It’s all about relationships: interacting with other people can be the biggest source of happiness, but it can also be the biggest source of misery! The quality of your relationships is determined by your emotions: When you manage your emotions during a disagreement with your best friend, it helps keep your friendship intact. However, if you lose control and get really angry, it can lead to losing your job or even causing harm in situations like road rage.
Your relationships also determine the meaning in your life. If you have spent years searching for the meaning of life but nobody else cares about it, your hard work won't bring much satisfaction.You will only get meaning from what you do if you are surrounded by likeminded people. Even more, the people who make you happiest will also tell you WHAT makes you happiest!
To measure and improve happiness, I thus came up with the “Emotions, Relationships, and Meaning” (ERM) Way to Happiness.
We have previously used the
PERMA model from positive psychology to measure happiness and satisfaction in our research. However, users have sometimes found it too complicated and not actionable enough (PERMA is an acronym for P – Positive Emotion; E – Engagement; R – Positive Relationships; M – Meaning; A – Accomplishments).
The ERM Way to Happiness starts with your emotions. All too often we are stressed or depressed without realizing it. And even when we do, we may not know why we're feeling that way. We also frequently misjudge what makes us happy. We expect a huge boost in happiness from vacations, a new car, or a sports match, only to be disappointed because the beach was not perfect, the suspension of the car was too hard, or our team lost.
In our approach we measure human emotions from “honest signals”, the body language that gives away true feelings from the expressions of the face and the body, the words in the WhatsApp and email messages, how I mirror the body language of my friends, and how quickly I answer them.
Measuring my emotions when interacting with others will tell me if my interaction partners make me happy, angry, or sad. This means that hanging out with others that make me happy is a simple way to increase my happiness, as is getting out of the way of others that make me unhappy.
We also judge others by their friends. Friends usually share similar value systems, they are either nature-lovers, sports fans, traditionalists, believers in science and technology or believers in MAGA. If I look at which of my friends make me the happiest, and with whom I hang out the most, this will also tell me what my values are.
For instance, as an academic at the MIT Sloan Business School, I attended a few Academy of Management (AOM) annual conferences. These are huge events, where tens of thousands of business school professors and management scientists in business suits convene in thousands of sessions trying to convince their audience how smart they and their management frameworks are. I quickly realized that this style of conference does not fit my personality. Rather we started the small, friendly “Collaborative Innovation Networks”
(COINs) conference series where forty to hundred researchers and graduate students meet in an intimate setting to share results of how collaboration and wellbeing in teams and larger organizations can be improved. More recently, I also found that I very much enjoy researching the impact of nature on the human mind, working with half a dozen colleagues on an agricultural plot to measure
EEGs of plants interacting with humans. Similarly, a few years ago I started measuring the emotions of animals (dogs, cats, horses, cows) leveraging AI, and found that interacting with the students who joined me in this endeavor gave me a lot of happiness. Therefore, this year we created a new startup,
FaunaAI.
In other words, I find what gives me meaning from the happiness when interacting with others – which become also my friends – who pursue the same goals. In summary, by becoming aware of your emotions when you interact with others, you can discover which relationships bring the most meaning into your life, ultimately increasing your happiness and well-being.
In our research we have developed different tools to measure happiness when interacting with others, in particular the
Social Compass and the
Happimeter.
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