2019年雅思阅读全真模拟题：幸福的科学解释
Can Scientists tell us： What happiness is? A
Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they
are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The
most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness
is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state.
Esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman has spearheaded an effort to study the
science of happiness. The bad news is that we're not wired to be happy. The good
news is that we can do something about it. Since its origins in a Leipzig
laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and
contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and
misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and
angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go
well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have
mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or
depression, only one concerns a positive trait. B
A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice
Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive
emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to
give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky
diagnosis into three groups： one received candy, one read humanistic statements
about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the
most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others,
Seligman got stuck in. He raised millions of dollars of research money and
funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four
positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished
with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where
psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form \to discuss
subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science. C
But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of
defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts
vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research
positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic
depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside
trite notions such as \plan to stop the new