The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science

by Jonathan Haidt

There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that bias subsequent information processing. A flash of fear makes you extra vigilant for additional threats; you look at the world through a filter that interprets ambiguous events as possible dangers. A flash of anger toward someone raises a filter through which you see everything the offending person says or does as a further insult or transgression. Feelings of sadness blind you to all pleasures and opportunities. As one famous depressive put it: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”21 So when Shakespeare’s Hamlet later offers his own paraphrase of Marcus Aurelius—“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”22—he is right, but he might have added that his negative emotions are making his thinking make everything bad.