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Happiness

Definition

When psychologists use the term happiness, they tend to mean one of two things. In the narrow sense, happiness is a specific emotion that people feel when good things happen. It includes feelings of pleasantness along with moderate levels of arousal. In addition, the emotion often co-occurs with a specific facial expression: the smile. Happiness can be distinguished both from negative emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger and also from other positive emotions such as affection, excitement, and interest. People from around the world tend to have a similar concept for happiness and can recognize happiness in others. As a result, the emotion of happiness is often included as one of a small number of basic emotions that cannot be broken down into more fundamental emotions and that may combine to form other, more complex emotions (in fact, it is sometimes the only positive emotion that is considered to be basic). Thus, happiness is an important concept for researchers who study emotions.

Yet happiness also has a broader meaning, and an entire field of research has developed around this more inclusive concept. Psychologists often use the term subjective well-being to distinguish this broad collection of happiness-related phenomena from the more specific emotion. In this broader sense, happiness is a global positive evaluation of a person's life as a whole. As one might expect, people who are happy in this way tend to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions. But this broader form of happiness is not purely emotional; it also has a cognitive component. When happy people are asked to think back on the conditions and events in their life, they tend to evaluate these conditions and events positively. Thus, happy people report being satisfied with their lives and the various domains in their lives.

Interestingly, these different components of happiness do not always co-occur within the same person. It is possible that someone could experience a great deal of negative emotions yet still acknowledge that the conditions of his or her life are good ones. For example, someone who works with the poor, the sick, or the destitute may experience frequent negative emotions but may also feel satisfied with life because he or she feels that the work is worthwhile. Similarly, someone who spends lots of time engaging in hedonistic pleasures may experience frequent positive affect but may also feel that life is empty and meaningless. Subjective well-being researchers are interested in the various factors that influence these distinct components.

Background

Psychologists are interested in happiness for two reasons. First, psychologists study happiness because lay people are interested in happiness. When people from around the world are asked to list the things that are most important to them, happiness consistently tops the list. People rank attaining happiness as being more important than acquiring money, maintaining good health, and even going to heaven. Psychologists believe that they can help people achieve this goal of being happy by studying the factors that are associated with happiness.

A second reason why psychologists study happiness is because people's evaluative responses to the world may provide information about human nature. One of the most basic principles guiding psychological theory is that people and animals are motivated to approach things in the world that cause pleasure and to avoid things in the world that cause pain. Presumably, this behavior results from adaptive mechanisms that guide organisms toward resources and away from dangers. If so, people's evaluative reactions to the world should reveal important information about basic characteristics of human nature. For instance, some psychologists have suggested that human beings have a basic need to experience strong and supportive social relationships. These psychologists point to evidence from the field of subjective well-being to support their claim—people's social relationships are reliably linked to their happiness. Thus, cataloging the correlates of happiness should provide important information about the features of human nature.

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