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What if you took the "wonderful" out of your life, just for a few seconds? Could it make you happier?
Psychologist Minkyung Koo from the University of Virginia conducted several studies where college students were asked to think about the absence of a good thing in their lives, much like the path the angel, Clarence, asked George Bailey to travel down in It's a Wonderful Life. Koo was interested in how this type of thinking, known as counterfactual reasoning, would impact happiness.
Contemporary research has explored the impact that a recollection of positive events has on one's emotions, only to return somewhat inconclusive results. On more than one occasion, participants in these studies reported little or no change in their levels of happiness.
Koo suggests a couple reasons for this, one being the more frequently we recall an event, the more familiar we become with it. A memory that may initially increase our level of happiness will lose some of its positive potency with time, simply because we have mentally adapted to the event.
Counterfactual reasoning, or the "George Bailey Effect," is based on unadapting to a positive event, so that we are ultimately surprised by the thought of how life may have been altered. This surprise may actually help create more feelings of gratitude for the event that has actually taken place.
The day you received your driver's license — forget about it. Your hike to the top of Yosemite's Half Dome? — delete.
The results of Koo's studies indicated that most students who practiced the mental subtraction of a positive event reported feeling happier than participants who recalled their positive feelings of a good event. Not surprisingly, most students had predicted that positive recollections of a positive event would make them feel happier.
Koo also discovered, after running a fourth study with university staff members, that imagining the absence rather than presence of a romantic partner could make the heart grow fonder.
Is it counterintuitive to engage in counterreasoning? You bet. But it's certainly worth considering that there's more than one way to celebrate your wonderful life.
