首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Happiness and Sadness Happiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feelings for human beings. Recently, people have
Happiness and Sadness Happiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feelings for human beings. Recently, people have
admin
2013-09-24
43
问题
Happiness and Sadness
Happiness and sadness are two most basic and familiar feelings for human beings. Recently, people have achieved further understanding about them.
Happiness
University of Illinois, psychologist Ed Diener, who has studied happiness for a quarter century, was in Scotland recently, explaining to members of Parliament and business leaders the value of increasing traditional measures of a country’s wealth with a national index of happiness. Such an index would measure policies known to increase people s sense of well-being, such as democratic freedoms, access to health care and the rule of law.
Eric Wilson tried to get with the program. Urged on by friends, he bought books on how to become happier. He made every effort to smooth out his habitual worried look and wear a sunny smile, since a happy expression can lead to genuinely happy feelings. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, took up jogging, reputed to boost the brain’s supply of joyful neuro-chemicals, and began his conversations with "Great!" and "Wonderful!", the better to exercise his capacity for enthusiasm.
However, some scientists are releasing the most-extensive-ever study comparing moderate and extreme levels of happiness, and finding that being happier is not always better. In surveys of 118 519 people from 96 countries, scientists examined how various levels of subjective well-being matched up with income, education, political participation, volunteer activities and close relationships. They also analyzed how different levels of happiness, as reported by college students, correlated with various outcomes. Even allowing for imprecision in people’s self-reported sense of well-being, the results were unambiguous. The highest levels of happiness go along with the most stable, longest and most contented relationships. That is, even a little discontent with your partner can cause you to look around for someone better, until you are at best a serial monogamist(一夫一妻论者)and at worst never in a loving, stable relationship.
Nevertheless, "once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be harmful to income, career success, education and political participation", Diener and colleagues write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10s is extremely happy, 8s is more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more motivated to improve both their own lot(thus driving themselves to acquire more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs)and the lot of their community(causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency. "If you’re totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in the world," says Diener, "you don’t feel very motivated to work for change. Be wary when people tell you that you should be happier."
Sadness
The drawbacks of constant, extreme happiness should not be surprising, since negative emotions evolved for a reason. Fear tips us off to the presence of danger, for instance. Sadness, too, seems to be part of our biological inheritance. Wilson argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness of the human condition. He also asserts that "the happy man is a hollow man," but he is hardly the first scholar to see melancholia(忧郁症)as inspiration. A classical Greek text, possibly written by Aristotle, asks, "Why is it that all those who have become outstanding in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?" Wilson’s answer is that "the blues can be a catalyst(催化剂)for a special kind of genius, a genius for exploring dark boundaries between opposites. " The ever-restless, the chronically discontent, are dissatisfied with the status quo, be it in art or literature or politics.
For all their familiarity, these arguments are nevertheless being crushed by the happiness movement. Last August, the novelist Mary Gordon lamented to The New York Times that "among writers... what is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad." And, Jess Decourcy Hinds, an English teacher, recounted how, after her father died, friends pressed her to distract herself from her profound sadness and sense of loss. "Why don’t people accept that after a parent’s death, there will be years of grief?" she wrote. "Everyone wants mourners to ’snap out of it’ because observing another’s distress isn’t easy. "
It’s hard to say exactly when ordinary Americans, no less than psychiatrists(精神病学家), began insisting that sadness is pathological(病态的). But by the end of the millennium that attitude was well established. In 1999, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway 50 years after its premiere. A reporter asked two psychiatrists to read the script. Their diagnosis: Willy Loman was suffering from clinical depression, a pathological condition that could and should be treated with drugs. Miller was appalled. "Loman is not a depressive," he told The New York Times. "He is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is where he is." What society once viewed as an appropriate reaction to failed hopes and dashed dreams, it now regards as a psychiatric illness.
As NYU’s Wakefield and Allan Horwitz of Rutgers University point out in The Loss of Sadness, this message has its roots in the bible of mental illness, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Its definition of a "major depressive episode" is remarkably broad. You must experience five not-uncommon symptoms, such as insomnia(失眠), difficulty concentrating and feeling sad or empty, for two weeks; the symptoms must cause distress or impairment, and they cannot be due to the death of a loved one. Anyone meeting these criteria is supposed to be treated.
When someone is appropriately sad, friends and colleagues offer support and sympathy. But by labeling appropriate sadness pathological, "we have attached a stigma to being sad," says Wakefield, "with the result that depression tends to elicit hostility and rejection" with an undercurrent of "Get over it; take a pill. " The normal range of human emotion is not being tolerated. "We don’t know how drugs react with normal sadness and its functions, such as reconstituting your life out of the pain," says Wakefield. Those psychiatrists also express doubts to medicalise the sadness.
Who have the highest levels of happiness according to the survey in 96 countries?
选项
A、People with the most wealth.
B、People with the best health.
C、People with the highest position.
D、People with the most stable relationship.
答案
D
解析
细节辨认题。本题考查在96个国家所做的关于幸福感的调查的结果。从原文可知,调查发现最高水平的幸福感是与最稳定、最长期和最满意的家庭关系紧密联系在一起的。由此不难得出答案为D)。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/MyQFFFFM
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、Shedidn’tlikeworkinginacompany.B、Shedislikedmachines.C、Shewasnotgoodatdoingbusiness.D、Shedidn’tlikeaccount
Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteashortessayonthetopicWhoShouldBeOurSuperstars?Youshouldwriteat
A、Shehopesthatsomeonewillgiveherthemoney.B、Sheplansongettingridofherstudentcreditcards.C、Sheisgoingtoretu
Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteANoticeofExchange.SupposeyouareLiMing.YouintendtoimproveyourEng
RulesforUnconventionalResearchAfteryearsofobservingandsometimesparticipatinginthe"fringescience"arena,I’vec
Itwilltakeustwentyminutestogettotherailwaystation,______trafficdelays.
Theunauthorized(未经授权的)copyingofcomputerprogramsbyAmericanbusinessesalonedeprivedsoftwarepublishersof$1.6billion
Theunauthorized(未经授权的)copyingofcomputerprogramsbyAmericanbusinessesalonedeprivedsoftwarepublishersof$1.6billion
Inthe1960s,manypeopleinNorthAmericaturnedtheirattentiontoenvironmentalproblems,andnewsteel-and-glassskyscrapers
A、She’sinameeting.B、She’soutoftheoffice.C、She’stalkingwithanothercustomer.D、She’sspendingherholiday.B细节题。根据四个选
随机试题
国籍是指自然人属于某一国家的国民或公民的()
成人的椎体结核和椎体肿瘤在X线片上的主要鉴别点是
内墙面抹灰每遍适宜厚度的表述,哪一条是错误的?[2000—109]
企业采用出包方式建造固定资产,按合同约定向建造商支付工程进度款时,应()。
交易指令在基金公司内部执行情况中,说法错误的是()。
证券投资分析有利于增加证券投资的净效用,但不能降低投资者的投资风险。()
在一定程度上能避免企业追求短期行为的财务管理目标包括()。
将货币当局概览和存款银行概览归并,剔除中央银行货币与存款银行之间的信贷往来而合成的是()。
一把钥匙能打开天下所有的锁。这样的万能钥匙是不可能存在的。以下哪项最符合题干的断定?
Super-kidsandSuperProblems—ByDavidElkindNot
最新回复
(
0
)