Csikszentmihalyi, flow and happiness
Why did Csikszentmihalyi go to Jung’s lecture?
What % of people describe themselves as happy?
Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.
he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness,
You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it.
There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.
Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there.
Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television.
Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it.
give me comprehension questions and vocab qu (and answers for both) for this tedtalk
ChatGPT
https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness/transcript
ChatGPT
Comprehension Questions:
What is the main idea of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's TED Talk?
What is the Flow Theory?
According to Csikszentmihalyi, what is the relationship between attention and enjoyment?
What are some examples of activities that can induce a flow state?
What are the three conditions that are necessary for flow to occur?
Vocabulary Quiz:
What does "intrinsic motivation" mean?
a. Motivation that comes from external rewards
b. Motivation that comes from within oneself
c. Motivation that comes from social recognition
Answer: b. Motivation that comes from within oneself
What does "hedonic adaptation" mean?
a. The ability to experience pleasure
b. The tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness after experiencing positive or negative events
c. The pursuit of pleasure as the ultimate goal in life
Answer: b. The tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness after experiencing positive or negative events
What does "autotelic" mean?
a. A state of complete concentration and involvement in an activity for its own sake
b. The pursuit of pleasure as the ultimate goal in life
c. A state of happiness and contentment
Answer: a. A state of complete concentration and involvement in an activity for its own sake
What does "paradox" mean in the context of flow?
a. A statement that seems contradictory but is actually true
b. A situation where there are no clear solutions or answers
c. A state of confusion or disorientation
Answer: a. A statement that seems contradictory but is actually true
What does "psychic entropy" mean?
a. A state of order and harmony in the mind
b. A state of chaos and disorder in the mind
c. A state of heightened awareness and focus
Answer: b. A state of chaos and disorder in the mind
Comprehension Questions:
What is the main idea of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's TED Talk?
Answer: The main idea of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's TED Talk is that the key to happiness is achieving a state of "flow," which is a state of complete immersion and enjoyment in an activity.
What is the Flow Theory?
Answer: The Flow Theory is a theory developed by Csikszentmihalyi that describes the experience of complete absorption and enjoyment in an activity.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, what is the relationship between attention and enjoyment?
Answer: According to Csikszentmihalyi, attention and enjoyment are closely related, as people tend to enjoy activities that require their full attention.
What are some examples of activities that can induce a flow state?
Answer: Some examples of activities that can induce a flow state include playing music, rock climbing, writing, and dancing.
What are the three conditions that are necessary for flow to occur?
Answer: The three conditions that are necessary for flow to occur are a clear set of goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between the level of challenge and the person's skill level.
and some background info on his life
ChatGPT
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian-American psychologist who was born on September 29, 1934, in Fiume, Kingdom of Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia). He is best known for his research on the concept of "flow," a state of complete immersion in an activity, which he describes as "the secret to happiness."
Csikszentmihalyi received his PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1965, and went on to teach at several universities, including the University of Chicago, Lake Forest College, and Claremont Graduate University. He also served as the chairman of the psychology department at the University of Chicago and as the director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University.
In addition to his research on flow, Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively on creativity, motivation, and positive psychology. He is the author of several books, including "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience," "Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention," and "Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning." He has received numerous awards for his contributions to the field of psychology, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association in 2008.
Csikszentmihalyi currently resides in Claremont, California, and continues to teach and conduct research at the Claremont Graduate University.
Born: September 29, 1934, Rijeka, Croatia
Died: October 20, 2021, Claremont, California, United States
research on money and happiness
75k or 500 k
sample size of 500 k?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/money-happiness-study-daniel-kahneman-500000-versus-75000/
Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have pub-lished contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489–16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a line-ar-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinear-ities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration.Well-being | happiness | income | income satiation | experience samplingCan money buy happiness? Two authors of this article have published contradictory claims about the relationship between emotional well-being and income. We later agreed that both studies produced valid results and that it was our responsibility to search for an interpretation that explains both findings. We engaged in an adversarial collaboration and asked Barbara Mellers to be the facilitator. This article reports the outcome of our work.Kahneman and Deaton [(1); hereafter KD] reported data from “more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization in 2008 to 9.” The survey included several dichot-omous questions about the emotional experience of the preceding day: “Did you experi-ence the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about _____?” KD computed for each individual the average incidence (scored 1 or 0) of three happy states (happiness, enjoyment, and frequent smiling) and of two “blue” states (worry and sadness). A feature of this scoring method is that each measure of emotional well-being is a fraction, so the complement is a measure of unhappiness.The article presented detailed analyses that linked emotional well-being (which we will call happiness) to various life circumstances. The two curves in Fig. 1A show the means of individual scores on happiness (positive and “not-blue” affect) for different household incomes. The main finding of the KD study is the flattening pattern: the average of hap-piness scores rises up to a threshold income and then levels off. The evidence for flattening is that, for both the positive and the not-blue measures, averages in the top two categories of income (90 to 120k and 120k or higher) are statistically undistinguishable, despite large numbers of observations in each.KD concluded that “Emotional well-being [also] rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000.” The threshold of $75,000, which has been frequently quoted, is simply the midpoint of the “60 to 90K” income category. A more precise statement would be that there is no further progress in average happiness beyond a threshold at or below 90K.Matthew Killingsworth [(2); hereafter MK] recruited a large number of participants for a study in which he obtained “1,725,994 experience-sampling reports from 33,391 employed US adults.” The participants were prompted on their smartphones to report their current happiness, typically three times per day for several weeks. They answered the question, “How do you feel right now?” on a continuous response scale with end points labeled “Very bad” and “Very good.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
"You can't measure happiness, it's impossible, people don't have the same preferences for what makes them happy," said Stéfan Lollivier, director of social studies at Insee. "But you can measure the fraction of people who are dissatisfied, who think they are unhappy, and the proportion of people who are missing out on happiness or feel excluded from it."
The figures showed single-parent families were the most likely to miss out on happiness.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/17/france-happiness-index
The rise in UK child poverty and school pressures were cited alongside the fear of failure as reasons why only 64% of UK children experienced high life satisfaction – the lowest figure of 24 countries surveyed by the OECD.
Children in Romania had the highest levels of life satisfaction (85%), just ahead of Finland (84%), while the UK fared worse than Spain (82%) and France (80%).
On average, nearly three in four (73%) adults across 32 markets describe themselves as happy, according to the results of a new Ipsos survey. Of all the markets surveyed, those with the highest proportions of happy citizens are China (mainland - 91%), Saudi Arabia (86%), and the Netherlands (85%).
Global happiness has increased for the second year in a row. It is six points higher than a year ago and 10 points higher than it was in August 2020, just months after COVID disrupted people’s lives around the world. The overall increase masks very different trends across regions: while the proportion of self-reported happy people has risen sharply across Latin America, it has taken a tumble in many Western countries. Year-over-year changes range from 26-point gains in Colombia and Argentina to a 13-point dip in Great Britain.
On average, happiness in middle-income markets (as defined by the World Bank) saw a more pronounced increase than it did in high-income markets. The average happiness level of middle-income markets has surpassed that of high-income markets for the first time since Ipsos started tracking them in 2011.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/ipsos-global-happiness-index-2023
The BVA-Gallup poll showed a small upwards shift of just one point on 2016, but it marked the first time since 2013 that 50 percent of French people consider themselves to be "happy".
The survey also showed that French are also more confident in the future, with 26 percent of respondents believing that 2018 would be better than 2017, which saw the election of President Emmanuel Macron and numerous signs that the country’s economy was finally getting back into gear.