Scientists Reveal Three Keys to Happiness

Oct. 2 -- What would it take to make you really satisfied with your life? According to decades of research by a husband and wife team of psychologists at the University of Michigan, you need to put yourself in an environment that meets three basic human needs.

To make your way down the road to happiness you need to feel competent and believe that you can make a difference. You also need to understand what the heck is going on around you and have the opportunity to choose your own options.

Before you start firing off all those e-mails about money, love, health and so on, give these folks a chance to explain. They arrived at their conclusions partly by showing people pictures of nature.

Picturing a Perfect Life

Stephen Kaplan, who is also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science in addition to being a psychologist, and his wife, Rachel Kaplan, professor of environment and behavior, started down this road decades ago during the horror that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What could have precipitated such an unreasonable act of violence?

Could it be, they wondered, that violence could stem at least partly from an unhealthy environment?

"Some environments bring out the best in people," Stephen Kaplan says. "Others do exactly the opposite. How can you describe an environment that brings out the best in people?"

At that time there was no general consensus among psychologists as to what constituted a healthy environment. But the Kaplans were intrigued by one study that came out about that time suggesting that what people really liked in their lives was a "medium level of complexity."

"We thought that was very odd," Kaplan says, because both he and his wife believed that what people really needed in their lives was exposure to nature. So they set out to find if they were right.

They collected a bunch of photos showing urban scenes in Detroit and scenes of nature. Strangely enough, the urban scenes were shot by an expert photographer and were much better in quality than the scenes of nature, which were shot by a mediocre photographer after a dry, dull summer.