aesthetics of joy

Mark your calendar or set your DVR for January 4th, which is the premiere of an interesting new series from PBS called This Emotional Life. Happiness will be a significant focus of the series, and the interviewees are a fascinating and diverse group: Katie Couric, Richard Gere, Larry David, Chevy Chase, and a slew of scientists and everyday people. The series is hosted by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor and author of the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness.

I’m not sure there will be much perspective on the relevance of design to our emotional lives, but there rarely is in these sorts of discussions. They usually focus on a person’s relationship with the self or with others, and almost never focus on the relationships between people, spaces, and things, unless those relationships are negative: materialism, shopaholism, hoarding…. (Of course, I don’t think the focus on people is wrong — things are no substitute for people in the joy equation, and money can’t buy happiness. I only point out that the connection between objects and emotions in a positive way is rarely a focus in the pop science arena.)

But I’ll be watching because I think the topics covered will provide copious opportunities for thinking about emotion and design. Jessica Zucker’s info-packed post on skin and the sense of touch on the series’s website is  a great example of the kind of thinking that gets my mind buzzing with ideas for how to design in a more emotionally positive way.

Watch the trailer here.

In this week’s New York magazine, Justin Davidson has a review of the new Eero Saarinen show at the Museum of the City of New York (a wonderful place, so if you’ve never had the opportunity to visit, this might be a good chance). The title of Davidson’s review is “Joy Constructed,” so of course this caught my eye and started me thinking that perhaps Saarinen might represent a counterpoint to the hard-edged, rationalist, emotionally-muted modernism represented by the Bauhaus and the International Style — a truly joyful modernist.

Looking at the swooping railings, ceilings, staircases, and arches in the spread above (from New York magazine), I can’t help but feel uplifted. But why? I’ve previously suggested that curves and round forms have a primal appeal because they are connected with safety. As children we are naturally drawn to objects with non-threatening surfaces, and the more broad and neutral the curve, the more safe and approachable an object is. (No one’s going to cut themselves on a beach ball.)

As it turns out, there’s science to support this idea. In a 2007 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia, researchers demonstrated that angular objects and shapes are perceived as significantly more threatening by the emotional brain. Showing curved and angular variants of the same object (a watch, a pitcher, a candle) and abstract patterns to a group of volunteers resulted in markedly different activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in threat and fear reactions and responds far more quickly than the conscious brain. Angular objects create much more activity in this part of the brain than curved objects. This makes sense in the context of survival within a primitive world — sharp angles are rare in nature, and usually do signal danger, or at least something we should be alert to: teeth, claws, cliff edges, and so on.

Human nature is a funny thing. You can build upon it, channel it, develop it to its greatest potential, but you can’t fight it. I look at the rigid rectilinear solids of modernist construction and I think of them as an attempt to put human nature in a box. To suppress these innate responses. But the unconscious elements within us react whether or not we want them to — they are uncontainable. In thinking of Saarinen, along with Zeisel and Aalto and other modernists who embraced the curve, I see a modernism that runs along the contours of our natural inclinations, an aesthetic that is conducive to joy.

Joy isn’t rational, and it seems fitting that Saarinen would say of his water tower design for GM (below) that it “is a departure from the completely rational.” It’s an unexpected admission for a modernist, and yet a fitting one for a designer who, in Davidson’s words, was spurred on by,  “the dogged pursuit of joy.”

This has been in the works for a few weeks now, but I’m excited to announce that I’m starting a new blog on Psychology Today magazine’s website called Design and the Mind. This new blog will build on the research I’ve been doing for AoJ, looking at how everyday objects affect our emotions, thoughts, and behavior in unconscious ways. Though I’m always focused on how design can make our lives happier and better, on the PT blog you may find explorations into how design invokes other emotions besides joy — exhilaration, frustration, fear, elation, and everything in between.

I’m really excited about this new platform for sharing ideas about design and emotion. The first post, A Happiness Hat, is up on the site now. The piece looks at a conceptual design for a hat (by Lauren McCarthy, pictured above) that makes you smile (or else!) and the very real yet very mysterious psychological principles that underpin the idea. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts about the blog, and what you’d like to see in that new space.

Don’t worry though — I’m not going anywhere. This new project doesn’t change the fact that I’ll be sharing thoughts here on AoJ every day, just as I always do. Thanks for reading, and sharing the joy!

xx Ingrid

Whoa whoa whoa!

That was my friend Peter’s reaction to evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson’s NYT blog post this week, which discussed the connection between making certain sounds (such as “eeee”) and positive emotion, via what’s called the facial feedback hypothesis. Judson explains the link and then goes on to wonder: Do certain languages with “smiling sounds” make their speakers feel happier than others? Are some languages, by a curious accident of circumstances, languages of happiness?

Peter’s reaction was mine as well, because we had just had this exact conversation a few weeks ago. I was expressing my frustration in being unable to find a linguist who could illuminate the connection between language and the facial feedback hypothesis. I had done this post on words that make you joyful early on in the blog’s history, and drawing on Eric Weiner’s “Mol-do-va” (dour) vs. “Ja-mai-ca” (euphoric) comparison I was sure there had to be research on the subject. Peter then told me he had formulated this hypothesis 35 years ago, and had long believed in the power of onomatopoeic words like “glee” to boost your mood.

According to Judson, no research has really been done to confirm or refute these suppositions. But, going on what we do know we can deduce a premise that intuitively feels plausible. If induced smiles have been shown to impact mood (as they have in several studies, most notably this one), and certain sounds induce smiles, then it seems likely that these sounds could influence mood, and by extension, so could the languages that make frequent use of them.

If, through research, we discover this is true, then it adds in an exciting way to the pool of sounds that can be considered intrinsic aesthetics of joy. We already accept the emotional content of musical sounds — that a bright, brassy note from a trumpet is joyous while a drawn-out note on a cello is baleful and contemplative. And certain voices affect us similarly — the high pitch of a child’s voice triggering a different emotional response than the husky bass of an old man. With linguistic sounds, the question is slightly different because it is not about the sound itself, but the motions required to produce the sound — the accident of nature that conflated smiling and speaking functions into the same muscles.

This leads to another interesting question: do you have to actually make the “eeee” sound, or is just hearing it or seeing it pronounced enough? For true facial feedback, you’d actually need to perform the gesture. But I wonder if seeing the action might trigger another brain mechanism — mirror neurons — that might augment the effect of a “happiness language” through social interaction. Mirror neurons are a relatively recent (and extremely exciting) discovery in neuroscience. They fire not just when we perform an action, but also when we see or hear the action being performed by another. Supposedly, these neurons help us learn something new through imitation, whether its a language, an instrument, or another skill. If this is true, then perhaps just sitting across the table from a person making “eeee” sounds over brunch could give your mood a boost, and a “happiness language” could have a contagious quality, infecting people with positivity even during mundane interactions.

What does this have to do with design? Perhaps we could design a language for happiness. I’m not talking about the next Esperanto, but what about a new slang that replaces a few of the most frequently used words with eeee-heavy alternatives? We could adopt the Spanish “sí” for yes, but draw out the vowel so it becomes “seee” and choose another eeee word for no. Start pronouncing “the” as “thee,” as in “theeee end.” Push, pull, stop, go, walk, don’t walk — the verbs of urban living might all have smiling correlates.

What else could design do with smiling sounds? Redesign positive affirmations to use smile-inducing words, so that the act of speaking them reinforces the message. Change the yoga chant from “om” to “eeem.” Use smiling sounds in the naming of new products so that saying the name intrinsically creates a positive connection. Create linguistic-based facial exercises for sufferers of depression. Incorporate verbal keywords into the computing experience, all based around smiling sounds, so that instead of feeling frustration at our computers, we feel…a little less frustration. Design verbally activated switches for the home that react to “eeee” sounds — a happier “Clapper.” These are just top-of-mind thoughts, but the possibilities are intriguing. They may sound silly, but that could just be the point. At least, if you pronounce it “silleeee.”

NYT: A Language of Smiles
Image: Ferdinand Reus, CC

A few weeks ago we learned that sociologists have created a happiness index using Twitter, and last week we received news that a Facebook app has been developed that serves as a sort of emotional barometer for the socially-networked world.

Emotion aggregation is an interesting evolution from the kind of topic-driven analysis we saw when people first realized they could use the internet to compile sentiment. Google, master of the search, has been publishing a “zeitgeist” of current trends in search. But less than a “spirit of the times” it represents more a mentality of the times — revealing what people are thinking about and pondering in a given period, rather than what we are feeling.

The first (and most engaging) project that I know of to turn this lens on emotion is We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, which explores people’s emotions through blog posts and other web ephemera. The site allows you to view a wide range of emotions and filter them through criteria like geography, weather, age, and gender. (These images were the result of searching for joy under the program’s “Montage” movement, which overlays people’s joyful images with their feelings.)

This is a much richer look than the latest efforts, which reduce emotion to a linear scale. Happy or not, positive or negative. But the formula is a mystery. On days when millions of people are merely content, is the happiness rating higher or lower than on days when only a few hundred thousand are elated? Emotion does have a clear positive and negative dimension, but it also has dimensions of intensity, duration, and consequences not captured by such a reductive scale. It also, as we’ve seen in the explorations on this blog, has complications of language that make such distinctions even murkier.

It’s very exciting that emotion has become so compelling a topic that its measurement has moved into the mainstream. I also find it intriguing that we’re moving in the direction of being able to take an emotional pulse of the nation, and see the impact of certain events on our collective mood. I don’t think these oversimplified indices tell us much, yet, but hopefully as they develop, they will become powerful tools for sociological study and fodder for more beautiful explorations into the cultural aesthetics of our emotional lives.

With its latest ads, Microsoft is hoping that some tooth-aching cuteness will make you forget all about the nightmare that was Vista. We might quibble with the logic, but the execution is hard to fault. Kylie’s cute, and I can’t help but giggle when that music comes on and the cat with the marshmallows flashes on the screen with the words, “snappy and responsive.”

A few weeks ago, Virginia tweeted me the question: “What is the relationship between cuteness and joy?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now. My theory on the subject is still evolving, but in short, it’s based on the fact that we have a visceral, positive reaction to children and childlike things, even those that are not related to us. This is adaptive, of course, because raising children requires sacrifices of a society, not just a parental unit, and so a natural affinity and protective instinct towards children protects the species as a whole. (Chowing down on a few of your neighbor’s hatchlings might be ok when you’re a crocodile with 70 eggs, but with us low-yield humans this kind of behavior is evolutionarily unwise, not to mention socially unpopular.) The assertion that we have an innate positive reaction to children is supported to some extent by research by Morton Kringelbach in his book The Pleasure Center, in which non-parent adults show greater activity in a region of the brain associated with emotion and reward when viewing infant faces than when viewing adult faces.

How does this translate to cuteness? Many cute things are defined by abstractions of neotenized (juvenilized) qualities: big eyes, round cheeks, proportionally large head, and prominent forehead. You would think abstractions would be less effective at evoking our emotions, but actually the reverse may be true, due to something psychologists call the peak-shift effect. Evidently the brain recognizes features made more salient through amplification and distortion even better than the real thing. This is why caricatures are so easy to recognize and so compelling. Cute things are like caricatures of children, distorted by the overemphasis of certain childlike proportions and features. Compare the big-headed Bratz dolls with Barbie, and the features of any stuffed animal with the real thing to see how this abstraction plays out. You can also see abstraction of childhood in cute movements, such as the wobbling of Weebles, which mimic an unsteady toddler. And perhaps we will also find the same to be true for sounds, as children’s voices are higher in pitch than adult voices, and have a less regular cadence.

Maybe Microsoft is hoping that by associating Windows 7 with all this cuteness, there will be a halo effect of protection and tenderness towards the operating system. I’m not sure but it could work, at least in the short term until the emotional impact of daily use takes prominence. Emotions are curiously non-directed, and though they are triggered by one object, the feelings are often transferred or ascribed to another. Microsoft is also shrewdly and not-so-subtly tapping into something else here, which is the cute photo and video forwarding meme (epitomized by sites like Cute Overload) which consumes significant bandwidth on most social media platforms. So it’s not just an innate emotional programing this type of ad appeals to, but also a cultural moment.

At the end of the ad, Microsoft promises “more happy” is to come. Very curious to see what that will look like, and whether Windows 7 actually incorporates any aesthetics of joy into the design of the software itself.

I love non-traditional street art. Yarnbombing, seedbombing, mossbombing, LED throwies — anything that brightens and transforms the urban environment really brings me a sense of joy.

So this scent graffiti by Mitchell Heinrich really charms me. Scent is a particularly interesting medium for several reasons. Heinrich says:

Scent is interpreted by the limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This leads me to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of this project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

True, but this is only part of the story. Scent requires proximity in a way that vision does not. Visual understanding is nearly immediate once something enters our eyeline. But scent is based on the diffusion of volatile chemicals through the environment, so it reaches us in a more gradual way. It’s like vision is a sudden downpour and scent is a slowly increasing drizzle. So the quality of the surprise achieved is fundamentally different.

Also, in a chat I had a few weeks ago with Dr. Pamela Dalton at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, I learned one of the most important factors in scent processing is context. Many scents occur in multiple contexts. One example is butyric acid, a molecule that in some situations we recognize as aged cheese, and in others we recoil from as the odor of sweaty feet. Without realizing it, we constantly use contextual information to interpret scents and determine how to react emotionally to them. This fact creates some interesting possibilities for scent art. By taking scents strongly identified with a particular context — say cut grass or baking cookies — and pairing them with urban contexts that have a strong associated odor, the effect could be quite dazzling and dislocating. It could also work the other way, creating a powerful negative emotional response. But either way, it likely would cause to reflect on the environment more mundane sensory stimuli as well, and develop a clearer picture of how those make us feel.

Scent graffiti is also fleeting, and that transience is appealing. So often graffiti is not about destruction but about reclamation: the desire to form some kind of personal relationship with the anonymously-designed city that contains and constrains us. To shape this looming environment in some small way. The evanescence of aroma allows for continually shifting scent-images to alter the city, allowing a constant redesign and rediscovery of public space.

Here’s a link to an instructable on how to create your own scent spray cans. Images: attack the darkness and circulating.

{via PSFK}

Here’s an interesting project from Orlagh O’Brien about the associations we form with emotions and the ways we express them. The project consists of maps of colors, words, and shaded bodies that show how and where people feel certain emotions. He says:

By gathering concepts of feeling by word, colour and line and creating visual languages for anger, joy, fear, sadness and love – a kind of democratic visual language is created – a backwards-brand. As a graphic designer, I am attempting to bring attention to the body’s patterns of feeling and innate intelligence in a systematic but playful way.

To me the color map says it all. Yellow and other bright, light colors for joy, dark muted colors for fear and sadness, and intense warm colors for the fiery emotions love and anger. It’s like a visual glossary for emotion.

I love this project because it makes a point I frequently am called upon to reiterate in the process of writing Aesthetics of Joy. People often tell me that joy is individual and personal, and that it’s impossible to come up with a consensus on what the aesthetics of joy are. Indeed, if you look at these color maps, you can see that some people find joy in intense red (the same red others associate with anger) and some people find joy in the kind of kelly green that makes others fall in love. But, overall, when you put all these people together, there’s a feeling that emerges that makes a kind of sense. It may be tyranny of the majority, but well over half of the joyful colors are warm, nearly all are saturated and pure, and none are black, maroon, navy, or gray. It may not be a universal consensus, but it’s a vibe that we see and intuitively feels right.

The graphics are also beautiful. They strike me as pH strips for emotion, as if you could take the emotional temperature of a culture, and it would come out like this. Very interesting work.

See the full joy page here.

Choose your friends wisely: new research says they can make you happy (or fat, or a cancer-stick-sucking addict for that matter). We’ve known since at least Darwin that joy is contagious in a momentary sense — smiling or laughing often causes others to engage in the same behavior and share the pleasure of a particular experience. But this new research suggests a more durable social influence in determining positive emotion.

Interestingly, the article also suggests that positive emotion is more contagious than negative emotion. So while it pays to start hanging out with your friends in the rose-colored glasses, it doesn’t mean you have to drop the Debbie downers entirely.
NYT: Is Happiness Catching?

In another interesting piece of news today, French president Nicolas Sarkozy says France will incorporate happiness measures into their GDP. Though it sounds a little like the touchy-feely Bhutanese accounting method on the surface, the new method is the brainchild of Nobel Prize-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz. The revised indicators account for the economic benefits of welfare systems, holidays, and environmental measures, correcting what many see as a bias towards productivity at any social and ecological cost in the current figures.
FT: France to Count Happiness in GDP

This short snippet of conversation (2:34 mins — short and worth a watch) with architect Lars Spuybroek reverses the conventional paradigm around how we perceive space. Typically we think of space as static and ourselves as dynamic beings that move through it. But Spuybroek asserts that our sense of space is shaped by emotion, and is therefore much more fluid than we imagine.

When you’re happy, so to speak, or when you’re exhilirated your whole sense of space is totally different than when you’re moody or neutral or whatever. So there’s this whole idea of space being a byproduct of feeling instead of the other way around. That there is space and you just feel in there, no no, it’s feeling itself that actually creates space.

I think this is something we can all intuitvely relate to, and it has wonderful implications for design. If emotion can open up space, then inducing positive emotion can completely alter the way people experience a space. Aesthetics of joy, properly applied, could create a sense of expansion that could transform existing structures into spaces that feel good to inhabit. And as Spuybroek suggests, the aesthetics of joy that transform a space could even be portable, emanating from the people who occupy it.

Interview recorded by the Sputnik Observatory

In last weekend’s T Magazine, Chandler Burr wrote about the smell of the recession. The recession smells empty, he writes; it’s the smell of “the absence of people, of circulated air, of the layers of plastic, fiberboard and carpeting with which we surround ourselves.”

In fragrance, we find a replacement. He writes:

Jean Patou created Joy in 1930, at the start of the Depression — it was allegedly the most expensive perfume in the world — and I swear I smelled it on Fifth Avenue a few weeks ago. In plush times, it came off as an outdated French floral, a 100-carat diamond. Too much. In the summer of 2009, it smelled resolute, determined and weirdly appropriate. You wanted to applaud.

I love the idea that aesthetics of joy can be like aromatic stimulus package. We inject money into the economy to jumpstart growth; we also need to inject emotion into ourselves to find the energy and motivation to create and survive. As I wrote in my last post, joy is valuable not just as an end in itself but also for what it might lead to. Scent is so deeply connected to memory and emotion; who knows where the chance inspiration of a vibrant scent might lead?

We often think about joy as an end, something we want to achieve. Happiness is a goal, feeling good is desirable for its own sake, not for what it leads to. But one of the hypotheses behind Aesthetics of Joy is that positive emotion can lead to other things, such as heightened creativity, more fruitful collaboration, and social change.

At the end of an essay on enjoyment, neuroscientist Huda Akil suggests another possible benefit of bringing more joy into our lives: intelligence. The science behind it is still in its infancy, but she speculates that we will eventually discover a connection between pleasurable activity and child neurodevelopment. While playing with her granddaughter Sophie in the park, Akil observes:

On that day in the park, I realized that Sophie knows something essential that we adults tend to forget: Having fun is important! It entails unexpected sensations, novel situations, body contact, and physical challenge (as long as these are not extreme or threatening). I imagine that the motor and sensory stimulation and the ensuing exhilaration are doing something special to her young brain, possibly much more important than reading a book. I know with even greater certainty that playing with her–experiencing the simple joy of being silly and making her happy–is wonderful for my brain.

It all comes back to why we have joy in the first place. If I learned one thing from the Galapagos it is that evolution is not wasteful. These features of our bodies and minds have survived nature’s ruthless selection because they enhance our survival. The capacity for joy enhances our survival by inspiring us to seek out new sources of things that might be beneficial to the continuation of the species: food, territory, social connection, mates, etc. The aesthetic and emotional experience of joy rewards the effort.

Now that psychobiology has started to turn its lens on positive emotion, it will be exciting to see what discoveries they bring forward, and how that may influence how seriously we take the need for play, joy, and recreation in our lives.

Article: The Pursuit of Happiness
Image: Shoothead (one of my all-time favoritest Flickr finds)

Ben sent me these wonderful photos of hidden smiley faces. He writes, “I think you have to look at the world in an optimistic way to see them in the first place.”

While the human brain is wired to see faces (which is why people see Jesus in a piece of toast, but not toast in statues of Jesus), I don’t think we’re programmed to see them as happy or sad; to Ben’s point, it must be a matter of your personal prism. Do sad people see fewer smiley faces and more sad faces in things? In other people?

It bring up an interesting chicken-and-egg question. One thing I want to suggest with this project is that designing aesthetics of joy into an object or experience can create more opportunities for people to feel joy and therefore improve overall emotional wellbeing. But to what extent do we need to be receptive for these aesthetics of joy to work in the first place? Which comes first: the positive attitude or the positive aesthetic experience?

Thanks, Ben.

I would like to know what words make people feel joyful. I just finished reading Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss, a book that illuminates several truths about joy, and in one very funny passage, he comments on the way the name Moldova has a certain emotional quality:

Even the name sounds melancholy. Moldooova. Try it. Notice how your jaw droops reflexively and your shoulders slouch, Eeyore-like. (Unlike “Jamaica,” which is impossible to say without smiling.)

It’s true about Jamaica. I think this simple pronunciation exercise could be a prescription on a list of things designed to help people nudge up their happiness levels, ever so slightly. If people got out of bed every morning for a month and said “Jamaica” a couple times before they went about their days, I wonder what effects it might have.

It is really just a silly, but enjoyable form of facial feedback, a phenomenon well-documented by psychologists where a person’s facial expressions have been demonstrated to impact their mood. One particularly interesting experiment asked participants to rate a set of cartoons while holding a pencil either between their teeth or their lips. Holding a pencil between your teeth forces your mouth into a smile (you can try this yourself) while holding it between your lips curves your mouth downward into a frown. The subjects who rated the very same set of cartoons with the pencil between their teeth on average found the cartoons funnier than the “lips” group. Other studies have induced certain expressions in people by giving them instructions on which muscles to contract, and subjects have reported feeling anger and other emotions due to the induced expressions.

So maybe pronouncing joyful words, words that make our mouth muscles curve up into a smile, can make us feel more joyful. What words make you joyful? I’d love to know!

Image: edwindejongh

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I’m guilty of not being much of a public television watcher (even as I adore public radio), so I’m awfully glad that the New York Times reviewed tonight’s Nova: Musical Minds in this morning’s paper. I haven’t yet read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the latest of Dr. Sacks’s explorations into atypical neuroscience, but this was a pretty good primer. The show tells the stories of several people with unusual relationships to music: a guy with Tourette’s who discovered drumming keeps his tics in check, a blind and autistic man with a gift for piano, a man who developed a magical musical ability after being struck by lightning, and a woman who gets no pleasure from music at all.

The show also treats us to fMRIs of the brain of Dr. Sacks himself, on music, so to speak. Interested as I am in the way that music relates to joy, it was particularly exciting to see how many parts of the brain are involved in the enjoyment of music. Sacks points out that even some of the oldest parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, get in on the act when music is processed in the brain, suggesting to me that music is a very deep, very old pleasure for humans.

You can watch the entire episode online tomorrow, here. I highly recommend it!

This morning, the driver of my taxi here in Montreal advanced his own theory of joy. “Joy,” he said, “is anything you love to do.” But this theory of his has attenuating complications. As my driver said, “When a serial killer murders people, he feels joy too.”

Can this be possible? We think of joy as a wholesome, innocent sort of feeling — how could something so horrific bring joy? It seems to violate one of the key premises of joy, that joy comes from things which are generally good or at least neutral for humanity, not things with damaging consequences. There are joys that have a mischievous feel which I call transgressions, but these transgressions are notable for having no real harmful consequences: the trivial destruction of bubble wrap, the illicit pleasure of jumping on the bed, the forbidden delight of dessert before dinner, where the only thing ruined is an appetite. (And as Jerry Seinfeld says, it doesn’t really matter if you ruin your appetite because there’s always another one right behind it.)

Joy may not always be universal, but it usually has the potential to be shared and appreciated by others through participation, observation, or retelling. I may not myself enjoy spinning until I’m dizzy, but watching a trio of girls do so probably would bring a smile to my face.

Not so with murder, which makes me say that while a serial killer might feel pleasure from his actions, he doesn’t feel what we call joy. It may feel good for him, but it’s not transcendent, it’s not taking him out of his everyday prism and changing his perspective. If anything, like an addict, it’s only deepening his narrow field of existence. In that case, we might say the serial killer feels a sort of euphoria, an emotional high that does not shift your perspective, but just provides a temporary peak.

My thinking on this is evolving, but it is a worthwhile practical challenge to the theory. I’d love to know what people think. Do serial killers feel joy?

A friend sent me this fascinating article from June’s Atlantic on the Grant Study, a 60+ year exploration into what makes people live happy and fulfilled lives. In some ways, this long-term macro focus is the opposite of my work, which looks at the micro, the momentary flashes of delight in our lives. But there’s a common goal, to understand the underpinnings of positive emotion, and to understand how to create more of it.

The most interesting aspect of the article to me is how the writer and the scientist grapple with the inconsistencies in the data, the people who had every reason to be happy but turned miserable, or the people who led underwhelming lives but looked back on them with beatific satisfaction. These paradoxes recall others in the study of happiness, namely this oft-cited one also mentioned in the article: “How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger)—yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?”

I wonder if the answer lies in the moment to moment nature of life, and of joy. Children bring moments of joy, even if they also bring other effects (like less time for other passions, tiredness from keeping up with them, and certain relationship stresses and conflicts) and the intensity of those moments outweighs longer periods of feeling other emotions. Certain experiences occupy disproportionate amounts of space in our memories, such that 2 weeks of vacation a year holds more emotional memory value than 50 weeks of work.

I’d go further to speculate that the pleasurable experiences that constitute joy tend to be richer in sensory value than our everyday experiences, both because of their natural intensity and because of the relative difference between them and the sensations to which we’ve become habituated. So perhaps in storage and on recall they activate more brain regions than normal memories? I don’t know, I’m not an authority in this area, but it’s a question for the neuroscientists…