Transcript

Kim Mills: What are the elements of a good life? What constitutes a happy life? These are age-old philosophical questions, but more than 80 years ago, researchers in Boston began working on a new way to answer them. During the closing years of the depression and the beginning of World War II, these researchers began following two groups of people, several hundred Harvard undergraduates and several hundred boys from some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. The researchers documented the participants’ lives in exhausting detail through surveys, interviews with them and their families, medical records and more. They then stuck with them, continuing to follow their lives as the men aged, all in an effort to find out which factors would ultimately lead to health, happiness, and wellbeing.

Remarkably, 80 years later, the project is still going strong. It’s called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and it now includes many of the original participants’ spouses, and their children too. So what have researchers learned from following these men and their families? What led to lasting happiness? Was it love, friendship, money, career success, all of the above? Is happiness innate? Are some people born happier than others and just destined to stay that way, or is happiness something you can choose or cultivate? And how can examining the lives of people born more than a century ago yield insights that remain relevant for people today, living in a very different world?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Marc Schultz, the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Dr. Schultz is also a professor of psychology and director of the data science program at Bryn Mawr College. Together with study director Dr. Robert Waldinger, he is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Largest Scientific Study of Happiness, a new book based on the findings of the eight-decade study.?

Dr. Schultz, thank you for joining me today.

Marc Schulz, PhD: It’s such a pleasure to be with you, Kim.

Mills: Let’s start by having you tell us a little bit more about the history of this study. It started before you were born. And you and Dr. Waldinger are both—you are the fourth generation of researchers to lead it. How did it begin? How has it evolved over the years?

Schulz: Yeah, so it started in the 1930s as you suggested, and what made these studies unique—they initially began as two separate studies—so 724 participants, almost two thirds were these inner-city boys, and the remaining one third were the Harvard students. Both studies were united in an interest in trying to identify what factors led to human thriving. So very unusual for the 1930s. This is an early form of positive psychology, if you will. Curious about things in their life, factors that they brought to the table and their personality or their background that would lead to flourishing and growth for the rest of their lives. It certainly didn’t begin as a study that would last 85 years, we’re in our 85th year, but they were really interested in trying to identify human flourishing and the factors that shaped that. So made it fairly unique.

It was also a study that was really interested in the lived experience of participants. So the study began with home visits, interviews with parents, always had interviews about every 10 years during the course of their lives, questionnaires, many, many questions, but also open-ended questions in which they could write responses. So the study developed very close connections to the participants across these 85 years.

Mills: And the study has managed to hang onto 84% of its original participants and many of their children as well.

Schulz: Yeah.

Mills: We all know that retaining participants can be a big challenge for researchers, especially for something as time-consuming as this study has been. What do you think has kept people from dropping out of the study?

Schulz: It’s really remarkable, the participation rate. And I can’t take credit for this. This is something that started in the very beginning in the 1930s. And I think there were probably a few factors. The study was really interested in people’s experience. And I think most of us, including the participants that began the study in the ’30s, appreciate when people have a genuine interest in our experience, and they felt heard and noticed and seen. We like to talk about the fact that the Harvard students, it didn’t surprise them that people would be interested in their experiences, and they thought probably other people could learn from their experiences. Whereas the larger part of the sample, the two-thirds that were growing up in inner city Boston, many of those families questioned why anyone would be interested in their son’s experience, and they had to be persuaded that it was of value, that we were really interested in the circumstances they were growing up in to try and understand what led some kids to do well, to adapt well to the circumstances and perhaps flourish, and other kids to struggle.

So the relationship with participants over time—really important, there was regular contact with participants. Over time, I think the participants began to look at the study as almost a part of their family. It was a place they could check in, update us about how they were doing. The questions that we asked enabled them to reflect on their experiences. And maybe this was particularly important for a cohort of boys that were born in the ’20s and ’30s or even before that that didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk about their inner life and their inner experience. But really remarkable. That 84% participation rate across time is something the study’s very proud of and I think deserves to be.

Mills: There have been a number of people who have directed this study over the years. Who have been the other directors? I mean, how did they continue? And how did you end up with this job?

Schulz: Yeah, so the study began—again, there’s two separate studies. The Harvard student study began at the Harvard Health Center with an interest in trying to understand, again, what led to their students thriving ad successful outcomes among their students. It was part of the Harvard Health Service, which made it particularly interesting because again, they were interested in the sort of positive adaptive side of psychology, which was unusual for that time. Arlie Bock was one of the original organizers of the study along with others that then helped shape the study. And then the other study was actually designed by a married couple, Glueck and Glueck, who had an interest in trying to understand delinquency and trying to understand how kids may pursue a path that put them in touch with the law, challenged the circumstances that they were living in and the kind of ability to adapt.

These studies were united by the third director, who was George Vaillant, who led the study for many years and was very important keeping it alive. About 20 years ago, Bob Waldinger, who I co-wrote this book, The Good Life, with, was asked by George to begin to take over the study. And Bob and I already had a working relationship going on at that point, about 10 years. And Bob brought me along, so I rode on his coattails to become part of this study.

Mills: So you mentioned that initially in the early phases there was some interest in looking at delinquency. Was there sort of a preconceived notion that these underprivileged boys were going to be more likely to be delinquent and the Harvard boys would, of course, be golden?

Schulz: Absolutely. I think that was part of it. Again, it was two separate groups, so it wasn’t one group that was saying the Harvard students were going to be the ones who would be successful and would be happy in life, and the inner city kids would follow a different path. But the participants that are part of our study, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, were only one part of the study of delinquency. That study began with already identified delinquents that were already experiencing challenges in life and difficulty with the law, and were part of official records in Boston. And the group that we followed was the comparison group of kids that were doing okay despite the circumstances they were growing up in, but were growing up in very challenging, poor circumstances.

Most of them lived in tenement buildings without running water. They were born to immigrant families, most of them, I think almost 70% of them. So this was a sample that was facing a lot of challenges in life, but they were the comparison group. So people were trying to understand how they were doing okay despite the challenges that they were facing in these very poor neighborhoods.

Mills: One of the challenges around doing any kind of research is funding, and here is a study that’s in its 85th year. How have you managed to keep it going? Where are the dollars coming from?

Schulz: So over the years, we’ve been really fortunate, and part of it is certainly serendipity and luck, and I want to kind of highlight that. That perseverance and luck has been a big part of it. People never imagined the study would last this long. When the study began, it had critical funding from what became the Grant Foundation. So this was W.T. Grant who had started some department stores and was really interested in early development. The Grant Foundation continues to be interested in that work, and the study received funding at critical points along the way from the Grant Foundation. We’ve had a lot of federal grants to study specific questions that have allowed us to expand the reach and also the focus of the study. And more recently, because the study has developed a kind of public recognition, it’s allowed us to raise some private monies as well to continue the research.

But money is always a critical challenge, and I think a testament to the three generations that came before Bob and I, sort of clever strategic leadership to continue the study. I think, having now been involved in the study for 20 years, there’s probably an experience that other past leaders have had. There’s a kind of tremendous devotion to the study from participants. They’re giving generously in their life. They’re revealing intimate details of their experience, all in the service of trying to help others or to help move science further. And I think that really motivates you as a leader. It certainly motivates me to try and do right by those participants, to answer questions that are meaningful, both to scientists and to the general public as well. So I think over time it becomes a kind of bigger enterprise and maybe even more investment in trying to keep it alive and going. But it’s always a challenge to keep a study like this going.

Mills: Is a lot of the data publicly available or, say, shared with other researchers?

Schulz: So certainly data has been shared with other researchers. We are engaged in lots of collaborations with others. And increasingly we’re trying to archive data that’s been de-identified in public resources, and that’s actually ongoing, that effort. One of the challenges in a study like this, and it’s a really interesting challenge, it’s a privacy issue. When you have so much data going across so many years, the privacy issues are pretty significant. And as computers get better and better at piecing together little bits of information to figure out the bigger puzzles, we have to be even more careful. So what we’ve done is to try and think about the de-identified data that doesn’t put anyone at risk of being identified in the study. And that can be archived in places where people can gain permission to work with those data. And then there’s other data that’s too sensitive that it needs to be kept behind a kind of wall, and perhaps collaborators can engage with us about whether they’re equipped to handle that kind of information, and of course, promise to keep it confidential as we have over 85 years.

Mills: Now, the original participants in the study were all white men from the Boston area, and researchers today would of course aim for a more diverse group. How do you address that issue and make sure that the findings you’re getting from this study remain relevant beyond the relatively homogeneous group of participants?

Schulz: This is just such an important question. I would just also add, anyone who does longitudinal research, this was a group that was born in the early 1900s, so things have changed, so the relevance of their experience, also, we need to raise questions and be critical about that. So it’s very hard to collect 85 years of data. If we could begin again, we would’ve had a more diverse sample in some ways. Certainly would’ve included women in that sample at the beginning as opposed to including them along the way. We are studying now more than 1,300 children of the original participants. So the study has gotten slightly more diverse, but no one study, really, that studies people this closely can capture the diversity of experience that we all represent in the world. So it’s really critical to go beyond any one study. And this is just good science. This is the idea about replication of findings.

So in our book, we don’t just rely on the findings from the Harvard study. We rely on hundreds of studies that have asked similar kinds of questions, perhaps with different methods, perhaps at different times in different countries. So we’re looking for that signal that repeats across many studies that suggests something is important to wellbeing. And that something that we found is that it’s good relationships are critical for our happiness and for our physical health as well. And that data, those findings don’t just come from our own research because it’s important, Kim, as you’re suggesting, to be able to generalize to broader populations. It comes from hundreds and hundreds of studies that have happened all across the world and across decades of time. The really critical question of circumstances change so much in today’s society, that data that were collected a hundred years ago or 50 years ago may not have relevance. That’s a really important question to ask.

Mills: Well, let’s talk about the book and its main focus, which I think is, as you’ve said, the importance of relationships in our lives. And you illustrate that in a lot of different ways in the book, one of which is by contrasting two men whom you call John Marsden and Leo DeMarco, can you talk about them, who they are, were, and the different characteristics?

Schulz: Yeah. So John Marsden and Leo DeMarco were two of the students who began the study as participants from the Harvard sample. They were both very good students. John Marsden was interested in becoming a lawyer. He went on to have a very successful career in law. This was after World War II intervened in both their lives, so both John and Leo were interested in serving in the military. John, it turned out, had some medical concerns and wasn’t able to serve, but he served stateside in support of the military efforts in World War II. Went to a leading law school, started to work in a leading firm, so very successful by conventional standards in his career. He taught law for law students as well, did some public service work. So it was quite a varied and successful career.

But he struggled in his relationships. He had a marriage that was not satisfying. That marriage ended. He had another relationship that was also not satisfying with him. With the connections that he had within his family, there were lots of conflict and disappointment, and it was something where he often felt alone and not supported by others. So he lived a life that by the standards of the whole sample, was on the very lowest end of happiness. He was unhappy for most of his life.

Leo, who graduated about the same time, studied history, was interested in being a writer, served abroad in the Pacific region in World War II, kept very detailed notes that he thought he might turn into a book or a series of articles after the war. When the war ended, he had to go home because his mom got sick with a pretty serious illness, and he ended up not being able to pursue his dream of being a writer and instead became a high school teacher.

And he was a very successful high school teacher, well-loved, very connected to the community that he taught in, so respected by peers. Students would talk about him. And he lived a life embedded in connections to others. Very close to his family. He met his wife soon after he returned from the war. She was the love of his life, remained married to her for his entire life. Very close to his daughters and to his grandchildren. And he turned out to be one of the happiest people in the study. So we use John and Leo to illustrate this idea that it’s not really the circumstances of your life or the success that you have at work that dictates your happiness. The data suggests, not just these two stories, the data suggests it’s your connections with others, the quality of those connections with others.

Mills: What about the role of money in life? I mean, a lot of people think that making a lot of money is going to make them happy. What did you find in this research? Were the people in this study who ended up wealthier and with more career success, were they any happier or healthier on an average basis?

Schulz: They weren’t, and that’s consistent largely with other research that’s out there. Although the research on the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, and it’s complicated for a reason than I think will make sense to most listeners. The most cited study is a study that suggests that there is a small connection between money and happiness until you get to about $75,000, which at that time was the average salary for a middle class family in the United States. And after that, that relationship begins to disappear. Other studies have found it might continue, but it’s very, very small. I would say tiny is probably the best characterization of that.

So what we think is going on, and this I think is a belief that many others have, is that money, at least in the United States and probably true in other Western or industrialized societies, gives you a certain kind of control over life. And it provides the kinds of things that we think are important for basic needs. So it provides us with security, access to food, in the United States, importantly, access to healthcare, so sort of safety, food, security, some control over our life. And after that, it doesn’t seem to add very much to our happiness. So we had people who were at the very high end, and I mean really high end of the income spectrum, who were very unhappy, and people at the low end, particularly folks that had grown up in these poor Boston neighborhoods that lived a very simple but productive life, they might have worked in factories for much of their life. They were quite happy and fulfilled with the nature of their life, the circumstances of their life.

Mills: Now, there’s some research that suggests that people have happiness set points, that some people are naturally happier than others, and that we tend to return to our set point despite life’s ups and downs. What did you find in your research? Do happy people stay happy? Do unhappy people stay unhappy? Or does it change through life?

Schulz: So the answer to these questions there are always, “It’s complicated.” So I want to say yes to each of your questions. So there’s no question that there’s some genetic influence on our happiness. Happiness is often measured in two ways. When we talk about all the research that’s going on about happiness, it’s measured by looking at your momentary feelings that you have across the day. Do you experience a lot of joy and happiness? If we asked you questions about your mood, do you report that? And then there’s also the more longstanding component about your overall satisfaction with life, the meaning that you find in life, your sense of purpose. So those two components probably have a genetic component. Some research that’s well cited suggests that maybe genes affect about 50% of our happiness. And it’s always fun when it’s about 50% because we have the glass half empty and half full at the same time.

So that means that genes are important, but it also means that the circumstances we live in and our daily decisions, the activities that we do, the way we live our life are very important for our happiness. And we certainly find that in our study. We also find two kinds of changes. One kind of change is a kind of normative change across time. So for example, if we look at marital satisfaction, we find something that looks like a U-shaped curve, that couples begin their marriage relatively happy. During the time when they’re raising children, right after they have a child to the time that the child leaves the proverbial nest, marital satisfaction declines. I’ve done other research that confirms that with the transition to parenthood. And then it begins to pick up again. For most people, so this is on average, marital satisfaction picks up.

And this is similar to other curves of satisfaction. So if you look at happiness curves, we see a modest U-curve with happiness dipping in middle age and then picking up again as people grow old. So those are really interesting, those normative changes or changes on average. But we also find in this very close study of 724 individuals and their children is that people have their own changes and trajectories across time, that people have events that have happened to them, some expected, some unexpected, that often change their trajectory of their happiness as well. So it might be the loss of a job and the finding of some very new kind of meaning. It might be getting out of a relationship or getting into a new one, that people have their own individual curves, by which I want to say more simply and plainly, it means that people’s happiness changes. Despite any kind of set point that may set the range of their happiness, there are changes that occur across time, some individual and some normative or average.

Mills: The people who came from really difficult, unhappy childhoods, whether they were the privileged people or the folks from the less privileged areas of Boston. Were there any differences regarding—I mean, did they tend to grow up unhappy or were they able to overcome that adversity?

Schulz: Yeah, so again, another really critical question. And I think a lot of people are thinking about their childhood and what impact it may have on their adult life. And what we find is there are connections. So extraordinary data allows us to ask these really interesting questions. So we see, for example, a link between the ratings that our researchers did when they went into the homes of the participants in the 1930s and rated the quality of the parenting, how warm, present, consistent the parenting was, and the quality of relationships when participants are in their eighties. So this is a 60-, 70-year time span. There is a connection. That connection is small. So what that means for folks that are trying to make sense of research like this is that coming out of childhood with a benefit of a warm, loving set of conditions of childhood environment, huge benefit in terms of the way in which you might enter into adult relationships. But our relationships themselves affect how we develop across time.

So there is a long reach. You can see it even into the eighties, but that reach is pretty small. And that’s because we learn things as we grow through adulthood, that we’re in new relationships. We tend to grow and modify our expectations for relationships as we have good ones or as we have bad ones. So childhood relationships, I think, are important. It’s a gift to go into adulthood with some of those positive experiences from childhood, and it’s more challenging if you don’t have them, but they’re not determinative. It’s not your fate is the key part. And I think that’s really critical for people to recognize.

Mills: Now, science has evolved over the course of this study, and early on you didn’t have things like DNA or video or the kinds of things that are being collected now. What are these newer factors showing you that you weren’t able to see maybe 60 years ago?

Schulz: Science has grown in so many ways along with the technologies. So the places we pay attention to have also changed, and it’s partly driven by technology and our ability to look at new questions. So things like genetic processes or internal bodily processes like our immune functioning or inflammatory responses are things that would’ve been very difficult to assess when the study began. So it allows us different windows into trying to understand the mechanisms, for example, that might explain how relationships might get into our bodies and affect our health. So we’ve tried to harness those new technologies, all the ones that you’re describing, brain scans, blood assays, to understand even epigenetic effects. So this is whether genes are turned on and off by life experiences. And we know from other research that relational experiences, particularly early on, have an impact on our epigenetics.

So a concrete example is genes that affect our ability to fight invaders to the body, germs, are affected by loneliness and difficult childhood experiences. And we’ve done some of the research that also points in that direction as well. We’ve been trying to study what happens for people who are aging and have the benefits of close connections to others. So they have partners that they’re close with, and it’s a secure, mutually beneficial relationship. There’s some physical benefits that we see from that as well, including signs, for women at least, that their cognitive functioning doesn’t change as much as other people’s cognitive functioning does. And we’re talking about in your eighties, so the general changes decline in cognitive functioning. But people in those secure connected relationships, for women, they show less of a decline across a three-year period. So we’re trying to make sense of the mechanisms that might connect relationships to our physical and even our brain health. And these new technologies are extraordinary for doing that.

But it also means that we’re looking in a different place. Thirty years ago, maybe not that surprising, that relationships were connected to emotional wellbeing, but it was surprising that it would affect our physical health. And there’s been just extraordinary research that’s been done in the last 20 years, maybe a little bit longer, that showed these incredible connections between our experiences and close connections and our physical health. I’d like to talk just about one, Kim, as an example, because I think it’s really lovely research, and it’s really elegant science as well. This was work that Jim Cohen did at the University of Virginia, and he exposed people to a mild experience of pain. So he pricked them, their skin, for example. And in one condition, people did this alone by themselves. They were in a brain scanner. And another condition, they were holding the hand of another. And in that second condition, sometimes the hand that you were holding was the hand of a loved one.

And what Cohen found in this really interesting study is that the areas of the brain that light up when we experience pain, that activity was diminished when people were allowed to hold the hand of another and particularly diminished when they were holding the hand of a loved one. And that’s just one example of the way that relationships might be able to affect our physical health, and in this case, our brain activity in a pretty profound way. So I think we’re beginning to understand that with the help of these new technologies. It’s very exciting. I’m eager to see sort of where it takes us in the future.

Mills: There must have been some influence by participating in the study that there was a connection, say, between the researcher and the participant. Do you have any sense of how much that may have influenced the outcome? I mean, people from your book, some of the people who were interviewed actually looked forward to the regular interactions. Has that skewed things in a way that would make a difference, do you think?

Schulz: So this is a really interesting question. It’s also a challenging one to answer scientifically. If we really wanted to find the answer, we would somehow randomly assign people to not answer study questions for a period of time and follow them and also look at people who are answering them. So I can’t give a really rigorous scientific answer. All I can give you or the anecdotal evidence that we have from participants. So we asked them what their experience was like participating, and most of them talked about it as a very positive experience. They talked about being able to check in with themselves, thinking about where they were spending their time, how they were doing. I think, again, for many of these participants born in the early 19th century, this was an opportunity to talk about experiences that they were really socialized not to talk about. And in fact, they told us that they shared experiences with us that they never talked about with other people.

So we think this sort of regular check-in might have some benefits for anyone, not just people in a study. And part of what we do in The Good Life is share some exercises and assessments, like the assessments in the study, that anyone can use to check in, particularly around their social functioning. So in the book, we highlight this idea about social fitness being really important, and like physical fitness, we need to exercise those muscles. So we provide some exercises that people can do to check in once a year or more regularly if they feel like they can use that support.

But this connection people had to the study was quite extraordinary, and you see it partly from their sense that it helped them. We have file drawers full of information about the participants, all the questionnaires they were filled out, but we also have letters from the participants and letters from their families. And people were quite devoted to the study. It became an important part of their life. Some of these men and their families decided to donate their bodies and their brains to the study, which is an ultimate example of sacrifice for others. And importantly, in addition to that incredible compliance for the first generation, when we went to the children of the original participants, almost two thirds of them said, “Yes, I’d love to participate in that study that my parents have been participating. I’ve always been curious what kinds of questions you all ask. So yes, I’m happy to participate.”

Mills: So when you talk to the children, they were then accepted into the study in the same way that the original participants were? So it wasn’t, they were just reflecting upon their fathers, but they became subjects as well.

Schulz: Exactly. Exactly. So both of those things were important. We did ask them about their memories of growing up and these families that we followed very closely because that allows us to look at the difference between our retrospection and our eyewitness reports. And that gap is really interesting. It might tell us something about the way anyone adapts over time and whether the gap might be bigger in certain kinds of families and what the consequences of that gap may be. So we did ask them to reflect on their childhood experiences, and that was the focus of one of our federally funded grants from the National Institute on Aging.

But we were really interested in their own experience as well. So these are baby boomer age participants that range widely from, depending on the marriages of the original participants, from somewhere in late 20s all the way up into the 70s. So one of the questions, for example, that we can ask with this sample is, “Where were you in terms of the digital divide, the introduction of technologies like cell phones and internet and social media? Does that have an impact on the way that you conduct your social connections?” This data collection happened before and after COVID, so we’re also interested in the impact of the pandemic, and again, which side of the social divide you were on and how that might have helped you navigate or hindered your navigation during the pandemic.

Mills: So last question, what’s next for the study? Are you enrolling yet another generation of participants or collecting different data? Are there other research questions that you want to pursue?

Schulz: There are. I feel like it’s an important resource, and we’re trying to steward it properly. So with the second generational participants, we’re asking lots of questions about social media and technology impact on social connection. Because we were somewhat lucky about the timing of our assessments, we’re able to look a little bit at the impact of the pandemic. But we’re in the middle of a large data collection now with that second generation. Part of what we’re asking about, as a sneak preview, is we’re asking about their sense of when they might become grandparents, because we think this sample might be an interesting sample to think about a prospective transition to grandparenthood study, which as far as we can tell has never been done. But if we plan it well, this would allow us or future researchers to look very carefully at another very important lifecycle event that I think has been underappreciated in terms of what impact it might have on people’s wellbeing.

Mills: Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Schulz. This has been really interesting, and I think this is a fascinating study that you’re part of. Thank you.

Schulz: Thank you for having me, Kim. It’s been a pleasure.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.?

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.