Is there anything special about using character strengths?

Today we had a journal club discussion (presented by Hayley Jach) that substantially increased my skepticism about strength-based interventions. Here are a few quick thoughts on appropriate control groups in intervention studies, and a challenge to future strength-based interventionists!

Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) are intentional activities that aim to increase your happiness*. Of the different types of PPIs, strength-based interventions have been particularly well-researched. Broadly speaking, strengths can include positive personality traits as well as things that we're good at and enjoy doing (i.e., talents). The VIA classification (used in the paper I'll discuss) focuses on (moral) personality strengths, described by this taxonomy:

Importantly, although we all have all 24 strengths to varying degrees, apparently some strengths are more special than others. Signature strengths are the 3-7 strengths that best characterise us, and Seligman and Peterson (2004) have argued that using your signature strengths is invigorating, energising, and engaging. For example, if Kindness, Gratitude, and Love of Learning are your signature strengths, you'll be happier if you have regular opportunities to do things like donating to charities, writing thank-you notes, and attending talks.

In a seminal article reporting results from various PPIs, Seligman and colleagues (2005) found that participants who were instructed to use their strengths in a new way every day reported greater happiness and depression up to 6 months later, relative to a control group who were instructed to recall early memories.

Several studies** have since used this intervention and found various positive effects, but Proyer and colleagues (2015) decided to do something a bit different. Instead of just comparing the signature strengths intervention with a control group, they also introduced a second intervention group: using your "lesser strengths" (i.e., your bottom 5/24 character strengths).

They launched a large online intervention, beginning with 1,046 participants but ending up with 375*** who completed all follow-ups to 6 months, and were included in analyses. After taking the VIA character strengths survey, participants were given their intervention instructions. Participants in the two strengths intervention conditions were given the same instructions:

“We have selected five character strengths for you. Use one of these strengths in a new and different way every day for 1 week. You can apply the strength in a new environment or when interacting with a ‘new’ person. It is up to you how you want to apply these strengths. Try to apply these strengths, regardless of whether you feel like already using this strength frequently or not.”

The difference was that participants in the signature strengths (SS) condition were assigned their top 5 strengths, whereas participants in the lesser strengths (LS) condition were assigned their bottom 5 strengths (and neither group were not told which of these conditions they were in). Participants in the "placebo control" condition were instructed to write about their early memories.

The key finding was that participants in both strengths intervention conditions reported a tiny increase in happiness (but not decreased depression) for up to 3 months****, relative to participants in the control group.

From this, Proyer and colleagues concluded:

"working on the SS as well as working on the LS, is beneficial for increasing happiness."

And sure, it's plausible that maybe signature strengths aren't that special after all, and that using your lesser strengths can increase your happiness too (because it still involves acting in a more socially-desirable, or well-adjusted way).

But, the fact that we see identical effects in both intervention conditions suggests that something placebo-ish may be going on. So, before accepting Proyer and colleagues' conclusion, I think we should take another look at the intervention instructions: 

"Use one of these strengths in a new and different way every day for 1 week. You can apply the strength in a new environment or when interacting with a ‘new’ person."

Looking at these instructions, I am totally not convinced that these results provide any evidence for the effects of using strengths per se. Instead, the instructions seem to focus on getting people engaged, doing new things in life, and hanging out with new people (i.e., acting extraverted, which we also know is associated with increased positive affect). It seems to be more of a novelty and general behavioural activation intervention than a strengths intervention. Meanwhile, the "placebo control" participants are at home, writing about their early memories. It's just not comparable.

This is a challenge to the validity of all previous strength-based intervention studies that used similar novelty-based intervention instructions without an appropriate control group (including the seminal 2005 paper). 

A much more appropriate control condition would involve instructions that go something like this:

"Do something new and different every day for 1 week. For example, you can go to a new environment or interact with a ‘new’ person. It is up to you how you want to bring more novelty into your life."

So, before I can be convinced that using your strengths (signature or lesser) has any unique effect on happiness, over and above the effects of generally making an effort to be engaged in life, I want to see a replication of Proyer and colleagues, but with a control condition where participants have similar opportunities to be engaged with new and interesting things and people in life. I'd be very curious to see the results!

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*more formally, "to cultivate positive feelings, behaviors, or cognitions" (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009, p. 468)

**of varying quality. do not get me started on various issues like power and representativeness of participants.

***huge huge attrition (typical of online studies). intention-to-treat analyses were not used.

****how plausible is it really is that a 1-week, one-off intervention could result in such long-lasting effects anyway? logically, it seems like sustained, long-term increases in wellbeing require similarly sustained, long-term changes in thoughts and behaviours, including habits and lifestyle choices. i'd be curious to know if this 1-week intervention motivated participants to get out there and be more engaged in life on an ongoing basis, beyond just the intervention week. that kind of information would make for a more compelling story!

Proyer, R., Gander, F., Wellenzohn, S., & Ruch, W. (2015). Strengths-based positive psychology interventions: a randomized placebo-controlled online trial on long-term effects for a signature strengths- vs. a lesser strengths-intervention Frontiers in Psychology, 06 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00456

A New Explanation for Why Extraverts Are Happier

Extraversion and Happiness

One of the most robust findings in personality psychology is that people who are more extraverted also tend to feel happier. And by "happier", which I'm using as shorthand, what I really mean is "high activation positive affect", e.g., feeling excited, enthusiastic, energetic and lively. Psychologists, however, have had more difficulty explaining exactly why it is that people who are more talkative, bold and assertive experience more happiness than their more quiet, reserved and passive counterparts.

One class of structural explanations suggests that it's something that extraverts have that explains their greater happiness. Perhaps extraverts just have a higher biologically determined "set-point" or fixed level of happiness. Or maybe extraverts "get more bang for their buck" and experience a stronger positive reaction when good things happen to them.

A second class of explanations proposes a role for social processes. The social activity hypothesis suggests that since extraverts are more sociable, and social activities tend to be enjoyable, their increased quantity of social activity explains why extraverts tend to feel happier. However, a particularly strong study showed that the amount of time spent in various social situations only explained about a sixth of the relationship between extraversion and positive affect.

Studies employing a "counter-dispositional behaviour" paradigm present a further difficulty for all of these explanations. In these studies, participants are instructed to act extraverted, act introverted or given no acting instructions during a group discussion task. A consistent finding that has emerged is that participants report feeling happier after acting extraverted than after acting introverted, and that surprisingly, this applies for dispositional introverts and extraverts alike! 

These studies show that the quantity of social experience can't explain this relationship because all participants spent the same amount of time interacting. And structural explanations also can't explain why simply acting like an extravert is enough to increase one's momentary levels of happiness. This suggests that it's the extraverted behaviours - in other words, what extraverts do - that cause increased happiness.

This still doesn't tell us much about how one gets from being talkative to feeling excited, but a recently published study finally sheds some light on the processes that may be at work here.


A Social Quality Explanation

Smillie and colleagues (2015) first surveyed 225 undergraduates and showed that social wellbeing, a measure of the quality of one's social life, explained a third of the relationship between extraversion and positive affect. This effect was driven almost entirely by one dimension of social wellbeing, social contribution, a person's sense of having an influence on their social world, or having something valuable to give to society.

Since the correlational design of Study 1 could not establish causality, Smillie et al. ran a counterdispositional behaviour experiment for Study 2. In groups of 3, 81 undergraduate students completed two fun problem-solving tasks. One participant was instructed to act extraverted (i.e., bold, talkative, energetic, active, assertive, adventurous), another was asked to act introverted (i.e., reserved, quiet, lethargic, passive, compliant, unadventurous), and a third participant was given no acting instructions.

Consistent with previous research, participants who acted extraverted experienced more positive affect than participants who acted introverted, whether they were naturally more extraverted or introverted. But the key contribution of this study was in revealing that perceived contribution to discussion tasks explained 70% of the effect of acting extraverted on positive affect. In other words, participants who were acting extraverted felt happier because they felt that they contributed more to the group activities.

So, it looks like social processes do matter - but instead of the mere amount of time spent with others, it's the qualitative aspects of social experience that help to explain the relationship between extraverted behaviours and positive affect. Specifically, this study suggested that one reason why extraverts (and pseudo-extraverts) feel happier is that extraverts feel that they are contributing more strongly to their social world. A follow-up Honours thesis (not yet published) also replicated this effect and found that it extended to another mediator, social power - an individual's perception of their ability to influence others in a social context.

This is interesting - but before extrapolating further, we'll need to consider a couple of limitations. First, like all other studies using the counterdispositional behaviour paradigm, participants were university students. This means that further research is needed before it's safe to generalise that all people feel happier after acting extraverted. And it's especially important considering that the explanation for the extraversion-happiness link may vary depending on age. For example, as Smillie et al. suggest, it's plausible that social coherence, one's ability to make meaning out of social affairs, could have a stronger effect on positive affect for older adults.

A second limitation is that it's unclear whether the difference in positive affect was due to the happiness-boosting effects of acting extraverted, or the happiness-lowering effects of acting introverted. After all, it can't be much fun to be asked to be quiet, reserved and lethargic while being dominated by an extraverted participant and another participant who tends to act quite extraverted in this context anyway. Yet, there seems to be a lack of research on how acting extraverted makes other people feel ("affective presence"), compared to how it makes the extravert (or pseudo-extravert) themselves feel.

Similarly, at the Positive Psychology Interest Group Journal Club a few weeks ago, some suggested that the instructions for acting introverted were overly-negative. Maybe - but according to the dominant Big Five descriptive framework of personality, these are more-or-less the terms that describe introverted behaviours. Being introverted does not actually mean being "introspective" or "imaginative", although popular misconceptions abound regarding what introversion is.


Should Introverts Act More Extraverted?

A final few caveats on whether it's a good idea to act more extraverted. First, extraverted behaviours are most reliably linked to activated positive affect states and are unrelated to "deactivated" positive affect states (e.g., calm, relaxed, at-ease); states that some people may see as more long-lasting, valuable end-goals. 

Second, how a person feels is of course only one component of wellbeing, and this research does not say much about the effect of extraverted behaviours on, say, one's perceptions of meaning and purpose in life (although it's also worth noting that positive affect does predict an increased sense of meaning). Smillie et al. do show that extraversion predicts positive affect via one's sense of social contribution - an important aspect of wellbeing - but there is clearly plenty of scope for further research to clarify the nature of the relationship between extraversion and wellbeing more broadly construed.

Third, whereas there's been no evidence to suggest that acting extraverted incurs costs for introverts (interestingly, extraverts do seem to suffer cognitive costs after acting introverted), no research has investigated the long-term effects of counterdispositional behaviour, as it's possible that extended periods of acting extraverted could be more challenging for introverts. Brian Little has a lot more to say about the need for "restorative niches" after acting out of character.

Taken together, however, Smillie et al. contribute a valuable new perspective on why it feels good to be or act like an extravert. And despite the need for further investigation with broader samples, in everyday life, and across longer periods of time, I'm excited by the optimistic view that these studies present. It looks like happiness isn't dependent on a fixed property specific to dispositional extraverts, but is something that anyone can experience more of - and that it might be as simple as strategically choosing to act more extraverted when the situation calls for it.

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Smillie, L., Wilt, J., Kabbani, R., Garratt, C., & Revelle, W. (2015). Quality of Social Experience Explains the Relation Between Extraversion and Positive Affect. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/emo0000047