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heard the sounds of drilling and a showering of rocks signaling that a rescue effort had begun, Mario found happiness by focusing on what he would do when he got out. He tried hard not to let the dusty air get him down and didn’t complain about sleeping on damp cardboard with no sense of whether it was day or night.

      Instead, he led efforts to find potential escape routes, made jokes to maintain his sanity and hold up group morale, and supported the younger miners who were often scared and hysterical. Whenever Mario got depressed, he kept his tears private so that the group would not lose their faith. After the tense rescue effort came to an end and the miners were lifted to safety, Mario gave the rescue workers rocks wrapped in tin foil as a gag gift for their hard work.

      “We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed,” he told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “It was important to keep clean, to keep busy, to keep believing we would be rescued.”

      The international headlines dubbed him “Super Mario” because he was the one who kept the group from falling apart. They celebrated Mario’s natural charisma, leadership, and positive outlook. But we have a slightly different take on the matter: we expect that Mario mobilized a healthy working memory to stay focused on the positive.

      Although the understanding of the relationship between working memory and happiness is still developing, a growing body of evidence shows that working memory is involved in our ability to keep a positive outlook, even in stressful, threatening situations like the one Mario and his fellow coal miners faced.

      The Science of Happiness

      “Happiness depends on ourselves.” This insightful gem, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, elegantly summarizes what philosophers have long known: happiness is the consequence of decisions that we make in our lives. We can choose to be happy even in the most desperate circumstances. When Viktor Frankl, a key figure in existential therapy, was imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II, he found meaning and a reason to live by focusing on his love for his wife. Instead of dwelling on his imprisonment, he made a choice to be happy by focusing on future goals. In the past decade or so, psychologists and neurologists have been employing sophisticated experimental techniques in an effort to understand what philosophers have known for so long. Working memory is at the center of their investigations.

      Sara Levens and Ian Gotlib from Stanford University are two of the psychologists examining the role that working memory plays in happiness. In a 2010 study, they recruited a group of adults with depression and another group of adults without any history of the mood disorder. Both groups had to perform a working memory task that required them to evaluate the emotional expressions—happy, sad, or neutral—of a series of faces viewed on a computer screen.

      As each face appeared on the screen, the participants had to judge whether it had the same or a different emotional expression as a face they had seen previously. The groups performed this task twice. The first trial does not require working memory because the participants only had to determine if the facial expression matched the one they had seen immediately prior (1-back). In the 2-back task, which does engage working memory, they had to determine if the facial expression matched the one they had seen two faces earlier. Here are examples of these tasks:

       1-Back Task ¹

      Sad Happy Sad Sad Neutral

       2-Back Task

      Sad Neutral Sad Happy Neutral Happy Happy

       The words that are repeated in the 1-back or 2-back task are in bold.

      Levens and Gotlib measured the speed and accuracy of the responses. There was no significant difference between the depressed and nondepressed groups on the 1-back task. The difference emerged when it came to remembering the emotional expressions on the 2-back task, the task that engages working memory. The depressed individuals were faster in matching sad faces, while the non-depressed adults were quicker in matching happy faces. The psychologists suggest that the way we use working memory to process emotions played a role in this difference. They conclude that depressed individuals were more likely to keep sad emotions in their working memory, while the non-depressed people keep happy emotions in their working memory. This suggests that your working memory Conductor can be a double-edged sword when it comes to happiness: you can use it to fixate on the bad, or the good. Paraphrasing Aristotle, it’s your choice. But as we will see, those with a stronger working memory tend to choose happiness.

      To take her research a step further, Levens teamed up with Elizabeth Phelps of New York University to investigate what happens in the brain when people use working memory to process emotional information. They asked participants to perform working memory tasks in which they had to recognize positive and negative emotions. Participants were first shown a string of negative emotional words—like murder and terror—on a computer screen. They were then shown a single word (known as the target word) and asked to determine whether it was in the list of negative words they had just seen. The experimenters did the same with positive words. These tasks required the participants to use working memory to keep in mind the lists and then compare the target word with the lists. At the same time, the scientists observed the brain activity of the participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The scans revealed that blood rushed to the PFC, and the researchers showed that working memory plays a role in judging positive and negative emotions. But distinguishing between positive and negative thoughts isn’t the same as feeling a negative or positive emotion. So does having a strong working memory actually help make us feel happier?

      Working Memory Fires Up the Feel-Good Brain Chemicals

      The human brain is coursing with chemicals that create happy feelings. Two of these feel-good chemicals are the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is a pleasure and motivation chemical that is released in the brain whenever you do something enjoyable. The quick hit of dopamine produces a short-term feeling of euphoria, which encourages you to repeat the behavior. Serotonin is known as the Zen neurotransmitter because it is associated with feelings of deep and subtle satisfaction and long-term happiness. Serotonin is so critical to happiness that the most commonly prescribed antidepressants work by increasing its level in the brain.

      Exciting research is showing some surprising links between working memory and the production of both dopamine and serotonin. One study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to investigate the relationship between working memory and dopamine. The first step in this trial was to test the participants’ working memory to identify individuals with high and low working memory. Then both the strong and weak working memory groups underwent PET scans to measure dopamine production in their brains. The researchers found that the brains of participants with good working memory made more dopamine, while those with poor working memory made less.

      In another study conducted at the Heinrich-Heine University in Germany by Ruediger Grandt and colleagues, PET scans were used to examine whether there is any link between working memory and serotonin. The study revealed that when participants performed a working memory task that involved remembering a sequence of faces, they experienced an increase of serotonin that participants completing a non–working memory task did not experience. What we find particularly exciting about this study is that it is the act of using working memory that was linked to the surge in serotonin. In other words, simply using your working memory may make you happier. If you are feeling grumpy, you may want to try to engage in activities that use your working memory, to see if that dopamine and serotonin boost can improve your mood.

      Working Memory and the Glass Half Empty

      At the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to investigate how working memory is related to unhappiness, in particular, depression and rumination. Rumination is the term psychologists use when people fixate on things, often negative. It is an unproductive style of thinking that is difficult to control or stop, and it tends to be linked with strong emotions like worry

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