The following is a bilingual article on happiness found at the UDN website. The English version is originally from the New York Times.
好奇愛嘗鮮 比較容易快樂
Those Seeking the New May Find Happiness
【By JOHN TIERNEY／陳世欽譯】2012/03/01
Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored?
Those are the kinds of questions used to measure novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive gambling and criminal behavior.
Now researchers see that it can also be a crucial predictor of wellbeing.
“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. “If you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”
Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia.” In her book “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia is a quintessential human survival skill .
“Nothing reveals your personality more succinctly than your characteristic emotional reaction to novelty and change over time and across many situations,” says Ms. Gallagher, who classifies people as neophobes, neophiles and, at the most extreme, neophiliacs.
Neophiliacs are more likely to possess a “migration gene,” a DNA mutation that occurred about 50,000 years ago, as humans were dispersing from Africa around the world, according to Robert Moyzis, a biochemist at the University of California, Irvine. The mutations are more prevalent in the most far-flung populations, like Indian tribes in South America descended from the neophiliacs who crossed the Bering Strait.
Researchers have found that a tendency for novelty-seeking also depends on upbringing, the local culture and stage of life. By some estimates, the urge for novelty drops by half between the ages of 20 and 60.
Dr. Cloninger, a professor of psychiatry and genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, tracked people using a personality test he developed two decades ago.
He found a trio of traits essential to a happy temperament: novelty-seeking, persistence and “self-transcendence.”
“People with persistence tend to be achievers because they’ll keep working at something even when there’s no immediate reward,” Dr. Cloninger says. “They’ll think, ‘I didn’t win this time, but next time I will.’ But what if conditions have changed? Then you’re better off trying something new. To succeed, you want to be able to regulate your impulses while also having the imagination to see what the future would be like if you tried something new.”
The other trait in the trio, selftranscendence, gives people a larger perspective. “It’s the capacity to get lost in the moment doing what you love to do, to feel a connection to nature and humanity and the universe,” Dr. Cloninger says. “It’s sometimes found in disorganized people who are immature and do a lot of wishful thinking and daydreaming, but when it’s combined with persistence and novelty-seeking, it leads to personal growth and enables you to balance your needs with those of the people around you.”
But the urge for novelty can also lead you astray. “Neophilia spurs us to adjust and explore and create technology and art, but at the extreme it can fuel a chronic restlessness and distraction,” Ms. Gallagher says.
She and Dr. Cloninger both advise neophiles to be selective . “Don’t go wide and shallow into useless trivia,” Ms. Gallagher says. “Use your neophilia to go deep into subjects that are important to you.”
【2012-02-28/聯合報/G9版/UNITEDDAILYNEWS】
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