What makes us happy, the study

In today's New York Times, David Brooks links to an article in the Atlantic which reports on a study of male Harvard undergrads that started in the late 1930s and spans to today.  It's a long, but fascinating article.  I found a couple things in the article to be worth reflecting on.  First, the description of a hierarchy of defense mechanisms we use to deal with adversity:
 
At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

An interesting observation from the article was that normal people tend to mature from the unhealthiest to the healthiest adaptations as they age, noting that even healthy kids can employ "psychotic" adaptations when they are young and appropriately named "immature" adaptations as teenagers, but still manage to become healthy and happy adults with "mature" adaptations.  That's comforting.  Of course, on the discomforting side was the observations that a number of the study's subjects displayed mature adaptations as 20 year olds, but later regressed to more immature adaptations.  I'm not sure what to make of it all.  But the best summation of the whole study was captured in the following sentence:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

May we all give proper attention to our most important relationships and model mature adaptive behavior for our children: altruism, humor, anticipation, suppression, and sublimation.