Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Okay, what about beauty? Physical attractiveness has been shown to have a host of benefits for individuals, from an increased number of friends to larger raises in the workplace. Perhaps it was the beautiful Mills grads who had the warm smiles, and thus, perhaps it was beauty, and not the warmth captured in the D smile, that produced the results that we observed. Perhaps the long-term benefits of the warm smile in this study simply reduced to being outwardly beautiful. As it turns out, beauty is remarkably easy to judge from photos. We had a group of undergraduates rate the beauty of the 110 Mills alumnae in our study. More beautiful Mills grads did indeed feel more connected to others, less anxiety, and greater well-being. Importantly, the warmth of a woman’s smile still predicted less anxiety, increased warmth toward others, greater competence, and healthier marriages and increased personal happiness when we controlled for how beautiful the participants were. Warmth and kindness differ from physical beauty.

SMILES AND THE ORIGINS OF HAPPINESS

 

Sometimes the simplest questions are disarmingly hard to answer. A graduate advisor of mine once stopped me in my tracks with this one: “So you’re studying emotion…answer this one. Why do orgasms feel good?” I mumbled something about the opioids, and dopamine, and oxytocin, and then collapsed into a state of blushing, bumbling confusion. He was asking about the origins of happiness and pleasure—where they come from, and what their basic elements are—and my answer wasn’t much of an answer. Electrochemical signals in the brain and body cannot provide a satisfying answer about the nature of experience or, in this case, what the roots of pleasure and happiness might be. What are the deeper evolutionary contexts that led to the centrality of the smile in our social life? Where does happiness come from?

Darwin’s genius was to describe the patterns of behavior we see today—patterns of affection, submissiveness, laughter, and smiling—and to trace those fleeting but precise, efficient, designed behaviors back in evolutionary time to their deeper roots, to the survival and reproduction-related contexts in which they arose. This kind of evolutionary analysis has revealed that the earliest primate smile is a submissive display subordinates use when nearing dominant primates, and fearing a jugular-threatening attack or the forceful backhand of a hairy arm. If this was the end of our search for the origins of the smile, we would be confronting the following conclusion: that the smile has its origins in the attempt to short-circuit threat, that the smile emerges out of a tremulous anxiety about being destroyed, that it is based in the most powerful strategy weaker individuals can resort to—submissiveness. Happiness, by implication, is simply the by-product of our attempts to navigate threats to our existence.

Let’s call this thesis the Woody Allen hypothesis, thanks to his characterization of the intertwinement of suffering, happiness, and love so central to his brilliant movies, captured in the quote below:

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

 

Of course, Woody Allen works this thesis to hilarious effect in his comedy. I’ll line up with his most impassioned fans to see his latest comedy the first night of release to laugh at the absurdity of human happiness, love, and neurotic suffering. The Woody Allen hypothesis might seem solely the provenance of his comedic imagination, but in actuality this hypothesis—that anxiety and dread lie at the core of human happiness—is a long-standing assumption in the West about the elemental ingredients, the basic molecules, of happiness. This view holds that at the core of our experience of positive emotions are threat and anxiety; our positive emotions are layered on top of, emerge out of, are antidotes to, negative emotions like despair, fear, and anger.

For example, Silvan Tomkins, who helped forge the scientific study of emotion in the early 1960s, argued that positive emotions evident in smiles and laughs emerge with the cessation of negative states, such as anger and fear. As one example, laughter and our sense of amusement emerge out of the termination of anger. Someone angers you, your heart rate rises and your muscles tense, you’re ready to throw a punch, and then in an instant, it’s over, and you are suffused with a feeling of levity and amusement, the antimatter of anger.