Kyla Miller: A Writing Portfolio

The "Set Point" Theory

 

As it turns out, a lot of people. In fact, it was a study in 1978 that changed the ways that people thought about happiness. Brickman and colleagues analyzed the happiness levels of lottery winners immediately after winning the lottery and for an extended period of time after that. What they found was astonishing. Yes, their levels of happiness did sky rocket, but only for a few months. After that period of time, they returned to their original level of happiness. They called this the “set point” theory. According to this theory, everyone has a “set point”, or hereditary level of happiness that they will likely maintain for the rest of their life. This average level of happiness is what our day-to-day, moment-to-moment happiness fluctuates around. No matter what happens, good or bad, you will only fluctuate momentarily, and then will return to your “set point” (Brickman et al, 1978). This theory is expressed in the theory of temperament, mood, and emotion. Temperament is what stays constant, and our slowly changing moods and momentary emotions we experience fluctuate only slightly around our temperament (Easterlin, 2005).

 

After this theory was presented in the late 1970’s, psychologists were itching at the chance to do more research on happiness, and either further confirm this theory or disprove it. In 1980, Costa & McCrea did just that. Their study was a spin off of the set point theory, where instead they looked at peoples’ emotions. Because the Big 5 Model was already established, they were able to pick out two of those traits: extraversion and neuroticism, and directly link them to happiness. What they found was that for those who scored high on extraversion, they were found to be more positive about life and overall happier people. Those who scored high on neuroticism; however, were found to be more negative about things and lead less happy lives. Because these big 5 characteristics are genetic, this correlation was too large to ignore. They concluded that their research was consistent with the set point theory (Costa & McCrea, 1980).

 

And with that study, personality traits’ relation to happiness quickly became the hot topic in Psychology.

 

A study conducted by Hamer in 1996 , almost 16 years after the first study linking personality traits to happiness, finally got more answers. This study began by looking at whether or not there was a happiness gene, which was another hot topic in psychology at the time. Although they did confirm that happiness is at least in part hereditary, they couldn’t contribute much to whether or not there was a happiness gene; however, they did discuss the next logical steps that would help researches find out what could contribute to an individual’s predisposition to happiness. The researchers concluded that, although there may not be a specific gene for happiness, there are ways that you can simplify things by decomposing happiness into its underlying personality traits. They said that positive and negative affect were the major contributors. Because these two types of emotional reactivity are at least partially independent at the phenotypic level, they could actually be governed by separate and more tractable sets of genes (Hamer, 1996).

 

Um…what?

 

Essentially what they’re saying is that positive and negative affect could be controlled by different genes than other emotions, which means that there could be more than one happiness gene, potentially. So what did researchers do? They found a new obsession. THE HAPPINESS GENE.