Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Human temperaments, like Champagnes, come in different degrees of effervescence. Some are grands mousseaux, fully sparkling, unstoppable, bubbling, and relentlessly high-spirited. Others are pétillants, only faintly sparkling. Most are crémants, somewhere in between. The grands mousseaux infect others with their liveliness and bring to life’s delights and setbacks a seemingly inexhaustible energy and resilience. They carry into adulthood that full measure of joy which so many others leave behind with youth. It is written into the wild expansiveness of Whitman—“O the joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning! / It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, / I will have thousands of globes and all time”—and we feel it in Churchill’s uninhibited passion for the brilliant colors on his palette: “I must say I like bright colours. I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermillion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”

  For those less exuberant or not at all, one globe may be more than enough, and bright colors, while pleasing, will not transport. We vary in our capacities for enthusiasm because a diversity of temperaments serves our collective good. We know intuitively that some will be quick and passionate in their responses, as we know that others, less urgently moved, will wait and be more deliberative. For each the world has space and reason.

  In their musical Gigi, based on the novella by Colette, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe put human differences in the capacity for joy, and the universal desire for it, at the heart of their words and music. Honoré, played by the ebullient Maurice Chevalier, loves women, wine, love, Paris, everything. He exults in life and is as enchanted by it as his nephew, Gaston (played by the mannerly, devastatingly handsome Louis Jourdan), is jaded and bored. Honoré experiences the world as a source of wonder and thrill; for Gaston it provokes nothing but indifference and malaise. The French, it is said, touch Champagne to the lips of newborn babies. Clearly some remain under its spell longer than others.

  Only the young schoolgirl Gigi (played by Leslie Caron), exuberant by youth and nature, can make Gaston laugh and relieve his ennui. But Gaston’s worldliness and imperturbability have, in turn, charm for Gigi: he is ballast to her scattered effervescence, a challenge to her unschooled gaieties. He can introduce her to the world of Maxim’s, white tie, and tails; to Champagne and dancing; to love, desire, and restraint. He has the pleasure of being disarmed, she of disarming. Yet it is Gigi’s exuberance and joie de vivre that linger long after the film is over. To “fly to the sky on Champagne / And shout to everyone in sight” is, as Gigi sings in “The Night They Invented Champagne,” the essence of exuberance. Uninhibited joy such as hers is captivating, contagious, and a powerful psychological force. It is, however, a psychological force that has been of more interest to songwriters than to most psychologists.

  Exuberance, it is safe to say, has not been a mainstay of psychological research. Until recently, psychology textbooks have devoted more than twice as much space to “negative” emotions like depression and anxiety as they do to “positive” ones like joy and happiness; the most dynamic of the positive emotions, exuberance, is scarcely studied at all. For every hundred journal articles on sadness or depression, calculates psychologist Martin Seligman, only one is published about happiness. Cross-cultural analyses of language find that in virtually every society there are many more concepts for negative emotional states than for positive ones. This, in the context of the richness of human experience, seems on the face of it hard to comprehend. Yet it makes sense, at least up to a point, to focus on psychopathology and potentially destructive emotions or dangerous circumstances. They, not joy or happiness, raise awareness of immediate threats to the individual and to society. Pathological behavior can incapacitate or kill, and it can create dangerous instability within a group. Survival is made more likely by a biological and emotional system that is highly focused, alert to peril, and ready to handle threat with dispatch. Positive emotions, in this context, could be viewed as an evolutionary luxury.

  Indeed, brain imaging studies conducted at the University of Iowa demonstrate that when subjects are shown emotionally pleasant pictures (for instance, landscape scenes, fireworks, and dolphins playing with a ball); unpleasant pictures (a bird covered in oil, a dead soldier with part of his face missing, a rotting carcass of a dog); or pictures that are neutral (an open umbrella, a woven basket, leaves on a tree), the unpleasant pictures provoke activation in the primitive, subcortical parts of the brain conceptualized by scientists as an ancient danger-recognition system. The pleasant pictures, on the other hand, activate a phylogenetically much younger part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Danger, the researchers conclude, requires a quick and relatively simple response system; the ability to appreciate the positive in situations requires, on the other hand, a more sophisticated level of processing in the brain.

  But, as we have seen, nature has taken care to create a capacity for delight and prolonged enthusiasm. These exuberant and otherwise affirmative states can generate alternative solutions to menace and hazard, foster resilience and social bonds, and reward successful behavior with an infusion of pleasure. The brain systems necessary to appreciate the auspicious and to fashion a fitting response are recent but vital. The study of the pursuit and harnessing of the auspicious, however, has been skipped over in favor of understanding danger, distress, and disease.

  My colleagues and I, for example, published a paper more than twenty years ago about positive experiences associated with mania. In our review of the medical and psychological literature on mania—an admittedly destructive state, but one that in its milder forms is often characterized by many advantageous qualities such as high energy, exuberance, increased sexual desire, and rapid, creative, and expansive thinking—we were stunned to see how disproportionately psychological research had focused on negative emotions and how slight was the mention of temperamental strengths. Our field was more interested in the depressed and anxious brain than in what Coleridge so marvelously described as the “Bright Bubbles of the … ebullient brain.” As clinicians, we of course knew that psychologists and psychiatrists are obligated to ameliorate suffering, not to root around for benefits that might derive from it. We are asked to find remedies. Suffering demands action in a way that pleasure and success do not.

  Still, as a clinical psychologist interested not only in psychosis and suicide but in creativity and the arts as well, I was disconcerted to see how far our field had moved away from the wide-ranging and profound interests of David Hume and William James, how far behind we had left our earlier attempts to understand passion, imagination, and the nature of human greatness. I was far from alone in these concerns.

  Psychology has begun to catch up with its earlier, broader interests. In the last two decades, psychologists have brought new life and better science to the study of positive psychological traits. The number of articles published about “positive psychology” and “positive emotions” has quadrupled over the last two decades. In January 2000 an entire issue of American Psychologist was dedicated to the topic of “Positive Psychology: Happiness, Excellence, and Optimal Human Functioning.” The issue’s coeditors, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the Claremont Graduate University in California, are well-respected researchers and writers who have pioneered the study of optimism and optimal experiences. They argued powerfully for an emphasis on those aspects of human nature which enhance life and productivity, capacities that might one day prevent mental illness, not simply contend with it once it occurs. “Our message,” they wrote in American Psychologist, “is to remind our field that psychology
is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best. Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger. It is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play.” Their statement was an eloquent call to the field.

  Psychology has always, if insufficiently, concerned itself with individual differences in personality and temperament. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, and fear are universal, but individuals vary enormously in the nature, quickness, and intensity of their emotional responses. Emotions are innate, although susceptible to alteration through experience and the environment, and they exist to alert us to specific and significant situations such as danger or opportunity, so that we respond in a visceral way to gain advantage or to increase our chances of survival. These emotional responses—such as increased heart rate, a surge of adrenaline, or physical shutdown—tend to be of rapid onset and short duration. Most consistently, they are characterized by two principal psychological dimensions, “pleasantness” and “activation.”

  Emotions can be placed along a continuum of subjective enjoyment that ranges from pleasant to unpleasant, and another continuum of alertness and energy that ranges from high activation to low. This dimensionality approach to emotions to some extent circumvents William James’s apt observation about the futility of rigid categories: “The trouble with the emotions in psychology,” he wrote more than a hundred years ago, “is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. So long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural history, so long all that can be done with them is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and effects.” Modern psychological science views emotions in far more complex ways than observers did in James’s time.

  Exuberance, under this model, can be conceptualized as high on the pleasantness (or “positive affect”) dimension, as well as high on activation. This combination of positive emotion and high energy is far more likely to result in an active engagement with the world than depression or anxiety, which are psychological states hallmarked by avoidant and fearful behaviors and lacking in drive. Exuberance is also more likely than happiness alone to lead to new and energetic pursuits. Happiness is a less activated emotional state and one that is, by definition, more content with the way things are than eagerly gauging possibilities of how things might be in the future. Joy, on the other hand, lures the individual forward with further promise of pleasure for, as C. S. Lewis has observed, anyone who experiences joy will want it again.

  Exuberance encourages exploration and rewards it with the possibility of joy and greater opportunity for food, territory, and mates. But exploration also increases the likelihood of danger to the individual. The active, exploring animal is more vulnerable to predators and the elements than the timid one who is likely to remain sheltered and camouflaged, more protected by remaining within the group than if it ventures out on its own. Captive foxes who are fearful of new situations and strangers, for example, are far less likely than their bolder littermates to be killed by predators and automobiles once they are released into the wild. Guppies, even, show a range of intrepidness. Most, sensibly enough, will keep their distance when placed near larger fish. A fearless and curious few males, however, will swim toward a potential predator. Not surprisingly, they are more likely to be eaten, but those who are not prove to be more attractive mates to the surviving female guppies. Trepidation cuts both ways.

  Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and writer at the University of Iowa, uses the sea anemone to draw in a simple and elegant way the differences between an active, exposed animal and a closed and withdrawn one: “This fundamental duality is apparent in a creature as simple and presumably as nonconscious as a sea anemone. Its organism, devoid of brain and equipped only with a simple nervous system, is little more than a gut with two openings, animated by two sets of muscles, some circular, the others lengthwise. The circumstances surrounding the sea anemone determine what its entire organism does: open up to the world like a blossoming flower—at which point water and nutrients enter its body and supply it with energy—or close itself in a contracted flat pack, small, withdrawn, and nearly imperceptible to others. The essence of joy and sadness, of approach and avoidance, of vulnerability and safety, are as apparent in this simple dichotomy of brainless behavior as they are in the mercurial emotional changes of a child at play.”

  The exuberant person, far from simply responding to the environment in which he finds himself, acts vigorously upon it or seeks out new ones. Whether through play, through exploration, or through engagements of the imagination, those who are exuberant act. Spirited play, as we have seen, rewards exploration with pleasure, and propels young animals and children into more intimate and varied contact with their physical environment; play sees to it that necessary skills are acquired and a diversity of experiences is tried. Joyous states do other critically important things as well. They strengthen the bonds between members of a group and make more likely the group’s participation in shared activities that will benefit the group as a whole; they fortify the ties between parent and child, teacher and student, leader and follower, lover and lover. The energy, enthusiasm, and optimism of those who are exuberant tend to make them more socially outgoing, as well, and more likely to take risks; this, in turn, almost certainly increases their attractiveness to the opposite sex and, accordingly, their chance of reproductive success.

  We have some sense of what exuberance does, but what actually is meant by it, and how is exuberance measured? What elements combine to make an exuberant temperament? How often, and with what steadiness, does the temperament persist over time? To what extent is exuberance determined by genes and to what extent is it influenced by the environment? We know more than we did in William James’s time, but not nearly as much as one would like.

  Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen described individual differences in temperament, as did others over the centuries to follow, but it was not until the twentieth century that scientists and clinicians studied and classified temperament in a more empirical way. Temperament, which can be broadly defined as the relatively stable pattern of moods and behaviors first manifest early in life, has been more fully described by the psychologist Gordon Allport as the “class of ‘raw material’ from which personality is fashioned.” “Personality” generally denotes the unique or most distinctive aspects of an individual, characteristics shaped by innate forces operating under the influence and constraints of upbringing and environment. “Temperament,” according to Allport, is the “internal weather” in which personality evolves. “The more anchored a disposition is in native constitutional soil the more likely it is to be spoken of as temperament.… [It comprises] the characteristic phenomena of an individual’s emotional nature, including his susceptibility to emotional stimulation, his customary strength and speed of response, the quality of his prevailing mood, and all peculiarities of fluctuation and intensity in mood.” These phenomena, Allport assumed, were largely inherited. In practice, the terms “temperament” and “personality” are often used interchangeably, although temperament is assumed to be more genetically determined.

  One of the most reliably measured differences in temperament is between those individuals who are highly enthusiastic and active, who reach out to new people and new experiences, and those who are less energetic and outgoing, more likely to avoid the unfamiliar. The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, in his classic 1913 textbook General Psychopathology, described a continuum of active, ebullient temperaments. The “euphoric” temperament, as set out by Jaspers, was distinguished by the “abnormally cheerful” individual who “bubbles over happily … is blissfully light hearted about everything that happens to him and is contented and confident. The happy mood brings a certain excitement with it including motor excitement.” The “sanguine” temperament
, he believed, was abnormally excitable: “It reacts quickly and in lively fashion to every kind of influence, it lights up immediately but excitement dies down equally fast. The individual leads a restless life, and likes extremes. We get a picture of vivacious exuberance or of an irritable, troubled hastiness.”

  More recently, Hagop Akiskal, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Diego, has developed the concept of “hyperthymia” to describe the cheerful, overly optimistic individual, more often male than female, who is talkative, extraverted, self-assured, and filled with plans and ideas. He or she needs little sleep and possesses the kind of energy which leaves others gasping. Akiskal, who estimates that at least one person in a hundred meets the research criteria for hyperthymia, cautions that while there are many advantages to this type of temperament—gregariousness, indefatigability, and the ability to handle highly stressful situations with relative ease—there is, as well, an instability in mood that can lead to intemperate behavior.

  Extraversion, of all of the traits examined by psychologists to date, is the one most clearly and directly related to exuberance. The extravert, as defined by a variety of extensively and well-validated personality assessment measures, is energetic, outgoing, lively, cheerful, enthusiastic, forceful, active, and talkative, and tends to seek excitement. Extraverts have low levels of social anxiety, high levels of self-esteem, and are exquisitely alert and sensitive to reward signals. In experimental situations, for example, they react far more intensely than introverts when shown photographs of people with happy faces. (This is consistent with findings from neuropsychological studies of patients with manic-depressive illness. When manic, patients attend and respond far more to positive words presented to them in an experimental task; when depressed, they are much more likely to pay attention and respond to negative words. The state of one’s mood also clearly affects the content of the material that is remembered. Neuropsychologists repeatedly find that depressed patients disproportionately recall words with depressive content and that nondepressed subjects do the opposite. Depressed patients are also more likely to remember failures and other negative experiences in their lives, as well as to underestimate their performance on a variety of psychological and intellectual tests.) Mood state influences what is noticed, how it is remembered, and how it is retrieved from the memory. Those whose temperaments afford them extended periods of positive mood, or periods of particularly intense and exuberant moods, experience the world in a very different way from those who are more even-tempered or dyspeptic.