Affective modulation in positive psychology’s regime of happiness

Abstract

Over the last decade, positive psychology has reified happiness as the key to achieving an understanding of human psychological experience and development. According to positive psychology, happiness can be understood as a measurable object of self-cultivation and psychological enhancement. This conceptualization has provoked multiple critiques, focusing on the power effects invested in these psychological discourses, with a special emphasis on the governmentality practices they exercise on subjectivity formation, in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which specific technologies, derived from this “turn to happiness,” have had an influence on subjects’ bodies and embodied experiences beyond discursive means. In this article, we borrow insights from affect studies to contribute to and expand the critique of positive psychology. We do this by analyzing a positive psychology-based app called “Happify.” Our analysis consists of identifying and describing three mechanisms through which this technology modulates the capacities of human bodies by producing preemptive habits that result in what we call the positive psychology regime of happiness.

Keywords

affect happiness neoliberal governmentality positive psychology preemption

The so-called “science of happiness,” or positive psychology, is a branch of psychology that aims to study happiness and human well-being with scientific rigor, using a positivist framework. As they state, the specific focus of positive psychology is on strengths, capacities, and “optimal human functioning” rather than the negative or pathological aspects that have hitherto been the focus of most perspectives in psychology. The origin of this discipline is attributed to Martin Seligman—at the time president of the American Psychological Association—who, along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published some of the founding texts in this field (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Seligman, 2000, 2002, 2012; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

From this perspective, happiness can be empirically and objectively measured, as well as controlled, through precise therapeutic techniques allegedly accessible to everybody. Positive psychology, as an academic discipline and realm of expertise, has achieved broad acceptance in the most diverse social fields. It has influence not only in academic circles, but also in public policy, business and management spheres, education, and a range of popular practices in therapeutic culture, such as clinical psychology, coaching, and self-help literature (Béjar, 2011; Donaldson, Csikszentmihalyi, & Nakamura, 2011). Seeking to penetrate daily life has become one its main features. In this line, Tal Ben-Shahar (2007), author of the bestseller Happier, manifests that positive psychology’s role consists of connecting the “ivory tower” of the academy with the popular knowledge of everyday life, the universal quest for spiritual enlightenment, and the excitement of the self-help movement’s guidance. The aspirations of positive psychology’s program of happiness are such that Seligman (cited in Binkley, 2014) has declared, in the context of the First World Congress of Positive Psychology, that its main purpose is to increase the percentage of the world’s happy and “flourishing” population from 7%–33% to 51% during the next few decades.

Positive psychology’s version of happiness has been the target of a number of critical evaluations from different perspectives in the social sciences (see Frawley, 2015). In the US context, for example, a culturally specific analysis has focused on the connection between the positive happiness ideology and an individualistic and conservative political agenda related to consumerism and business-driven interests in the form of a “happiness industry” (Becker & Marecek, 2008a; Christopher & Hickinbottom, 2008; Davies, 2015; Ehrenreich, 2009, 2010). A different critical approach has sought to problematize the psychological subject depicted in positive psychology and argue for a deeper and more complex conception of well-being within a humanistic psychological framework (Becker & Marecek, 2008b; Lazarus, 2003; Miller, 2008; Wilson, 2008). The discursive and rhetorical resources used by positive psychology to persuade and obtain social legitimacy have also been highlighted (Yen, 2010). More broadly, numerous works have been devoted to analyze contemporary social and cultural transformations that could encompass positive psychology discourses, such as “positive thinking” and the self-help movements, optimism ideology, and the role of “positive” emotions in shaping political and social relations (e.g., Ahmed, 2010; Béjar, 2011; Berlant, 2011; Hochschild, 2012; Illouz, 2008; McGee, 2006; Moskowitz, 2001; Papalini, 2006, 2010; Segal, 2017).

Within this extensive landscape of critique, we are interested in highlighting two approaches particularly relevant to our analysis. The first engages with social psychological perspectives analyzing the epistemological and ontological problems of positive psychology and its notion of happiness; arguing the difficulty inherent in considering happiness as an individual, singular, universal, and objective entity, capable of transcending cultural and temporal contexts (Cabanas & Huertas, 2014; Christopher & Hickinbottom, 2008; Held, 2005; Slife & Richardson, 2008). This perspective also analyzes the theoretical and methodological problematic assumptions of current forms of measuring and accounting for happiness as an object (Cromby, 2011). From this perspective, happiness can be understood as a dispositif that locates psychological experiences, feelings, and desires as strictly individual and internal affairs, ruled by a cognitive and subjective voluntarism. As Greco and Stenner (2013) have argued, this conception of happiness splits the subject from her world, reducing her powers and potentialities over it and restricting her to an entrepreneurial subjectivity.

The second trend of critical analysis we are interested in comes from a Foucauldian perspective and particularly from governmentality studies (Binkley, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2018; De la Fabián & Stecher, 2017; Zevnik, 2014). These works are interested in analyzing how happiness discourses and practices in the frame of positive psychology can shape distinct subjectivities and promote specific relationships individuals have with themselves. Through a genealogical approach, this perspective considers the functionality of the “science of happiness” regarding particular historical and cultural orders and political transformations in late capitalism. Binkley’s work has traced the “psy-function” of happiness over forms of subjectivity shaped by the neoliberal enterprise. This shift involves an erosion of the docile subject dependent on external and institutional psychological authorities in favor of an autonomous subject, with an entrepreneurial spirit, ready for self-government. It also implies the refusal of the psychological interiority and psycho-biographical forces as explanatory models, opting for formulae of cognitive determinism. In sum, it involves the transition of a model centered on psychological adjustment to a rationality consisting of a self-regulated individual invested in the maximization of her psychological and emotional capital. In this manner, De la Fabián and Stecher (2017) emphasize that this neoliberal governmentality, situated in the larger biopolitical context, promotes a specific kind of work on oneself—work characterized by the use of political economy as its main rationality and, particularly, by the notion of human capital. As Binkley (2011b) suggests, this transformation within the psy sciences and functions shows a more intensified form of capitalist subjectification, where psychological discourses related to happiness operate “from a range of sites not only [from] within the traditional institutional domains of the psy-function, but also through popular and media channels largely outside the halls of expert practice, including popular discourses linked with consumer lifestyles and self-help publishing, and an expansive, semi-professional network of practitioners and service providers” (p. 92).

In this paper, we will argue that these analyses, and particularly the one developed by the governmentality perspective, can be further advanced by taking insights from the field of affect studies. While the discussed critical approaches have contributed a great deal to understanding some of the effects of positive psychology’s version of happiness, they mainly focus on discursive practices and point out power effects at the level of the individual’s values and desires. The “entrepreneur of oneself” as a figure that allows for capturing positive psychology’s subjective formations refers mainly to a particular rationality for conduct regulation in relation to the self and identity. Nevertheless, the diversification of sights and modalities through which this kind of psy-function operates, and the heterogeneous technologies mediating their version of happiness, has expanded the landscape of effects for positive psychology.

In order to contribute to developing critical approaches toward positive psychology’s technologies, this paper has a twofold objective: (a) to integrate affect studies as a theoretical framework and analytical tool and (b) to analyze the positive psychology-based mobile app, “Happify,” and the impact of this technology at the level of the body and the affective experience of subjects. By discussing the effects of this mobile app, we will argue that in addition to shaping a certain subjectivity, when the positive psychology discourse of happiness is technologically mediated, it also modulates affective registers within human bodies.

Affect studies and the so-called “affective turn” (Blackman & Venn, 2010; Clough & Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Lara & Enciso, 2013) is marked by a strong concern for non-individual, non-conscious, non-cognitive, transpersonal processes as well as an interest in the communicative capacities of bodies outside linguistic representation and socially constructed meaning. While the original project of affect studies was to develop a strong matrix of knowledge to theorize “affect” understood as the capacities of bodies, or what bodies can do, this approach has been criticized by assuming a straightforward and clear distinction between affect and emotion; the former being non-conscious, non-linguistic, non-individual and the latter being conscious, linguistic, and containing an individual representation of affect. Social psychologists have been particularly critical of this distinction, arguing that it raises methodological problems (Wetherell, 2015); that it promotes the idea that they are independent of each other (Stenner, 2018); that it promotes a de-subjectification of emotion and bodily activity (Ellis & Tucker, 2015); and that it raises the problem of theorizing intentionality (Cromby & Willis, 2016), as well as neglecting the relevance of memory and subjectivity (Brown & Reavy, 2015).

Understanding affect as a corporeal experience shouldn’t—and in fact can’t—be separated from its linguistic representation or other intentional forms of socialization. The effort of affect studies when pointing to something else, or something beyond, or previous to, discourse-conscious-representation, brings to attention the co-constitutive nature of this discourse, consciousness, and representation. As Gregory Seigworth explains, “‘non-’ is not ‘anti-’ and […] affect study does not—indeed, cannot—sustain its workings through negation or inversion or exclusion” (2017, p. ii). Even Massumi has acknowledged the relevance of focusing on the circuit of affect–emotion / discursive–pre-discursive, precisely because one cannot be understood without the other. In his words, this relation is a symbiotic one,

where practices that are not primarily linguistic are seen to bear active conceptual force that can be brought to explicit verbal expression, and by being brought into language can cycle back into the practice from which they develop to spur it further. (2015, p. 77)

In recent years, the tendency of affect studies seems to be marked by renovated approaches to the study of subjectivity as it emerges out of material relations (see Clough, 2018; Lara et al., 2017) and the political implications of what the multiple technologies of control societies do to human bodies (see Clough & Willse, 2011; Massumi, 2015; Protevi, 2009). Cromby summarizes the contributions of affect studies in two points: first, their focus on “the deliberate or incidental manipulation of material intensities” and second, “the ways that feelings can instantiate in the present the influence of the indeterminate future” (2015, p. 121). The latter is known as preemption, a concept that we will develop later on in the article. Affect studies stands as a body of knowledge that has taken as one of its main concerns the analysis of control devices that do not target conscious or ideological processes, but rather the modification of bodies’ capacities either by technological augmentation or public policies. This theoretical potential is particularly important when analyzing the effects of positive psychology’s version of happiness within the human body, or what we have called “positive psychology’s regime of happiness.” By that, we mean an engagement with the set of technologies and devices that bring the body into affective states that are supposed to provide happiness to the subject.

In the following section we briefly discuss the theoretical coordinates where we situate this work in relation to the critical approaches toward the psy sciences. Next, we developed an analysis of the Happify app using the notion of preemption. Although this analysis is not a research report per se, with an exhaustive methodological design, the theoretical analysis of this technology is enriched by the authors’ experience of using the app and the record kept of this experience by the authors. Finally, we conclude by highlighting the ways in which this analysis can expand critical approaches toward the psy technologies in the context of the discipline–control dualism.

Happiness: From discipline to control

Critical analysis of psychology and psy sciences as mechanisms for the control and regulation of subjectivities in late capitalism have developed focusing primarily on their disciplinary function. Indeed, it has been rightly pointed out that psychology and other related sciences emerged to respond to the requirements of modern capitalist societies, exercising a disciplinary power in which subjects are modeled to meet institutional standards of production. The disciplinary function of psychology contributes to the surveillance and normalization of subjects, by organizing the circulation of bodies through specific spaces and tasks. This sort of mechanism operates by external supervision over the movements of bodies in closed institutional spaces (e.g., prison, factory, military, school, and hospital): “disciplinary systems strive to make surveillance an integral part of their schedules of production and control such that the individual subject can be precisely and comparatively observed” (Hook, 2007, p. 18).

It is argued that this political power over bodies will be central for the production of psychological individuality. The functioning of disciplinary power is entangled with a proliferation of professional agents and rehabilitation experts such as teachers, doctors, therapists, and counselors. For instance, Rose (1985, 1990) has described the emergence of a psy-complex within the welfare state over the course of the 20th century. In this context, the “psy disciplines” played an important role in the government of individuals and populations and their productive integration within disciplinary institutions, via the military, the psychiatric hospital, industrial organization, and the general “social adjustment” of children, workers, and stay-at-home parents to psychological and moral criteria of the time.

As the “discipline” of the subject, psychology has been the institution assigned to operationalize the historical shaping of the healthy and functional subject useful for the purposes of capitalism (see, e.g., Danziger, 1979; Parker, 2007; Rose, 1990, 1998). Psychology has been catching up and adapting to the correspondent socio-political model. As Parker (2007) explains, “Psychological theory is always a child of its time, and the theories do adapt and survive in the intellectual marketplace as the survival of the fittest ideas for capitalism” (p. 22). In this sense, psychology can be thought of as a disciplinary mechanism devoted to the production and regulation of the subject. It could be said that a shared aim of several critical psychologies has been to point out precisely what kind of subject is being shaped by either traditional models of psychology or specific expressions of current capitalism.

While most psychological power functions have been understood in terms of discipline, we suggest that the affective realm of phenomena involved in positive psychology’s regime of happiness is best understood through the Deleuzian notion of “control societies.” This is so because, as we will argue, contemporary psy technologies, particularly those related to positive psychology’s regime of happiness, work through the modulation of tendencies “within the human” in contemporary capitalism. In other words, the notion of “control societies” provides a useful framework to grasp the affective dimensions of these new happiness technologies as they reconfigure and move beyond its traditional objects and power strategies.

A particular aspect of the distinction between disciplinary and control societies in which we are interested refers to the different subjects they target. Such a distinction allows us to reconsider the sovereign status of the individual subjected to contemporary psychological technologies. The different kinds of power correspond to and target a different subject: “the subject of sovereign power, according to Deleuze is, in the end, the sovereign (i.e. God) and the subject of discipline is man, the subject of biopower is the living within man” (Nail, 2016, p. 255).

As concepts for the theorization of power, discipline refers to a system based on confinement (punishment) of organic bodies, whereas control refers to a system interested in the probabilities of those bodies, their parts, or capacities. Discipline is a form of power targeting the subject, so it focuses on the production of subjects whose behavior expresses internalized social norms. Further, discipline produces practices meant to shape subjectivities and their corresponding behaviors.

In contrast, control targets the modulation of life itself, so it does not need the “subject” as a sovereign entity. It can work with parts of the subject—fragments of liveliness. As Nail explains, “discipline normalizes closed spaces, whereas biopower and control both manage open spaces according to a calculus of probabilities” (2016, p. 260). Foucault defines discipline as an operation seeking normalization, thus it requires institutions within which such a shaping takes place, but control is imminent and less localized: “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5).

The critical analyses toward the psychology of “happiness” have focused predominantly on the level of psychological individuality and “man as subject.” Particularly, Foucauldian and governmentality-informed analyses of positive psychology and happiness discourses (Binkley, 2014; De la Fabián & Stecher, 2017) have shown that the neoliberal subject of happiness can be characterized as an “entrepreneur of oneself.” A subject prompted to lead her life as a project of continuous maximization and enhancement of her own self, acting upon herself in an economic fashion and with an entrepreneurial spirit. It is a rational and strategic subject, compelled to conduct herself in an autonomous manner and to make individual choices in a frame of (regulated) freedom. This self-regulated subject is constantly pushed to develop internal skills and abilities that allow her to enter into a social order shaped by the image of the free market. In this framework, happiness discourses function as “technologies of the self” that mediate between self-regulation practices and broader political goals oriented by late capitalism and neoliberal societies. Such an analysis further develops the way in which psy discourses and technologies play a role in modeling or shaping the individual self in accordance with political features of late capitalism and neoliberalism. This subjectification mode, based on self-regulation and the incessant capitalization of an individual’s initiative, transcends the disciplinary mechanisms of the psy sciences, based on external normalization technologies, to move closer to the security mechanisms of neoliberal rationality.

Certainly, positive psychology its regime of happiness operate through myriad heterogeneous practices and technologies. To a large extent, they fall into the conventional means of psy disciplines as well as into governmentality strategies targeted at an individual psychological level. This is evident in academic life in the form of research programs, scientific literature, thematic conferences, and theoretical bodies that constitute mechanisms for knowledge production. It is also present in professional practices seeking to develop group or individual interventions, for example, through training programs or therapeutic processes. It has also ventured into the field of institutional and organizational administration, as in the form of economic criteria for the evaluation of social development and guidelines for public policies (Martínez-Guzmán & Medina Cárdenas, 2016). Moreover, positive psychology’s happiness regime can also be found in less formal or institutionalized social fields such as entrepreneurial and self-realization practices, as well as in pop culture (Cabanas & Huertas, 2014; Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks, & Kerrigan, 2016). In sum, they operate as “discursive formations” and “technologies of the self” in the regulation of subjects and subjectivities.

Nevertheless, this regime can also work through new technologies that actually amplify its scope of action—technologies that are not necessarily aimed toward psychological individuality per se, or centered only on the relation of the individual with herself in the context of conduct regulation, but that operate on a more molecular scale: a pre-conscious level of body states and propensities. The intervention at this level can be seen, for example, in the mobile app discussed in this paper. In the development of mobile apps designed to boost happiness through positive psychology’s theory and principles, we can find new technologies of happiness that relate differently to the human body and subjectivity. These technologies of happiness not only shape subjects by regulating behaviors to internalize specific norms. In addition, positive psychology’s technological resources target material relations inside the human body.

These mechanisms modulate the probabilities of bodies experiencing variations of intensities that cannot be consciously controlled. That is, new technologies derived from positive psychology do not only operate through the government of the self and target psychological individuality, but also reach the domain of control and regulation of material relations inside the human body.

From the rhythm of breathing to the frequency of auto-check-in or self-report to the reinterpretation and further domestication of embodied experience, positive psychology pushes the human body toward a regime of homogeneous happiness by attuning bodies and investing in their capacities: smiling, managing time, profiting from relationships, breathing, or changing body postures. This exists in relation to detrimental capacities: being nostalgic or angry, enjoying toxicity, dwelling on past experiences, gaining pleasure from non-profitable activities. This is what Massumi (2015) would identify as bodies being “induced into, attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurist and potential” (p. 57). This is of great relevance for the theorization of subjectivity as it emerges out of affective modulation upon the body.

In this sense, the shift from discipline to control societies represents an expansion in the power mechanisms of modern capitalist societies: an extension from power executed by the state and through institutions to an immanent power capable of modulating life without the need for institutions shaping subjects. In control societies, Deleuze argues, we face things like “perpetual training” replacing education, or “the new medicine ‘without doctor or patient’ that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk” (1992, p. 7). This expansion of power mechanisms has created a historical fold, one in which we are still subjected to regimes of discipline (e.g., still immersed in the logic of schools or hospitals), but now we also have technologies for self-regulation. The capacities of our bodies and life components are being modulated with technologies that bypass conscious activity, in the sense that such technologies are not dealing with us as subjects, but as components of populations, pieces without subjectivity.

Thus, a key aspect in this fold is the progressive transition from shaping to modulation that occurs in control societies. Disciplinary mechanisms captured a subject as an inert mass ready to acquire form, as a malleable substance to which a mold gives its final consistency. Modulation, on the other hand, is a kind of intervention that follows, changes in shape, giving the substance new intensities and configurations, often variable. As Lazzarato (2006) suggests, if the disciplines molded bodies to occupy specific positions in closed systems by constituting habits, the societies of control modulate brains and feelings constituting habits, primarily in the “spiritual memory,” often carving this memory through information and communication technologies operating in open spaces. Thereby, in addition to advancing the criticism concerning the type of subject that positive psychology is constructing, these technological devices framed in the logic of control societies call for an analysis of the kind of modulation that positive psychology’s regime of happiness is bringing to human bodies through its mechanisms. This turn allows for a further elaboration and expansion of the critique of the regime of happiness and technologies for the government of subjectivity.

Happify, preemption, and habits

Zizi Papacharissi has explored the way in which affect and technology evolve together. According to her, technology allows for events that intensify or subtract from bodies, encounters, and ideas informing our sense-making process of the human body in relation to technologies that are affect-driven. In her words “affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity, which permits feelings to be felt and subsequently transcribed into emotions” (2015, p. 21). Based on this idea, we can see how positive psychology must invest in the modulation of body intensities to create the specific collection of affective modalities that will be linked together to become the organic correlate of what we then signify as “happiness.” In other words, to materialize their version of happiness, positive psychology brings human bodies into specific affective registers. They make us feel things. In this section, we explore the ways in which the app “Happify,” a positive psychology technology, works to modulate affective registers within human bodies.

Happify™ is a positive psychology based app for the improvement of happiness. It describes itself as “the single destination for effective, evidence-based solutions for better emotional health and wellbeing in the 21st century” (Happify, n.d., para. 1). This app sets programs meant to help you to improve specific skills allegedly needed to increase your happiness. On its webpage, it is stated that the techniques offered by the app “are developed by leading scientists and experts who’ve been studying evidence-based interventions in the fields of positive psychology, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy for decades” (para. 3). Moreover, activities and exercises displayed have a hyperlink leading to positive psychology’s scientific references in which they are based. It is precisely this focus on happiness boosting and its explicit foundation in positive psychology’s theory and research that makes this app particularly relevant to analyze.

This analysis of the app’s modulation of the body’s intensities emerged as the two authors of this paper have engaged with the app throughout months of using and systematically registering our own physical experience following its programs. We followed the tracks offered by the app and kept an individual record of our bodily experiences and general considerations. Later we shared and discussed these experiences to elaborate a joint theoretical reflection on the effects of this technology. Although this is not an empirical research report per se and, therefore, it is neither possible nor intended to account for the app functioning with different users and throughout different contexts, we believe that the reflection on our systematized experience with the app can offer some useful insights to enrich critical reflection around positive psychology’s technologies. In order to better illustrate our interaction with the app, we will include some screenshots taken from the programs we followed (available as Supplemental Material in the online version of this article).

The tasks assigned by the app result from a questionnaire conducted when one first downloads the app. The questionnaire is meant to detect what is preventing one from being happy, and explores issues like marital status, work satisfaction, and health. As a result of the questionnaire, the app suggests a specific program to follow, containing a set of activities to help the user improve the skills for happiness they lack. Programs such as “conquer your negative thoughts” or “relationship turmoil ends here,” “manage conflict & improve relationships at work,” or “motivate yourself to succeed.” Regardless of what program—or “tracks” as the app calls them—one chooses or which one the app suggests, all of them work by providing a few activities meant to improve five specific skills: “savor,” “thank,” “aspire,” “give,” and “empathize” (see image 1, available online as Supplemental Material). According to the app’s website, working through the five skills “brings you effective tools and programs to help take control of your feelings and thoughts” (Happify, n.d., para. 2). All this emotional work is done through the immediacy provided by a smartphone, which allows one to use the app at any moment. It follows that the prerogative of this technology, as indicated on its website, is that “Small slices of time can make big-time changes” (Happify, n.d., para. 5).

Binkley has suggested that modifying the temporalization of the subject is the resource through which positive psychology brings the subject to the logic of a neoliberal economy. He posits:

Happiness, to the extent that it frames the government of the self as a problem of time, expresses the intensification of power, which now satiates, not just the bodies and conducts of subjects, but the very potentialities by which subjects imagine and project their capacities into the future. Happiness, and the temporalization of government, is an intensification of power’s production of subjectivity. (2014, p. 90)

While we wholeheartedly agree with him, we want to argue that this neoliberal temporality involves not only the production of certain subjects but also the reorganization of temporalities within bodies by means of introducing new affective states in specific time lapses. In order to explain this new temporal reorientation of the body by means of the happiness regime, we invoke the term “preemption” as understood and developed within affect studies.

Preemption refers to the capacity of a body to feel what is to come. It is an intensification of the body’s current experience by means of an investment of the future in the present. Crucial for the concept of preemption as developed within affect studies is the idea that the aspect of the future that is brought to the present is unknown and is a threat. The threat is still to be determined because it has not yet emerged. The investment of the future within the present that preemption represents can be explained, according to Anderson, as a generative or productive power that acts in the present, “a present that is unbalanced by potential threats, preemptive logics work by unleashing transformative events in order to avoid a rupture in a valued life” (2010, p. 790). Thus, in preemptive logic, you are abducted from the present to act into a future present. This preemptive power has been featured by affect studies as an important capacity of current neoliberal capitalism (Clough, 2009), an important means by which the subject’s body is made to feel fear (Massumi, 2007, 2015), attraction to brands (Parisi & Goodman, 2011), or precaution through the configuration of spaces (Anderson, 2010), among many others. Interestingly, critical psychology has argued for a diversified nature of preemption, where the preempted affect doesn’t necessarily represent a threat but might bring the future in the form of hope (Cromby, 2015), or might even be reassuring as a result of surveillance (Ellis, Tucker, & Harper, 2013). The fact that individuals do not all respond to the intensities that are being promoted in the same way supports the idea of the analytical inseparability of affect and emotion that we argued for in the introduction of this article. In the specific case of happiness, it has been argued that subjects with different beliefs about positive psychology reach different results (Mongrain & Anselmo-Matthews, 2012).

The logic of preemption has reconfigured the linear understanding of time, as well as the capacities of the future to act upon the present. Clough explains this reconfiguration of time by asserting:

here indexes function such that the future is no longer believed to be a linear extension of the past so that the accurate prediction of probabilities is imagined to provide wisdom. Instead, the probability of effects in the future is deployed to assure or agitate affectively by power working on memory, tackling a universe of micro temporalities enabling the future not to be predicted by means of probabilities but for the future actively to occupy the present by means of immediacy–that is, affectively. (2009, p. 53)

Preemption then, does not aim to prevent the crisis. Its ultimate goal is to make such a not-yet-existent crisis a living feeling in the present body. This preemptive temporality is exactly what positive psychology’s regime of happiness does, as explained by Ahmed: “positive psychology involves the instrumentalization of happiness as a technique. Happiness becomes a means to an end, as well as the end of the means” (2010, p. 10). That is to say that techniques of happiness that are suggested to the subject to be performed in the present possess the final goal of delivering happiness in the future, and are simultaneously supposed to be the means by which you, in the present, work to achieve this happiness. Ahmed refers to this technical re-temporalization as “the promise of happiness,” a promise that is never delivered.

For Massumi, the preemptive capacities of the human body can be created by means of habit. A habit is a device that anticipates corporeal states, as Massumi notes: “Habit can become a creative force for the acquisition of new propensities, because it makes capacities available for action, and something can vary in the course of that making-available, and then be added to a body’s repertory” (2015, p. 61). Preemptive power is crucial then to understanding new forms of control, precisely because, as has been proposed elsewhere, the study of those propensities produced within bodies leads to the production of propensities in the production of subjectivity too (Lara et al., 2017). For Massumi, the subject does not come before the habits, because the subject is not prior to the event-formation, it emerges from it; “‘I’ do not contract habits. Habits contract to form me. That is taking me to be the regional matrix of reactivation that my body carries forward” (2015, p. 62). It follows that the intensification of the present involved in technologies working with preemptive power might be entering the body by means of repetition, or the creation of habit that happens to be one of the main means of positive psychology. To make the future tangible in the present, positive psychology introduces the subject in cycles of repetition creating habits that intensify the present: preemptive habits.

In the next section, we will identify and describe three different mechanisms through which the regime of control of positive psychology enters the human body when one engages with the Happify app. The three mechanisms of modulating the body’s affect are: (a) Permanent not-yet-ness, (b) reduction of the body’s emotional spectrum, and (c) organic production of habits. As we develop the description of these mechanisms, we will be using some screenshots taken as we engaged with the app (available in the online version of this article as Supplemental Material). These three mechanisms of entering the body help to illustrate how positive psychology’s regime of happiness has extended its resources from a disciplinary device to shape subjectivities toward a control technology to modulate affect within human bodies.

Permanent not-yet-ness

As McMahon (2006) has shown, one of the main conceptions of happiness in western societies has been as a state of evaluation or assessment of past events or life trajectories. This interprets happiness as an evaluation belonging to extraordinary moments or, in another framing, exceptional times of distanced appraisement that do not occur on a regular basis. In contrast with this, positive psychology has changed the frequency and order in which the idea of happiness is present in our life. Their version of happiness is a systematized one that requires constant thought and evaluations, at least two or three times per day. Likewise, it is centered in a time of expectation of a-greater-happiness yet to come. We have called this sensation of a happiness that is about to come, yet is never quite present, “permanent not-yet-ness.” The affective register of the permanent not-yet-ness is created by the app Happify via two resources: (a) the habit of reporting and (b) the cycle of the program.

First, the habit of reporting. The constant gesture of checking-in, reporting, posting, responding to evaluations, and practicing to improve certain skills all produce certain states. These states range from states of confrontation with your success (or failure) in your happy program, to states of reduction to classification of current feelings that are more and more recurrent. About three or four times per day, your body is brought not only into the state that results from such evaluations, reports, etc., but also—and more importantly—to the state that precedes such a state: the state of a body that is ready to feel. This readiness of the body to feel becomes a permanent state as the habits progress and becomes the preemptive quality of the positive psychology regime of happiness. The Happify app brings the human body into a permanent state of intensification of the present, by means of the constant presence—in the present—of the potential future. This happiness is thus actually experienced as expectation. Engaging with an app that works if you spend “small slices of time,” involves the commitment of checking in and reporting three or four times per day. It follows that, as your day advances your body is often feeling that you should post, or check in, or report something. It is not only the idea or the thought reminding you that you should use the app, it is also the sensation that becomes more and more recurrent, almost permanent at some point. Small spasms of a combination of anxiety, hope, and frustration invade the present in search of a promised future.

The permanent not-yet-ness of happiness means the production of a body that feels constantly worried, at some points stressed, because it should be actively working for its happiness right here, right now. Thus, positive psychology’s happiness is neither an assessment of the past nor the final outcome of a work process. It is rather the intensification of the present by means of the preemption of the future felt in the present body. As Ahmed (2010) explains, positive psychology’s happiness is a promise, and it is required to not be delivered, not yet, so it remains a promise in the present of a future that never comes. Even if it is possible to imagine different feelings and responses to the app (e.g., motivation, expectation), what remains a constant is that through the systematic reconfiguration of the practice of engaging with happiness, the body develops a new rhythm. In any case, an affective rhythm is modified by means of promoting repetition all the way to the perpetuation of a habit.

Second, the permanent not-yet-ness of happiness is also fed by the cycle of the program and the rhythm it prints in the body by means of the temporality of the tracks. The app brings you to permanently feel the cycle’s rhythm. The program of happiness is designed within a temporal frame; you have a certain number of weeks to fully improve all the skills of your program. Happify works within given times in which you must accomplish a certain amount of happiness, or certain skills, certain “happy capital” to use their language; if you don’t, the promise of happiness appears further away than it was, or than you were thinking you were from it. The app demands you to evaluate your performance from time to time, creating a representation of an isolated period of time that is again restricted and value-laden: either you did well the last few weeks or you didn’t. After a little training, the body gets ready to feel success, failure, or pushed forward to keep trying. The cycle of the program is presented to the user by different moments warning about the specific point of the program. In the “home” section, the app has a timeline indicating at what point you are and how much time you have left, as it presents phrases such as the following: “6 days left to complete part 1,” “Do you want more time?,” “It is time for evaluation,” “Time is coming” (see image 2; available online as Supplemental Material). This readiness to feel is operationalized by such indicators of the program’s time. If you have not “conquered” all your skills and you ask for more time, the couple of seconds to make that choice comes, in our experience, with the idea of “I didn’t make it”; a subtle sentiment of failure comes with the condescendence of the app offering you more time. These recurrent evaluations give some rhythm to the program’s cycle. They promote a given frequency for the body to feel attuned with the not-yet-delivered happiness.

The cycle of the program involves a system of points and rewards that contribute to imprinting the rhythm in the body. For example, the app might also suggest that you are in the position to obtain a “silver medal.” But if you choose to take it, the app asks again if you are sure, and argues that you might keep working to improve your strengths and achieve a “gold medal.” This technology plays with the timing of happiness and enlarges the promise of happiness. If the technique is a means for the goal and the goal is what you get by exercising the techniques meant to improve your skills, why isn’t happiness already there? Why are we prompted to keep improving certain skills if the “next level” of the game is going to offer another set of tasks that promise to make us happier? This is consonant with one central feature of neoliberal governmentality consisting, as asserted by Binkley (2014), in the continuous maximization and enhancement of the self. Nevertheless, the cyclical quality of the program’s app has effects not only in the participant but also in the participant’s body, imprinting the rhythm of the cycle in the body’s repertory. The app induces not an upgrading of the self but a rhythm of the body. Such a rhythm generates a value-laden meta-sensibility: the body feels good or bad, satisfied or dissatisfied, about the way it currently feels.

By means of reproducing the gesture of reporting and the cycle of the program, this permanent not-yet-ness produces a sensation that works directly upon the user’s self-image. It produces a distance between subject and happiness as an identity category. You are doing well on your path to happiness or you are doing badly, and are still far from it. Whatever the case, this not-yet-ness of happiness provides input to be used to create small moments of subjectification that work as the base for the development of subjectivity propensities toward a (distance-driven) auto-constitution of the subject. Then the human body acquires tendencies and trajectories, it learns the temporal dimension of social goals, and knows when to be tired, when to be exhausted, when it is almost there, and when it will never make it. In such a way that the body can inform feedback, inform in advance the state of the journey before you think about it, the technology feedforwards you, as Hansen (2015) would have it.

The duration of the programs or tracks act upon the user’s self-image and affect their perception about their personal history and their sense of performance. They help to create a certain subject. This happens slowly, as part of the process of incorporating the patterns of the technology to the user’s body; the processual impact on the self-image results from the systematic feedback the app gives them and the correspondent moment of interpretation that follows. Again, it is the repetition which creates the habit and gives specific tendencies to subjectivity. This feature of the technology, however, also contributes to modulate the affective experience of the temporality of happiness. The readiness to feel creates a body that every now and then feels ready to start again, because it is not yet there.

Reduction of the body’s emotional spectrum

The app produces a sort of tempo-material gap resulting from the relation between the body and the enforced alienation of this experience. We will refer to this as the “reduction of the body’s emotional spectrum,” meaning the way in which this app offers a limited range of emotions to represent body states, and how this impacts affective registers. This is a crucial feature of the app that is very useful in better understanding the inseparability of affect and emotion. If the app limits the potential representations of affect, and reproduces both the affect and the idea, then we need to explain how positive psychology impacts humans through this app. Happify restricts the possibilities of representing body states, as you might be feeling whatever experience your body wants, but you are forced to classify them through a short range of value-laden options, like happiness, sadness, thankfulness, empathy, anxiety, or the feeling of “savoring the moment.” The gesture of self-reporting is conditioned because the app is designed to achieve happiness through a two-sided strategy: (a) to avoid non-happy states such as sadness, anxiety, loneliness, etc. and (b) to improve five skills: “savor,” “thank,” “aspire,” “give,” and “empathize.” Thus, the activities of the app work specifically with these emotions, either to avoid or to reproduce them.

An example of this reduction of the emotional spectrum regarding the emotions that should be avoided can be found in the program “conquer your negative thoughts.” It includes a game where the user “throws away” their negative feelings and it consists of doing exactly that: picking signals of the “negative emotions” that they currently feel, throwing them into a hole and getting points by doing so. In this activity, whatever negative experience the user wants to work through must be classified under either “anger,” “sadness,” “disappointment,” “worry,” “anxiety,” “despair,” “jealousy,” “resentment,” or “tension,” among others (see image 3, available online as Supplemental Material). Even when the game provides the option of introducing the user’s own word, they can get rid of it by throwing it in the hole. The experience must be captured in one word and this involves the reconfiguration of the experience to make it fit into a given category.

Regarding the emotions we are compelled to foster, we can cite a common practice suggested in the skill, to “thank.” The app encourages the user to contact someone—from the list of contacts on their phone and social networks—and send them a message (whatsapp, email, text message, Facebook message) describing a moment they experienced together that they are thankful for. It is worth noting that the app does not give the user any points for the activity until they have actually sent it. This experience that the user recalls in the message activates the need to express gratitude. In a similar way, the activities belonging to any of the five skills encourage the participant to “feel,” “savor,” “thank,” “aspire,” “give,” and “empathize” (see image 1, available online as Supplemental Material). This mechanism that forces any good experience to be recognized within any of these five categories systematically reduces the possibilities of the body to feel different things. We describe the experience of this “reduction of the body’s emotional spectrum” as a sort of tempo-material gap because it enlarges the transition from affect to emotion creating a “momentum of vacuum” where the experience is about to be modified because it has to be classified and the result of this momentum is the reconfiguration of the actual bodily state. The gap is temporal because it enlarges time and is material because it reconfigures the body state during this time lapse.

This temporal gap between affect and emotion is intensified by breaking the actual experience to classify it within a given range of options. Your body feels, then you are forced to pay attention to what you are feeling, and to choose which category to place it in. Self-report does not mean free report: you report within the given categories. But bodily experience does not necessarily follow these categories. It is not as though our body can only feel sadness, or joy, or thankfulness. Life is made of a plethora / myriad / unending range of / multitude of / vast spectrum of diverse feelings. But the user is compelled to classify, so the happiness program necessarily breaks the flow of the body’s experience to make it fit, so the user can measure it and continue with the program. This temporal and material gap is a break in the rhythm of the experience. It is a set of a new pattern of temporality; that of realizing you are sad, or happy, or whatever, which of course most of the time is a far more simplified version of what you were actually feeling. The result of this is an affective register that feels like a specific “joy”—or “thankfulness” or “empathy”—that a second ago felt like something else and now is trying to feel like joy. Our experience with the program has been that of feeling a sort of artificial experience. Whether the experience is a memory of the day or the immediate event, the user needs to recognize or evoke and recognize, capture the affect, and alienate it into the categories of the program. They do that by creating this little moment of vacuum, this interruption of the experience to decide which experience deserves to be thrown away, and which one deserves to be cultivated. The gap of temporality of this technology creates a subject that always knows how she feels, and is able to report it and classify it. But more importantly, it creates a subject that always knows for sure what is good and what is bad, she knows this difference. Playing within these categories proposed by the program, positive psychology creates a narrow-minded subject with an automatic relation to report the events of her body: her “happy body.” The break of the flow of the experience induced by this technology repeats again and again as one follows the training. After a little while, the body itself knows the corresponding value of each experience and is ready to activate the corresponding course of action: extinguish sadness, express gratitude, realize anxiety, and so on. It is not only subjective interpretation which is narrowed. After some training, the user does not even need a narrow interpretation because they are already in possession of a “happy body.” A body with a restricted and pre-defined landscape of experiences to be felt, as well as a body that has a tendency to respond to each state.

This value-laden and distance-driven new relation between one’s own body and the way it is represented, makes evident the necessity to question the sovereign status of the subject that was thought to be the object of discipline. Berlant refers to this sovereignty as a “fantasy misrecognized as an objective state: an aspirational position of personal and institutional self-legitimating performativity and an affective sense of control in relation to the fantasy of that position’s offer of security and efficacy” (2011, p. 97). The technologically mediated affective modulation described here as a reduction of emotional spectrum is an example of the ways in which control mechanisms bypass conscious activity and directly target material and temporal relations that escape the subject’s control; although the app also subsequently manipulates the possibilities of representation to alienate both the affect and its representation.

Organic production of habits

The third mechanism of the Happify app to attempt entry into the body refers to the production of specific states of the body by means of training and explicitly asking the user to put the body in certain positions or perform specific actions with their body. This technology is closer to a discipline mechanism as long as it persuades the participant to consciously adopt a habit through the practice and a conscious modification of their current state. However, the technology target is not the participant. The willing participant is a means to modify a specific body state, to literally change the frequency and intensity of specific organic functions. An example of this “organic production of habits” can be found in the guide for relaxation and meditation with several tutorials based on following instructions about what to do with one’s body, almost like an audio yoga class that trains the body to reproduce certain behaviors. But the most outstanding and clear example of this third technology of modulation is the “breather”: a technology used to systematically change whatever state the body has for a given pattern of breathing and circulation of the blood, creating what we identify as an organic habit (see image 4, available online as Supplemental Material).

The breather is a tool of the Happify app that helps the user to “relax” by reducing their heart rate and this is done by inducing specific rhythms of breathing: reducing frequency of inhaling, and extending the length of exhalations. The app asks the user to choose a relaxing place to be used as a backdrop for the exercise. Once this is done, the user positions their finger in the camera so it can measure their heart rate. The breather then starts running and the exercise finishes only when the user’s heart rate has decreased. The breather asks the user to attune their breathing with a line representing movement. The technology measures their heart rate and calibrates the breather to a lower frequency, so by slowing down their breathing rate it eventually modifies their heart rate. The breather will not stop and the task will not be completed until their heart rate decreases. To complete the activity and get points—and improve the skill at stake—the user’s internal frequency must physically change. This technology is a clear example of what Massumi (2015) calls the modulation of affect through the modulation of habits. The body keeps training to promote specific states, to alienate the rhythm and frequencies of the human body to states associated with positive psychology’s idea of happiness.

This breather mechanism makes one conscious of experience data that would not be part of the experience as data. One is never aware of their heart rate unless informed by technology. It expands the present by bringing to conscious experience information from other scales of the reality and the target is to replace the material relations that constitute the current state. The breather trains your body, not your mind. However, such a reproduction of affective states is achieved by directing the will of the participant into a specific set of activities: breathe this way, put the finger here, follow the line when breathing in, and then follow the line when breathing out. At first glance, this looks like a disciplinary technology of the body, although the target is not—or not only—to alienate the will of the participant or specific representations in her mind, but to produce a body with a certain heart rate in her repertoire. This is a device in between discipline and control. On the one hand, it presents itself to the participant as a discipline device and as a discourse of a scientific authority that explains to you a technique for happiness. On the other hand, the target of this device is not the alienation of human subjectivity but rather the modulation of a specific material intensity within the body: the heart rate. The breather uses the means of discipline to deliver control. It follows that this breather is a pertinent representation of the contemporary moment in our society; one in which we are still subjected to discipline because we still live in organic bodies with consciousness, but we are simultaneously vulnerable to control devices like the technology used by the Happify app. Equally, the breather is a good example of the inseparability of the discursive dimension of the app—giving instructions, creating categories for emotions, rating skills, etc.—and the targeted affective experience in the body. Affect, in this technology, is necessarily mediated by meaning.

Final remarks

In this analysis, we have explored some of the control mechanisms used by the app Happify™. We have described what such technology does to the human body in terms of the creation of preemptive habits that promote specific affective registers by means of repetition and instantiation of future presents. This is what we have called positive psychology’s regime of happiness. If, as we have argued, the modulation of bodies’ intensities affects the production of subjectivity, it follows that in order to fully understand the subject constructed by positive psychology we have to start paying attention to the modulation of material and temporal relations. At the same time, the analysis illustrates that even when affective modulation is the target of a specific control device, it cannot be understood as being fully separated from the discursive-meaning-representational dimension of life. This is precisely because all these conscious processes mediate affective modulation. In contemporary capitalism, technology allows for meaning to have two functions: on the one hand, it still works as the direct resource to reach discipline and alienate behavior and subjectivity; on the other hand, it can also work as the means to modulate and control affective experience beyond consciousness.

The three mechanisms of the regime of happiness described here help to understand ways in which this technologically mediated discourse of happiness affects the capacities of the human body. By promoting the sensation of the not-yet-ness of happiness, reducing the spectrum of feeling and training the body to replace organic states, the Happify app enters and modifies the capacities of human bodies. The instantiation in the present of future feelings and the manipulation of material forces are fully presented, and in fact describe what the mechanisms of Happify do to the human body. Through the process of preemption and habit modulation, these three technologies of happiness are creating a new subject, not exclusively by (but certainly not independent from) discursive means, ideological manipulation, or disciplinary tactics, but by direct alteration of the body’s processes and cycles. Happiness promoted by positive psychology not only regulates the subject’s cognitions and behaviors, it is also a project of the production of bodies with limited and controlled emotional states.

The analysis of this technology also articulates—and further develops—the critical approach derived from governmentality studies and particularly with the thesis of the entrepreneurial self. The particular happiness regime that the app promotes is consistent with practices of subjectification of neoliberal governmentality, as it operates as an individualized, mobile, and self-applied technology, targeting a subject tied to a rationality of continuous self-evaluation and systematic enhancement. Moreover, it shows how these technologies are internalized in the body and how they reach affective processes beyond the realm of the unified subject and her conscious behaviors and desires.

In the discipline–control fold, the power functions of the psy sciences venture outside institutional spaces and penetrate deeper than the subject’s behavior and cognition to reach organic states and affective processes. As this positive psychology-based app illustrates, governing subjectivities in the era of control is more related to electronic technologies than to the institutional and closed expertise circuits traditionally deployed by the psy sciences. The relation of the subject with herself goes beyond the implantation of patterns of behavior and representation, to the modulation of bodily habits and affective cycles, reframing subjectification processes into open spaces and intervening the temporality of feeling. As proposed by Deleuze (1992),

the conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. (p. 7)

Our proposal allows us to further elaborate and expand the critique toward the regime of happiness and the psychological technologies for the government of subjectivity. Future lines of research around these kinds of psy technologies may include empirical analysis exploring the various possible relations of subjects with them—e.g., appropriation, re-signification, and resistance. The way in which such technologies impact differently on bodily processes, affects and subjectivity, attending to differences in gender, social class, and ethnicity, among other lines of power. Likewise, such inquiry might be enriched with the exploration of uses and experiences of these technologies in different and particular geopolitical and cultural contexts.

In the discipline–control fold, psychology has also expanded its ways of dealing with the subject, from subjectivity-shaping to the modulation of (happiness) probabilities. We have shown how the Happify app, as a specific technology used by positive psychology, contributes not only to the production of certain subjectivities, as has been explained by several critics, but also and crucially, that this technology enters the body and modulates the capacities of the body to feel what we have called the regime of happiness. When regimes of control expand toward new landscapes, the theoretical apparatus from which we form our critique needs to be expanded too.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental_material – Supplemental material for Affective modulation in positive psychology’s regime of happiness

Supplemental material, Supplemental_material for Affective modulation in positive psychology’s regime of happiness by Antar Martínez-Guzmán and Ali Lara in Theory & Psychology

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biographies

Antar Martínez-Guzmán is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Colima (Mexico). His research interests include gendered subjectivities and identities, the social construction of the body and mental health, and psychology as a governmental technology. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, Athenea Digital, and Universitas Psychologica.

Ali Lara is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London (UK). His research interests include affect and emotions studies in context such as everyday eating and drinking, as well as everyday use of mobile apps. His work has been published in such journals as The Senses & Society, Capacious, and Subjectivity.

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