Maybe now is a good time to do a thing that I need to do but don’t really want to do.” And then equally when you’re feeling a bit down, rather than saying, “Oh well, now is a good time to start doing something that I don’t enjoy,” you say instead, “now might be a good time to call a friend or just take some time for myself and make sure that I don’t bring my mood even further down.” So I think flexibility is definitely relevant for resilience.ģ) Your study found when we’re in a bad mood, we generally look for things to boost our mood. With flexibility, one might say, “Well, actually I’m feeling quite good now. Using a computer simulation, we noted that simulated people with low hedonic flexibility had a much higher chance of having depressive episodes for reasons that make sense: When one’s mood goes down, you are less likely to engage in things that will bring it back up. If you don’t have flexibility, you might remain in a vicious cycle of, “I’m feeling bad, and I’m going to engage in things that ultimately do not improve my circumstance.” This study speaks to your question, which is that to be healthy, quite literally in this case, you need to have that flexibility to engage in a wealth of activities and not just to seek immediate pleasure. We found quite striking evidence that it was related to both depressed mood and actual clinical depression by looking at a wealth of data, both in France and Belgium, and in low- and middle-income countries. We published a follow-up study in JAMA Psychiatry (“ Mood Homeostasis, Low Mood, and History of Depression in 2 Large Population Samples”) where we tried to see whether people who were strong in the hedonic flexibility principle, how they compared against those who had lower flexibility-whether lower flexibility relates to depressed mood and depression. With that in mind, could hedonic flexibility be a function of inherently understanding that pleasure is better actualized when we experience a breadth of emotional states through what we choose to engage in?
We do things knowing the activity will decrease our affect in the short term, in the hope of longer-term benefits.Ģ) To some degree, hedonic tone (our ability to experience pleasure) appears to be an exercise in comparison. One likely reason for this is because we have other goals in life than just feeling happy all the time. We know that we all do things for other reasons than just improving our affect. We can’t constantly engage in activity that will increase our instant affect directly. Intuitively, this interpretation makes sense, most of us understand we can’t just go on having fun all the time. But as you said, I think this is the most likely interpretation. There might be other interpretations of the data with more validity. We cannot be certain that this is what’s happening. It’s also our interpretation of the data. He is now passionate about combining data of many kinds (brain imaging, mobile phone, electronic health records, etc.) to better diagnose and treat mental illness.ġ) Based on the study “ Hedonism and the choice of everyday activities ” you authored with your colleagues, I make the following claim in my book The Fun Habit, “When our ‘fun cup’ is full, we can resist the allure of short-term gains (because these types of ‘rewards’ are already bountiful through deliberate design) and invest in long-term enrichment goals that will support our existence.” What nuances to this interpretation (regarding the hedonic flexibility principle) are important to note?įirst, as you said, your assertion is an interpretation.
#Hedonic principle tv#
The app was used in a reality TV show in France and enabled the collection of 10 million data points among 60,000 people who reported their mood and behavior several times a day. In his spare time, Max developed an app with a few friends to monitor mood and behavior. He did his doctoral research between UCLouvain (in Belgium) and Harvard Medical School where he was a research fellow. Taquet did a PhD in engineering sciences focused on the development of new brain imaging technologies. Maxime (Max) Taquet is an Academic Clinical Fellow within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford.
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