HAPPINESS

Happiness

Happiness

Introduction

Colloquially used, the term “happiness” can have a number of meanings. It might refer to a momentary burst of joy when one hears good news, a sense of satisfaction at a job well done, or an abstract goal that one pursues. Because so many feelings and states can be implied by the word happiness, researchers who study happiness usually talk about subjective well-being instead. This term captures a specific sense of the term happiness and conveys how behavioral scientists think about happiness—as an evaluation made by an individual that his or her life is positive (Lightsey, 2007). The subjective nature of happiness is emphasized by this term because it is conceptualized as a judgment resulting from an individual's own personal criteria and experience. Thus, when people describe “happy people” in this entry, they mean people high in subjective well-being.

Discussion

A person's sense of subjective well-being might derive from a cognitive sense of satisfaction with life as a whole or with specific life domains such as education, work, or family. Or it might derive from a person's affective experience—moods and emotions—with positive emotions (e.g., sociable, calm) and negative emotions (e.g., depressed, sad). The three main ingredients for high subjective well-being are a sense of satisfaction with one's life and life domains, the experience of positive emotions, and a relative absence of negative emotions (Lent, 2007). Considering positive and negative emotions separately has proven to be an important advance in understanding subjective wellbeing. The amount of positive affect and the amount of negative affect that one experiences, although intuitively opposites, turn out to be somewhat independent of one another (Diener, 2006). For instance, some people might experience a lot of both positive affect and negative affect, whereas others might experience little of each, and still others more of one type than the other.

Happiness has been measured across time periods that range from daily or hourly to over the lifetime. Although short-term happiness is related to long-term happiness, there are differences between them. Short-term happiness is more changeable than long-term or trait happiness (which appears to be partly genetically determined); therefore, counselors are more likely to focus on clients' short-term happiness and fulfillment (Argyle, 2006). Long-term happiness is relatively stable and appears to be affected by life events only for a period of about 3 months, after which it returns to its usual level for most people. General or long-term happiness appears to be partly determined by satisfaction in particular life areas such as work, yet it is also likely that a person's overall happiness level will affect his or her satisfaction in particular life areas. Since general happiness is less changeable, and since most people report relatively high overall happiness, counselors tend to promote happiness by focusing on things that are known to increase short-term or immediate happiness (Barnet, Bedau, 2008).

The factors that affect happiness, and the theories of happiness, may be grouped as either bottom-up or top-down. Bottom-up theories, which focus on external and situational factors, construe subjective well-being as the product ...