it leads to desirable outcomes because it predisposes specific actions that are adaptive in concrete situations. Said another way, the mechanisms linking optimism to outcomes may vary according to the type of optimism in focus. For example, one of the striking correlates of optimism is good health (e.g., Peterson, 1988; Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988; Scheier & Carver, 1987, 1992). This link seems to reflect several different pathways, including immunological robustness (Kamen-Siegel, Rodin, Seligman, & Dwyer, 1991; Scheier et al., 1999; Segerstrom, Taylor, Kemeny, & Fahey, 1998: Udelman, 1982), absence of negative mood (Weisse, 1992), and healthpromoting behavior (Peterson, Seligman, Yurko, Martin, & Friedman, 1998). The big-versus-little optimism distinction may help us understand which pathways are involved in given instances of well-being (Peterson & Bossio, 1991). The trajectory of a severe illness such as AIDS or cancer may be better predicted by big optimism working through the immune system and mood, whereas the onset of disease and the likelihood of traumatic injuries may be more influenced by little optimism working through behavior and concrete lifestyle choices (Peterson, Moon, et al., 1998). What exactly is the relationship between little and big optimism? Empirically, the two are no doubt correlated, but it is possible to imagine someone who is a little optimist but a big pessimist, or vice versa. It is also possible to imagine situations in which big optimism has desirable consequences but little optimism does not, or vice versa. The determinants of the two may be different, and ways of encouraging them may therefore require different strategies. Researchers need to approach the big-versus-little optimism distinction more deliberately. On the face of it, the dispositional optimism measure of Scheier and Carver (1985) and the hope measure of Snyder et al. (1996) tap big optimism because they ask people to respond to generalizations about the future. In contrast, measures of explanatory style--especially the CAVE technique--seem to get at a smaller optimism because the focus is on specific causal explanations for concrete events. Studies to date have rarely included more than one optimism measure at a time, and those that do are conducted by researchers more interested in how measures converge than with the possibility that they have different patterns of correlates. The big-versus-little optimism distinction may provide a way of thinking about such differences if they indeed emerge. Again, What Is Optimism? In addition to the big-versus-little optimism distinction, there are some other definitional issues that need to be addressed by psychologists. Let me repeat that optimism is not just a cognitive characteristic: It has inherent emotional and motivational components (cf. Carver & Scheier, 1990). Researchers often seem to regard emotion and motivation as outcomes that are separate from optimism per se. At least in the case of big optimism, this assumption may not be warranted. We ask different questions if we see emotion and motivation as part of big optimism. How does optimism feel? Is it happiness, joy, hypomania, or simply contentment? Is the optimistic person experiencing flow: actively engaging in what he or she is doing while not self-consciously mindful (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)? Fredrickson (1998) argued that positive emotions, neglected by psychologists relative to negative emotions, broaden the person's cognitive and behavioral repertoire. Is this true as well for big optimism? We know that optimism is linked to perseverance, but is it associated as well with a good choice of goals, those that lend themselves to pursuit and eventual attainmenl? As R. M. Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, and Deci (1996) discussed, not all goals are of equal merit for individuals, given their particular psychological makeup and context. Is optimism therefore associated with the choice of goals that facilitate authenticity in this sense? Carver, Reynolds, and Scheier (1994) have begun to investigate these sorts of questions by ascertaining the possible selves of optimists and pessimists. There are probably activities that satisfy a person's need to be optimistic hut are ultimately pointless, the psychological equivalent of junk food. Are video games, the World Wide Web, mystery novels, gambling, and collections of thimbles or matchbooks (or journal article reprints we never read) analogous to empty calories, activities whose pursuit consumes time and energy because they engage optimism but eventually leave us with nothing to show, individually or collectively? Optimism and Pessimism Another definitional issue has to do with the relationship between optimism and pessimism. They are usually regarded as mutually exclusive, but surprisingly there is evidence that they are not. For example, the optimism and pessimism items in Scheier and Carver's (1985) LOT prove somewhal independent of one another. This lack of correlation can be regarded as a methodological nuisance, but it is worth considering the possibility that some people expect both good things and bad things to be plentiful. Such individuals could be described as having hedonically rich January 2000 • American Psychologist 49

expectations as opposed to misbehaving on a questionnaire. Are they living life fully, or are they ambivalent and confused? Distinguishing between optimism and pessimism allows an intriguing question to be investigated: Are there effects of optimism above and beyond those of the absence of pessimism (Robinson-Whelen, Kim, MacCallum, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1997)? Along these lines, as already noted, explanatory style derived from attributions about bad events is usually independent of explanatory style based on attributions about good events. The former is usually identified as "the" optimistic explanatory style, in part because the correlates are stronger, but a step back reveals this treatment is curious. Attributions about bad events (presumably linked to expectations about such events) are identified as optimistic or pessimistic, whereas attributions about good events are not. One would think it should be just the opposite, a point made by Snyder (1995) when he described explanatory style as a strategy of excuse making. This criticism is blunted--but only somewhat--when internality-externality is removed from the meaning of the construct. The concern of helplessness theorists with attributions about bad events is explained by the outcomes of historical interest: depression, failure, and illness. Optimism is correlated with their absence, and pessimism, with their presence. Explanatory style research has led to increased understanding of these problematic states. However, one must appreciate that the zero point of these typical outcome .measures signifies, respectively, not being depressed, not failing, and not being ill. If we want to extend findings past these zero points to offer conclusions about emotional fulfillment, achievement, and wellness, we may or may not be on firm ground. Perhaps explanatory style based on attributions about good events would then be more relevant. In any event, researchers of positive social science need to study not just independent variables that pertain to strength but also appropriate dependent variables. Psychological well-being cannot be simply the absence of distress and conflict, any more than physical health is the absence of disease. Discussions of what wellbeing entails are ongoing in various research and theoretical literatures (e.g., Barsky, 1988; Seeman, 1989), but these have not yet been incorporated into the lines of inquiry concerned with optimism. I recommend that this incorporation take place, and I speculate that big optimism might be a more potent influence on well-being than is little optimism. In the typical demonstration of learned helplessness, animals or people exposed to aversive events they cannot control show deficits in problem solving relative to research participants exposed to aversive events they can control as well as participants given no prior experience with aversive events; these latter two groups do not differ from one another (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). Prior experience with controllable events confers no apparent benefit. Perhaps this is because the baseline assumption is that control exists, or, to say it another way, individuals are optimistic unless there is a reason not to be. If the test tasks are changed, however, prior experience with controllable events does have a demonstrable effect: enhanced persistence at a difficult or unsolvable task. Theorists have discussed this opposite manifestation of learned helplessness under such rubrics as learned hopefulness, learned industriousness, learned mastery, learned relevance, and learned resourcefulness (e.g., Eisenberger, 1992; Mackintosh, 1975; Rosenbaum & Jaffe, 1983; Volpicelli, Ulm, Altenor, & Seligman, 1983; Zimmerman, 1990). Outcome measures have to allow the benefit to be manifest. In choosing appropriate measures, it would be instructive for optimism researchers to turn to the literature on resilience (Anthony & Cohler, 1987). Here we see an interest in children growing up in dire circumstances who not only survive but thrive. Their resilience is only evident if we choose measures that reflect thriving. Resilience depends critically on a supportive relationship with another person. Could the same be true of optimism in the face of adversity? Much of the optimism literature is curiously asocial. Researchers do not even distinguish between private versus public (socially communicated) optimism, which would seem to be an important distinction. Emphasis is quite individualistic, but optimism may be as much an interpersonal characteristic as an individual one. l The Reality Basis of Optimism One more important issue is the relationship of optimism to reality. Optimism can have costs if it is too unrealistic. Consider unrealistic optimism as described by Weinstein (1989) with respect to people's perception of personal risk for illnesses and mishaps. When people are asked to provide a percentage estimate of the likelihood, in comparison with peers, that they will someday experience an illness or injury, most underestimate their risks. The average individual sees himself or herself as below average in risk for a variety of maladies, which of course cannot be. This phenomenon is appropriately lamented because it may lead people to neglect the basics of health promotion and maintenance. More generally, optimism in the form of wishful thinking can distract people from making concrete plans about how to attain goals (Oettingen, 1996). Unrelenting optimism precludes the caution, sobriety, and conserwttion of resources that accompany sadness as a normal and presumably adaptive response to disappointment and setback (Nesse & Williams, 1996). For another example, consider the personality variable of John Henryism (James, Hartnett, & Kalsbeek, 1983; James, LaCroix, Kleinbaum, & Strogatz, 1984). Inspired by the railroad worker of folklore, who won a contest against a steam hammer but died thereafter of a heart Consider the helping alliance in psychotherapy, which many theorists agree is a necessary condition for any form of treatment to succeed (Frank, 1978). One way to look at the helping alliance is in terms of shared expectations for treatment and its outcome. To the degree that both parties believe therapy will be helpful, it is likely to continue to and indeed be helpful (Priebe & Gruyters, 1993; Tryon & Kane, 1990). In other words, the helping alliance revolves around a dyad-level optimism. 50 January 2000 • American Psychologist