Don't worry, happiness is now a science

London - Dr Richard Stevens certainly sounds happy enough. He whistles a jolly tune from the kitchen as he makes a cup of tea, stopping only to apologise for having soya milk, not dairy. But when asked how happy he is, he rates himself at just 7.3 out of 10. The Open University psychologist, a guru in the emerging field of "happiness science", has things on his mind.

There are exam questions to set by five o'clock, a weekend of teaching ahead, and a film crew coming from Korean television. "I’m very pressured at the moment," he says. But then he decides to look on the bright side and you can almost see his happiness levels rising as he lists some of the things achieved so far today. This is a technique that Stevens calls "counting your blessings" – putting aside your worries for a moment, thinking instead about the good things in your life.

It is a favourite tool for boosting happiness. Others include smiling at strangers, nurturing plants, and performing a daily act of kindness. Does it work? Yes, according to a very public experiment that Stevens was involved in in 2005.

With a team of five other happiness experts, Stevens accepted the challenging task of raising the happiness levels of 50 volunteers from the Berkshire town of Slough, the location of that agonising carnival of human misery, The Office. The results formed a series of programmes for BBC2, Making Slough Happy.

Working with two fellow OU academics – Dr Jane Henry, senior lecturer in applied psychology at the Open University Business School and Linda Corlett, a social psychology tutor – as well as a psychotherapist, Nevia Mullan, Stevens' role was to run five all-day happiness workshops with the volunteers.

He used different techniques to boost their self-esteem, help them build better relationships, improve their happiness at work, and change the way they felt about their community and society more widely.

To do this he drew on ideas from positive, humanist and evolutionary psychology, combined with a bit of Buddhism and a dash of old fashioned showmanship – in a previous career Stevens directed episodes of Z Cars.

He also took volunteers on a series of "away days". These included a camping trip, a "gratitude party" – where you invite a special person and tell them how important they are – and "housework therapy" – which is aimed at making mundane work more enjoyable. There was also a visit to a graveyard in Stoke Poges (yes, the one where Gray wrote his Elegy) so the volunteers could reflect on their own mortality. Does that sound depressing? Not at all. "They realised that all of them would die at some point, but at this particular moment they were alive, and how wonderful it was to be alive," he says.

Stevens and his fellow academics used a combination of measures to determine how happy the volunteers were at the start and end of the project. The results were much better than expected. "I thought we’d be lucky to get an increase of 10 percent, but we actually got 33 percent," he says.

Might that simply reflect the fun of being in a television programme? Stevens accepts the criticism. There was no proper control group; the project was a reality TV programme, not a rigorous psychological experiment. But he rejects any assertion that happiness itself is too ill-defined or subjective to be measured.

There are three main elements, he says: a sense of generally feeling good, of being engaged in life and of having a some sort of purpose or direction. Definitions aside, people tend to be good at judging how happy they are. Ask someone to self-assess where they are on a 10-point scale, and they’ll give a reasonably accurate answer – or rather, they’ll give an answer that correlates with the results of more complicated questionnaires. There are also physiological measures that indicate increased happiness, such as increased activity in the left half of the brain.

The various measures were rigorous enough for Slough Borough Council to start monitoring the town’s happiness levels. But Stevens wants steps to improve national happiness to play a role in government policy. He would like to see government do more to regulate so-called "emotional pollutants", such as advertising, which has a negative effect on our general sense of well-being because it encourages social comparison and creates artificial needs.

"It would be much more healthy for our society if advertising took the form of information, rather than trying to persuade people to buy a product," he says.

Controls on advertising and town-planning, for example, need to have an explicit psychological component. "We should ask: 'what effect does it actually have on our experience and our well-being?'."

He’s also concerned about the psychological damage caused by a surfeit of choices – whether it be of soap powders or primary schools. Not knowing which to choose and worrying about whether you’ve made the wrong choice, can be big sources of misery.

Rather than restricting available choices, Stevens wants to teach people how to cope with them. One of the tricks is to accept what is good enough, instead of always looking for the best – what psychologists call being a "satisficer" not a "maximiser". Satisficers are generally much happier people.

The most important role for happiness science in government policy is education, he says. "Schools should be helping children to develop skills and techniques for dealing with the world and increasing their own wellbeing."

But he doesn’t want everyone to be happy in an unthinking, happy-clappy sort of way. Melancholia, the Greek mood of non-specific brooding, can be a positive experience, if it produces constructive reflection about the nature of existence, he says. "But life has been better for me – whatever that means – in those times when I have been happy than when I have been unhappy."

Researching happiness

Happiness and how we might experience more of it is just one strand of an increasing trend among mind experts – research into what has been termed "positive psychology".

"Psychology has tended to focus largely on pathology and illnesses of the mind, rather than on happiness and fulfilment," says psychologist Dr Alex Linley, a colleague of Dr Richard Stevens.

"Suddenly people began to realise there was a huge gap in the research. Positive psychology is the science of optimal human functioning – people at their best," Linley adds. "Happiness is only one part of it. It's also about identifying strengths and how they can be used to optimise our functioning, among other things."

The trend is so recent that the term "positive psychology" was only coined as recently as 1999 by leading United States psychologist Martin Seligman. Seligman initiated this shift to a greater focus on the positive sides of human experience and, together with another US psychologist, Christopher Peterson, identified 24 character strengths that helped people to take a more positive – and therefore successful – approach to life.

Seligman and Peterson put these strengths into six categories