Happiness
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This article is about an emotion. Happiness is also a 1998 U.S. film written and directed by Todd Solondz as well as a song by Australian indie pop band Regurgitator. For the town, see Happy, Texas. See also Joy for the disambiguation of that term.
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Happiness is often used to describe emotional or affective state in which we feel good or pleasure. Overlapping states or experiences associated with this idea of "happiness" include joy, exultation, delight, bliss, and love. Antonyms include suffering, sadness, grief, and pain. The original meaning of the idea of happiness referred to a success in life, or flourishing, rather than simply the pleasurable emotion associated with the term in popular usage.
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Terminology
Happiness originally came from the idea of living the good life of rational virtuous action, and thus was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, meaning roughly "to be well-souled". Although nowadays, people often equate pleasure with the term "happiness" (see Hedonism), the original meaning of the term has not been completely discarded among moral philosophers, and is still used and especially prevalent in virtue ethics. Nowadays terms such as well-being or quality of life are commonly used in everyday speech to signify the classical meaning and happiness is reserved for the felt experience or experiences that philosophers historically called pleasure.
Psychological views
Positive psychology
Martin Seligman in his book Authentic Happiness gives the positive psychology definition of happiness as consisting of both positive emotions (like comfort) and positive activities (like absorption). He presents three categories of positive emotions:
- past: feelings of satisfaction, contentment, pride, and serenity.
- present (examples): enjoying the taste of food, glee at listening to music, absorption in reading, and company of people you like e.g. friends and family.
- future: feelings of optimism, hope, trust, faith, and confidence.
There are three categories of present positive emotions:
- bodily pleasures, e.g. enjoying the taste of food.
- higher pleasures, e.g. glee at listening to music.
- gratifications, e.g. absorption in reading.
The bodily and higher pleasures are "pleasures of the moment" and usually involve some external stimulus. An exception is the glee felt at having an original thought.
Gratifications involve full engagement, flow, elimination of self-consciousness, and blocking of felt emotions. But when a gratification comes to an end then positive emotions will be felt.
Gratifications can be obtained or increased by developing signature strengths and virtues. Authenticity is the derivation of gratification and positive emotions from exercising signature strengths. The good life comes from using signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in, for example, enjoying work and pursuing a meaningful life.
Mechanistic view
Biological basis
While a person's overall happiness is not objectively measurable this does not mean it does not have a real physiological component. The neurotransmitter dopamine, perhaps especially in the mesolimbic pathway projecting from the midbrain to structures such as the nucleus accumbens, is involved in desire and seems often related to pleasure. Pleasure can be induced artificially with drugs, perhaps most directly with opiates such as morphine, with activity on mu-opioid receptors. There are neural opioid systems that make and release the brain's own opioids, active at these receptors. Mu-opioid neural systems are complexly interrelated with the mesolimbic dopamine system. New science, using genetically altered mice, including ones deficient in dopamine or in mu-opioid receptors, is beginning to tease apart the functions of dopamine and mu-opioid systems, which some scientists (e.g., Kent Berridge) think are more directly related to happiness.
Difficulties in defining internal experiences
It is probably impossible to objectively define happiness as we know and understand it, as internal experiences are subjective by nature. It is almost as pointless as trying to define the color green such that a completely color blind person could understand the experience of seeing green. While we can not objectively express the difference between greenness and redness, we can certainly explain which physical phenomena cause green to be observed, and can explain the capacities of the human visual system to distinguish between light of different wavelengths, and so on. Likewise, in the following sections, we will not attempt to describe the internal sensation of happiness, but will instead concentrate on defining its logical basis. Importantly, we will try to avoid circular definitions -- for instance, defining happiness as "a good feeling", while "good" is defined as being "something which causes happiness".
In non-human animals
For non-human animals, happiness might be best described as the process of reinforcement, as part of the organism's motivational system. The organism has achieved one or more of its goals (pursuit of food, water, sex, shelter, flowers etc.), and its brain is in the process of teaching itself to repeat the sort of actions that led to success. By reinforcing successful decision paths, it produces an equilibrium state not unlike positive-to-negative magnets. The specific goals are typically things that enable the organism to survive and reproduce.
By this definition, only animals with some capacity to learn should be able to experience happiness. However, at its most basic level the learning might be extremely simple and short term, such as the nearly reflexive feedback loop of scratching an itch (followed by pleasure, followed by scratching more, and so on) which can occur with almost no conscious thought.
In humans
When speaking of animals with the ability to reason (generally considered the exclusive domain of humans), goals are no longer limited to short term satisfaction of basic drives. Nevertheless, there remains a strong relationship of happiness to goal fulfillment and the brain's reinforcement mechanism, even if the goals themselves may be more complex and/or cerebral, longer term, and less selfish than a lower animal's goals might be.
Philosophers observe that short-term gratification, while briefly generating happiness, often requires a trade-off with negative repercussions in the long run. Examples of this could be said to include developing technology and equipment that makes life easier but over time ends up harming the environment, causing illness or wasting financial or other resources. Various branches of philosophy, as well as some religious movements, suggest that "true" happiness only exists if it has no long-term detrimental effects. Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximization of happiness.
From the observation that fish must become happy by swimming, and birds must become happy by flying, Aristotle points to the unique abilities of man as the route to happiness. Of all the animals only man can sit and contemplate reality. Of all the animals only man can develop social relations to the political level. Thus the contemplative life of a monk or professor, or the political life of a military commander or politician will be the happiest.
Of course, Zhuangzi points out that only man is endowed with the ability necessary to generate complex language and thought—language and thought that can be used to distinguish between things and form dichotomies. These dichotomies then formed, man tries to find reasons to like one side of things and hate the other. Hence, he loses his ability to rove freely, in true happiness, unlike the rest of his animal brethren. As Man descends into hack-logic the animals are happy without needing to contemplate at all.
In artificial intelligence
The view that happiness is a reinforcement state can apply to some non-biological systems as well. In artificial intelligence, a program or robot could be said to be "happy" when it is in a state of reinforcing previous actions that led to satisfaction of its programmed goals. For instance, imagine a search engine that has the capacity to gradually improve the quality of its search results by accepting and processing feedback from the user regarding the relevance of those results. If the user responds that a search result is good (i.e. provides positive feedback), this tells the software to reinforce (by adjusting variables or "weights") the decision path that led to those results. In a sense, this could be said to "reward" the search engine. However, even if the program is made to act like it is happy, there is little doubt that the search engine has no subjective sense of being happy. Current computing technology merely implements abstract mathematical programs which lack the causal and creative power of natural systems. This does not preclude the possiblity that future technologies may begin to blur the distinction between such machine happiness and that experienced by an animal or human.
Mystical (religious, spiritual & mythological) view
Explanation of happiness in mystical traditions, especially in advanced spiritual techniques is related to full balance (conjunction, union, "secret marriage") of so called inner energy lines (energy channels of a soul or deepest dimension of the human): nadi (hindu), gimel kavim (hebrew), pillars, columns, gnostic ophis or caduceus. In balanced state two main lines (left & right, Ida & Pingala) form third line, called Shushumna or lashon hakodesh (hebr.). Speaking technically (full) activity of this third or central line is happiness. Left and right lines include all aspects of normal human life: sleep and awake, body and mind, physical and spiritual and so on. To attain balanced state of these 2 lines is a main task of life - a paradoxical result of all kinds of activities and endeavours combined with full relax or tranquillity at the same time.
Positive effect study
| Positive effect | Hours/day | Reporting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activities | |||
| Intimate relations | 5.10 | .2 | .11 |
| Socializing | 4.59 | 2.3 | .65 |
| Relaxing | 4.42 | 2.2 | .77 |
| Pray/Worship/Meditate | 4.35 | .4 | .23 |
| Eating | 4.34 | 2.2 | .94 |
| Exercising | 4.31 | .2 | .16 |
| Watching TV | 4.19 | 2.2 | .75 |
| Shopping | 3.95 | .4 | .30 |
| Preparing food | 3.93 | 1.1 | .62 |
| On the phone | 3.92 | 2.5 | .61 |
| Napping | 3.87 | .9 | .43 |
| Taking care of my children | 3.86 | 1.1 | .36 |
| Computer/Email/Internet | 3.81 | 1.9 | .47 |
| Housework | 3.73 | 1.1 | .49 |
| Working | 3.62 | 6.9 | 1.00 |
| Commuting | 3.45 | 1.6 | .87 |
| Interaction partners | |||
| w/ friends | 4.36 | 2.6 | .65 |
| w/ relatives | 4.17 | 1 | .38 |
| w/ spouse/SO | 4.11 | 2.7 | .62 |
| w/ children | 4.04 | 2.3 | .53 |
| w/ clients/customers | 3.79 | 4.5 | .74 |
| w/ co-workers | 3.76 | 5.7 | .93 |
| w/ boss | 3.52 | 2.4 | .52 |
| alone | 3.41 | 3.4 | .90 |
| from A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method [1] |
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See also
Other concepts related to happiness are bliss, cheerfulness, cheeriness, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, and light-heartedness.
External links
- The World Database of Happiness — a register of scientific research on the subjective appreciation of life
- Journal of Happiness Studies - a social psychology journal with studies largely based on subjects' self-reports
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Pleasure" - concentrates on the quesion "What is pleasure?", including historical and recent, philosophers' and neuroscientific, approaches to happiness, with a long Bibliography. and links at the end to leading affective neuroscientists' websites
- The Sunday Times Magazine — article on the scientific study of happiness
- Happiness Manifesto
- My Happiness -- Helps individuals find their own path to sustained happiness using Happiness Information, directory of resources, online tools and the help of an online community.
- Your happiness is in your hands.
