A person's type of happiness can affect their genes

[bananas]

Source: UPI

A person's happiness can affect their genes and different types of happiness have surprisingly different effects on the human genome, U.S. researchers say.

For the last 10 years, Steven Cole, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor of medicine and a member of the UCLA Cousins Center, and colleagues, including first author Barbara L. Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, examined how the human genome responds to stress, misery, fear and all kinds of negative psychology.

The researchers examined the biological implications of both hedonic, pleasure seeking happiness, and eudaimonic happiness, contentment from a life of purpose and meaning, through the lens of the human genome -- a system of some 21,000 genes that has evolved fundamentally to help humans survive and be well.

<snip>

While those with eudaimonic well-being showed favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells and those with hedonic well-being showed an adverse gene-expression profile, "people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn't feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being," Cole said.

<snip>

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion.

<snip>

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2013/08/01/A-persons-type-of-happiness-can-affect-their-genes/UPI-78311375412636/

[alfredo]

1. Crap! I'm the wrong kind of happy.

[SunSeeker]

5. Just find meaning in your hedonistic pursuits and you're good to go.

[alfredo]

12. I just have to channel RJ of Over the Hedge.

[kentauros]

15. Try Tantra and you can combine the two!

http://barbaracarrellas.com/

[alfredo]

16. Tantric Yoga, that was big back in the seventies. Liquor was quicker.

[kentauros]

17. Liquor MAY be quicker,

but a naturally-induced ecstatic experience has no hangover
You ought to look at Barbara Carrella's site. She's also working with Annie Sprinkle in making ecstasy a broader experience for more people.

[alfredo]

18. I'll take a look.

[bananas]

21. Gabrielle Anwar and Catherine Oxenberg will be doing a documentary

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101669537

Exclusive: Gabrielle Anwar's Burn Notice Follow-up: A Vagina Documentary

<snip>

"We'll also be launching an educational website so people can learn these techniques we're trying to teach women and men in order for women to fulfill their greatest power potential and feel their deepest bliss," says Anwar. "It's going to be an all-consuming - excuse the pun - fabulous time."

Anwar and Oxenberg will interview 30 to 40 experts in the fields of gynecology, Taoism, shamanism and tantra. "I don't know if we're going to get Sting, although he is a friend of my father, so maybe I can wangle my way in," she says. "But we might get his wife, Trudie Styler, and we're definitely interviewing their tantric instructor."

<snip>

[kentauros]

30. Oh that's cool!

I'm glad to see this kind of thing being explored again, so to speak. I think it's important to know, whether it's ever used or not. Better, of course, is if we do strive towards bliss and ecstasy

[silverweb]

2. Interesting concept.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Interesting enough to try to find more information after work.

[delrem]

3. Well, *MY* happiness affects the whole universe.

[jtuck004]

4. Well. if Momma ain't happy, none of this is gonna matter anyway... n/t

[alfredo]

13. Ha!

[Nay]

26. True in this household! Keep me happy and things will go along swimmingly.....

[DeSwiss]

6. K&R

- Define happy.

[Igel]

8. It's research. They'd have to define it or use commonly accepted definitions.

Can't find Cole's paper. I'll assume "commonly accepted definitions."


These appear to be fairly common, based on lit review:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-010-9632-5#page-1


BTW, there will be many sermons in the next couple of weeks based on this. Seems like an arcane corner of psychology, but it'll easily mesh with some fundamentals of belief or be easily fit into those views.

[Chemisse]

7. Aha! The biological mechanism of karma!

[LiberalLoner]

10. So a person gets a disease because they are being horribly abused for years...karma???

[Chemisse]

19. I would hardly call abuse a source of hedonistic pleasure.

[LiberalLoner]

24. But it works both ways, right?

[Chemisse]

25. Perhaps you could elaborate. I'm just not getting it.

[LiberalLoner]

27. People have told me I have health problems due to having been abused as a kid.

That it is karma. It doesn't seem fair to me at all.

[Chemisse]

29. No that certainly is NOT fair.

It's bad enough to have to suffer the abuse, but then to go on to endure post-trauma health problems is really awful.

Believe me, I was only thinking of those who seek hedonistic pleasure when I made that comment, and it took a rereading of the article to realize that if it is related to stress, it could also apply to victims.

[marions ghost]

9. And what does unhappiness do

re gene expression in immune cells?

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. This seems to say it affects how the genes are expressed

not the genes that you pass on to your children.

From the paper:

Previous studies have found that circulating immune cells show a systematic shift in basal gene expression profiles during extended periods of stress, threat, or uncertainty. This conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA) is characterized by increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and decreased expression of genes involved in type I IFN antiviral responses. The CTRA transcriptional program likely evolved to help the immune system counter the changing patterns of microbial threat ancestrally associated with changing socioenvironmental conditions (e.g., increased risk of wound-related bacterial infection associated with experienced threat or social conflict vs. increased risk of socially mediated viral infection associated with affine social contact). However, in the very different environment of contemporary human society, chronic CTRA activation by social or symbolic threats may promote inflammation mediated cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and neoplastic diseases and impair host resistance to viral infections. The present analysis used the CTRA gene expression profile as a high-dimensional molecular reference space in which to map the potentially distinct biological effects of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/Fredrickson%202013%20PNAS.pdf

So I think this is saying that stress can make your immune system emphasise defence against wound infection, at the expense of other parts of your health; and that can also happen to 'hedonic' people, although they regard themselves as happy, not stressed.

[alfredo]

14. The pursuit of thrills can be quite draining.

I find I am healthier now that I no longer live in a high pressure situation.

[Jim Lane]

22. Thanks, that's an important clarification.

I was wondering how someone's psychological state could possibly affect the DNA that was inherited. The headline is, at best, confusing.

[rucky]

20. This is why I donate generously

to the sperm bank

[ramparta]

23. Wait one minute. Is this article implying Lamarckism?

What makes me happy changes my genome?

I'm more comfortable with an interpretation that my genetics might predispose me to hedonic or eudiomonic happiness, with learned behavior making either, or a combination, or a sliding scale more pleasurable as stimulous changes.

If a genome is this easy to change we are very close to great changes in the way we view education, substance rehabilitation, crime ...........

[westerebus]

28. Getting into someone's jeans can affect your happiness.

there fixed it for you..