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I was recently asked to give a brief talk at the Fall 2010 University of Michigan Psi Chi induction. Psi Chi is the national honorary for undergraduate psychology students. Here is a cleaned-up version of what I said.
"I am happy to join you today to mark this well-deserved recognition of our students, our friends, and our family members. The older I get, the more I see the value in such formal recognitions.
Today's new members join a group that has been in existence for more than 80 years. Psi Chi was founded in 1929 at the University of Kansas. According to my research, the organization was originally called Sigma Pi Sigma, but - oops - the name was already taken by a physics honorary. So, in 1930, the change was made to Psi Chi, probably a better name anyway because it sounds like the word 'psychology.'
The original membership fee was $1, which stayed unchanged from 1929 to 1945. That's why we call them the good old days. There are nowadays 500,000+ members - all for life - in 1050 chapters in the US and Canada. According to Wikipedia, among Psi Chi's members are Dr. Phil and Hugh Hefner!
Nowadays, the average annual inductee class is 20,000, which sounds like a lot of members, but appreciate that each year 1,000,000 students take introductory psychology in colleges and universities in the US and Canada.
In previous years, I have spoken at other Psi Chi inductions, and every time I have had the honor, I drew on the work that I was doing as a psychologist at the time to offer up some food for thought. Looking back, I have trouble understanding why I was ever invited back, because I have spent the bulk of my career as a researcher studying depression, demoralization, distress, and disease - oh my.
Things changed in 2000, though, when I was asked to join a research team embarked on something different, an approach we call positive psychology that calls upon the field to study those things that make life most worth living. The typical concerns of psychology with healing wounds are laudable and will remain as long as there are wounds to heal, but there is so much more to life than mitigating problems and easing someone out of a diagnostic category. Unfortunately, psychology has often had little to say about the rest of life, and positive psychology tries to redress this balance by studying happiness and fulfillment, positive emotions, the state of flow, strengths of character, talents, passions and callings, and the various institutions - friends, families, schools, workplaces, religions - that enable flourishing
For our purposes today, I would like to draw on work within positive psychology on happiness. Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman has made an important distinction between two types of happiness: (i) happiness as we experience it on a moment-to-moment basis; and (ii) happiness as we remember it after-the-fact.
Experienced happiness and remembered happiness are of course related - they correlate about .50 - but they are not identical. Kahneman uses the example of someone who attended a wonderful concert. At the very end of the concert, the musician misplayed a note - terribly. Kahneman recounts the reaction of someone in attendance. 'It ruined the entire experience.' In point of fact, the experience had already happened, and it had been wonderful. What had been ruined was the memory of the experience.
Much of the happiness research in positive psychology relies on life satisfaction surveys and as a result studied remembered happiness. Kahneman himself seems to privilege experienced happiness, wondering how well research on remembered happiness applies to experienced happiness. There are of course asymmetries. Consider raising children. On a moment-to-moment basis, raising children is not fun - stinky diapers, tantrums, arguments about curfews, punishingly high tuition fees, and so on. But when we think back on raising our children, we say that it was the best and most enjoyable thing we have ever done Are we hypocrites? Not at all. It's just that experienced happiness and remembered happiness do not always line up.
As I see it, both experienced happiness and remembered happiness matter. And remember that they are somewhat related, not independent. We live in the here-and-now but also in the past (as we recall it) and the future (as we anticipate it). Indeed, we base most of our important life decisions on remembered happiness and out expectation (hope) that the future will repeat the past ... as we remember it.
So how can we maximize both types of happiness? Kahneman's own peak-end theory of remembered happiness is a good starting point. According to this theory, what we remember most about hedonic experiences are their high (or low) points and how they end. Within limits, we are rather indifferent to the duration of a hedonic experience.
Duration, of course, is what matters in experienced happiness, and the more densely packed our experiences are with happy moments (peaks), the happier we are in the moment.
In planning anything, whether an afternoon like this one, a college career, or an entire life, we want it to be happy in the moment and to be happy in memory
We need to chunk the episodes of our life (break them into units so we can think about them), have highlights in each chunk, and have each end well. Said another way, we want our chunks to be chocked with good moments, and we should savor them. The more we savor them, the more happiness they produce in the moment and after-the-fact in our memories. That's how to have it both ways.
Positive psychologists have studied savoring, and it is clear that there are effective strategies. So, Fred Bryant and Joe Veroff have written about savoring and how to promote it. They articulate five techniques for savoring:
• Sharing with others the experience and its aftermath - by far the most important technique, and something we all know - if we are fortunate, we have someone in our life who takes pleasure in our pleasures
• Memory-building in the form of mental photographs or physical souvenirs
• Self-congratulation - there is nothing shameful or immodest about private pride
• Sharpening perceptions - interestingly, I think we may be able to savor good things if we do not stack them up - e.g., one birthday present is better than ten, and honeymoons as typically orchestrated-one amazing experience after another - are downright bizarre
• Absorption - for just that moment, live in the moment - don't think about what you are not doing or what you need to do next
Congratulations, now and in the future. Today is certainly a peak, and it is only an end of this chapter in your life."
