Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being

According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals' set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policy-makers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness.     

The psychotic wavelength

In this paper I have endeavoured to draw attention to what is meant when we refer to a patient as psychotic. It is argued that it is not enough just to be ordinarily sensitive to our patients; we need to tune into the psychotic wavelength with all its implications for understanding and management. Illustrative case-histories are presented from everyday psychiatric work.     

Explaining Differences in Societal Levels of Happiness: Relative Standards, Need Fulfillment, Culture, and Evaluation Theory

This article addresses the question of which societal characteristics are likely to enhance subjective well-being. Empirical results bearing on four theories are presented: needs theory, goals theory, relative standards models, and cultural approaches. The theories are to a degree compatible, rather than completely contradictory. There is empirical support for each of the theories, but also there are data contradicting a simple formulation of each model, and no approach can by itself explain all of the extant findings. For both applied and theoretical reasons, it is imperative that we determine the types of societal characteristics that enhance subjective well-being. In this vein a model called Evaluation Theory is proposed, in which SWB depends on people's evaluations of self-relevant information. Attention is selective and therefore the factors that determine its focus are likely to influence evaluations of events. Thus, appraisals are likely to be influenced by chronically accessible information, which in turn is influenced by the person's needs, goals, and culture. Currently, salient information is seen as being a key to life satisfaction judgments. The present paper describes numerous limitations in current research suggesting studies that will allow more definitive theories to emerge.     

Evidence against a predictive role for rhythm in speech perception

Some languages create the impression of being stress timed. Claims have been made that this timing of stressed syllables enables the listener to predict the future locations of informative parts later in a sentence. The fact that phoneme monitoring is delayed when targets in a spoken sentence are displaced has been taken as supporting this claim (Meltzer, Martin, Bergfeld Mills, Imhoff and Zohar, 1976). In the present study temporal displacement was induced without introducing phonetic discontinuities. In Dutch sentences a word just in advance of a target-bearing word was replaced by another one differing in length. Results show that the temporal displacement per se did not have any effect on phoneme-monitoring reaction times. Implications for a theory of fpeech processing are discussed.