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Shakespeare may have written “O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes,” but he apparently never met many psychologists, a good number of whom have been attempting to do exactly this for some time.

Psychology and its social-science cousin, behavioral economics, seem to have a lock on “happiness studies,” tackling vexing questions about our positive and negative moods and our feelings of satisfaction and well-being.

Recently, we wondered what other approaches were being taken to this venerable subject. Here are a few recent findings from less expected sources — bee and sheep scientists, linguists and artificial intelligence experts.

In describing nonhuman animal populations, scientists are disinclined to use the word “happiness” (or especially “unhappiness”) to describe their charges. But there have been a few papers testing a related disposition: an animal’s “pessimism” or “optimism.”

Consider “Release from Restraint Generates a Positive Judgment Bias in Sheep” (Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2010). In this study, 20 young merino ewes were trained to distinguish between two buckets, one of which led to food and another to the appearance of a dog — a highly unpleasant sight for a young ewe. Half of the animals were then bound at their legs and isolated from the other animals for six hours, three days in a row. On release from their imprisonment, this experimental group was shown a new, “ambiguous” bucket, which did not clearly lead to either food or dog. The previously imprisoned animals, despite their elevated stress levels, were much more likely to approach the ambiguous bucket than were a control group of ewes. Against all odds, they were, in a word, optimistic that the bucket might lead to something good.

But when honeybees were tested in a similar fashion, stress did not lead to optimism, as related in “Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases” (Current Biology, 2011). A group of bees was trained to distinguish between two odors, and to extend their mouthparts to one, which bore sugar, but not the other, which led to punishment. Some of the bees were then shaken vigorously for one minute — an experience intended to reproduce the presumably alarming feeling of a honey badger attacking their hive. Afterward, the shaken bees chose to avoid getting their mouthparts near an ambiguous odor presented to them — apparently pessimistic about what it might hold.

Are ewes naturally cheery and bees predisposed to gloominess? Or is being tethered and isolated less depressing than a hive attack? The evidence is not yet in. Disappointingly, psychologists and behavioral economists have yet to begin characterizing human behavior as either more ewe-like or honeybee-like.

Perhaps that’s because the emotions of human beings vary so much depending on what day of the week it is. This has been one of the findings of linguists and computer scientists, many of whom have been analyzing the enormous body of public writing that has emerged from the social media of the past decade, looking for clues to our collective mood.

A few years ago, a pair of researchers published “A Corpus-based Approach to Finding Happiness” (American Association of Artificial Intelligence, 2006). This paper analyzed words found in a selection of blog posts, looking for patterns in the use of “happy” and “sad” words. The authors determined that 3 a.m. and from 9 to 10 p.m. were the happiest times of the day, and that Saturday was the happiest day of the week (Wednesday was the saddest). Happy words, they noticed, are more likely to be connected to social activity than sad words are, so sitting at home alone on a Wednesday is obviously inadvisable.

Despite the fact that users of disparate social media cannot agree on which day of the week makes them happy or glum, there are some commonalities: holidays and birthdays make people feel happy, and deaths of celebrities make them feel sad.

What can we advise the average person to do to be happier? Go out with your Facebook-using friends, but not every day, and stay away from honey badgers.

 

The New York Times

Alexandra Horowitz is the author of “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” Ammon Shea is the author of “The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses but No One Reads.”