Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds
By DENISE GRADYDEC. 9, 2015
A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.
“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.
“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford.
He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.
Such beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.
“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea,” Professor Peto said in an interview. “There are enough scare stories about health.”
The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.
The results come from the so-called Million Women Study, which recruited women ages 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions. The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.
The researchers included questions about happiness “because it’s something a lot of people were interested in,” Professor Peto said.
When the answers were analyzed statistically, unhappiness and stress were not associated with an increased risk of death. It is not clear whether the findings apply to men.
Professor Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema.
A “substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely to die than were the women who were generally happy.
“This finding refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed,” Dr. Peto said.
Unhappiness itself may not affect health directly, but it can do harm in other ways, by driving people to suicide, alcoholism or other dangerous behaviors, he warned.
This type of study, which depends on participants’ self-assessments, is not considered as reliable as a rigorously designed experiment in which subjects are picked at random and assigned to a treatment or control group. But the huge number of people in this study gives it power.
Still, some observers noted that measuring emotions is more nuanced and complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness.
“I would have liked to see more discussion of how people translate these complicated feelings into a self-report of happiness,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies decision-making, who was not involved in the study. “Think about everything that’s going on in your life and tell me how happy you are. Happiness is a squishy measure.”
The results of earlier studies have been mixed, with some finding that unhappiness causes illness and others showing no link, Dr. Fischhoff said.
“It looks to me like people have collected a lot of data without finding a clear signal,” he said. “So if there is some correlation out there, it’s not very big.”
An editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet noted that it had “the largest population so far in happiness studies,” and praised its statistical methods. But it also said more research was needed.
Professor Peto said he doubted that the new study would change many minds because beliefs about the perils of unhappiness are so ingrained.
“People are still going to believe that stress causes heart attacks,” he said.
儘管生氣吧！不爽不會殺了你。
星期三柳葉刀雜誌發行一項研究結果，研究追蹤100萬位英國的中年女性10年，發現一般廣為接受，認為快樂可以帶來健康及長壽的觀點是沒有根據的。
「快樂及相關作為與死亡率並無直接關連，」研究結果顯示。「對脾氣差的人來說真是好消息。」研究學者Richard Peto如此解讀，他是牛津的醫學統計及流行病學教授。
他和他的研究團隊當初決定研究這個主題，Peto說是因為一般人相信壓力跟不愉快是帶來疾病的主因。這些想法認為負面思考會帶來小病小痛，提醒人們振作或打起精神。
Peto訪談時說：「相信一切是假實在不是個好方法，為了健康，這種可怕的故事太多了！」
新研究表示，早期的研究混淆了因果關係，認為是不高興導致生病，而不是其他因素導致生病。
這個報告追蹤了百萬中年女性，網羅50~69歲的人，並從1996開始一直到2001，以問卷跟官方死亡及醫療紀錄追蹤。問卷詢問他們感到快樂，放鬆及緊張的頻率，並指引他們量化健康病痛紀錄，像是高血壓，糖尿病，氣喘，關節炎和沮喪，焦慮等。
研究人員特別將快樂選項放進問題裡，「因為這是很多人都感興趣的，」Peto說。
當全數資料被統計過後，不愉快跟緊張的情緒與死亡率增加的風險是無關的。這發現不確定是否適用於男性。
Peto說特別是其中50萬個女性在一開始的報告中都很健康，沒有心臟病，癌症，中風或肺病病史。這些實質上少數的健康女性認為自己是緊張或是不快樂的，但10年過後他們也沒比其他一般快樂的女性更容易死亡。
「這發現反駁了其他人認為壓力跟不愉快在致死率上所帶來的廣大影響。」
不愉快本身不會直接影響健康，但他的確會使人輕生，酗酒或產生其他危險行為，而危害健康。
這份報告是以受訪者自評為依據，嚴格來說比實驗過程可隨機挑選及治療與對照來的可信，不過極大量樣本仍有其影響力。
有觀察者認為，情緒不是簡單的說快樂或不快樂，他是有細微差別的，複雜的。
「我很希望可以看到更多的討論，探討人們如何轉譯複雜的情緒到自評問卷上，」一位卡內基大學心理學家，研究決策學的Fischhoff說，他沒有參與這次研究。「想想你人生中曾發生的每一件事，然後告訴我你有多快樂......快樂是很模糊的衡量方式。」
早期的研究結果已經一團亂，有些認為不愉快導致生病而有些認為無關，Fischhoff認為，「在我看來，人們已經搜集了一堆資訊卻找不到明確的訊息。所以資訊如果有關聯，肯定也不是什麼大事。」
隨後社論在柳葉刀表示這是目前快樂研究中母體最大的一次，公開表揚其統計研究方法。不過社論也說仍需要更多相關研究。
Peto說因為不愉快帶來的危害這個信念根深蒂固在許多人心中，他也不確定這個研究結果可以改變他們的心態。「畢竟人們還是相信緊張會導致心臟病。」
sulk (v.) 生氣
grumpy (adj.) 壞脾氣的
epidemiology (n.) 流行病學
ailment (n.) 小病
asthma (n.) 哮喘
arthritis (n.) 關節炎
baseline (n.) 底線
emphysema (n.) 肺氣腫
rigorously (adv.) 嚴格地
nuanced (adj.) 細微差別的
squishy (adj.) 糊狀的
peril (n.) 危害
ingrained (adj.) 根深蒂固的
OMG, what a crap study I translated......
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