In positive psychology happiness is a four letter word. Positive psychology, as you may know, is a relatively new movement within psychology that seeks to shift the focus of research and interventions from psychological maladies to human flourishing. When I teach this topic at the university I ask my students what concepts they would like to see included under the umbrella of positive psychology. A few topics such as happiness, optimism and resilience are the clear winners time and again. One notable absence: intelligence. Intelligence is something that most of us would want for our children and we often admire intelligence in others and yet it seems overlooked.
Why would students overlook the idea that intelligence might be related to high functioning or to success? It turns out that the students are not alone; positive psychologists seem to be neatly side-stepping this topic even though it is one of the oldest and best researched in all of psychology. In fact, a search of the leading professional database shows that only two articles have ever been published in the flagship Journal of Positive Psychology with “intelligence” in the title and both of those were about emotional intelligence!
I think some of the standoffishness is the result of our common attitudes about intelligence. Intelligence, like extroversion or left handedness, is seen as a trait. There is a trend, both among experts and lay people, to preference topics in psychology that are malleable. In short: we want to learn about stuff that we can change and improve.
It was with all this in mind that I was surprised to see a recent publication on intelligence. A piece of research that wasn’t just focused on how is smart or how they got that way but, instead, took aim at a positive psychology pillar: happiness. That’s right, the author of the study was curious as to whether intelligence is associated with happiness. In fact, he focused his lens a bit further and asked not about overall levels of happiness (boring!) but about overall stability of happiness.
Here’s how the researcher conducted his study and here’s what he found: First, he used a sample of almost 10 thousand British people for whom he had childhood IQ scores. He also happened to have happiness data for them at ages 33, 42, 47 and 51. He also had data on personality, income, job satisfaction and marital status so that he could control for all of these other possible complicating factors and just look at the pure relationship between intelligence and happiness stability.
It turns out that IQ—even intelligence assessed in childhood—predicts the emotional ups and downs a person will have over the course of her life. People who were below average in intelligence experienced significantly more variability in their life satisfaction than did those who were above average. Importantly, this was not due to differences in education, income or job (although it was, in part, due to differences in health).
Here’s where I think this research gets interesting: when this basic research result interacts with you, the person reading this. There may be a tendency to say “So what?” or perhaps something about the finding just rubs you the wrong way, regardless of the relative merits of the methodology. If you find that you have an aversive reaction to this I would encourage you to reflect on your own basic attitudes about intelligence. Perhaps intelligence, to the extent that it is a stable trait, feels somehow undemocratic or unfair to many people. Even so, the way that people learn, process, remember, recall and solve problems is a worthy topic of study. And if we view it as a skill then it might not be so surprising that it has some small association with happiness.