The Psychology of Happiness

Peter Warr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351610094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is happiness all down to luck? Do events in our life influence how happy we feel? Can too much of a good thing make us less happy?

The Psychology of Happiness introduces readers to the variety of factors that can affect how happy we are. From our personality and feelings of self-worth, to our physical health and employment status, happiness is a subjective experience which will change throughout our lives. Although feeling happy is linked with positive thinking and our sociability in daily life, the book also includes surprising facts about the limitations of our personal happiness.

We all want to feel happy in our lives, and The Psychology of Happiness shows us that achieving it can be both an accident of fortune and as a direct result of our own actions and influence.

1
An initial look

Happiness and unhappiness are central to our existence. Their dependence on personal desires and motives means that in some form they underpin almost every thought and action, and surveys across the world have found that happiness is considered to be the most important aspect of life. Similarly, happiness is at the heart of psychology. Many psychological themes – as in attitudes, habits, motivation, reinforcement, personality traits, values, preferences and prejudices – reflect happiness-related feelings¹ in one form or another, although academic and other presentations may not mention happiness at all. Instead the explicit references are to enjoyment, desire, preference, want, need and interest or to distress, anxiety, depression and despair – all illustrating aspects of happiness and unhappiness. Many other meanings will be reviewed throughout the book.²

Definitions are fairly straightforward in outline terms, but as so often the devil is in the detail. We’ll be looking at people who have ‘a deep sense of pleasure or contentment’ (from the Oxford English Dictionary) or are ‘characterized by pleasure, contentment or joy’ (from Dictionary.com). We’ll also be examining negative feelings of unhappiness, strain and distress, and we will need to check beyond merely feeling good or feeling bad to include more elusive notions of ‘flourishing’.

Details of definition and measurement are covered in Chapters 2 and 3. At this outline stage, we should recognize another central theme in dictionary definitions, the possession of good luck. Dictionary.com also tells us that happy people are those who are ‘favored by fortune; fortunate or lucky’. Indeed happiness-as-luck was historically the term’s primary definition. The word is based on early-English hap, and words like happenstance, mishap and hapless have retained hap as their stem. ‘Good hap’ was offered in Middle Ages England rather than ‘good luck’, and many countries still use fortune, fate or luck as the construct’s primary meaning. Good fortune is in 80 per cent of current dictionary definitions of happiness across the world.³

Fortunate coincidences are certainly important for happiness. Were you lucky enough to be born with the right genes? Did your chance genetic makeup come from parents who turned out to be supportive? Did happenings in your life come together positively instead of fate conspiring against you? Did the many people you met turn out to include a future partner? When it came to jobs, were you coincidentally in the right place at the right time? In terms of bad luck, did a car driver unexpectedly swerve in front of you? So much depends on how your cards fall.⁴

Only around a century ago did Western countries shift the meaning of happiness to prioritize positive feeling states, and the construct became principally defined in terms of pleasant experiences rather than, as for hundreds of years, in terms of benevolent fate or good fortune. Despite a general similarity between Eastern and Western uses of the term, Japanese and Chinese notions of happiness particularly emphasize social harmony and group welfare, whereas Americans are more concerned with personal goal-attainment.⁵

Even within a single culture, people can have different views. For example, research has looked at the meaning of happiness for people at different ages. Analyses within the United States of personal blogs and findings from surveys and laboratory studies have pointed to differences between the teenage years and several decades later. Whereas young people are likely to associate happiness with excitement and fun, older ones see it more in terms of peacefulness and the avoidance of stress.⁶

In general, there is a small bias to positive: people overall tend to be slightly happy rather than unhappy. And in almost every case, happiness has a target. We are ‘happy with’ or ‘happy about’ something – an object, idea, person, group or ourselves.⁷ American psychologist Charles Osgood showed that positive or negative evaluation is involved in almost every experience. Together with colleagues, he explored the ‘connotative’ meaning of thousands of words – what the words imply to people beyond their dictionary (‘denotative’) meaning. From many studies around the world, it was clear that a large factor of evaluation, from dislike to like, is primary within the connotative meaning of any word, irrespective of what it denotes.⁸ Evaluations – feelings of positivity or negativity – are central to our thinking about almost everything, even though denotative meaning may conceal that fact.

Happiness and wellbeing

Given that happiness or unhappiness is almost always directed at something or somebody, it’s important to distinguish between targets’ different levels of scope. Let’s think in terms of three levels: expanding from (the narrowest) ‘feature-specific’ happiness through ‘domain-specific’ happiness on to wide-ranging ‘global’ or ‘context-free’ happiness. Feature-specific happiness or unhappiness is experienced in the continuous stream of likes or dislikes that occur throughout life – positive or negative feelings about a single thing, person, idea or activity. These feelings are not necessarily experienced in terms of ‘being happy’ or ‘being unhappy’. You might feel enthusiastic, excited, calm, relaxed, gloomy, anxious or in many other ways to be reviewed later, but those feelings all represent happiness.

At the second level of scope, with a medium-range focus beyond single features, is domain-specific happiness or unhappiness. That’s concerned with feelings in a particular segment of life – about sets of things, people, ideas or activities. At this middle breadth of scope, we might study feelings about a particular area of life, for example, asking people about happiness with their job or their health or about a category of people (family members, work colleagues, etc.) or a set of ideas (e.g., a particular religious ideology). This middle-scope level of happiness includes prejudices directed at the generality of people from a certain country, race, gender, age and so on.

Third, the broadest form of happiness (global or context-free) covers feelings about your life as a whole. How positive do you feel in general when considering all aspects of your life? With this wide scope, we might study life satisfaction, overall happiness or generalized anxiety. Context-free happiness is usually what writers have in mind when comparing particular groups or countries, often citing national differences based on overall satisfaction with life.

Happiness at this global, context-free level largely derives from the accumulation of localized experiences that are themselves restricted to single features or single domains. Different instances of narrow-scope happiness combine across time to generate more wide-ranging feelings about your life. Focussed forms of happiness are the building blocks of life satisfaction and other examples of global wellbeing, so feature-specific and domain-specific instances are central to this book.⁹

Types and measures of wellbeing

The term ‘wellbeing’ is frequently used as synonymous with happiness and is particularly favoured by academic researchers.¹⁰ The two words have often been treated as largely interchangeable, but we should note that wellbeing is a broader notion than happiness itself. Wellbeing as a whole extends beyond the subjective experiences in happiness to also cover wellbeing that is physical, social, economic or spiritual. Given that our focus is on subjective or psychological wellbeing, otherwise viewed as happiness, the other kinds of wellbeing will receive only limited attention here.

Within psychological wellbeing, we should distinguish between forms that are ‘hedonic’ and those concerned with ‘flourishing’. The term ‘hedonic’ derives from the Greek word for pleasure (he¯don), and a hedonic perspective on happiness is in terms of experienced pleasure and pain, such that happy people experience more positive feelings than negative ones.¹¹ In those terms, happiness or unhappiness about targets of a particular scope can be measured through positive or negative feelings. And yet there’s more to hedonic happiness and unhappiness than merely positivity or negativity; feelings also vary in their activation or arousal. Positive wellbeing includes, for instance, not only joyful cheerfulness (activated as well as positive) but also contented peace of mind (positive but low activation). Similarly, negative feelings can be tense and anxious (high activation) or sad and depressed (low activation). These different kinds of experience will be explored in Chapter 2.

In contrast to the focus on feelings within hedonic wellbeing, ‘flourishing’ wellbeing emphasizes aspects of personal functioning. Drawing on Aristotle’s (384–322 bc) philosophical discussions of eudaimonia – a good, worthwhile or fulfilled life – the construct has in recent years been developed and modified by psychologists. Researchers have viewed it in different ways, and psychologists have debated its definition and contents within happiness without reaching complete consensus.¹² In general, flourishing involves undertaking activity that is somehow worthwhile or valued or can contribute to attaining one’s ‘true self’.

As we’ll see in Chapter 3, writers have emphasized involvement in issues beyond oneself, building up self-worth, working towards valued objectives, becoming psychologically immersed in an activity, contributing to others, and personal thriving and development. Flourishing wellbeing has in these ways been viewed as the achievement of personal meaning in life and working towards self-realization or self-validation – notions that have much in common with earlier ideas about self-actualization and psychological growth.¹³

The time focus of experienced happiness depends on how you direct your attention. For both hedonic and flourishing wellbeing, studies of happiness can be directed at time periods of any duration, from ‘this very minute’ through ‘this afternoon’, ‘this week’ and ‘this month’, and extending to ‘my life as a whole’. In addition, an across-time perspective has asked about ‘me as a person’, through a dispositional indicator that is often referred to as ‘trait happiness’ in contrast to more short-term forms of ‘state happiness’. Importantly, longer-term wellbeing is largely based on earlier short-term feelings about particular situations.

For assessing different forms of wellbeing, psychologists have developed a wide range of self-description questionnaires and interview schedules. On the one hand, information might be gathered about people’s recollection of happiness in an earlier period (asking about happiness or related experiences across ‘the last month’, in ‘your life as a whole’ and so on), or alternatively the focus can be on a current or very recent situation, for example, by requesting experiences at this particular moment in response to randomly timed cues from small electronic alarms. Retrospective self-reports of previous or general feelings are easier for both investigators and research participants, but they can suffer from errors of recall,¹⁴ whereas sampling very recent experiences yields potentially more accurate information but is open to concerns about generality: are these recent or current experiences typical for the person across a longer period?

In all empirical research, we are in effect applying an operational definition; the variable is being defined in terms of the measure applied – its operationalization. However, that operational definition may well or poorly represent an underlying conceptual definition – the inherent meaning of the construct. Since different operationalizations are often possible for the same concept and many have been used for happiness, different researchers’ investigations may in fact be addressing several versions of the same concept. That situation can be acceptable, but it does mean that we must check carefully how a variable has been defined conceptually and how well that conceptual definition has been operationalized in a particular study or discussion; different operationalizations can be measuring different concepts despite using the same concept-name.

Happiness and unhappiness sometimes occur in feelings that overall are ambivalent – mixing positive and negative, as people feel happy and unhappy about different aspects. Ambivalence can also occur across time, as progress in personal projects may require working through obstacles or struggling with limited resources before progress is made and success is achieved; in those cases, you have to feel bad before you can feel good.

That kind of interdependence between opposites is particularly emphasized in Chinese notions of ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ (the ‘dark side’ and the ‘bright side’), such that everything in the world is seen as having two aspects that are both complementary and contrasting. Yin and yang are seen as interdependent, and each is inseparably present within the other; everything is a balanced mixture of them both.

As we’ll see later, hedonic wellbeing has been more precisely conceptualized and operationalized than has flourishing and has been investigated in more detail. For much of the world’s population, reducing hedonic unhappiness may be more important than experiencing a sense of flourishing; self-actualization can seem an unrealistic goal when you’re struggling to cope with a mountain of problems and need to reduce your own and your family’s distress.

Collectively, those two kinds of happiness have much in common with the notion of mental health. That is itself difficult to define, but one general overview suggests that positive mental health might be described as a combination of subjective wellbeing, competence, aspiration, autonomy and specific forms of integrated functioning.¹⁵ The first of those elements – subjective wellbeing – is similar to hedonic wellbeing as considered here, and the other four components – competence, aspiration, autonomy and integrated functioning – overlap with aspects of flourishing.

Finally in this introduction, we should distinguish sharply between happiness and its possible causes. Many writers have mixed them up. ‘Happiness is a good meal’ or ‘happiness is relaxing in the sunshine’ can make for an entertaining magazine article, but of course the good meal or relaxing in the sunshine are not part of happiness; they are possible causes of the experience and not the experience itself. This book will retain that separation between happiness and its causes, examining the construct itself in Chapters 2 and 3 and reviewing the causes of happiness in Chapters 4 and 5. Possible consequences will be explored in Chapter 6 before the final chapter considers what we might do next.

Chapter 1: some take-home messages

Happiness almost always has a target (we’re ‘happy about’ or ‘happy with’ something or somebody), and happiness experiences take many different forms that are often described without referring to ‘happiness’ itself. Instead we’re said to be ‘enjoying’ or ‘liking’ some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 An initial look
• 2 Hedonic wellbeing: feeling bad to feeling good
• 3 Flourishing wellbeing: self-worth and a good life
• 4 Influences from the world around you: nine principal features
• 5 Influences from within yourself
• 6 Some consequences of happiness
• 7 What to do now?
• Notes about the text and some additional reading
• References cited in the text
• Index