Critical Views
One critical point made regarding our individual set point is to understand it may simply be a genetic tendency and not a completely determined criterion for happiness, and it can still be influenced.
The notion of "historical neglect", that people tend to focus more on negative emotions than positive emotions, can become a great detriment to improving our happiness set point. Negative emotions require more attention and are remembered better, overshadowing any positive experiences that may even outnumber negative experiences.
Ahmed and Koob (1998), in a study on moderate to excessive drug intake on rats, put forth that the use of mind-altering drugs such as cocaine can change an individual's hedonic set point; their study provides an animal model for the relation between excessive drug usage and how it affects our hedonic set point.
Read more about this topic: Hedonic Treadmill
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or views:
“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)