Happiness is an important emotion, but it should not be considered our sole or ultimate value. Instead, we should think about well-being.
Table of contents
- Who is Happy?
- What is Happiness and Subjective Well-Being? + 11 Interesting Facts About Happiness
- What Are Happiness and Well-Being? — Happiness and Well-Being
Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policy-makers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness. Three decades of progress. Psychological bulletin, 2 , The next steps in the evolution of the field are to comprehend the interaction of psychological factors with life circumstances in producing SWB, to understand the causal pathways leading to happiness, understand the processes underlying adaptation to events, and develop theories that explain why certain variables differentially influence the different components of SWB life satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect.
Who is Happy?
The mental health continuum: From languishing to flourishing in life. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 42 2 , This paper introduces and applies an operationalization of mental health as a syndrome of symptoms of positive feelings and positive functioning in life. Dimensions and scales of subjective well-being are reviewed and conceived of as mental health symptoms. Findings revealed that The risk of a major depressive episode was two times more likely among languishing than moderately mentally healthy adults, and nearly six times greater among languishing than flourishing adults.
Multivariate analyses revealed that languishing and depression were associated with significant psychosocial impairment in terms of perceived emotional health, limitations of activities of daily living, and workdays lost or cutback. Flourishing and moderate mental health were associated with superior profiles of psychosocial functioning. The descriptive epidemiology revealed that males, older adults, more educated individuals, and married adults were more likely to be mentally healthy.
Implications for the conception of mental health and the treatment and prevention of mental illness are discussed. Promoting and protecting mental health as flourishing: A complementary strategy for improving national mental health. American Psychologist, 62 2 , This article summarizes the conception and diagnosis of the mental health continuum, the findings supporting the two continua model of mental health and illness, and the benefits of flourishing to individuals and society. Completely mentally healthy adults—individuals free of a month mental disorder and flourishing—reported the fewest missed days of work, the fewest half-day or greater work cutbacks, the healthiest psychosocial functioning i.
Findings reveal a Black advantage in mental health as flourishing and no gender disparity in flourishing among Whites. The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Drawing on her own research with thousands of men and women, Sonja Lyubomirsky has pioneered a plan to increase happiness in our day-to-day lives—in the short term and over the long term. Using more than a dozen uniquely formulated happiness-increasing strategies, The how of happiness offers a new and potentially life-changing way to understand our innate potential for joy and happiness as well as our ability to sustain it in our lives.
This leaves 40 percent of our capacity for happiness within our power to change. Helping you find the right fit between the goals you set and the activities she suggests, Lyubomirsky also helps you understand the many obstacles to happiness as well as how to harness individual strengths to overcome them. Always emphasizing how much of our happiness is within our control, Lyubomirsky addresses the scientific how of her happiness research, demystifying the many myths that unnecessarily complicate its pursuit.
Her recommendations are supported by scientific research. The how of happiness is both a contribution to the field of positive psychology and a gift to all those who have questioned their own well-being and sought to take their happiness into their own hands. A measure of subjective happiness: Preliminary reliability and construct validation.
What is Happiness and Subjective Well-Being? + 11 Interesting Facts About Happiness
Social Indicators Research, 46 2 , Data was collected in the United States from students on two college campuses and one high school campus, from community adults in two California cities, and from older adults. Students and community adults in Moscow, Russia also participated in this research.
Results indicated that the Subjective Happiness Scale has high internal consistency, which was found to be stable across samples. Test-retest and self-peer correlations suggested good to excellent reliability, and construct validation studies of convergent and discriminant validity confirmed the use of this scale to measure the construct of subjective happiness.
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The rationale for developing a new measure of happiness, as well as advantages of this scale, are discussed. The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9 2 , The pursuit of happiness is an important goal for many people. However, surprisingly little scientific research has focused on the question of how happiness can be increased and then sustained, probably because of pessimism engendered by the concepts of genetic determinism and hedonic adaptation.
Nevertheless, emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. The authors then consider adaptation and dynamic processes to show why the activity category offers the best opportunities for sustainably increasing happiness. Finally, existing research is discussed in support of the model, including 2 preliminary happiness-increasing interventions.
Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6 1 , Different orientations to happiness and their association with life satisfaction were investigated with adults responding to Internet surveys. We measured life satisfaction and the endorsement of three different ways to be happy: Each of these three orientations individually predicted life satisfaction.
People simultaneously low on all three orientations reported especially low life satisfaction. These findings point the way toward a distinction between the full life and the empty life. Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55 1 , Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function.
Accordingly, research guided by self-determination theory has focused on the social—contextual conditions that facilitate versus forestall the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development. Specifically, factors have been examined that enhance versus undermine intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and well-being.
The findings have led to the postulate of three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness—which when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being. Also considered is the significance of these psychological needs and processes within domains such as health care, education, work, sport, religion, and psychotherapy.
What matters is not your opinion of your life, but whether you actually enjoy it from moment to moment. Eudaimonia arguably just is well-being—there is no difference, as most scholars understand the notion. However, Greek philosophers tended to view well-being in distinctive ways. In particular, they generally saw it as a matter of nature-fulfillment: According to Aristotle, well-being consists in a life of virtuous or excellent activity—including, among other things, moral virtue.
It was nothing more than the word Greeks used for well-being, however they conceived it. Note that interpretation of the ancient tradition is somewhat contested, and some commentators take 'eudaimonia' to serve more like the broader term 'good life' discussed below in ancient ethics. In the broadest sense of the word, a good life is the sort of life that one should want to lead.
The majority view in philosophy is that we should want things other than just our own self-interest: Other things also are important, such as virtue, or being morally good. In a sense, morality may be much more important: The main source of disagreement on this question is this: To do well or flourish just is to be good, at least in part. Even if a sadistic tyrant enjoys his life, he is a deficient, twisted specimen of humanity, leading a sad life that no one should envy. On this sort of view, it can make sense to say that well-being is all that matters in a good life. But this is only because well-being is understood so broadly that it includes items we usually consider to be separate from it, like morality.
In a way, then, there is remarkably little disagreement among philosophers about the core elements of a good life, namely well-being and virtue: But there is sharp disagreement about whether those elements are really distinct, or amount to the same thing. When deciding whether the recently departed had a good life, for instance, we do consider how well they fared—probably not a good life if they suffered nonstop agony. But we also consider how well they lived.
What Are Happiness and Well-Being? — Happiness and Well-Being
You might not envy Abraham Lincoln given his depression and other trials, but still think he had a good life because you admire the way he lived it. Many—but not most—philosophers would say yes. Utilitarians, for example, believe that we ought only to do what would produce the greatest sum of well-being in the world. Morality, including political morality, is purely about making people better off on this view. While just about everyone agrees that well-being is important, it is widely believed that other things matter as well.
This can be for many reasons, but a few of the most common reasons for rejecting utilitarian approaches in ethics or policy include:. There is no standardly agreed-on list of causes of happiness, partly because happiness arises from a complex interaction of many factors. Still, there is a fairly broad consensus that certain factors tend to be especially important for human happiness, in just about any society.
A Very Short Introduction:. Autonomy is the most controversial of these items, as cultures vary greatly in how much they value individual control, for instance sanctioning arranged marriage. But in general, the effect of money probably tends to be strong only for poor people. Outside of poverty, greater income and wealth tend to have only modest effects. As well, the money-happiness connection may not mostly be a matter of greater buying power, but of other things that tend to improve with income: Such claims can be misleading.
Because these studies only look at a small and relatively uniform sample of the environments humans face—for instance, middle class Western households—it is quite possible that the role of genes is being overstated.
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If you look at variations in happiness just among the people on your block, genes will probably play a large role: But if you compare the people on your block with warriors in the forests of Papua New Guinea, the environment has much more chance to make a difference, so genes will probably explain less of the differences in happiness between people.
There is no simple answer to this question. Happiness depends on a huge range of factors, and what works wonders for one person may not be so effective for another. A natural starting point is to consider improvements in areas that are known to be important for happiness in most people, for instance in the SOARS items noted above such as relationships and skilled, meaningful work. Taking care of the fundamentals may be the most important part of securing happiness. Beyond that, there are a variety of techniques you can try, or skills you can develop, that many have found useful.
What works best in your case will depend on your personality and situation. Some excellent resources are listed on our Suggested Readings page. In general, creating or placing yourself in a situation where the sources of happiness, and sensible choices and habits, tend to come naturally is probably a good way to boost your odds of having a good quality of life. Similarly, if you want to be physically fit, it will be easier if you live in a place that encourages an active lifestyle, like walking or biking daily. Relationships and work, for instance, seem to be most rewarding when engaged in for their own sake, and not simply done with personal happiness in mind.
At the same time, there is no evidence that we are better off never thinking about what will make us happy. When making a career choice, for instance, it seems unlikely that ignoring the fact that one hates certain kinds of work, while loving others, would be a wise means of proceeding if one wishes to be happy. Similarly, there is no evidence that we are more likely to be happy if we disregard strong evidence about the major sources of happiness when deciding how to live. Indeed, it would be very surprising if, for example, one would be better off setting aside evidence that exercise tends to promote happiness when deciding whether to start exercising.
One does not have to think about happiness, or even have the concept of happiness, in order to be happy. Well-Being Lecture Series Happiness: What Are Happiness and Well-Being? Integrating Research Across the Disciplines. What are happiness and well-being? A brief guide To keep it accessible, many of the points in this FAQ are somewhat oversimplified.
What is the difference between happiness and well-being? Why think you can define "happiness" at all? Isn't it completely subjective?
Is it different from subjective well-being? Does it matter which philosophical theory of well-being we accept? How is hedonism about happiness different from hedonism about well-being? Is well-being all that matters in a good life? Should well-being be the sole aim of policy or morality? What are the main sources of happiness?
What can I do to be happier? Isn't the pursuit of happiness self-defeating? Why think you can define "happiness at all? Which brings us to… Return to top. If we are talking about the state of mind, there are three basic theories of happiness: What about subjective well-being?