Happiness and SadnessHappiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feeling for hum
Happiness and Sadness
Happiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feeling for human beings. Recently, people have achieved further understanding about them.
Happiness
University of Illinois, psychologist Ed Diener, who has studied happiness for a quarter century, was in Scotland recently, explaining to members of Parliament and business leaders the value of increasing traditional measures of a country's wealth with a national index of happiness. Such an index would measure policies known to increase people's sense of well-being, such as democratic freedoms, access to health care and the rule of law.
Eric Wilson tried to get with the program. Urged on by friends, he bought books on how to become happier. He made every effort to smooth out his habitual worried look and wear a sunny smile, since a happy expression can lead to genuinely happy feelings. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, took up jogging, reputed to boost the brain's supply of joyful neuro-chemicals, and began his conversations with "great!" and "wonderful!", the better to exercise his capacity for enthusiasm.
However, some scientists are releasing the most-extensive-ever study comparing moderate and extreme levels of happiness, and finding that being happier is not always better. In surveys of 118 519 people from 96 countries, scientists examined how various levels of subjective well-being matched up with income, education, political participation, volunteer activities and close relationships. They also analyzed how different levels of happiness, as reported by college students, correlated with various outcomes. Even allowing for imprecision in people's self-reported sense of well-being, the results were unambiguous. The highest levels of happiness go along with the most stable, longest and most contented relationships. That is, even a little discontent with your partner can cause you to look around for someone better, until you are at best a serial monogamist and at worst never in a loving, stable relationship.
Nevertheless, "once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be harmful to income, career success, education and political participation", Diener and colleagues write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10s is extremely happy, 8s is more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more motivated to improve both their own lot (thus driving themselves to acquire more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs) and the lot of their community (causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency. "If you're totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in the world," says Diener, "you don't feel very motivated to work for change. Be wary when people tell you that you should be happier."
Sadness
The drawbacks of constant, extreme happiness should not be surprising, since negative emotions evolved for a reason. Fear tips us off to the presence of danger, for instance. Sadness, too, seems to be part of our biological inheritance. Wilson argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness of the human condition. He also asserts that "the happy man is a hollow man," but he is hardly the first scholar to see melancholia (精神忧郁症) as inspiration. A classical Greek text, possibly written by Aristotle, asks, "Why is it that all those who have become outstanding in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?" Wilson's answer is that "the blues can be a catalyst (催化剂) for a special kind of genius, a genius for exploring dark boundaries between opposites
A．The standard of morality.
B．The freedom of speech.
C．The sense of well-being.
D．The access to health care.
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