To psychological researchers, happiness is life experience marked by a preponderance of positive emotion. Feelings of happiness and thoughts of satisfaction with life [1] are two prime components of subjective well-being (SWB).
The scientific pursuit of happiness and positive emotion is also the first pillar of the new positive psychology first proposed in Martin E. P. Seligman's 1998 American Psychological Association presidential address. Positive psychologists also study positive character strengths and virtues and positive social institutions.
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Psychologists assess people's happiness with varied measures. The simplest is a single item that has been posed to hundreds of thousands of representatively sampled people in many countries: "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days─would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"
Other investigators employ multi-item happiness measures. Some tap into the "cognitive" component of happiness (i.e., judgments of high life satisfaction) and others assess the "affective" component (i.e., the experience of frequent positive emotions and relatively infrequent negative emotions). For example, the popular Satisfaction With Life Scale asks respondents five questions about their feelings regarding their lives (e.g., "In most ways my life is close to my ideal.") Other measures assess the affective component of happiness in different ways. The Affect Balance Scale invites people to report how frequently they have experienced various positive and negative emotions over the last 30 days. The Experience Sampling Method uses a pager to occasionally interrupt people's waking experience and to sample their moods, and the Day Reconstruction Method requires respondents to review their previous day hour by hour and to recall exactly what they were doing and how they were feeling during each hour.
Multi-item global measures of happiness are also frequently used by researchers. The Subjective Happiness Scale asks people to rate the extent to which they believe themselves to be happy or unhappy individuals (e.g., "In general, I consider myself...," with the options being somewhere between "not a very happy person" and "a very happy person").
Contrary to many reports of abundant misery ("Our pains greatly exceed our pleasures," said Rousseau), most people report being "fairly" or "very" happy and relatively few (some 1 in 10 in many countries, including the USA) report being "not too happy." Pioneering happiness researcher Ed Diener aggregated SWB data from 916 surveys of 1.1 million people in 45 nations that represent most of the human population. When responses were converted to a 0 to 10 scale (with 5 being neutral), the average SWB score was near 7.
Likewise, when people’s moods have been sampled using pagers or in national surveys, most people report being in good rather than bad moods.
These generally positive self-reports come from people of all ages and both sexes worldwide, with a few exceptions: people hospitalized for alcoholism, newly incarcerated inmates, new therapy clients, South African blacks during the apartheid era, homeless people, sex workers, and students living under conditions of political suppression.
When surveyed, there is some tendency for people to overreport good things (such as voting) and underreport bad things (such as smoking). Yet people’s SWB reports have reasonable reliability across time and correlate with other positive indicators of well-being, including friends' and family members' assessments. Positive self-reports also predict sociability, energy, and helpfulness, and a lower risk for abuse, hostility, and illness.
Happiness does, however, vary somewhat by country. Recent (1999 to 2001) World Values Survey data collected by Ronald Inglehart from 82 countries indicate highest SWB (happiness and life satisfaction) in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, and Switzerland, and the lowest in Moldova, Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia.
Despite presumptions of happy and unhappy life stages or populations, there are mostly happy and a few unhappy people in every demographic group. Happiness is similarly common among people of differing
Other indicators do offer clues to happiness.
In the early 21st century, economists and environmental sustainability advocates came to share psychologists' interest in the extent to which money and consumption can buy happiness. Three in four entering American college and university students (in annual UCLA surveys) say that it is "very important or essential" to "be very well off financially," and 73 percent of Americans in 2006 answered "yes" when Gallup asked "Would you be happier if you made more money?"
In their scientific pursuit of happiness, psychologists and sociologists have asked three questions:
Psychologists have sought to explain why objective life circumstances -- especially positive experiences -- have such modest long-term influence on happiness. One explanation is our human capacity for adaptation. Sooner than we might expect, people will adapt to improvements in circumstances and recalibrate their emotions around a new "adaptation level." Thus, finds Daniel Gilbert in his studies, summarized in Stumbling on Happiness, emotions have a shorter half-life than most people suppose. Nevertheless, some psychologists, such as Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, draw from happiness research in designing interventions that aim to increase happiness.
Happiness reflects not only our adaptations to recent experiences but also our social comparisons. As people climb the ladder of success, they tend to compare upward. And with increasing income inequality, as in contemporary China, there will likely be more available examples of better off people with whom to compare. In experiments, people engaged in comparing downward─by comparing themselves with those impoverished or disfigured─express greater satisfaction with their own lives.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Knopf, 2006
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Basic Books, 2006
David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness, Harper Paperbacks, 1993.
Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness, Free Press, 2002.
Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Rethinking happiness: The science of psychological wealth, Malden, MA: Blackwell/Wiley, 2009.
Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness,Penguin Press, 2008.
Internal references
The Positive Psychology website
The World Database of Happiness
The Journal of Happiness Studies
Research-based suggestions for a happier life
Values in Action "founded to advance the science of positive psychology"