Preface

Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz

OUR AIM IN editing this book was not at all mod-est: we hoped to announce the existence of a newfield of psychology. Hedonic psychology—thatcould be its name—is the study of what makesexperiences and life pleasant or unpleasant. It isconcerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, ofinterest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and ofsatisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concernedwith the whole range of circumstances, from thebiological to the societal, that occasion sufferingand enjoyment. Although the adjective “hedonic”is often used to refer solely to pleasure, hedonicpsychology covers the full spectrum from thepleasant to the unpleasant, consistent with a defi-nition of “hedonics” in Webster’s New UniversalUnabridged Dictionary, (1989) as a “branch ofpsychology that deals with pleasurable and un-pleasurable states of consciousness.” We apply theterm even more broadly, to include levels of psy-chological analysis other than states of conscious-ness.

Enjoyment and suffering have attracted far lesssystematic research than many other psychologicalfunctions, such as attention or memory. The ne-glect of hedonics is obvious in the index sectionsof introductory textbooks: there are a few pagesabout pain, a mention of pleasure centers and thepleasure principle, but little else. There are typ-ically no entries at all for happiness or well-being.This pattern does not reflect the importance of thetopics in people’s lives, but it does reflect the his-tory of the dominant themes of modern psychol-ogy.

First there was behaviorism, then there was thecognitive revolution, and the study of hedonicscould not thrive under either of these intellectualregimes. Feelings were explicitly rejected as a legit-imate object of study in the behavioristic philoso-phy of science, and they were of little interest inthe information-processing approach. Research onhedonics never actually ceased, but its resultscould not be elegantly described in the dominanttheoretical language of the day. As a consequence,this research was relegated to peripheral regions,

where small communities of investigators focusedon different aspects of hedonics and developedseparate dialects in which to speak about their par-ticular problems. Students of the pleasures of foodand of the pains of arthritis have had no commonframework and little to say to each other, studentsof mood and well-being did not appear to beaware of the mutual relevance of their work, andthe physiology and psychology of hedonic stateswere studied separately.

Another characteristic of past research is the re-markable accentuation of the negative. Textbooksthat do not mention pleasure or well-being at alldevote many pages to the clinical phenomena ofanxiety and depression. This negative focus is dueto many causes; the eternal fascination with theabnormal and the professional concerns of clinicalpsychologists are certainly part of the story. It isalso relevant that the determinants of negative af-fective states are often associated with consider-able urgency, and that the physiological and be-havioral manifestations of these states are oftenobvious and dramatic; for these and other reasons,pain avoidance provides explanations of behaviorthat are often more compelling than explanationsin terms of pleasure-seeking.

Our aim is to bring these threads together tofacilitate an integrative view of hedonic experi-ences in all their instantiations. The hedonic psy-chology of the future, as we imagine it, will an-alyze the full range of evaluative experience, fromsensory pleasure to creative ecstasy, from fleetinganxiety to long-term depression, from misery tojoy. It will also address the determinants of theseexperiences, from the genetic to the societal, andfrom the biochemical to the cultural. Researcherswill inevitably specialize, but they will be aware oftheir place in the broader picture and alert to thepossibility of instructive parallels between phe-nomena in different domains.

We have tried to anticipate future developmentsby featuring some new approaches and by empha-sizing some distinctions that have often beenblurred in past research. The new approaches we

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feature involve the collection of measures of he-donic experiences over time rather than total re-liance on global retrospective evaluations, basedon the memory of past experiences. The study ofon-line measures of experience and real-time phys-iological measurements is in its infancy as this col-lection goes to press. We believe, however, thatthere will be increasing use of such indices in thefuture, and that they will eventually define thestandard for accurate measurement of the plea-sures and pains of individual life, and for a moreobjective measurement of overall well-being.

The distinction between real-time experienceand global retrospective evaluations raises newquestions, which have not yet attracted the atten-tion they deserve. How do global evaluations of anaspect of life, or of life as a whole, relate to theactual pleasures and pains that an individual hasexperienced over time? How accurate are theseretrospective evaluations? Related questions can beraised about the accuracy of people’s predictionsof their future pleasures and pains, and about theirintuitive understanding of the rules of hedonicpsychology. An ability to predict future tastes andexperiences is central to the economic model ofrational choice that provides the foundation formuch of the theorizing in the social sciences andfor many policy applications. Pursuing one’s ownself-interest requires appropriate predictions of thelikely short-term and long-term hedonic conse-quences of different courses of action, but thequestion of how people arrive at these predictionshas hardly been addressed in psychological re-search. The evidence available suggests that peoplemay not have the ability to predict their futuretastes and hedonic experiences with the accuracythat the economic model requires.

THE SCOPE OF HEDONIC PSYCHOLOGY

The question of what makes for a good life can bestudied at many different levels. Starting at the topof figure P.1, we note that any evaluation of qual-ity of life is embedded in the cultural and socialcontext of both the subject and the evaluator. Al-ternative views of what constitutes a good lifemust be part of the analysis. In particular, the se-rious student of well-being soon discovers thatquality of life cannot be reduced to the balance ofpleasure and pain, or to assessments of subjectivelife-satisfaction; other values contribute to thejudgment. Moreover, objective characteristics of asociety, like poverty, infant mortality, crime rate, or

FIGURE P.1 Levels in the Analysis of theQuality of Life

Cultural and social context:Definitions of the good life

Other aspects of quality of life:values, capabilities, tasks

Subjective well-being:judgment, measurement

Persistent moods:temperament, disorders

Pleasures, pains, real-time:retrospectively judgedbiological and social determinants

Neural systems of emotion: reward, punishmentanatomical, physiological, biochemical levels

Transient emotions:subjective, physiologicalstress effects

pollution, figure prominently at this level. Thoughthese qualifications are important, the experienceof pleasure and the achievement of a subjectivesense of well-being remain at the center of thestory.

Subjective well-being, at the next level down,involves a component of judgment and compari-sons with ideals, aspirations, other people, andone’s own past. Several decades ago, social scien-tists began large-scale investigations of individuals’satisfaction with their lives and with their society.One of the robust findings of this research wasthat the correlations between global judgments ofthe quality of life and objective conditions of liv-ing are often quite low. Leaders in this field, suchas Frank Andrews, Angus Campbell, NormanBradburn, and Gerald Gurin, emphasized, as wedo, the need for assessments of the positive aspectsof life, including pleasant emotions. Our selectionof chapters for this book belongs to this tradition,but it also departs from the past in several ways—perhaps most importantly in our emphasis on sub-jective and on physiological measures of ongoinghedonic experience as an essential supplement toglobal judgments of life.

One level below global well-being we findmood states, which are characterized by their per-sistence and by their loose connection to particularevents. There are large individual differences inpeople’s characteristic mood, which clearly shouldbe assigned substantial weight in assessing theirwell-being. Next we encounter affective states thatare more closely related to the current situation.

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These include the many varieties of pleasures andpains, and transient emotional states. Each ofthese affective responses has multiple aspects be-yond the subjective experience of the moment:there is a cognitive coding of the present, and aretrospective coding of past affect; there are bothtransient physiological and chemical changes andpermanent adaptations.

The next level of reduction involves neural sys-tems and the biochemistry of hormones and neu-rotransmitters that regulate the motivational sys-tems with which affective responses at all levels areassociated. One of the important lessons of recentyears is that the physiological and biochemicallevels of analysis are characterized by the preva-lence of opponent systems and complex feedbackloops, with effects that often appear paradoxical,such as the familiar “runner’s high.” And it isprobably at these levels that the main keys to theunderstanding of addictions, anhedonia, and de-pression will be found.

This overview of levels of analysis suggests thatan understanding of the higher levels will often re-quire careful consideration of lower ones. How-ever, there are also important influences that travelthe other way. Among the most dramatic are thealmost complete suppression of pain in some war-wounded and in some states of exaltation and thewell-documented effects of mental states on physi-ological responses. We hope that collecting treat-ments of the different levels of analysis in a singlevolume will contribute to research that traces theconnections between these levels. Equally impor-tant, it may contribute to an understanding ofquestions that arise at several levels, and may haverelated answers in all. One such question is thenature of the relation between positive and nega-tive affect: is this a single bipolar dimension, wherefactors that produce one kind of affect can cancelthe effects of factors that operate in the oppositedirection? Or should we understand positive andnegative affect as separate attributes of experience?This question can be raised at the level of self-re-ported affect, but it can also be raised at the bio-chemical levels, where pleasure and pain appear tobe mediated by different neurotransmitters.

A related multi-level question concerns the ap-parent asymmetry between the relative potenciesof pain and pleasure. In the context of decisionresearch, the overweighing of negative conse-quences has been called loss aversion; does thisphenomenon have a counterpart at the variouslevels of hedonic experience? Another generalquestion concerns adaptation. This label has

sometimes been applied to negative feedbackloops in the intracellular environment, and it hasalso been used to explain why the mean level ofsatisfaction with income hardly changed over a fif-teen-year period in which mean income nearlydoubled. Are there important commonalities inadaptation processes at different levels? Are theregeneral characteristics of stimuli to which adapta-tion is easy or rapid? We believe that the pursuit ofcross-level analogies is likely to yield useful hy-potheses for future research, and we hope thatbringing together discussions of these levels undera single cover will advance that process.

Cross-cutting this organization by levels of anal-ysis, there is an organization by causes and con-texts. It is useful to know the circumstances underwhich people are most likely to experience well-being or misery. For example, what is to be madeof the finding that people experience many oftheir happiest moments in the presence of friends,whereas more intimate family relations are oftenloaded with substantial ambivalence? And what isthe impact of insecurity about the future (for ex-ample, for people with no health insurance) onwell-being? Issues like these have rarely been ad-dressed in psychological research, but their investi-gation is likely to contribute to our basic under-standing of hedonic experience as well as topsychology’s relevance to society.

POLICY RELEVANCE

Our hope is that hedonic psychology will be rele-vant to policy. We recognize, with a large degreeof humility, that scientific understanding in thisfield is currently woefully inadequate to provide astrong underpinning for national policies. We be-lieve, however, that in the decades to come therewill be much greater success in understanding he-donics, and that principles will emerge that can beused by policy makers. We are particularly hopefulthat a scientific understanding of hedonic experi-ence will allow for the development of valid he-donic indicators that reflect the pleasantness of lifein the everyday experiences of people. At present,economic indicators hold the most sway in policycircles. Yet, the economic approach is limited inseveral ways. First, it focuses on those aspects oflife that can be traded in the marketplace. Thus,desirable goods such as love, mental challenge,and stress are given little consideration. As peoplereach what Ronald Inglehart has labeled a “post-materialist” level in which basic physical needs are

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met, they become increasingly concerned with ful-fillment in less materialistic realms. Second, theeconomic view presupposes that individuals willchoose the greatest amount of utility for them-selves; yet a great deal of evidence now contradictsthis proposition. Third, economics assesses vari-ables that are only indirect indicators of somethingelse—of subjective fulfillment. What is not knownis whether people are becoming happier or lesshappy, and in what situations people experiencethe most enduring pleasures. To this end, we pro-pose that nations should begin monitoring plea-sure and pain through on-line experience record-ing among samples of respondents to complementexisting social indicators, and to provide a moredirect assessment of the final outcome aboutwhich people are most concerned.

Fortunately, there have already been major ad-vances in the field of hedonic psychology. Theneural areas related to pleasure, pain, and to spe-cific emotions are understood with increasing clar-ity, as are the hormonal underpinnings of hedonic

phenomena. Scientists are accumulating increasingknowledge of affect—of mood and emotion—thatpromises to shed light on the long-term aspects ofpleasant experience. We are beginning to under-stand factors such as adaptation that can stronglyinfluence pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings,and the personality correlates of pleasant experi-ences are receiving increasing empirical attention.Thus, despite our relatively modest degree of un-derstanding, progress in the science of hedonicshas been made in the last several decades.

The following chapters present overviews of theknowledge accumulated thus far about hedonics.Our advice to authors was to make the chaptersaccessible to educated lay readers. Our selection oftopics was based on the idea that hedonics can beunderstood well only through an approach thatbrings together understanding at all levels of anal-ysis. Although there are several glaring omissionsin the book, we believe that most important topicsare covered. And we hope that reading this vol-ume will bring to each reader a degree of pleasure.