Abstract
The Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at the University of California, Berkeley, is on a mission to help people learn skills that foster greater integration of happiness, compassion, and resiliency in their lives. Believing that such skills help improve the well-being of individuals, the GGSC has channeled their cause through a variety of venues to teach the masses about the evidence-based benefits of seeking good and finding meaning and purpose in the world. Looking specifically at gratitude, awe, happiness, compassion, and other states that improve well-being, the team from GGSC explained in further detail how they are trying to help improve people's lives.
Jason Marsh, Editor-in-Chief and Director of Programs at GGSC, commented. “One of our main goals at the GGSC is to put research findings on the roots of compassion, generosity, and happiness—what we call ‘the science of a meaningful life’—into terms that are understandable and practical to people outside of academia, especially parents, educators, and health professionals.” New research findings have important implications for how to lead a happy, healthy life and maintain strong relationships with others—and yet these findings rarely reach the general public, according to Marsh. Therefore, the GGSC publishes and highlights important strategies for social and emotional well-being, particularly for people who may have great influence over the well-being of others.
Founded in 2001, the GGSC keeps close tabs on new developments in the scientific literature, and then reports on these findings and disseminates such information through their online magazine, e-newsletter, through social media, and classes, programs, and events. Together, these venues reach hundreds of thousands of people each month, according to Marsh. The GGSC has recently expanded its focus on practical “how to” resources available on a new Web site, Greater Good in Action 1 —a clearinghouse for the research-based practices for fostering happiness, resilience, kindness, and connections. “Each practice includes step-by-step instructions as well as brief summaries of the research supporting that practice,” said Marsh.
Dacher Keltner, the GGSC's Faculty Director and the Thomas and Ruth Ann Hornaday Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, stated, “The initiatives of the GGSC have wildly exceeded my hopes in terms of reach, audience, and impact.” Keltner stated that specific findings, which he has personally learned about and/or experienced through his work with the GGSC, include the facts that being outdoors in nature makes people more altruistic, modest, humble, and reduces stress; focusing on the suffering of others and practicing compassion boosts happiness; the right kind of touch can calm the physiology of stress and build bonds; and laughter and play are the most important things parents can do with kids. Keltner is hopeful and excited about continuing to share the latest science on compassion, altruism, and mindfulness for both clinicians and patients to study, and for such populations to utilize the science-tested practices at Greater Good in Action.
Cutting-Edge Research in Positive Psychology
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the Science Director of the GGSC, is in charge of research initiatives including the GGSC's Research Fellowship program, which supports early career scientists studying topics that pertain to connection, kindness, and community. Simon-Thomas reports that as opposed to focusing only on in-house research, the GGSC works with a rich network of expert researchers and writes about these scientists' cutting-edge work. She said, “We also synthesize and distill findings into practical insights that can be applied to real-world contexts. In house, we examine the impact of our content, programs, and partnerships. We've observed that participation in our online course The Science of Happiness, 2 for example, boosts an array of metrics of well-being and reduces risk factors such as loneliness and stress.”
Among the current, cutting-edge positive psychology research findings that the GGSC is tracking are the developments on the topic and experience of “awe.” Marsh commented, “Researchers define awe as the feeling that you are in the presence of something vast, which defies your comprehension and requires you to rethink your mental models of the world. This feeling can come from art, nature, or even the inspiring actions of another person.” Recent studies have found that awe carries a variety of physical, psychological, and social benefits. Marsh referred to an article by Jennifer Stellar et al., which evaluated how positive emotions affect inflammatory cytokines. 3 Results of that study showed that when looking at the effects of a variety of positive emotions, awe was the strongest predictor of lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. The authors of the article commented, “This work suggests a potential biological pathway between positive emotions and health through pro-inflammatory cytokines.” 3 Marsh pointed out that these findings, put into practice, may help lower a person's risk for a variety of health problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and depression.
Self-compassion is another area of growing interest and research in positive psychology today. Marsh stated, “Self-compassion refers to the simple but radical idea that you can treat yourself with the same type of kindness and understanding that one would show a friend, particularly after making a mistake. Contrary to what some might assume, people high in self-compassion show more resilience in the face of a challenge, setback, or mistake—they're more capable of bouncing back to take on the next challenge, because they realize that these challenges are what connect them to the rest of humanity and are not something to be ashamed of. People high in self-esteem but low in self-compassion may be particularly hard on themselves and perhaps even avoid the next challenge, because their sense of self is so wrapped up in being superior to others.”
Gratitude is another hot topic today,
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and Marsh reported that studies have found that grateful people have fewer stress-related illnesses, lower blood pressure, stronger relationships, and reduced risk of heart problems. He said, “People who regularly record things for which they are grateful—by writing in a gratitude journal—may report greater levels of happiness and fewer symptoms of physical illness after just a few weeks of journaling.” Guided by these findings, the GGSC built its own online gratitude journal, called
One of the strongest findings the GGSC has reported on to date pertains to the importance of social connections for health and well-being. Simon-Thomas commented, “The emerging literature on how pro-social orientation, experience and behavior contribute to health and well-being is increasingly essential. Gratitude, for example, is associated with less loneliness, more social connection and, therefore, less risk of health problems. Mindfulness, particularly when it involves concerning oneself with the alleviation of suffering—both one's own and others (e.g., compassion and self-compassion)—is associated with lower biomarkers of stress and aging. Kindness—that is, investing more of one's personal resources in addressing the welfare of others—is systematically predictive of greater well-being, and this has been found to be true around the world.” Simon-Thomas commented on the physiologic basis for these findings: “As an overarching theme, there's a tendency for pro-social orientation, experience and behavior to shift the default mode of neural processing—that is, what the billions of neurons in our brains tend to do all the time beneath our everyday conscious experiences and decisions—away from focusing on vigilance-to-threat to the self, which is the engine of rumination that is associated with dysphoria, and towards social trust and connection—our greatest strength.”
Clinical Application
As the GGSC grows in terms of offerings and reach, they are striving to make their resources extremely practical and applicable to health professionals' work. The GGSC believes that by providing healthcare professionals with the latest research-based tools for well-being, they will not only help support these professionals' health, but also the health of the people for whom they care.
“As the research expands, we hope it can suggest with more precision not only why to engage in practices like gratitude, self-compassion, or mindfulness, but also how to do so in a variety of settings,” Marsh said. He added, “We want the lines of communication to flow both ways between the research community and health professionals. That's why, for instance, we've been working with health professionals on our Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude 6 project, sharing with them the results of the latest research on gratitude and obtaining their input on how these findings can be tailored to their work. We also have been engaging health professionals in our work, such as through our online Science of Happiness class and our workshop on mindful self-compassion, so that they take away the key lessons from this research and apply them to their own work in innovative ways.”
In partnership with several major healthcare organizations, the GGSC has focused on how to infuse the organizational culture with a richer sense of gratitude. Simon-Thomas said, “We've organized exploratory meetings with healthcare leaders to try to understand how to best achieve this and build a web-optimized, sharable gratitude journaling platform. We are gearing up to run dedicated gratitude campaigns within our partner organizations. I, in particular, will be insuring that we gather data to help us understand and track the impact of such initiatives.”
Simon-Thomas also hopes that the work of the GGSC will have a strong influence on leaders who determine the structure of healthcare clinicians' daily experiences with regards to scheduling, training, and expectations. She commented, “Healthcare clinicians navigate a particularly difficult terrain in terms of structural constraints against fulfilling their formative motivations—helping others—within an overwhelming culture of perfection and financial efficiency/profit motive. There are great opportunities, including utilizing the GGSC content and resources, for leaders to infuse the healthcare system with more compassion and authenticity to better serve their clinicians and their patients.”
Conclusion
As the GGSC continues to reach out to the masses for the betterment of society and improved well-being, Keltner stated they plan to expand their partnerships with health organizations to promote the practices they have focused on such as awe, gratitude, and kindness. He also hopes to reach a larger audience by providing greater access and disseminating information to populations such as teens and the very poor that may not have the time or resources to access their site. Keltner said, “I hope that certain practices such as experiencing awe outdoors for example, will become treated as prescriptions that physicians prescribe strategically to a wide variety of patients.”
Simon-Thomas advised healthcare providers to learn about the ideas and practical opportunities drawn from rigorous science available through the GGSC, which may help improve their personal lives and the patients they work with in terms of strengthened relationships, greater opportunities for positive experiences, and further skills for handling the inevitable stressors in life. She said, “Try them. Stick with it, like you might maintain a healthy exercise habit. Personal life is not as different from work life as some may think. We are the same people at our desks, at the bedside and at the dinner table, so investing in the ideas and exercises that the GGSC makes readily available and useful is a promising way to realizing a greater quality of life.”
Finally, Marsh concluded, “It has become clear to me that, while there's no panacea, there are relatively simple practices that can have a profound impact on our psychological and physical well-being.” ■