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StillnessScience fact

Helping other people or spending money on them tends to lift the giver's own mood a little, many studies find; psychologists call such acts prosocial.

Psychology of well-being

MindScience

The story behind the card

In a well-known 2008 study published in Science, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton gave people $5 or $20 and asked some to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on someone else or on charity by the end of the day. That evening, those who had spent on others reported feeling happier. Later work by Aknin and colleagues found similar links between generosity and well-being in survey data from more than 130 countries. The lift is usually small and short-lived rather than life-changing, but it has appeared across very different places and income levels.

Türkçe oku
Başkalarına yardım etmek ya da onlar için para harcamak, verenin de keyfini biraz yerine getirir; pek çok araştırma bunu gösteriyor. Psikologlar bu tür davranışlara “prososyal”, yani başkalarının yararına davranış diyor.

Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin ve Michael Norton'ın 2008'de Science dergisinde yayımlanan tanınmış çalışmasında katılımcılara 5 ya da 20 dolar verildi. Bir kısmından bu parayı gün bitmeden kendileri için, ötekilerden ise başka biri ya da bir hayır kurumu için harcamaları istendi. Akşam, parayı başkası için harcayanlar kendilerini daha mutlu hissettiklerini söyledi. Aknin ve arkadaşlarının sonraki çalışmaları, 130'dan fazla ülkeden toplanan anket verilerinde cömertlikle iyi oluş arasında benzer bir bağ buldu. Etki çoğu zaman küçük ve kısa sürelidir, hayat değiştirmez; ama birbirinden çok farklı ülkelerde ve gelir düzeylerinde görülmüştür.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Prosocial behavior
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StillnessMind

Money spent on experiences, such as a trip or a concert, tends to bring more lasting satisfaction than money spent on things, though the effect varies from person to person.

The idea is most linked to the psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich. In a 2003 study they asked people to compare a recent experience they had paid for, such as a trip, with a recent object of similar cost; on average, the experience made them happier. Later work suggested three reasons: experiences become part of who we are, they invite fewer comparisons with what other people have, and we share and talk about them with others. Anticipation helps too, since looking forward to a trip is itself pleasant. It is an average tendency, not a rule that every holiday beats every useful purchase.

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StillnessHealth

Living for years with loud road, rail or aircraft noise can harm health. It is linked to broken sleep, poorer learning in children and a higher risk of heart disease, and the body keeps reacting even after people stop noticing the sound.

In 2020 the European Environment Agency estimated that at least 113 million people in Europe live with long-term road traffic noise of 55 decibels or more, averaged over day and night; that is the level the European Union uses to report harmful noise, and the World Health Organization recommends keeping road noise below 53. Studies link such exposure to disturbed sleep, raised stress hormones, poorer reading and memory in children near airports and busy roads, and more high blood pressure and heart disease. People do get used to a sound in the sense that they notice it less, but sleep studies show that heart rate still jumps when a lorry or plane passes at night.

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StillnessMind

Walking through a doorway can make it harder to remember what you were just doing, which may be why you reach the next room and forget what you came for. Researchers read it as a sign that memory stores experience in episodes, not as one continuous recording.

In experiments published by Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues in 2011, people carried objects either from one room to another or across the same distance within a single room, in virtual and real settings. Memory for the objects dropped more after a doorway, and walking back to the first room did not restore it. The explanation offered is that the mind divides experience into events, and a doorway signals that one event has ended, so its details are filed away. Later work adds caution: in a 2021 series of experiments at Bond University, McFadyen and colleagues found no doorway effect in most conditions, only more memory errors when people were also holding other information in mind. A doorway is one possible cause of forgetting, not the whole story.

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StillnessMind

Older adults who took a weekly 15-minute walk looking out for things that filled them with awe felt more joy and less daily distress over eight weeks, a 2020 study of 60 people found. In the selfies they took on the walks, they gradually gave themselves less of the frame.

Awe is the feeling of standing before something vast that you cannot take in at once, such as a mountain view or a sky full of stars. Neuroscientist Virginia Sturm and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, randomly divided healthy older volunteers into two groups: one was asked to seek out awe on its walks, the other simply walked. Both took photos of themselves on every walk. Over time the awe group's selfies showed more scenery and less of the walker, and their smiles grew broader. Scores for anxiety and depression did not change in either group, so the study points to a small daily lift in mood, not a treatment.

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StillnessMind

Seeing or hearing birds is linked to a better mood that lasts for hours, according to a 2022 smartphone study of 1,292 people. Participants who noticed birds at one check-in also rated their mental wellbeing higher at the next one, hours later.

The study used Urban Mind, an app developed at King's College London that prompts people several times a day to say what they can see and hear at that moment and how they feel. Asking in the moment avoids the distortions of remembering one's mood later. Between April 2018 and October 2021, the 1,292 participants answered 26,856 of these prompts. The link with birdlife showed up both in healthy people and in those with a diagnosis of depression, the most common mental illness in the world. Because the study only observed people rather than testing an intervention, it cannot prove that the birds caused the lift: places with birds may be pleasanter in other ways too.

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