Professional Documents
Culture Documents
8 JULY 2015
By Tosin Thompson
If youre a human being, I suspect you want to be happy. What is happiness for you? Happiness for me is
reminiscing about good times with a friend while I indulge in some Nandos chicken, or receiving a
standing ovation at the end of a theatre performance. My versions of happiness may not be your cup of
tea, but the stimulus for happiness is subjective and thus hard to measure objectively.
(SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 from one in 184 Americans to one
in 76. For children, the rise is even more startling a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades,
writes physician Marcia Angell in the New York Times Book Review.
Since the days of Aristotle, happiness was thought to have at least two aspects: hedonia (pleasure) and
eudaimonia (a life well lived). In contemporary psychology, happiness is referred to as simply pleasure
and meaning. Positive psychologists such as Dr Martin Seligman have recently added one more distinct
component to the definition of happiness: engagement. Engagement refers to living a good life of work,
family friends and hobbies.
Using these three aspects, psychologists have come up with a scientific term for happiness called
subjective-well being (SWB), which is defined as a persons cognitive and affective evaluations of his or
her life. According to a 2012 paper on SWB, these evaluations include emotional responses to stimuli as
well as cognitive judgements on what is satisfying and fulfilling. So SWB is a combination of life
satisfaction and feelings of fulfilment.
In identifying SWB across people in the real world, it was found that roughly 50 per cent of our happiness
is determined by our genes, 40 per cent by our daily activities and the remaining 10 per cent by our
circumstances so what you choose to do with the 40 per cent is entirely up to you.
It was concluded that there was a significant relation between happiness and psychological well-being.
From the paper, Those students with good relationship and those who had reported to enjoy attending
social events indicated better mental health status.
In a talk, psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University compares happiness to optometry in terms of
subjectivity: Optometry is another one of those sciences that is built entirely on people's reports of
subjective experience. The one and only way for an optometrist to know what your visual experience is like
is to ask you, Does it look clearer like this or (click click) like this?
In the late Thirties and early Forties, researchers at the Harvard Study of Adult Development began
studying the health and well-being of 268 seemingly promising male students from Harvard University.
Under the direction of Dr George Vaillant, these men, some now in their 90s, are still being studied today.
Called the Grant Study, the study examines the lives of these men through war, career, marriage and
divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood and old age. Some of the study's archived content is published
in The Atlantic (the study is in Vaillants book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant
Study).
A newer and similar social study is the BBC documentary Child of our Time. The documentary is
presented by Professor Robert Winston and plans to examine the first 20 years of the lives of 25 British
children born in 1999/2000.
So, by using Seligmans definition of happiness (pleasure, meaning and engagement), subjective wellbeing and self-reports on happiness, researchers are continuing to learn more about who is happy, what
makes them happy, and why.
This infographic by Webpage FX nicely sums up some of the studies on the science of happiness so far:
You can't talk about happiness without relating it to depression. I ask Shawn Achor, author of the New
York Times bestselling book The Happiness Advantage (2010), and founder of the Institute of Positive
Research and GoodThinkInc., how happiness is linked with depression:
I went through two years of depression while at Harvard. The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness.
Unhappiness serves a valuable purpose. The opposite of happiness is apathy, which is the loss of joy we
feel moving toward our potential.
I also ask why there is a stigma associated with depression:
There is a stigma associated with depression because people mistakenly believe that if you were tough
enough, negative feelings would not get you down. The toughest CEOs, Navy SEALS, Harvard professors,
and NFL players I know have gone through depression. Sometimes, trying to be tough by ignoring
emotions backfires and makes us weaker. The key to a good emotional immune system is being aware of
your emotions and channeling the energy they provide toward constructive ends.
Watch segments of Achor's recent two-hour interview with Oprah Winfrey:
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Source URL: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2015/07/pursuit-happiness-what-happiness-andhow-can-we-make-ourselves-happier