Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Just ask the parents of children with Williams Syndrome: see www.williams-syndrome.org.

This questioning found galvanizing expression: It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Robert Frank’s superb book on thinking about emotion, morality, and cooperation. In elegant and provocative arguments, Frank has made the case for the wisdom of the moral emotions, emotions like gratitude and love, and how these emotions are a bedrock of cooperative communities. Robert H. Frank, Passions Within Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt found that 71 percent of the allocators offered the responder between 40 and 50 percent of the money: Fehr and Schmidt, “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999): 817–68.

Does material gain make us happy?: These findings as well as many others that speak to the rise of materialism in contemporary U.S. culture are summarized in David Myers, The American Paradox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

Look at the table below, adapted from: Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

Does money make us happy?: D. G. Myers, “The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 56–67.

what makes us happy is the quality of our romantic bonds, the health of our families, the time we spend with good friends, the connections we feel to communities: For superb summaries of the many benefits of healthy relationships, as well as the costs of impoverished relationships and isolation, see R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995): 497–529; M. Argyle, “Causes and Correlates of Happiness,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Edward Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), 353–73; Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

there are more words in the English language that represent negative than positive emotions: James A. Russell, “Culture and Categorization of Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 426–50.

These empirical facts led many in the field to the view that positive emotions are in reality by-products of negative states: Sylvan S. Tomkins, “Affect Theory,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984), 163–95.

My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999).

DARWIN’S JOYS

 

Darwin’s: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1872/1998).

Perhaps most important to Darwin, the book met with modest smiles of approval from his wife, Emma: Janet Browne’s brilliant two-volume biography of Darwin reveals the at times ambivalent stance Emma Darwin took with regard to her husband’s revolutionary scholarship. Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

anatomist Sir Charles Bell: Browne, Power of Place, 364.

One of the clearest signs of dominance: For some of the most systematic work on power and nonverbal display, consult the work of John Dovidio. Dovidio et al., “The Relationship of Social Power to Visual Displays of Dominance between Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 233–42. Judith Hall and her colleagues have also provided a definitive review of the different behaviors that accompany displays of power. J. A. Hall, E. J. Coats, and L. S. LeBeau, “Nonverbal Behavior and the Vertical Dimension of Social Relations: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 898–924.

One prevailing metaphor of emotion: George Lakoff has done superb work on the different metaphors of emotion. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Zoltán Kövesces, Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).