Riis researches health, happiness

How do health and living conditions affect overall happiness? University Research Associate Jason Riis is exploring these and other possible predictors of happiness in his research for the Woodrow Wilson School's Center for Health and Well-Being.

The results of Riis' investigation into the link between health and happiness, conducted at the University of Michigan in collaboration with other researchers, were published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The study compared the happiness levels of dialysis patients with end-stage kidney failure to those of healthy volunteers. Participants were given palm pilots to record their moods throughout the day in 90-minute intervals.

Both groups reported experiencing about the same level of happiness. While past research in psychology had reached similar conclusions about the mistaken assumption that good health brings greater happiness, this study took a new approach.

By questioning study participants often throughout the day, "this study captures moment-to moment happiness," said Peter Ubel, a doctor at the department of medicine at Michigan who had been leading the health and happiness research when Riis joined his group.

This approach leads to more accurate results, Ubel said, since "current mood will have a big effect on how happy [participants] say they are."

Riis and his colleagues also extended past research by showing that people are bad judges of others' happiness.

"To estimate the happiness of a typical healthy person, we had sick people imagine that they had never been sick . . . and to estimate how happy they would be," Riis said in an email. "They thought [that] they would be much happier than healthy people really seem to be."

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Ubel describes Riis as a "really thorough, thoughtful researcher" whose sense of humor added moments of levity to the research.

"Jason came into the office and impressed me very much . . . he joined the study and took the lead," Ubel said.

Riis left the University of Michigan in 2003, after receiving a Ph.D. in social and cognitive psychology, to join University economics professor and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman in his related research on happiness.

"We want to develop an instrument to measure the wellbeing (or happiness) of people in different countries," Riis said. "There are some peculiarities in current research on cross-national differences in wellbeing."

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In late February, Riis went to India to gather data for his research. After returning for a short period, he left again on Tuesday for Ghana and will later travel to China. Kahneman is also traveling to France on the same project.

One example of cross-national differences that Riis likes to give is the difference between Denmark and France. In Denmark over 50 percent of people say they are satisfied with life while in France only 15 percent say they are content.

"Of course we doubt very much that there's such a big difference," Riis said. "One of the reasons why we think these differences are so implausible is that unemployed Danes are more satisfied with life than employed French people."

Instead of measuring how satisfied people are with their lives, Riis and Kahneman are measuring the percentage of time that people are in a happy mood and trying to come up with national averages.

To do this, the researchers will use the Day Reconstruction Method, developed and published by Kahneman in 2004.

"People are asked what they did yesterday, in detail, and asked to remember how they felt while they were doing all of those things. Then we basically add things up and see what percentage of the time people report being in a good mood."

Riis also plans to look into how living conditions and happiness are interrelated. With this information, policy makers can base their decisions on how people will be affected by their policies.

"I want to help policy makers and individuals find the policies, habits, and behaviors that will tend to bring the largest sustainable gains in subjective experience," Riis said.

"We all have intuitions about how being poor, wealthy, or unemployed will affect our lives," Riis said. "There are probably better ways of quantifying this."