The five strategies most cited in the media as ways to increase happiness are expressing gratitude, improving sociability, practicing exercise, meditation or mindfulness, and increasing exposure to nature. However, according to a systematic review published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, solid research is still needed before confirming its efficacy for sure, since most of the research analyzed in this regard lacks solid scientific evidence according to current criteria.
This, the authors defend, does not necessarily mean that these strategies do not help well-being, but it does mean that the field of happiness needs to be better studied. So not everything has been said about how to be happy, far from it.
Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, from the University of British Columbia, Canada, first identified through the internet what the most common advice in the press for improving well-being was. Once the five main strategies were located, they reviewed the literature published on the subject, identifying 49 papers and 532 studies. In almost 95% of the experiments on exposure to nature, exercise or mindfulness and meditation they found that there was a lack of sufficient statistical power to detect noticeable benefits. Only 57 of these studies were pre-registered (thus committing to specific methodologies) or included well-planned experiments testing the effects of these strategies on self-reported well-being in a sufficient number of healthy subjects.
The standards of research in psychology have changed a lot in the last decade: scientific practices that were not common before, such as previous registration, are now common.
Peter Malinowski, Professor of Health Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, said of the paper that it is “a reflection on how research practices have changed. Pre-registration of empirical studies is becoming more common, and more attention is being paid to power analyzes [of studies].
The conclusion the authors come to is that, when evaluated against the current standard of empirical rigor, only a few studies measure up. So, based on these research papers, not many conclusions can be drawn on the question of whether different ‘happiness strategies’ are effective.”
“We cannot conclude that all other empirical work, often published before these new standards were established, is useless. In fact, for many research questions there are meta-analyses that suggest the efficacy of such approaches and that, to some extent at least, they can mitigate for lack of pre-reporting or low power,” he adds.
The study authors point out that there may be a misperception that everything has already been said about happiness. “If we go by the current norm, they are not. But, if the scientific effort continues, it will always be this way: the norms will keep changing. It is useful to keep this in mind and avoid going extremist by ‘discarding’ everything that has been done before,” says the John Moores University professor.
Bruce Hood, Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Bristol Society (UK) and author of the book The Science of Happiness, due out next year, agrees. “Despite the large number of studies reviewed, almost all were poorly conducted, making them susceptible to publication bias. This is not to say that there is no evidence to support these interventions, but until we have a substantial body of well-designed research, we should treat these recommendations as tentative rather than firmly established.”
