When Less Is More: Too Much Happiness May Be Too Much of a Good Thing

Are you happy? Well don't try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the gist of a multi-cultural study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues at three other institutions found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general – more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese – but are more easily made less happy by negative events, and recover at a slower rate from negative events, than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry.

On the other hand, Koreans, Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans, are less happy in general, but recover their emotional equilibrium more readily after a setback than European-Americans."We found that the more positive events a person has, the more they feel the effects of a negative event," Oishi says. "People seem to dwell on the negative thing when they have a large number of good events in their life. "It is like the person who is used to flying first class and becomes very annoyed if there is a half-hour delay. But the person who flies economy class accepts the delay in stride."

Oishi, a social psychologist who grew up in Japan and then moved to the United States at 23, is interested in comparing how people from East Asia and the United States respond to the daily events of life.He and his colleagues surveyed more than 350 college students in Japan, Korea and the United States over a three-week period. The students recorded daily their general state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life, as well as the number of positive and negative events they had during the course of each day.

The researchers found that the European-Americans needed nearly two positive events (such as getting complimented or getting an A) to return to their normal level of happiness after each negative event, such as getting a parking ticket or a lower grade than expected. The Koreans, Japanese and Asian-Americans generally needed only one positive event to make up for each negative event.

Oishi says that people who become accustomed to numerous positive or happy events in their life are more likely to take a harder fall than people who have learned to accept the bad with the good. And because negative events have such a strong effect when occurring in the midst of numerous positive events, people find it difficult to be extremely happy. They reach a point of diminishing returns.This is why the extreme happiness people may feel after buying a new car or a house, or getting married, can be rapidly diminished when the payments come due or the daily spats begin. It becomes a problem of ratio, or perspective.

"In general, it's good to have a positive perspective," Oishi says, "But unless you can switch your mindset to accept the negative facts of everyday life — that these things happen and must be accepted — it becomes very hard to maintain a comfortable level of satisfaction."

His advice: "Don't try to be happier."

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White Supremacists Blame Immigration, Asians for Virginia Tech Tragedy, ADL Says

In the wake of the tragic shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, extremists and white supremacists and conspiracy-oriented Internet forums and Web sites have focused on the ethnicity of the killer in an attempt to blame Asians, immigrants and other minorities for the deaths and to spread a message of hate, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

"Extremists are using the Virginia Tech shootings to spread a message of hate against immigrants, particularly Asians," says Abraham Foxman, ADL national director. "They are using the shooter's Asian ethnicity as an excuse to pile on hate against Asians, Blacks, Jews and immigrants. It is yet another example of how the neo-Nazis and haters are seeking to create an atmosphere of divisiveness around the immigration debate and to engender fear of minority groups living in America."

Some white supremacists groups have posted virulently anti-immigrant, racist and anti-Semitic videos on YouTube, the popular mainstream videosharing site, with deceptive titles such as "Virginia Tech Shooting Update" that make them appear as if they were legitimate news clips dealing withthe aftermath of the shooting, ADL says.

Additional examples are available on ADL's Web site.

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By This Anniversary Year, U.S. Becomes Much More Accepting of Interracial Marriage

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that declared states could not prohibit interracial marriage. A measure of how far U.S. attitudes have come is that when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's interracial parents married in 1960, their marriage would have been illegal -- and he would have been considered illegitimate -- in half of all the states in America.

Prior to 1970, the overwhelming majority of all couples were same-race married couples. Couples who lived together outside of marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex, were practically invisible. Inter-racial marriages were extremely rare. In fact, until 1967, many states in the US had laws against interracial marriage. In Virginia, for example, all nonwhite groups, including blacks, native Americans, and Asians, were prohibited from marrying whites. Even in states that never had laws against racial intermarriage, such as Illinois and New York, racial intermarriage was rare before the end of the 1960s.

Since 1970 there has been a steady increase in all types of nontraditional romantic unions. The number of same-sex couples livingtogether openly has climbed significantly, while the number of heterosexual unmarried cohabiting couples has soared, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 4.6million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2005.

State laws prohibiting interracial marriages were finally struck down in the Supreme Court's Loving decision. Yet such marriages continued to be very uncommon well into the 1970s. In 1970, less than 2% ofmarried couples in the US were interracial. By 2005, the number of such marriages had risen almost fourfold, with interracial couples representing 7.5 percent of all married couples. Although this percentage may seem small, it is a dramatic increase over several decades, and many signs pointto it accelerating in the future, says Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University.

Some of the rise in racial intermarriage since 1970 is due to immigration, which has increased the racial diversity of the US since 1965. Hispanics and Asians are the predominant groups among the new immigrants, and because neither Asians nor Hispanics are residentially segregated tothe extent that blacks in the US historically have been, Asians and Hispanics have substantial opportunity to socialize with members of other racial groups, says Rosenfeld, of Stanford's sociology department.

The increased numbers of these immigrants have contributed to the rise in intermarriage between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, and the rise in intermarriage between Asians and whites, Rosenfeld says.

The rise in black-white marriages cannot be due to immigration. One cause is improvement in race relations. Despite enduring prejudices, the post-Civil Rights era has led to more socialization between blacks and whites, and to more intermarriage. Polls show that the percentage of Americans who want interracial marriage to be illegal has declined precipitously since the early 1970s, and thereis much higher acceptance of inter-racial unions than at any time in the past 200 years.

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