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Positive Psychology in “The Pursuit of Happyness” Film Essay

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Introduction

Tenets of positive psychology.

The Pursuit of Happyness , a 2006 movie adaptation of Chris Gardner’s autobiography, retells a story of a salesman becoming a stockbroker and reversing his life despite the obstacles in his way. Due to its emphasis on positive experiences, happiness, positive thinking, strengths, and virtues, the movie may serve as a suitable illustration of the principles of positive psychology. Gardner demonstrates perseverance, hope, and social intelligence and illustrates the importance of effectance motivation and the power of social networks, even though the protagonist’s relationship with his wife could be improved.

The movie depicts multiple issues related to the central concepts of positive psychology. It posits that finding positive experiences is crucial – even though down on his luck, Gardner presents his son with a basketball he so covets (Muccino, 2006). It also spares no effort in depicting the importance of positive thinking: no matter how desperate his situation is, Gardner still has positive expectations for the future. It aligns with Seligman’s original idea of authentic happiness, stressing that a pleasant life is focused on positive emotions and positive thinking (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). Similarly, happiness and the issues related to it constitute the central theme of the movie, as highlighted by the title. The “y” in it refers to an episode when Gardner is frustrated by the misspelling of the word, yet it provokes him to reflect on the meaning of happiness (Muccino, 2006). Initially, his main issue with happiness is that one can always be in pursuit of it without actually achieving but eventually, he changes his mind. Finally, the movie also focuses heavily on strengths and virtues, the treatment of which deserves a more thorough elaboration.

If one has to pick three principal strengths characterizing Gardner, these would be social intelligence, hope, and perseverance. Social intelligence – that is, the ability to understand and predicts the behaviors of those around him – leads Gardner through his turbulent internship at the stock brokerage firm. For example, when noticing the Rubik cube at Jay’s taxi seat, he immediately deduces he could impress him by assembling it (Muccino, 2006). Hope is self-explanatory – despite having little luck, the protagonist always aspires to improve his lot. As for perseverance, it might well be Gardner’s defining trait. The obstacles he has to overcome on his way to being a broker include coming to a job interview in dirty clothes or being arrested and even evicted (Muccino, 2006). Yet Gardner overcomes them despite his meager financial resources through the application of his internal strengths. He is fully aware of his conditions and the dangers they pose to him and his son, but he deliberately focuses on the positive goal ahead.

Apart from displaying strengths, the movie also illustrates other specific tenets of positive psychology. In order to excel in his internship for the stockbroker position, Gardner develops relations with potential clients. One of these clients takes Gardner and his son to a football match together with his own family – and, apart from working opportunities, it also results in more positive emotions for everyone involved (Muccino, 2006). This episode illustrates the concept of social contagion, showing how emotions can spread across social networks (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). Another positive psychology concept highlighted by the movie is effectance motivation. At one point, Gardner instructs his son to never say he cannot do something and focus on achieving goals while disregarding demotivating comments. What Gardner discusses is effectance motivation that drives people toward the feeling of competence (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). Since positive psychology focuses on achieving well-being beyond simple psychological needs, effectance motivation is an important part of its theoretical arsenal.

Gardner fares better than many would in his situation in terms of well-being. Admittedly, his emotional well-being is shaky – he does not feel happy all that often and reflects whether the phrase “pursuit of happiness” means it cannot be achieved (Muccino, 2006). However, his psychological well-being – the sense of competence and purpose – is an example to anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). His social well-being is also better than might be expected – he maintains his impressive socialization skills and perceives the people and society positively (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). After all, if Gardner had a negative attitude toward society would not have trusted his bone scanner to a stranger on the street while going to a job interview (Muccino, 2006). One thing that could be done differently to improve his well-being, though, is Gardner handling his marriage. While he loves his son, he consistently fails to arrive at mutually acceptable arrangements with his wife, and fulfillment in relationships is an essential component of social well-being (Compton & Hoffman, 2019). While socially competent in many other areas, Gardner struggles to communicate with his wife.

To summarize, The Pursuit of Happyness illustrates some crucial tenets of positive psychology. Preoccupied with the themes of happiness, positive experiences, and positive thinking, the film features the protagonist possessing the strengths of perseverance, hope, and social intelligence. At various points, the film hints at the importance of social contagion and effectance motivation. The character’s development of his strengths despite the obstacles he faces results in a surprisingly high level of well-being for a person in dire financial circumstances, but his relationship with his wife remains a considerable problem.

Compton, W. C., & Hoffman, E. L. (2019). Positive psychology: The science of happiness and flourishing . SAGE Publications.

Muccino, G. (Director). (2006). The Pursuit of Happyness [Film]. Columbia Pictures.

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Movie Review | 'The Pursuit of Happyness'

Climbing Out of the Gutter With a 5-Year-Old in Tow

By Manohla Dargis

• Dec. 15, 2006

A fairy tale in realist drag, “The Pursuit of Happyness” is the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw. Inspired by a true story, as they like to say in Hollywood, the film traces the fleeting ups and frightening downs of Chris Gardner, whose efforts to keep his family from sinking into poverty evolve into a life-and-death struggle of social Darwinian proportions. It’s the early 1980s, and while Ronald Reagan is delivering the bad economic news on television, Chris is about to prove you don’t need an army to fight the war on poverty, just big smiles and smarts, and really sturdy shoes. (It also helps that the star playing him is as innately sympathetic as Will Smith.)

Given how often Chris breaks into a run on the streets of San Francisco, it’s a good thing his shoes are well built; his lungs, too. Written by Steven Conrad and directed by Gabriele Muccino, “The Pursuit of Happyness” recounts how Chris, plagued by some bad luck, a few stupid moves and a shrew for a wife, Linda (Thandie Newton), loses his apartment and, with his 5-year-old, Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Mr. Smith’s own beautiful son), joins the ranks of the homeless, if not the hopeless. Evicted from the mainstream and bounced from shelter to shelter, Chris holds firm to his dignity, resolve, faith, love and independence. His optimism sweeps through the film like a searchlight, scattering clouds and dark thoughts to the wind.

It’s the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith’s warm expressiveness. That warmth feels truthful, as does the walk-up apartment Chris’s family lives in at the start of the film, which looks like the real paycheck-to-paycheck deal. As does the day care center, which is so crummy it can’t even get happiness right (hence the title).

This is no small thing, considering the film industry’s usual skewed sense of economic class, a perspective encapsulated by the insider who described the middle-class family in “Little Miss Sunshine” to me as working class, perhaps because the mother drives a gently distressed Miata rather than next year’s Mercedes.

Money matters in “The Pursuit of Happyness,” as it does in life. But it matters more openly in this film than it does in most Hollywood stories that set their sights on the poor, largely because Chris’s pursuit of happiness eventually becomes interchangeable with his pursuit of money. He doesn’t want just a better, more secure life for himself and his child; either by scripted design or by the example of the real Chris Gardner, he seems to yearn for a life of luxury, stadium box seats and the kind of sports car he stops to admire in one scene. His desires aren’t just upwardly mobile; they’re materialistically unbound. Instead of a nice starter home, he (and the filmmakers) ogles mansions. It’s no wonder he hopes to become a stockbroker.

That may sound like a punch line, at least to some ears, but it’s the holy grail in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” A self-starter, Chris has sunk all of the family’s money into costly medical scanners that he tries to sell to doctors and hospitals. But the machines are overpriced, and the sure thing he banked on has landed them in debt. Forced to work two shifts at a dead-end job, Linda angrily smolders and then rages at Chris, which seems reasonable since he has gambled all of their savings on an exceptionally foolish enterprise. (And, unlike her, he hasn’t signed up for overtime.) But this is a film about father love, not mother love, and Linda soon leaves the picture in a cloud of cigarette smoke and a storm of tears.

Chris and the filmmakers seem happy to see her go, but life only gets tougher once she and her paychecks disappear. Much of the film involves Chris’s subsequent efforts to keep himself and his child housed and fed while he is enrolled in an unpaid internship program at a powerful stock brokerage firm. Bright and ferociously determined, Chris easily slides into this fantastical world of shouting men, ringing phones, gleaming surfaces and benevolent bosses. He goes along to get along, and when one of his bosses asks for money to pay for a cab, he quickly opens his wallet. Chris himself stiffs another working man for some money because that wallet is so light. But this is a film about him, not the other guy.

How you respond to this man’s moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith’s and his son’s performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams. Both performances are certainly likable in the extreme, though Mr. Smith shined brighter and was given much more to do when he played the title character in Michael Mann’s underrated “Ali.” That film proves an interesting comparison with this one, not in filmmaking terms, but in its vision of what it means to be a black man struggling in America. In one, a black man fights his way to the top with his fists; in the other, he gets there with a smile.

“The Pursuit of Happyness” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes mild adult language and some parental fighting.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Gabriele Muccino; written by Steven Conrad; director of photography, Phedon Papamichael; edited by Hughes Winborne; music by Andrea Guerra; production designer, J. Michael Riva; produced by Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch James Lassiter and Will Smith; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 117 minutes.

WITH: Will Smith (Chris Gardner), Thandie Newton (Linda) and Jaden Christopher Syre Smith (Christopher).

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The Pursuit of Happyness, Essay Example

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To be happy and to have a high standard of living is an American dream, which is based on individual freedom and connected with the concept of “self-made man”. This paper describes Chris Gardner’s story (2006) which is riddled with despair, challenges, cruelty, violence, but is advanced and foremost of love, faith and hope. It proposes up reminders that until now the American dream subsist and gives the opportunity to everyone to find it in themselves and to achieve the highest point in their life performance. This story is a saga of various singers, actors, performers, which are used as the examples of happy and fortunate people. It is a saga of a man who destroyed his family’s cycle of people abandoning their kids. Never giving up and falling into despondency and despair, Chris Gardner did an amazement change from being a part of city’s indigent and poor to being a strong and powerful person. The Pursuit of Happyness (Gardner, 2006) is a true American success and welfare story of a person who overcame difficulties and obstacles.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happyness (Gardner, 2006) is an encouraging and inspiring autobiography of a person, who overcame all types of misfortune and adversity to become a powerful person in a world of finance.

The Pursuit of Happyness (Gardner, 2006) is an autobiographical honest and humility story which describes Chris Gardner’s long, excruciating, ultimately rewarding travel from poor region Milwaukee to the top of success in a Wall Street. It is faithful and rags-to-riches story of a homeless father who brings up his son on mean and cruel streets of San Francisco and becomes a famous businessmen and moneymaker (Gardner, 2006).

Chris Gardner is a poor and indigent minority who is described as honest-minded, fair and comprehensive person. He is trying to show that it is impossible to buy happiness, but money and prosperity can help in this.

This story shows the contrast between San Francisco’s rich and poor, and the capitalistic rage of Dean Witter office where Chris Gardner’s internship was. It is a description of a person who at no time succumbed to self compassion. He did not surrender to bitter stuff either. He censured nobody for his plight, just pushed ahead and found decisions to each situation and problem he faced (Gardner, 2006).

For better understanding Chris Gardner’s psychology and why he denies giving up notwithstanding of having obstacles and impediments in his path at every turn it is important to answer the following questions:

• How does Chris Gardner’s childhood influenced his path to success?
• What were Chris Gardner’s main principles and goals?

Investigation of these questions will show the inner world of the main hero, interesting patterns of his behavior and the things which influenced his strong desire and thirst to become the number one in the world of finance.

Chris Gardner was born and grown up in the Milwaukee inner-city ghetto. He was a dutiful, quiet and good child who got into the mishap from time to time, but stayed on a stable, upward track (Gardner, 2006). It is a pity that the childhood accounts are all described not from a kid’s foreshortening and perspective, but with the grown-up and adult Gardner’s comprehension inserted regularly.How does Chris Gardner’s childhood influenced his path to success?

Gardner was poor, indigent and fatherless. His worship and adored mother Bettye Jean was strong on church and children and was not all the time near. When she was incarcerated, Chris stayed with relatives (Gardner, 2006).

Chris Gardner’s childhood was wracked with cruelty, brutal treatment and abuse of Freddie Triplett, his stepfather, who plainly and routinely verbally and physically mistreated child and whole family. Violent, spiteful and hateful he denied accepting Gardner as a stepchild and contradicted him at every turn.

Freddie Triplett considers being one of most unpleasant and meanest stepfather. His rages made Gardner constantly blue and afraid (Gardner, 2006).

An expert on psychopathy Dr. Robert D. Hare (1999) explains such antisocial or even criminal behavior of Gardner’s stepfather as a “continuations of behavior patterns that first showed themselves in childhood” (p. 97). He underlines that it is impossible to know why people such as Freddie Triplett become psychopaths and cruel with their family and society, but present evidence takes away from the ordinarily held concept that “the behavior of parents bears sole or even primary responsibility for the disorder” (p. 178). That means that in his childhood Freddie Triplett’s parents were cruel and violent with him. When he became an adult he tried to revenge for such bad treatment and violently abused Gardner and his family.

John W. Livesley (2003) a psychiatrist, whose investigation and research has been orientated at the grading, classification and etiology of individual disorder supposes that antisocial, dangerous and aggressive behavior in people such as Gardner’s stepfather runs in families. He underlines that “many difficult to alter because the environment remains the same” (p. 78). Livesley (2003) believes that the etiology of individual disorders within a wide framework where neither genetic spirited nor psychosocial factors may have considered for their development. Whereas admitting research demonstrating that a lot of patients experience childhood miseries, Livesley (2003) does not clarify and explain an individual disorder as through the sequel of such events. Instead, the author underlines the factors that keep up and support maladaptive features in the present.     Hare (1999) believes that though people can change, “many personality traits and behavioral patterns remain stable through-out life” (p. 97). That means that person’s personality and behavior are determined and fixed early in life, or that maturation, experience and development are not powerful coercion in define what kind of adults the person will become.

At the same time, Dr Stanton E. Samenow (2004), a clinical psychologist, supposes that such kind of people like Freddie Triplett cause offence not because of parents, neighbors, unemployment and television but because of their mind. Samenow (2004) strongly believed that different thinking is the cause of psychopaths violent behavior. On the other hand Samenow (2004) underlines that everything and everyone is responsible for the offence. The environment, economy, policy, poverty are responsible for committing a crime, brutal treatment and abuse.

People like Freddie Triplett “feel that their abilities will enable them to become anything they want to be” (Hare, 1999, p. 39). They want to be “physically and psychologically abusive to others with our society’s glorification of violence” (Wolman, 1999, p. 117). Hare (1999) believes that such people see nothing dishonest or wrong with their personality and find their behavior as “rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern” (p. 195).     Such people like Freddie Triplett do not “feel they have psychological or emotional problems, and they see no reason to change their behavior to societal standards with which they do not agree” (Hare, 1999, p. 195). That means, that Freddie Triplett was well satisfied with his own personality and with his “inner landscape, break as it may seem to outside observers” (p. 195). Samenow (2004) found that criminals, psychopaths and offenders will not change their personality until other options forsakes him / her. The author underlines that if a person wants to change a criminal or offender behavior, he / she should make alternative.

Hare (1999) emphasizes that people like Gardner’s stepfather does not authorize their actions to themselves. Once, Freddie Triplett because of groundless and irrational anger physically abused Chris. During cold winter, he threw him and his mother into the snow. He did it at the time Gardner was taking a bath and was thrown out naked.

The only way to curtail violence in such people is to change their way of thinking. Samenow (2004) found that such people think otherwise from a responsible person. The only appropriate offender’s issues are to continue their behavior, to change their personality or to suicide. Freddie chosen to continue his behavior and to abuse Chris, his family and weak people.

Wolman (1999) found some distinctive features between dangerous individuals, which are cruel and passive and the community which created them. According to his research, Chris Gardner’s stepfather belonged to the first type of such dangerous individuals. Freddie Triplett is an impassive, resourceful, amoral, impetuous and guileful individual. He is represented as no signs of remorse for his disgusting and terrible actions. Wolman (1999) underlines that such people are totally lacking sympathy for a human being. They are self-enamored individuals who have a tendency to consider that they are authorized to another people’s things, and that they merit to be loved.     The growth of sociopath behavior among children and adults, whether in a strained poor district or in a quiet suburban and country setting, is skillfully described by Dr Benjamin Wolman (1999) a famous national psychologist. He supposes that the growth of sociopath individuals is accountable for the moral and ethical collapse, whereas at the same time proposing the contrary hypothesis that the moral and ethical collapse is accountable for the growth in the population of sociopaths.

“Parental psychopathology” (Livesley, 2003, p. 57) growth and increasing the risk of developing individual problems is most extensive for unsociable antisocial feature. Livesley (2003) supposes that personal behavior like Freddie Triplett had toward Chris Gardner is due to regularities and consistencies in the environment. Samenow (2004) underlines that even though they are not able to change their past, they can change their future. When the person is responsible for himself / herself, it allows him / her to believe in changing its personality and life.

Of course Chris Gardner could escape or rescue his realities over any means accessible whether it was drugs or even mesmerism it would work. However, he didn’t. He was really afraid his stepfather. Even so, even during these bad and unfavorable times when everything was against him Gardner continued to struggle for everything better. He found some satisfaction and solace in reading various books in the library. He ran with different crowds being a young person and usually stayed out of difficulty and trouble (Gardner, 2006).

Emotional and physical maltreatment by Freddie Triplett towards Chris Gardner implicated “emotional abuse (verbal assaults and demeaning components) or emotional neglect (the failure of caregivers to meet the child’s needs for love, nurturance, and support)” (Livesley, 2003, p. 58). It means that pari passu with physical abuse and violent, emotional abuse has important, great and prevalent effects. Physical abuse increases the danger and risk of different individual problems, which include an antisocial personality disorder, Livesley (2003) emphasizes. Fortunately physical maltreatment by Triplett towards Gardner didn’t lead to the causes described by Livesley (2003).     Wolman (1999) emphasizes that parents and teachers sometimes may assist to the growth of sociopath and antisocial behavior. The way which parents bring up their children may be significant. The author underlines that parents which allow their children to do whatever they want and those which do not teach their kids the importance of morality will default to tell apart wrong from right. On the other hand, children of cruel and abusive parents, like Chris Gardner are generally very rough, aggressive, and unfriendly and used to hate and detest their parents. However, such children are not able to treat aggressively and rough against their own parents because they feel terror that they may retaliate. Instead such children conduct themselves rough and aggressively against weak people.

What Were Chris Gardner’s Main Principles and Goals?

Inspired by his uncle’s worldwide adventures and trips in the United States Navy, Gardner decided to hire shortly after graduating high school (Gardner, 2006). Thanks to the Navy Chris could leave his native city and start his life from the beginning.

At the age of twenty after the Navy Chris Gardner went to San Francisco where he got married and divorced. His wife was an educated and intelligent woman who was looking-for to sit for her dental boards. Right this time Gardner started a medical career, which led him to the market of medical equipment (Gardner, 2006).     The majority of Gardner’s time in the Navy was spent as a medical man at a military base. He assisted with the surgeon investigation and was honorable as well-informed and intelligent expert in teaching medical interns on surgical methods (Gardner, 2006).

Gardner, a smart and intelligent salesman invests all the family money and savings in bone-density scanners. This equipment was twice as costly as an x-ray equipment but with a little distinct image.

Unfortunately, the money, Gardner earned as a salesman was not enough for him, his girlfriend and their son (Gardner, 2006). Right that time, Gardner decided to change his profession and to earn more money. He was interested in selling, inspiration, business, motivation and social speaking. Gardner was good with numbers and great with people. He became an internship in Dean Witter company. Chris wanted to gain an entry level position, beat each candidate and obtain the position he wanted. Chris Gardner became an interned person just around the time he became homeless. During his internship Chris was paid a little stipend, but it was too small for living in hotels all the time. Right that time, his girlfriend left Gardner, and took their small son Christopher with her (Gardner, 2006).

Abandoned by own father and left to the depraved rage of a mean and cruel stepfather, Chris Gardner sworn that no matter what occurred in his own life, he would be committed and faithful father to his own kids. Induced and motivated by the promise Chris Gardner made to himself as a fatherless kid he took away his son.

Wolman (1999) emphasizes that parental refusal, like Gardner had in his childhood, could adversely affect their kid’s self-reliance and self-assurance. Such children will feel abandoned in case their parents are not sentimental, loving and attentive. That is why Chris Gardner was trying to give his small son more love, attention, protection and stable life (Gardner, 2006). Rather than give up his son, Gardner continued to follow his dream of being a successful and well-to-do businessman.     Livesley (2003) strongly believes that “family disorder, parental psychopathology, and various forms of parenting behavior” (p. 57) like Gardner had in his childhood can be considered as individual confusion. “Antisocial and psychopathic features” (Livesley, 2003, p. 57) in people like Freddie Triplett, are not able to prophesy antisocial features, traits and characteristics in his children.

“Poor parenting and unfavorable social and physical environments” (Hare, 1999, p. 178) may noticeably complicate potential problems and play an intense role in “molding the behavioral patterns” (Hare, 1999, p. 178). However, Samenow (2004) found that indigence, poverty, divorce and cruelty, the factors which Gardner had, were not the reasons of criminality.

Livesley (2003) determines two main types of parenting behavior, which are “neglectful (as opposed to loving and supportive) and overprotective (as opposed to encouraging independence and autonomy)” (p. 58). In his life Gardner used these two types of parenting behavior. The first type of parenting behavior belongs to the relations between Chris Gardner and his stepfather, the second is the relations between Gardner and Christopher.

Livesley (2003) pays great attention that the “higher-order patterns reflect the genetic architecture of personality” (p. 132) and consequently, represent essential and fundamental differences in individual structure. Each state of personality allure a particular pattern of emotions, means of thinking about “the self and others, interpersonal relationships, and coping strategies” (Livesley, 2003, p. 35).

It was difficult and complicated times for Gardner and his son. Because of lack of money they spent nearly a year traveling among hotels and shelters. Gardner had to carry out their clothes on his back all the time they were traveling (Gardner, 2006).

Sometimes Gardner with Christopher slept at the office and was afraid to be discovered by the night guards and cleaning crew. When Chris Gardner lived in shelters and hotels with his son, they used to play different games the main goal of which was to keep quiet, when people were searching them and knocking the door. Chris tried to make his best not to defeat (Gardner, 2006).

Chris Gardner is a personality with a response to the problems and tasks of everyday living. Personality disorder is represented as an inability to get adaptive solutions to life problems and tasks, and domains of sequel psychopathology proposed as coextensive (Livesley, 2003). Livesley (2003) found that the relation and connection between particulars and components of the personality system – “traits, self system, person system, and environment” (p. 76) generate a structure in which modification to one constituent tends to be dampened by its influence on other parts of the system.

Chris Gardner is a real personality. The relations with his stepfather influenced his personality, but it gave him a strong desire not to be like Freddie was. The main principles in his life were to be a human, to be a real father to his son and to be a useful part of the society. Thanks to these, Gardner became an individual with his own views on a human being and the importance to be a person, not a violent and cruel offender.

The story of Chris Gardner is not particularly fresh, but his voice is pleasant and likable, resulting in a virtue and quality African-American. He is the person who he is, and he is a successful and great moneymaker. Wolman (1999) believes that social harmony and true happiness are the main for each person. Chris Gardner succeeded contrary the establishment and became a successful businessman and moneymaker. After Gardner’s talents were estimated at company’s true worth, and he got the job he wanted, his American dream became real. Though all his achievements and progresses Chris Gardner was a prideful father. His own fatherless blues is disappeared now.

Chris Gardner’s Pursuit of Happyness (2006) is a painful, astonishing and amazing story, which describes remarkable frankness, comprehension and intelligent (Gardner, 2006). Best of all is that he is entirely unapologetic about following material benefits and success, and saying that these are pieces of his pursuit of happiness.

Hare, R. D. (1999). Without conscience . New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Gardner, C. (2006). The Pursuit of Happyness . New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Livesley, J. W. (2003). Practical management of personality disorder . New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Samenow, S. E. (2004). Inside the criminal mind . New York, NY: Crown Publishers.

Wolman, B. B. (1999). Antisocial behavior: personality disorders from hostility to homicide . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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The Pursuit of Happyness

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Chapter 11-Epilogue

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Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

How does Gardner use the five senses to bring his joys, sorrows and inspirations to life in his book?

Explore how the ambitions and desires of the female characters in Gardner’s life are thwarted. In what ways does the text imply that it is more difficult for women to break the poverty cycle?

How do the conflicting desires for control and exploration play out in Gardner’s life story?

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The Pursuit of Happyness Essay

Social stereotypes and Happiness The Pursuit of Happyness 11/21/2012 Instructor: Prof. Kristin Little Author: Tareq Naseer Alsamarh Social stereotypes and happiness The story of the movie The Pursuit of Happyness directed by Gabriele Muccino portrays a family who struggles with finding enough money to pay taxes and afford living expenses. The movie takes a place in San Francisco during the 80s. The two main characters are the father Chris Gardner and his son Christopher, Will Smith and Jaden Smith respectively. Gardner tries to support his family. But every time he attempts to make things better, they always end up worse. Gardner in the story wonders on "how to be happy?" He earns his money by selling the bone density …show more content…

In another perspective, fatherhood for Gardner is like a job for him. Because he loses his wife, he needs to provide joy, fun and help for his son Christopher which is not an easy job to do. Those fathers, who spend more time with their children, have a better life than others who spend most of their time working and gaining money. However, being a father as a single parent like Chris gives him the enthusiasm to do his best and replace his wife's role to have a better life with his son. Yet, this decreases the happiness that Gardner possesses. According to Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of California, points out that "Father's style of parenting has changed too. Fathers are beginning to look more like mothers" (qtd. in Cullen and Grossman). Before Linda leaves the family, she works double shifts to make more money to afford the living expenses and to help her husband. So Chris is the one who takes more care of their son than the mother, Linda. Gardner seems to be happier being close to his son. There are many scenes in the movie that show how Gardner and Christopher are happy of being together. Nonetheless, there is only one scene that Christopher not even misses his mother; instead he asks "did mom leave because of me?" ( The Pursuit of Happyness ). This indicates that Gardner does a great job of being a single parent that makes his son, not remembering his mother. For fathers, home

The Pursuit Of Happiness Essay

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This is an influential point for both book and movie because it has the effect of showing how both mothers are in and out of their child’s life but yet the father reminds to keep everything together. Basing character tendencies on how the mothers leave and the main character (father) with stay. Yet the movie does not detail this information but is evident to the abandonment of his actual wife at one point in the film. In the film, the wife leaves at the one-hour mark (film time). The film keeps their focus off the wife/mother to put more power in the struggle of Gardner’s life as a father. In contrast, the film “The Pursuit of Happyness” featured the bigger picture of the actual story. More so the theme that Chris Gardner conveyed in the book. The film goes from struggling married couple with a son, to a struggling single father chasing the ultimate dream of successfulness. The difference from the book is that Chris Gardner and his wife were together on and off. They struggle to make the relationship work but have differences in what they want to pursue.

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There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being ). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making.

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

1.2 clarifying our inquiry, 2.1 the chief candidates, 2.2 methodology: settling on a theory, 2.3 life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts, 2.4 hedonism versus emotional state, 2.5 hybrid accounts, 3.1 can happiness be measured, 3.2 empirical findings: overview, 3.3 the sources of happiness, 4.1 doubts about the value of happiness, 4.2 restoring happiness to the theory of well-being, 4.3 is happiness overrated, 5.1 normative issues, 5.2 mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, 5.3 the politics of happiness, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the meanings of ‘happiness’.

What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic. Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing , happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.

Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term:

• A state of mind
• A life that goes well for the person leading it

In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Just as inquiry about pleasure or depression fundamentally concerns questions of psychology, inquiry about happiness in this sense—call it the (long-term) “psychological sense”—is fundamentally the study of certain mental states. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.

Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? Since ‘happiness’ in this sense is just a psychological term, you could intelligibly say that happiness isn’t valuable at all. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied. The present article will center on happiness in the psychological sense.

In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value , namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value —or, more commonly, well-being , welfare , utility or flourishing . (For further discussion, see the entry on well-being . Whether these terms are really equivalent remains a matter of dispute, but this article will usually treat them as interchangeable.) “Happiness” in this sense concerns what benefits a person, is good for her, makes her better off, serves her interests, or is desirable for her for her sake. To be high in well-being is to be faring well, doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. Ill-being, or doing badly, may call for sympathy or pity, whereas we envy or rejoice in the good fortune of others, and feel gratitude for our own. Being good for someone differs from simply being good, period: perhaps it is always good, period, for you to be honest; yet it may not always be good for you , as when it entails self-sacrifice. Not coincidentally, the word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap,” and indeed the terms used to translate it in other languages often have similar roots. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you.

Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment : namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. [ 1 ] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Genghis Khan had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Whereas hedonists identify well-being roughly with experiences of pleasure, desire theorists equate it with the satisfaction of one’s desires— actually getting what you want, versus merely having certain experiences. Both hedonism and desire theories are in some sense subjectivist, since they ground well-being in the individual’s subjective states. Objective list theorists, by contrast, think some things benefit us independently of our attitudes or feelings: there are objective prudential goods. Aristotelians are the best-known example: they take well-being ( eudaimonia ) to consist in a life of virtuous activity—or more broadly, the fulfillment of our human capacities. A passive but contented couch potato may be getting what he wants, and he may enjoy it. But he would not, on Aristotelian and other objective list theories, count as doing well, or leading a happy life.

Now we can sharpen the initial question somewhat: when you ask what happiness is, are you asking what sort of life benefits a person? If so, then your question concerns matters of value, namely what is good for people—the sort of thing that ethical theorists are trained to address. Alternatively, perhaps you simply want to know about the nature of a certain state of mind—happiness in the psychological sense. In this case, some sort of psychological inquiry will be needed, either philosophical or scientific. (Laypersons often have neither sort of question in mind, but are really asking about the sources of happiness. Thus it might be claimed, say, that “happiness is being with good friends.” This is not a view about the nature or definition of happiness, but rather a theory about the sorts of things that tend to make us happy. It leaves unanswered, or takes for granted, the question of just what happiness is , such that friends are a good source of it.)

In short, philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. [ 2 ] Accordingly, there are essentially two bodies of philosophical literature about “happiness” and two sets of debates about its nature, though writers often fail to distinguish them. Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal. [ 3 ] For instance, some psychologists identify “happiness” with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct. Such researchers employ the term in the psychological sense. Yet it is sometimes objected against such claims that life satisfaction cannot suffice for “happiness” because other things, like achievement or knowledge, matter for human well-being. The objectors are confused: their opponents have made no claims about well-being at all, and the two “sides,” as it were, are simply using ‘happiness’ to talk about different things. One might just as sensibly object to an economist’s tract on “banks” that it has nothing to say about rivers and streams.

Which use of ‘happiness’ corresponds to the true meaning of the term in contemporary English? Arguably, both. The well-being usage clearly dominates in the historical literature through at least the early modern era, for instance in translations of the ancient Greeks’ ‘ eudaimonia ’ or the Latin ‘ beatitudo ’, though this translation has long been a source of controversy. Jefferson’s famous reference to “the pursuit of happiness” probably employed the well-being sense. Even later writers such as Mill may have used the term in its well-being sense, though it is often difficult to tell since well-being itself is often taken to consist in mental states like pleasure. In ordinary usage, the abstract noun ‘happiness’ often invites a well-being reading. And the locution ‘happy life ’ may not naturally take a psychological interpretation, for the simple reason that lives aren’t normally regarded as psychological entities.

Contrast this with the very different meaning that seems to attach to talk of “ being happy.” Here it is much less clear that we are talking about a property of a person’s life; it seems rather to be a property of the person herself. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition. Similarly when we say that so-and-so “is happy” (as opposed to saying that he is leading a happy life). This psychological usage, arguably, predominates in the current vernacular. Researchers engaged in the self-described “science of happiness” usually do not take themselves to be making value judgments when they proclaim individuals in their studies to be happy. Nor, when asserting that a life satisfaction study shows Utahans to be happier than New Yorkers, are they committing themselves to the tendentious claim that Utahans are better off . (If they are, then the psychology journals that are publishing this research may need to revise their peer-review protocols to include ethicists among their referees.) And the many recent popular books on happiness, as well as innumerable media accounts of research on happiness, nearly all appear to take it for granted that they are talking about nothing more than a psychological condition.

Henceforth ‘happiness’ will be used in the long-term psychological sense, unless otherwise specified. Note, however, that a number of important books and other works on “happiness” in recent decades have employed the well-being sense of the term. Books of this sort appear to include Almeder 2000, Annas 1993, 2011, Bloomfield 2014, Cahn and Vitrano 2015, Kenny and Kenny 2006, McMahon 2005, McPherson 2020, Noddings 2003, Russell 2013, White 2006, and Vitrano 2014, though again it is not always clear how a given author uses the term. For discussion of the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being . [ 4 ]

2. Theories of happiness

Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism , and the life satisfaction theory. Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do. [ 5 ] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice. Such arguments tend to grant the identification of happiness with pleasure, but challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.

Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one’s life as a whole. This basic schema can be filled out in a variety of ways, but typically involves some sort of global judgment: an endorsement or affirmation of one’s life as a whole. This judgment may be more or less explicit, and may involve or accompany some form of affect. It may also involve or accompany some aggregate of judgments about particular items or domains within one’s life. [ 6 ]

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole, of what is often called “emotional well-being.” [ 7 ] This includes nonexperiential aspects of emotions and moods (or perhaps just moods), and excludes pleasures that don’t directly involve the individual’s emotional state. It might also include a person’s propensity for experiencing various moods, which can vary over time, though several authors have argued against this suggestion (e.g., Hill 2007, Klausen 2015, Rossi 2018). Happiness on such a view is more nearly the opposite of depression or anxiety—a broad psychological condition—whereas hedonistic happiness is simply opposed to unpleasantness. For example, a deeply distressed individual might distract herself enough with constant activity to maintain a mostly pleasant existence—broken only by tearful breakdowns during the odd quiet moment—thus perhaps counting as happy on a hedonistic but not emotional state view. The states involved in happiness, on an emotional state view, can range widely, far more so that the ordinary notion of mood or emotion. On one proposal, happiness involves three broad categories of affective state, including “endorsement” states like joy versus sadness, “engagement” states like flow or a sense of vitality, and “attunement” states like tranquility, emotional expansiveness versus compression, and confidence. Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

A fourth family of views, hybrid theories , attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions. The most obvious candidate here is subjective well-being , which is typically defined as a compound of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect. (Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state.) The chief appeal of hybrid theories is their inclusiveness: all the components of subjective well-being seem important, and there is probably no component of subjective well-being that does not at times get included in “happiness” in ordinary usage.

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001). And some have argued that life satisfaction is compatible with profoundly negative emotional states like depression—a suffering artist might not value emotional matters much, and wholeheartedly affirm her life (Carson 1981, Davis 1981b, Haybron 2005, Feldman 2010). Yet it might seem counterintuitive to deem such a person happy. At the same time, people do sometimes use ‘happiness’ to denote states of life satisfaction: life satisfaction theories do seem faithful to some ordinary uses of ‘happiness’. The trouble is that HAPPINESS appears to be a “mongrel concept,” as Ned Block (1995) called the concept of consciousness: the ordinary notion is something of a mess. We use the term to denote different things in different contexts, and often have no clear notion of what we are referring to. This suggests that accounts of happiness must be somewhat revisionary, and that we must assess theories on grounds other than simple fidelity to the lay concept of happiness—“descriptive adequacy,” in Sumner’s (1996) terms. One candidate is practical utility: which conception of happiness best answers to our interests in the notion? We talk about happiness because we care about it. The question is why we care about it, and which psychological states within the extension of the ordinary term make the most sense of this concern. Even if there is no simple answer to the question what happiness is, it may well turn out that our interests in happiness cluster so strongly around a particular psychological kind that happiness can best, or most profitably, be understood in terms of that type of state (Haybron 2003). Alternatively, we may choose to distinguish different varieties of happiness. It will be less important how we use the word, however, than that we be clear about the nature and significance of the phenomena that interest us.

The debate over theories of happiness falls along a couple of lines. The most interesting questions concern the choice between life satisfaction and affect-based views like hedonism and the emotional state theory. [ 8 ] Proponents of life satisfaction see two major advantages to their account. First, life satisfaction is holistic , ranging over the whole of one’s life, or the totality of one’s life over a certain period of time. It reflects not just the aggregate of moments in one’s life, but also the global quality of one’s life taken as a whole (but see Raibley 2010). And we seem to care not just about the total quantity of good in our lives, but about its distribution—a happy ending, say, counts for more than a happy middle (Slote 1982, Velleman 1991). Second, life satisfaction seems more closely linked to our priorities than affect is, as the suffering artist case illustrates. While a focus on affect makes sense insofar as we care about such matters, most people care about other things as well, and how their lives are going relative to their priorities may not be fully mirrored in their affective states. Life satisfaction theories thus seem to fit more closely with liberal ideals of individual sovereignty, on which how well my life is going for me is for me to decide. My satisfaction with my life seems to embody that judgment. Of course a theory of happiness need not capture everything that matters for well-being; the point is that a life satisfaction view might explain why we should care so much about happiness, and so enjoy substantive as well as intuitive support. [ 9 ]

But several objections have been raised against life satisfaction views. The most common complaint has already been noted, namely that a person could apparently be satisfied with her life even while leading a highly unpleasant or emotionally distressed existence, and it can seem counterintuitive to regard such a person as happy (see section 2.2). Some life satisfaction theorists deny that such cases are possible (Benditt 1978), but it could also be argued that such possibilities are part and parcel of life satisfaction’s appeal: some people may not get much pleasure out of life because they don’t care particularly about affective matters, and a life satisfaction theory allows that they can, in their own fashion, be happy.

Two other objections are more substantive, raising questions about whether life satisfaction has the right sort of importance. One concern is whether people often enough have well-grounded attitudes of life satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Evaluating one’s life as a whole can be a complicated business, and there is some question whether people typically have well-defined attitudes toward their lives that accurately reflect how well their lives measure up relative to their priorities. Some research, for instance, suggests that life satisfaction reports tend to reflect judgments made on the spot, drawing on whatever information comes readily to mind, with substantial influences by transient contextual factors like the weather, finding a dime, etc. (Schwarz and Strack 1999). Debate persists over whether this work undermines the significance of life satisfaction judgments, but it does raise a question whether life satisfaction attitudes tend to be well-enough grounded to have the kind of importance that people normally ascribe to happiness.

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals’ perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2016). You might reasonably be satisfied when getting very little of what you want, or dissatisfied when getting most of what you want. One reason for this is that people tend to have many incommensurable values, leaving it open how to add them up. Looking at the various ups and downs of your life, it may be arbitrary whether to rate your life a four out of ten, or a seven. A second reason is that life satisfaction attitudes are not merely assessments of subjective success or personal welfare: they involve assessments of whether one’s life is good enough —satisfactory. Yet people’s values may radically underdetermine where they should set the bar for a “good enough” life, again rendering the judgment somewhat arbitrary. Given your values, you might reasonably be satisfied with a two, or require a nine to be satisfied. While it may seem important how well people see their lives going relative to what they care about, it is not obviously so important whether people see their lives going well enough that they are willing to judge them satisfactory.

If life satisfaction attitudes are substantially arbitrary relative to subjective success, then people might reasonably base those attitudes on other factors, such as ethical ideals (e.g., valuing gratitude or noncomplacency) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., comforting oneself). Shifts in perspective might also reasonably alter life satisfaction attitudes. After the funeral, you might be highly satisfied with your life, whereas the high school reunion leaves you dissatisfied; yet neither judgment need be mistaken, or less authoritative.

As a result, life satisfaction attitudes may be poor indicators of well-being, even from the individual’s own point of view. That people in a given country register high levels of life satisfaction may reflect nothing more than that they set the bar extremely low; they might be satisfied with anything short of pure agony. Another country’s citizens might be dissatisfied with their lives, but only because they set the bar much higher. Relative to what they care about, people in the dissatisfied nation could be better off than those in the satisfied nation. To take another example, a cancer patient might be more satisfied with his life than he was before the diagnosis, for he now looks at his life from a different perspective and emphasizes different virtues like fortitude and gratitude as opposed to (say) humility and non-complacency. Yet he need not think himself better off at all: he might believe himself worse off than he was when he was less satisfied. Neither judgment need seem to him or us to be mistaken: it’s just that he now looks at his life differently. Indeed, he might think he’s doing badly, even as he is satisfied with his life: he endorses it, warts and all, and is grateful just have his not-so-good life rather than some of the much worse alternatives.

For present purposes, the worry is that life satisfaction may not have the kind of significance happiness is normally thought to have. This may pose a difficulty for the identification of life satisfaction with happiness: for people frequently seem to use happiness as a proxy for well-being, a reasonably concrete and value-free stand-in that facilitates quick-and-dirty assessments of welfare. Given the discovery that someone is happy, we might infer that he is doing well; if we learn that someone is unhappy, we may conclude that she is doing poorly. Such inferences are defeasible: if we later find that the happy Ned’s wife and friends secretly hate him, we need not decide that he isn’t happy after all; we simply withdraw the conclusion that he is doing well. So long as happiness tracks well-being well enough in most cases, this sort of practice is perfectly respectable. But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life. This sort of case may not be merely a theoretical possibility: perhaps the very high rates of self-reported life satisfaction in the United States and many other places substantially reflects a broad acceptance of norms of gratitude and a general tendency to emphasize the positives, or perhaps a sense that not to endorse your life amounts to a lack of self-regard. It is not implausible that most people, even those enduring great hardship, can readily find grounds for satisfaction with their lives. Life may have to be pretty hard for a person to be incapable of affirming it.

Despite these concerns there is significant intuitive appeal in the idea that to be happy is to be satisfied with one’s life. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

A second set of issues concerns the differences between the two affect-based views, hedonism and emotional state. The appeal of hedonism is fairly obvious: the pleasantness of our experience is plainly a matter of great significance; many have claimed it to be the only thing that matters. What, by contrast, motivates the emotional state account, which bears obvious similarities to hedonism yet excludes many pleasures from happiness? The question of motivation appears to be the chief worry facing the emotional state theory: what’s to be gained by focusing on emotional state rather than pleasure?

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses :

‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being . ( Discourses , 1.18.19, emphasis added).

The Stoics did not expect us never to feel unpleasant sensations, which would plainly be impossible; rather, the idea was not to let such things get to us , to impact our emotional conditions.

Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness? For most people, the hedonic difference between happiness on an emotional state versus a hedonistic view is probably minimal. But while little will be lost, what will be gained? One possibility is that the more “central” affects involving our emotional conditions may bear a special relation to the person or the self , whereas more “peripheral” affects, like the pleasantness of eating a cracker, might pertain to the subpersonal aspects of our psychologies. Since well-being is commonly linked to ideas of self-fulfillment, this sort of distinction might signal a difference in the importance of these states. Another reason to focus on emotional condition rather than experience alone may be the greater psychological depth of the former: its impact on our mental lives, physiology, and behavior is arguably deeper and more pervasive. This enhances the explanatory and predictive significance of happiness, and more importantly its desirability: happiness on this view is not merely pleasant, but a major source of pleasure and other good outcomes (Fredrickson 2004, Lyubomirsky, King et al . 2005). Compare health on this score: while many think it matters chiefly or entirely because of its connection with pleasure, there are few skeptics about the importance of health. As well, emotional state views may capture the idea that happiness concerns the individual’s psychological orientation or disposition : to be happy, on an emotional state theory, is not just to be subjected to a certain sequence of experiences, but for one’s very being to manifest a favorable orientation toward the conditions of one’s life—a kind of psychic affirmation of one’s life. This reflects a point of similarity with life satisfaction views of happiness: contra hedonism, both views take happiness to be substantially dispositional, involving some sort of favorable orientation toward one’s life. But life satisfaction views tend to emphasize reflective or rational endorsement, whereas emotional state views emphasize the verdicts of our emotional natures.

While hedonism and emotional state theories are major contenders in the contemporary literature, all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people’s priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people’s lives taken as a whole.

Given the limitations of narrower theories of happiness, a hybrid account such as a subjective well-being theory may seem an attractive solution. This strategy has not been fully explored in the philosophical literature, though Sumner’s “life satisfaction” theory may best be classified as a hybrid (1996; see also Martin 2012). In any event, a hybrid approach draws objections of its own. If we arrive at a hybrid theory by this route, it could seem like either the marriage of two unpromising accounts, or of a promising account with an unpromising one. Such a union may not yield wholesome results. Second, people have different intuitions about what counts as happiness, so that no theory can accommodate all of them. Any theory that tries to thus risks pleasing no one. A third concern is that the various components of any hybrid are liable to matter for quite different reasons, so that happiness, thus understood, might fail to answer to any coherent set of concerns. Ascriptions of happiness could be relatively uninformative if they cast their net too widely.

3. The science of happiness

With the explosive rise of empirical research on happiness, a central question is how far, and how, happiness might be measured. [ 11 ] There seems to be no in-principle barrier to the idea of measuring, at least roughly, how happy people are. Investigators may never enjoy the precision of the “hedonimeter” once envisaged by Edgeworth to show just how happy a person is (Edgeworth 1881). Indeed, such a device might be impossible even in principle, since happiness might involve multiple dimensions that either cannot be precisely quantified or summed together. If so, it could still be feasible to develop approximate measures of happiness, or at least its various dimensions. Similarly, depression may not admit of precise quantification in a single number, yet many useful if imprecise measures of depression exist. In the case of happiness, it is plausible that even current measures provide information about how anxious, cheerful, satisfied, etc. people are, and thus tell us something about their happiness. Even the simplest self-report measures used in the literature have been found to correlate well with many intuitively relevant variables, such as friends’ reports, smiling, physiological measures, health, longevity, and so forth (Pavot 2008).

Importantly, most scientific research needs only to discern patterns across large numbers of individuals—to take an easy case, determining whether widows tend to be less happy than newlyweds—and this is compatible with substantial unreliability in assessing individual happiness. Similarly, an inaccurate thermometer might be a poor guide to the temperature, but readings from many such thermometers could correlate fairly well with actual temperatures—telling us, for instance, that Minnesota is colder than Florida.

This point reveals an important caveat: measures of happiness could correlate well with how happy people are, thus telling us which groups of people tend to be happier, while being completely wrong about absolute levels of happiness. Self-reports of happiness, for instance, might correctly indicate that unemployed people are considerably less happy than those with jobs. But every one of those reports could be wrong, say if everyone is unhappy yet claims to be happy, or vice-versa, so long as the unemployed report lower happiness than the employed. Similarly, bad thermometers may show that Minnesota is colder than Florida without giving the correct temperature.

Two morals emerge from these reflections. First, self-report measures of happiness could be reliable guides to relative happiness, though telling us little about how happy, in absolute terms, people are. We may know who is happier, that is, but not whether people are in fact happy. Second, even comparisons of relative happiness will be inaccurate if the groups being compared systematically bias their reports in different ways. This worry is particularly acute for cross-cultural comparisons of happiness, where differing norms about happiness may undermine the comparability of self-reports. The French might report lower happiness than Americans, for instance, not because their lives are less satisfying or pleasant, but because they tend to put a less positive spin on things. For this reason it may be useful to employ instruments, including narrower questions or physiological measures, that are less prone to cultural biasing. [ 12 ]

The discussion thus far has assumed that people can be wrong about how happy they are. Is this plausible? Some have argued that (sincerely) self-reported happiness cannot, even in principle, be mistaken. If you think you’re happy, goes a common sentiment, then you are happy. This claim is not plausible on a hedonistic or emotional state view of happiness, since those theories take judgments of happiness to encompass not just how one is feeling at the moment but also past states, and memories of those can obviously be spurious. Further, it has been argued that even judgments of how one feels at the present moment may often be mistaken, particularly regarding moods like anxiety. [ 13 ]

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about. Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole.

In a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent’s “I’m happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another’s might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

This entry focuses on subjective well-being studies, since that work is standardly deemed “happiness” research. But psychological research on well-being can take other forms, notably in the “eudaimonic”—commonly opposed to “hedonic”—literature, which assesses a broader range of indicators taken to represent objective human needs, such as meaning, personal growth, relatedness, autonomy, competence, etc. [ 15 ] (The assimilation of subjective well-being to the “hedonic” realm may be misleading, since life satisfaction seems primarily to be a non -hedonic value, as noted earlier.) Other well-being instruments may not clearly fall under either the “happiness” or eudaimonic rubrics, for instance extending subjective well-being measures by adding questions about the extent to which activities are seen as meaningful or worthwhile (White and Dolan 2009). An important question going forward is how far well-being research needs to incorporate indicators beyond subjective well-being.

The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

• Most people are happy
• People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their happiness “set point”
• People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and pursuing happiness
• Material prosperity has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness

The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers (for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener 1996). The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative. On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives. Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness. While the traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature. Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio might represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (e.g., Larsen and Prizmic 2008). While the evidence for any specific ratio is highly controversial, if anything like this proportion were adopted as the threshold for happiness, on a hedonistic or emotional state theory, then some of the evidence taken to show that people are happy could in fact show the opposite. In any event, the empirical claim relies heavily on nontrivial philosophical views about the nature of happiness, illustrating one way in which philosophical work on happiness can inform scientific research.

The second claim, regarding adaptation and set points, reflects well-known findings that many major life events, like being disabled in an accident or winning the lottery, appear strongly to impact happiness only for a relatively brief period, after which individuals may return to a level of happiness not very different from before. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables. Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short (five foot four) to tall (over six feet)—in the last 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you’re out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The question continues to be much debated, but in 2010 a pair of large-scale studies using Gallup data sets, including improved measures of life satisfaction and affect, suggested that both sides may be partly right (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Diener, Ng et al . 2010). Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al. 2018 along with relevant chapters in Diener et al. 2018 and the annual World Happiness Reports from 2012 onward (Helliwell et al. 2012). Research on the complex money-happiness relationship resists simple characterization, but a crude summary is that the connection tends to be positive and substantial, strong at lower income levels while modest to weak or even negative at higher incomes, and stronger and less prone to satiation for life evaluation than emotional well-being metrics. But again, these are very rough generalizations that gloss over a variety of important factors and admit of many exceptions across both individuals and societies.

In short, the relationship between money and happiness may depend on which theory of happiness we accept: on a life satisfaction view, the relationship may be strong; whereas affect-based views may yield a much weaker connection, again above some modest threshold. Here, again, philosophical views about the nature and significance of happiness may play an important role in understanding empirical results and their practical upshot. Economic growth, for instance, has long been a top priority for governments, and findings about its impact on human well-being may have substantial implications for policy.

It is important to note that studies of this nature focus on generic trends, not specific cases, and there is no dispute that significant exceptions exist—notably, populations that enjoy high levels of happiness amid low levels of material prosperity. Among others, a number of Latin American countries, Maasai herders, Inughuit hunter-gatherers, and Amish communities have registered highly positive results in subjective well-being studies, sometimes higher than those in many affluent nations, and numerous informal accounts accord with the data. [ 20 ] Such “positive outliers” suggest that some societies can support high levels of happiness with extremely modest material holdings. The importance of money for happiness may depend strongly on what kind of society one inhabits. An interesting question, particularly in light of common environmental concerns, is how far the lessons of such societies can, or should, be transferred to other social forms, where material attainment and happiness are presently more tightly coupled. Perhaps some degree of decoupling of happiness and money would be desirable.

So the role of money in happiness appears, at this juncture, to be a mixed bag, depending heavily on how we conceive of happiness and what range of societies we are considering. What (else), then, does matter most for happiness? There is no definitive list of the main sources of happiness in the literature, partly because it is not clear how to divide them up. But the following items seem generally to be accepted as among the chief correlates of happiness: supportive relationships, engagement in interesting and challenging activities, material and physical security, a sense of meaning or purpose, a positive outlook, and autonomy or control. [ 21 ] Significant correlates may also include—among many others—religion, good governance, trust, helping others, values (e.g., having non-materialistic values), achieving goals, not being unemployed, and connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010; see also Jebb et al. 2020). In that study, the life satisfaction measure was more strongly related to material prosperity, as noted above: household income, along with possession of luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living. The affect measures, by contrast, correlated most strongly with what the authors call “psychosocial prosperity”: whether people reported being treated with respect in the last day, having family and friends to count on, learning something new, doing what they do best, and choosing how their time was spent.

What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations. Errors might also arise through salience biases whereby material concerns might be more easily recalled than other important values, such as whether one has succeeded in having children; or through differences in positivity biases across income levels (perhaps wealthier people tend to be more “positive-responding” than poorer individuals). Another question is whether the affect measures adequately track the various dimensions of people’s emotional lives. However, the results are roughly consonant with other research, so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

Such concerns duly noted, the research plausibly suggests that, on average, material progress has some tendency to help people to better get what they want in life, as found in the life satisfaction measures, while relationships and engaging activities are more important for people’s emotional lives. What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct.

4. The importance of happiness

Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being. Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. (A few, like Almeder 2000, have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction.)

Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being. [ 24 ] (See the entry on well-being .) Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick’s experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are. [ 25 ]

A second set of objections concerns various ways in which a happy person might nonetheless seem intuitively to be leading an impoverished or stunted life. The most influential of these worries involves adaptation , where individuals facing oppressive circumstances scale back their expectations and find contentment in “small mercies,” as Sen put it. [ 26 ] Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities (blindness, Down Syndrome), or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives (e.g., counting blades of grass). Worries about impoverished lives are a prime motivator of Aristotelian theories of well-being, which emphasize the full and proper exercise of our human capacities.

In the face of these and other objections most commentators have concluded that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being. Philosophical interest in happiness has consequently flagged, since its theoretical importance becomes unclear if it does not play a starring role in our account of the good.

Even as happiness might fail to suffice for well-being, well-being itself may be only one component of a good life , and not the most important one at that. Here ‘good life’ means a life that is good all things considered, taking account of all the values that matter in life, whether they benefit the individual or not. Kant, for example, considered both morality and well-being to be important but distinct elements of a good life. Yet morality should be our first priority, never to be sacrificed for personal happiness.

In fact there is a broad consensus, or near-consensus, among ethical theorists on a doctrine we might call the priority of virtue : broadly and crudely speaking, the demands of virtue or morality trump other values in life. [ 27 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one’s happiness must be sacrificed. If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.

The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us. Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of (e.g., Singer 1972).

Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life. These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above.

Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being. This could happen in either of two ways.

First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being. A more ambitious proposal, originated by L.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one’s happiness is a response of one’s own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one’s own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner’s approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Višak 2015). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. [ 28 ]

A second strategy forsakes the project of giving a unitary theory of well-being, recognizing instead a family of two or more kinds of prudential value. Happiness could be central to, or even exhaustive of, one of those values. Shelly Kagan, for instance, has suggested that welfare hedonism could be correct as a theory of how well a person is doing, but not of how well a person’s life is going, which should perhaps be regarded as a distinct value (Kagan 1992, 1994). In short, we might distinguish narrow and wide well-being concepts. An experience machine user might be doing well in the narrow sense, but not the wide—she is doing well, though her life is quite sad. Happiness might, then, suffice for well-being, but only in the narrow sense. Others have made similar points, but uptake has been limited, perhaps because distinguishing multiple concepts of prudential value makes the already difficult job of giving a theory of well-being much harder, as Kagan pointedly observes. [ 29 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself. Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure (Sidgwick 1907 [1966], Brandt 1979, 1989).

Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it. Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is (see, e.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility. As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad. But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being.

In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept. Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint. More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?

We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner’s authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley’s soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits. It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently. While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them (wit, friendliness, etc.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.

Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one’s assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one’s life. Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous. [ 30 ]

A different question is what means of pursuing happiness are most effective . This is fundamentally an empirical question, but there are some in-principle issues that philosophical reflection might inform. One oft-heard claim, commonly called the “paradox of hedonism,” is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating; to be happy, don’t pursue happiness. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. It is plainly imprudent to make happiness one’s focus at every moment, but doubtful that this has often been denied. Yet never considering happiness also seems an improbable strategy for becoming happier. If you are choosing among several equally worthwhile occupations, and have good evidence that some of them will make you miserable, while one of them is likely to be highly fulfilling, it would not seem imprudent to take that information into account. Yet to do so just is to pursue happiness. The so-called paradox of hedonism is perhaps best seen as a vague caution against focusing too much on making oneself happy, not a blanket dismissal of the prospects for expressly seeking happiness—and for this modest point there is good empirical evidence (Schooler, Ariely et al . 2003, Lyubomirsky 2007).

That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it (Haybron 2008b). In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including (with recent surveys cited):

• Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
• Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
• Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people’s options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments (Doris 2002, 2015, Haybron 2014). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed. [ 31 ]

Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature (e.g., in what sense are we rational animals? How should we conceive of human autonomy?); second, the philosophical ideals of the good society and good government.

Just a decade ago the idea of happiness policy was something of a novelty. While it remains on the fringes in some locales, notably the United States, in much of the world there has been a surge of interest in making happiness an explicit target of policy consideration. Attention has largely shifted, however, to a broader focus on well-being to reflect not just happiness but also other welfare concerns of citizens, and dozens of governments now incorporate well-being metrics in their national statistics. [ 32 ]

Let’s consider the rationale for policies aimed at promoting well-being. In political thought, the modern liberal tradition has tended to assume an optimistic view of human nature and the individual’s capacities for prudent choice. Partly for this reason, the preservation and expansion of individual freedoms, including people’s options, is widely taken to be a central goal, if not the goal, of legitimate governments. People should be freed to seek the good life as they see it, and beyond that the state should, by and large, stay out of the well-being-promotion business.

This vision of the good society rests on empirical assumptions that have been the subject of considerable debate. If it turns out that people systematically and predictably err in the pursuit of their interests, then it may be possible for governments to devise policies that correct for such mistakes. [ 33 ] Of course, government intervention can introduce other sorts of mistakes, and there is some debate about whether such measures are likely to do more harm than good (e.g., Glaeser 2006).

But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that influence or even constrain choices in ways that make serious mistakes less likely. (Food culture and its impact on health may be an instructive example here.) The idea that people tend to fare best when their lives are substantially constrained or guided by their social and physical context has recently been dubbed contextualism ; the contrary view, that people do best when their lives are, as much as possible, determined by the individuals themselves, is individualism (Haybron 2008b). Recent contextualists include communitarians and many perfectionists, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism and even libertarian political morality. Contextualism about the promotion of well-being is related to recent work in moral psychology that emphasizes the social character of human agency, such as situationism and social intuitionism. [ 34 ]

Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has been a major subject of debate, both because of the literature on mistakes and research suggesting that the traditional focus of state efforts to promote well-being, economic growth, has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness. One concern is paternalism : does happiness-based policy infringe too much on personal liberty? Some fear a politics that may too closely approximate Huxley’s Brave New World, where the state ensures a drug-induced happiness for all (Huxley 1932 [2005]). Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Efforts to steer choice, for instance in favor of retirement savings, may be paternalistic, but advocates argue that such policies can be sufficiently light-handed that no one should object to them, in some cases even going so far as to deem it “libertarian paternalism” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). [ 35 ] The idea is that gentle “nudges,” like setting default options on hiring forms to setting aside money for retirement, interfere only trivially with choice, imposing little or no cost for those who wish to choose differently, and would very likely be welcomed by most of those targeted.

Also relatively light-handed, and perhaps not paternalistic at all, are state efforts to promote happiness directly through social policy, for instance by prioritizing unemployment over economic growth on the grounds that the former has a larger impact on happiness. Other policies might include trying to reduce commute times, or making walkable neighborhoods and green space a priority in urban planning, again on happiness grounds. Some may deem such measures paternalistic insofar as they trade freedom (in the form of economic prosperity) for a substantive good, happiness, that people value unevenly, though it has also been argued that refusing to take citizens’ values like happiness into consideration in policy deliberation on their behalf can amount to paternalism (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013).

A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities (Rawls 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Quong 2011, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that policies aimed at promoting happiness or well-being violate commonly accepted requirements of “liberal neutrality,” according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good. According to this constraint, governments must not promote any view of the good life, and happiness-based policy might be argued to flout it. Worries about paternalism also surface here, the idea being that states should only focus on affording people the option to be happy or whatever, leaving the actual achievement of well-being up to the autonomous individual. As we just saw, however, it is not clear how far happiness policy initiatives actually infringe on personal liberty or autonomy. A further worry is that, happiness isn’t really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008).

But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice . What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy. Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity (in the form of resources or capabilities, say) to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation. However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments’ overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.

However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• World Database of Happiness , Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
• Positive Psychology Center , University of Pennsylvania.
• The Happiness and Well-Being Project , with Suggested Readings and links to Funded Research , Saint Louis University.

Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Bentham, Jeremy | character, moral: empirical approaches | communitarianism | consequentialism | economics: philosophy of | emotion | ethics: ancient | ethics: virtue | hedonism | Kant, Immanuel | liberalism | Mill, John Stuart | moral psychology: empirical approaches | pain | paternalism | Plato | pleasure | well-being

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, many thanks are due to Anna Alexandrova, Robert Biswas-Diener, Thomas Carson, Irwin Goldstein, Richard Lucas, Jason Raibley, Eric Schwitzgebel, Stephen Schueller, Adam Shriver, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous referee for the SEP. Portions of Section 2 are adapted from Haybron 2008, “Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , and used with kind permission of Guilford Press.

Copyright © 2020 by Dan Haybron < dan . haybron @ slu . edu >

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A Better Way to Pursue Happiness

We all want to be happy. And science shows that happiness not only feels great but also predicts better physical health and even a higher paycheck .

But how do we pursue happiness effectively? After all, some recent scientific research actually cautions us against the pursuit of happiness. For instance, a study led by Iris Mauss, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, found that people instructed to feel happier while watching a pleasant film clip ended up feeling worse than people instructed just to watch the clip. Findings like this are echoed in the popular press: Writer Ruth Whippman argued in a recent New York Times piece that the pursuit of happiness is a “recipe for neurosis.”

But is this the whole story? Are we doomed to fail at the pursuit of happiness?

It depends. The difference between effectively and ineffectively pursuing happiness may all be in how we go about it. Research suggests that people who strive to feel happy all of the time may suffer disappointment, and people who pursue happiness as if it were the only thing that matters may, ironically, chase happiness away. 

But these are not the only ways you can go about pursuing happiness. Another approach involves what I call “prioritizing positivity”: deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains situations that naturally give rise to positive emotions. This way of pursuing happiness involves carving out time in your daily routine to do things that you genuinely love, whether it be writing, gardening, or connecting with loved ones. Prioritizing positivity also involves heavily weighing the positive emotional consequences of major life decisions, like taking a new job, which have implications for the daily situations in which you will regularly find yourself. This way of pursuing happiness means proactively putting yourself in contexts that spontaneously trigger positive emotions. 

For years I’ve studied prioritizing positivity, and through scientific research, I’ve found that it goes hand-in-hand with optimal mental health. That is, the people who pursue happiness by seeking out pleasant experiences as part of their everyday lives are happier. In stark contrast, people who strive to feel good every possible moment, as if it were possible to will oneself to be happy, appear to be following a recipe for unhappiness.

To test whether people are happier if they proactively seek out pleasant experiences as part of the framework for their everyday lives, I developed a prioritizing positivity scale to measure this tendency. The scale asks people how much they agree with statements such as, “What I decide to do with my time outside of work is influenced by how much I might experience positive emotions,” “My major decisions in life are influenced by how much I might experience positive emotions,” and “A priority for me is experiencing happiness in everyday life.” Together with Barbara Fredrickson and Sara Algoe, both professors of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I hypothesized that people who scored higher on prioritizing positivity would be happier and less depressed. Why did we predict this? One reason is that prioritizing positivity involves monitoring one’s daily itinerary, not one’s moment-to-moment emotional experience. As research has revealed, the mere act of monitoring one’s happiness from one second to the next may get in the way of positive emotions. By contrast, we thought a more effective strategy would be “situation selection,” which involves approaching (or avoiding) situations that naturally trigger certain emotions. Going for a walk with your partner after dinner is one way you might use situation selection to experience a feeling of tranquility. The tendency to prioritize positivity draws upon this strategy.

We also predicted that prioritizing positivity would predict greater happiness and fewer symptoms of depression because of its relevance to daily life. The “highs” we get from one-time events like going on vacation or winning a prize wear off over time. As a result, effectively pursuing happiness may require engaging regularly in behaviors that promote happiness. By its nature, prioritizing positivity increases the chance that we will weave these positive behaviors into our daily lives rather than just maintaining a general desire for happiness or expecting it to come from a few isolated events.

To test our hypothesis that people high in prioritizing positivity would be happier and less depressed, we ran a study surveying more than 200 adults, ranging in age from 21 to 87. The adults completed the prioritizing positivity scale, as well as questionnaires measuring their levels of positive emotions, negative emotions, symptoms of depression, and life satisfaction.

We also administered a questionnaire measuring the extent to which they value happiness to an extreme, obsessive degree—they had to indicate how much they agreed with statements such as, “How happy I am at any given moment says a lot about how worthwhile my life is” and “I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness.” This scale measures a way of relating to happiness that previously has been shown by Iris Mauss and her colleagues to predict less happiness and more symptoms of depression. Our team wanted to replicate this effect and also pit prioritizing positivity against the extreme valuing of happiness. Would only one of them be positively related to emotional well-being?

More on Real Happiness

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Discover four ways that too much happiness can hurt you .

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Take our quiz to measure how much you identify with your neighborhood, nation, and humanity.

Indeed, that’s what the data told us. Our results, published recently in the journal Emotion , show that people who scored higher on the prioritizing positivity scale felt more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, more life satisfaction, and fewer depressive symptoms than people who scored lower on that scale. People who scored higher on valuing happiness to an extreme showed the opposite pattern: They felt fewer positive emotions, more negative emotions, less life satisfaction, and more depressive symptoms. Both tendencies place a premium on happiness, yet one appears to be effective and healthy whereas the other does not.

So what are the real-world implications of these findings? The science on the deliberate pursuit of happiness is young, so any prescriptions for happiness must be offered with the caveat that the research is still evolving and conclusions might be subject to change. So far, however, I do have some speculations, based on my research, about how people might more effectively pursue happiness.

First, let go of extreme ways of relating to your happiness. Don’t set the unrealistic goal of feeling positive emotions all—or even most—of the time. Just because you’re striving to experience happiness doesn’t mean you should be striving to feel joy, contentment, gratitude, peace (or any other flavor of positive emotion) every second of the day. This is unrealistic, because life invariably contains hassles and disappointments—and, for many, chronic stress. The negative emotions that arise from negative life events, big or small, are natural and help us better understand ourselves—they provide vital information about what we value and what might need to change in our lives. For instance, feeling a wave of anxiety about your physical health may actually motivate you to improve your dietary habits.

Letting go of wanting to feel happy all the time also encourages less self-consciousness about happiness. This may be helpful because many peak, pleasant experiences, characterized by total absorption in an activity, a phenomenon known as “flow,” are marked by a lack of self-awareness.

Second, reflect on the activities that give you joy or contentment. This thought experiment should be highly personalized. For some, the activities that spark happiness are cooking elaborate meals and attending public lectures. For others, the activities are watching basketball and going to their children’s soccer practices. (If you have trouble coming up with ideas, here are two activities that, research has shown, elicit positive emotions in most people: connecting with a loved one and doing something physically active.)

Finally, once you think of a couple of activities, schedule them into your upcoming week. To ensure that you actually do them, consider transforming the activity into a social obligation. If running is something you enjoy, set up a specific time to go running with a friend, so that you’re more likely to follow through. Repeatedly incorporate these activities into your daily life; they don’t have to assume large blocks of your time. If carving out even 20 minutes each day to read a novel inserts a dose of tranquility into your life, then incorporate this ritual into your daily routine.

The pursuit of happiness is not easy. If people attempt it with unrealistic expectations and too much attention, they risk sabotaging it. But this doesn’t mean you should give up on trying to be happy. It may be more effective to adjust your daily routine so that it includes activities that naturally spark interest or contentment. Seeking happiness, although a delicate art, may still be a worthwhile pursuit.

About the Author

Lahnna catalino.

Lahnna Catalino, Ph.D. is postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. She studies the role of positive emotions and emotion regulation in the promotion of well-being and physical health.

Psychology of Happiness: A Summary of the Theory & Research

Little did I know the overwhelming depth of this topic! I found myself asking questions – can science explain happiness?

Can happiness be measured? What is happiness, anyway?

Arguably, a lot has been written on the topic of happiness , including on this website. The following provides an exploration of happiness, and, importantly, it provides you with links to further resources on this important topic.

Keep reading to discover a range of topics including the main theories of happiness, and a fascinating look at the neuroscience of happiness, as well as an interesting discussion on topics such as subjective wellbeing (the more scientific term for happiness), what positive psychology has to say about happiness, success and happiness, and more. Hopefully, it will answer some questions about happiness. Please enjoy!

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Happiness & Subjective Wellbeing Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify sources of authentic happiness and strategies to boost wellbeing.

This Article Contains:

A scientific explanation of happiness, a look at the theory and science of happiness, the psychology of happiness, happiness and positive psychology, interesting research and studies, the happiness research institute, the happiness professor, other well-known researchers, articles on success and happiness, 16 most important happiness articles, other recommended journal and scholarly articles (pdf), a take-home message.

What exactly do we mean when we talk about a scientific explanation of happiness? What, in fact, is the science of happiness?

Put very simply, the science of happiness looks at “ what makes happy people happy ” (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018). If you think about it, the subjective nature of happiness makes it incredibly difficult to define and also challenging to measure (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

Let’s look into this further …

In the past

Happiness has been the topic of discussion and debate since the ancient Greek times. Hedonism has a long history (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Science has looked closely at happiness as ‘hedonically’ defined – or, in other words, happiness is the outcome of the pursuit of pleasure over pain (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Aristippus, a Greek philosopher from the 4th century BC claimed happiness was the sum of life’s ‘hedonic’ moments (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Hedonic enjoyment is a state whereby an individual feels relaxed, has a sense of distance from their problems and, can be said to feel ‘happy’ (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Since the days of Aristotle, happiness has been conceptualized as being composed of at least 2 aspects – hedonia (or, pleasure) and eudaimonia (a sense that life is well-lived) (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

In the present

What does science say about this? Well, research has shown that, whilst these two aspects are definitely distinct and that, in ‘happy’ people, both hedonic and eudaimonic components of happiness correspond (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

A study by Kesebir and Diener (2008) report that in happiness surveys , more than 80% of interviewees rated their overall ‘eudaimonic’ life satisfaction as “pretty to very happy” and, at the same time, 80% of people interviewed also rate their current, hedonic ‘mood’ as positive (e.g. giving a rating of 6-7 on a 10-point valence scale, where 5 is ‘hedonically neutral’).

Neuroscientists have made substantial progress into investigating the functional neuroanatomy of pleasure (which, according to Kringelbach and Berridge 2010, makes an important contribution to our experience of happiness and plays a key role in our sense of wellbeing).

Pleasure has, for many years in the discipline of psychology, been closely associated with happiness (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

According to Sigmund Freud (1930), people: ‘ strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure ’ (p. 76).

Kringelbach and Berridge (2010) argue that the neuroscience of both pleasure and happiness can be found by studying hedonic brain circuits. This is because, according to most modern perspectives, pleasure is an important component of happiness.

Does this provide the opportunity to ‘measure’ happiness, therefore providing a scientific explanation of happiness?

In fact, work of neuroscientists has found that pleasure is not merely a sensation, or thought, but rather an outcome of brain activity in dedicated ‘hedonic systems’ (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

All pleasures, from the most fundamental (food, sexual pleasure) right through to higher-order pleasures (e.g. monetary, medical, and altruistic pleasures) seem to involve the same brain systems (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

Some of the hedonic mechanisms are found deep within the brain (the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, and brainstem) and others are located in the cortex (orbitofrontal, cingulate, medial prefrontal and insular cortices) (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

In the future

It can be said, then, that pleasure activated brain networks are widespread. Despite this exciting finding – a brain network for happiness – Kringelbach and Berridge (2010) say that further research is needed to fully comprehend the functional neuroanatomy of happiness.

As well as the findings from neuroscience supporting an anatomical basis to happiness, another component of a scientific explanation of happiness is the issue of measurement.

Can happiness be measured?

Some individuals argue that maybe happiness should not be the subject of scientific explanation because it is impossible to objectively measure it (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Perhaps, though, as argued by Ed Diener, happiness is subjective. According to Ed Diener, people are happy if they think they are, and each person is the best judge of whether they are, in fact, happy or not (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

He introduced a term to describe this ‘measure’ of happiness: Subjective wellbeing .

Having the measure of subjective wellbeing makes a scientific explanation of happiness possible… by asking questions such as:

• Are you happy?
• How would you rate your happiness on a scale of 1 – 10

Controlled experiments can be devised to determine what can be done to raise/lower these responses.

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) has been valuable in the assessment of subjective wellbeing. It has been a positive development in the science of happiness.

ESM provides an overall indication of wellbeing over time, based on the total balance of measurement of positive and negative affect at different times (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Diener provided evidence that subjective wellbeing has “construct validity” meaning that, yes, it is measuring something ‘real’! This is because Diener showed that subjective wellbeing is constant over time, is highly correlated with some personality traits and has the capacity to predict future outcomes.

Diener and colleagues suggest that it is possible to measure happiness using valid, reliable methods including using instruments, looking at observable indicators of happiness such as smiling behavior, and objective reports from one’s friends and family (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Nevertheless, many critics have opposed the concept of subjective wellbeing, including psychologist Michael Argyle (2001). Argyle states

“the main weakness of subjective measure is that they are affected by cognitive biases such as the effects of expectation and adaptation so that we don’t know how far to believe the scores”

However, other researchers have developed several well-validated scales for measuring happiness, supporting its’ validity as a scientific construct.

The Steen Happiness Index (Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, 2005)

Consists of twenty items. Participants read a series of statements and select the one that best describes how they are at the present time. Items indicate three kinds of ‘happy life’ – the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life.

These dimensions will be explored closely very soon!

Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999)

Consists of four items to assess global subjective happiness. The participants read four statements, including ‘In general, I consider myself…’ and the individual then selects an item from 1 to 7 from, for example, ‘not a very happy person’ to ‘a very happy person’.

Test-retest and self-peer correlations have suggested good to excellent reliability, and construct validation studies of convergent and discriminant validity have confirmed the use of this scale to measure the construct of subjective happiness.

Happiness Scale (Fordyce, 1977)

This scale is also referred to as the Emotion Questionnaire as it assesses emotional wellbeing as an indication of perceived happiness. It is comprised of two items. The first is a scale measuring happiness/unhappiness by participants ranking descriptive phrases on a 0 – 10 scale.

The other item making up the test requires participants to give an approximate percentage of time that he/she feels happy, unhappy and neutral. The test has shown to have adequate reliability and validity.

Therefore, evidence from neuroscience, paired with evidence from the measurement of subjective wellbeing, or, happiness, suggest that a scientific explanation of happiness is, in fact, possible.

It is overwhelming to consider what happiness is… where to begin?! Happiness has been the topic of discussion and debate since the ancient Greek times.

In 1973, ‘Psychology Abstracts International’ began listing happiness as an index term (Diener, 1984). However, because happiness is a term that is used widely and frequently, it has various meanings and connotations (Diener, 1984).

The construct of happiness is still evolving, and although challenging to define, it is a construct that can be empirically evaluated through qualitative and quantitative assessment (Delle Fave, Brdar, Freire, Vella-Brodrick & Wissing, 2011). Delle Fave and colleagues (2011) noted that happiness is also an ambiguous term which can have a number of meanings:

• A transient emotion (that is synonymous with joy)
• An experience of fulfillment and accomplishment (characterized by a cognitive evaluation)
• A long-term process of meaning-making and identity development through achieving one’s potential and the pursuit of subjectively relevant goals.

Historically, since the days of Aristotle, happiness has been conceptualized as being composed of at least 2 aspects – hedonia (or, pleasure) and eudaimonia (a sense that a life is well-lived) (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

Research has shown that, whilst these two aspects are definitely distinct, that in ‘happy’ people, both hedonic and eudaimonic components of happiness correspond (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010).

A study by Kesebir and Diener (2008) report that in happiness surveys, more than 80% of interviewees rated their overall ‘eudaimonic’ life satisfaction as “pretty to very happy” and, at the same time, 80% of the people interviewed also rate their current, hedonic ‘mood’ as positive (e.g. giving a rating of 6-7 on a 10-point valence scale, where 5 is ‘hedonically neutral’).

Moving forward into the modern era, there is some agreement about the aspects that make up theories of happiness. There are, according to Haybron (2003), when looking at theories of happiness, 3 basic views:

• Hedonism – in other words, to be happy is to experience, on the whole, a majority of pleasure. Hedonia.
• Life-satisfaction view – to be happy is to have a favorable attitude about one’s life as a whole, either over its entirety or just over a limited period of time. Eudaimonia.
• Affective state theory – that happiness depends on an individual’s overall emotional state.

Other theories of happiness are so-called ‘hybrid’ theories that combine the life satisfaction theory with other hedonistic or affective-state theories (Haybron, 2003). One of these hybrid theories is the one that is the most widely accepted theory of happiness: subjective wellbeing (Haybron, 2003). Subjective wellbeing is considered to be a more scientific term than happiness.

A closer look at hedonia

Hedonism has a long history (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Science has looked closely at happiness as ‘hedonically’ defined – or, in other words, the pursuit of pleasure over pain (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Aristippus, a Greek philosopher from the 4th century BC claimed happiness was the sum of life’s ‘hedonic’ moments (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Hedonic enjoyment is a state whereby an individual feels relaxed, has a sense of distance from their problems and, can be said to feel ‘happy’ (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Hedonia refers, in simple terms, to the pursuit of pleasure. It was argued by Hobbes that happiness is found in the successful pursuit of our human appetites, and DeSade went on to say that the pursuit of sensation and pleasure is the ultimate goal of life (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

The Utilitarian philosophers, including Bentham, put forth the argument that a good society is one which is developed out of individuals attempting to maximize pleasure and pursue self-interest (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

It should be clarified that hedonia, in respects to happiness, does not have the same meaning as physical hedonism: happiness can come not only from short-term pleasure, but can also arise from achieving goals or other valued outcomes (Ryan & Deci, 2001). So-called hedonic psychologists are of the belief that happiness can include the preferences and pleasures of the mind, as well as the body (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Kahneman (1999) defined hedonic psychology as the study of “what makes experiences and life pleasant and unpleasant” (p. ix). Within the framework of hedonic psychology, the terms wellbeing and hedonism are used interchangeably (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Hedonic psychology explains wellbeing in terms of pleasure versus pain, and it, therefore, becomes the center of much research and also interventions that principally aim to enhance human happiness (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Hedonic psychology has been a focus of the theory of happiness, in part, due to the links between hedonia and other dominant theories. For example, hedonia ties in with behavioral theories of reward and punishment, as well as theories that focus on the cognitive expectations of the outcomes of reward and punishment (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Despite there being a variety of ways to consider the human experience of pleasure/pain, the majority of research in hedonic psychology looks into the assessment of subjective wellbeing. To introduce the term, briefly, subjective wellbeing (or ‘happiness’) consists of three components (Ryan & Deci, 2001):

• Life satisfaction
• The presence of a positive mood
• The absence of a negative mood

Elsewhere in this website, you can read more about eudaimonia and the Aristotelian view of happiness . For the purpose of exploring theories of happiness, I will briefly look at eudaimonia now:

What is eudaimonia? (The life satisfaction view of happiness)

Aristotle argued that, because of man’s unique capacity to reason, pleasure alone cannot achieve happiness – because animals are driven to seek pleasure, and man has greater capacity than animals (The Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

In striving for happiness, the most important factor is for a person to have ‘complete virtue’ – in other words, to have good moral character (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Eudaimonia was, according to Aristotle, “activity expressing virtue” that will therefore lead to a happy life. Aristotle proposed that happiness was neither virtue, or pleasure, but rather the exercise of virtue.

The argument taken by the Aristotelian view is that happiness, per se, is not the principal criterion of wellbeing (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Proponents of this view see wellbeing as achieved by people living in accordance with the ‘daimon’ (true self). (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Eudaimonic theories of happiness argue that rather than the pursuit of pleasure, happiness is the result of the development of individual strengths and virtues (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

The theory of eudaimonic happiness has its basis in the concept of the self-actualising individual (proposed by Maslow ) and the concept of the ‘fully functioning person’ (Rogers) (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). Many modern scientific explanations of happiness are conducive with the theory of eudaimonic happiness.

For example, Waterman suggested that happiness is enhanced by people acting in accordance with their most deeply held values (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). Waterman also introduced the term ‘personal expressiveness’ to describe the state of authenticity that occurs when people’s activities reflect their values.

The eudaimonic theory of happiness adopts the Self-Determination Theory to conceptualize happiness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). This theory argues that fulfillment in the areas of autonomy and competence will enhance happiness. In other words, this view suggests that subjective wellbeing (i.e. happiness) can be achieved through engaging in eudaimonic pursuits (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Affective state theory

To recap, this theory of happiness proposes that happiness is the result of one’s overall emotional state. Bradburn (1969) put forward the argument that happiness is made up of two separate components that are quite independent and uncorrelated: positive affect and negative affect. According to Bradburn, happiness is a global judgment people make by comparing their negative affect and positive affect (Diener, 1984).

This led to the development of the Affect Balance Scale (Diener, 1984). The Bradburn Affect Balance Scale is a self-report measure of the quality of life. The scale is made up of descriptions of ten mood states (for example, item one is feeling “particularly excited or interested in something”), and the subject reflects upon whether they have been in that mood state during the last week.

A measure of the quality of life, as an indication of happiness, is derived by the sum of the ‘negative’ items are taken away from the sum of the ‘positive’ items (Diener, 1984).

Affect state theory also takes the view that the absence of negative affect is not the same thing as the presence of positive affect (Diener, 1984).

Theories developed by positive psychologists

The discipline of positive psychology has developed some unique theories of happiness. For example, Seligman (2002) introduced the Authentic Happiness theory. This theory is based around the notion that authentic happiness results from a person living according to their ‘signature strengths’ which develop as people become aware of their own personal strengths and take ownership of them (Seligman, 2002).

Another theory of happiness is Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ theory. Flow may be defined as “ the state of engagement, optimal happiness, and peak experience that occurs when an individual is absorbed in a demanding and intrinsically motivating challenge ” (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008, p. 395). This state of engagement has been proposed to be a pathway to happiness (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Some psychologists suggest that perhaps, in fact, happiness is relative – or, in other words, it is an evaluation of subjective judgments about one’s situations, comparing others’ situations to one’s own or even one’s earlier situations, goals or aspirations (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). This argument has, however, been refuted.

Veenhoven explains that comparison may affect the cognitive or life-satisfaction aspects of happiness, but that the affective component results from hedonic experience (meeting one’s fundamental needs) and is therefore quite separate of any comparisons (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

To summarise these related topics – the scientific explanation of happiness and the theory and science of happiness – there are a number of theories conceptualizing happiness and in keeping with these theories, the term can have slightly different meanings.

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Way back in 1929, Walter A. Pitkin wrote ‘ The Psychology of Happiness ’ and in this book, he differentiated between happiness and related emotions including pleasure and enjoyment (Samuel, 2019). He argued that achieving happiness was not merely the result of luck or chance. Since this time, psychologists have continued to try and define happiness.

According to psychology, happiness is about more than simply the experience of a positive mood. In order to describe happiness, psychologists commonly refer to subjective wellbeing (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). In other words, happiness is “ people’s evaluations of their lives and encompasses both cognitive judgments of satisfaction and affective appraisals of moods and emotions ” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008, p. 118).

The psychological inquiry into happiness is important because happiness is not only associated with improved physical health and even longevity, but it is also a priority for people – across the world, happiness has been rated as being more important than other desirable outcomes including living a meaningful life or making a lot of money (Psychology Today, 2019).

There are three ways that psychologists study happiness:

1. Need and goal satisfaction theories

These theories suggest that happiness results from striving to achieve appropriate goals and meeting one’s fundamental human needs (Nelson, Kurtz & Lyubomirsky, in press). Deci and Ryan (2000) for example, proposed Self-determination Theory, which stipulates that wellbeing is achieved when one meets their basic human needs including autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

2. Genetic and personality predisposition theories

These propose that wellbeing is influenced by genes, and is associated with the personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism (Nelson et al., in press). This, in turn, implies that wellbeing does not change much over time.

3. Process/activity theories

Process/activity theories argue that wellbeing may be improved by participating in activities that are engaging and require effort (Nelson et al., in press).

Psychologists ask the question, ‘is it possible to increase one’s happiness?’. Some psychologists claim that making an attempt to enhance happiness is pointless because happiness levels are predetermined and stable over time (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Consistent with this argument is the happiness set point. The happiness set point argues that a person’s state of happiness will be constant over time, regardless of changes in circumstances (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Adapting to environmental changes is termed ‘the hedonic treadmill ’ or ‘homeostatic control’ (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). This notion of adaptation (leading to relatively stable levels of happiness) is supported by findings in research that individuals who may be high in either positive or negative affect (e.g. lottery winners, paralysis victims) demonstrate that their happiness levels revert to their ‘usual’ range after a period of time (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Some psychologists argue that the happiness set point provides evidence that happiness cannot be enhanced (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). There is a perspective taken by some psychologists that happiness is a ‘trait’ or a personal disposition to experience a certain affect.

This perspective suggests that happiness is relatively stable over time, and therefore efforts to increase happiness are futile (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008). However, research has shown that although subjective wellbeing may be associated with personality traits (e.g. extraversion), that differences in reports of happiness levels over time suggest that, in fact, happiness is not a trait (Norrish & Vella-Brodrick, 2008).

Thus, happiness has been an important area of focus for psychologists. What, then, about the more recent science of happiness…positive psychology?

Positive psychology can be described as a psychology of potential, and what ‘could be’ as compared to what ‘is’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It aims to shift what has historically been the predominant focus of psychology – pathology – to examining the development of positive qualities in individuals and communities (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

In other words, Positive Psychology aims to understand and cultivate the factors that put individuals, communities, and societies in a position where they are able to ‘flourish’ (Fredrickson, 2001).

What does it mean to ‘flourish’? Put simply, it is a state of optimal wellbeing (Fredrickson, 2001). Fredrickson (2001) asked the question “ What role do positive emotions play in positive psychology? ”

Well, as it turns out, happiness can be thought of as experiencing predominantly positive emotions , or affective states, rather than negative ones (Tkach & Lyubomirsky, 2006). Thus, positive emotions are a sign of flourishing, or, in other words, happiness (Fredrickson, 2001). Happiness is central to the assumptions of positive psychology.

Seligman (2011) described the PERMA model of flourishing. This model defines psychological wellbeing in terms of 5 domains:

• P ositive emotions
• E ngagement
• R elationships
• A ccomplishment

For more detail on flourishing and how to achieve it, check out our article on Seligman’s PERMA+ model .

Let’s look at some interesting happiness research! In a large random-assignment experiment, Seligman and colleagues (2005) operationalized then evaluated 5 different happiness interventions.

They found that two of the interventions – writing about three good things the person had experienced each day and why they occurred, and using ‘signature strengths’ in a novel way – made people happier, and less depressed up to six months later! Compared to participants who engaged in the intervention, those in the placebo control group returned to the baseline levels of happiness and depression symptoms after just one week!

Lyubomirsky and colleagues (2006) conducted three studies examining the effects of writing, talking and thinking about significant life events – ‘triumphs and defeats’. While the majority of psychological research has focused on the way in which negative life circumstances are processed and managed, this unique study looked at the processing a positive life experience (Lyubomirsky, Sousa & Dickerhoof, 2006). This aspect of the study involved participants reflecting on their happiest day.

The researchers found that when participants thought while ‘replaying’ their happiest moment, it resulted in enhanced personal growth, improvements in general health and physical functioning, as well as lower pain levels, compared to the outcomes if the person was writing while analyzing their happiest moments.

The findings of the study suggest that people should be advised against over-analyzing or trying to make sense of a happy experience. Rather, Lyubomirsky and associates suggest that individuals should feel content in reliving and savoring happy experiences rather than trying to understand their meanings or causes.

Even though the experience of happiness is related to greater wellbeing and psychological health, in fact, some studies have shown that the desire to feel happy in an extreme form, or even simply placing a high value on happiness, can be detrimental in terms of wellbeing. In fact, in a research study by Ford and colleagues (2014), it was found that the emphasis placed upon attaining happiness can present a risk factor for symptoms and even a diagnosis of depression.

In a study of 181 participants, Sheldon et al. (2010) conducted a 6-month longitudinal experiment that sought to increase the happiness levels of those in the ‘treatment’ condition. The treatment group set goals to increase their feelings of autonomy, competence or relatedness in life while the comparison group set out to improve their life experiences.

In fact, it was found that those individuals in the treatment group had sustained increases in happiness (Sheldon et al., 2010). However, this gain lasted only while the individuals were actively engaged with the goals.

Interestingly, those who initially had a positive attitude towards change in happiness experienced greater benefits from the treatment! (Sheldon et al., 2010).

What, do you ask, is the Happiness Research Institute ? Well, it is an independent ‘think tank’ developed to investigate the reasons that some societies are happier than others.

The Happiness Research Institute aims to provide relevant parties with up-to-date information about the origins and effects of happiness, as well as to draw attention to subjective wellbeing as an important area for public policy debate. Furthermore, the Institute aims to improve the quality of life of all people.

The Happiness Research Institute provides knowledge, consultancy, and presentations. An example of the knowledge-building activities carried out by the Institute was that, in 2018, the Happiness Research Institute, in conjunction with the Nordic Council of Ministers compiled a study that was called ‘In the shadow of happiness’.

The study examined the reasons why some people living in Nordic countries are happy whilst others are suffering or struggling. The research also involved an analysis of why some groups within this cluster are struggling more often, and the impact this has on society.

In terms of consultancy, the Happiness Research Institute has also worked with groups including the Danish government, the Minister of State for Happiness in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the city of Goyang in South Korea. The aim of these partnerships is to improve quality of life and wellbeing of citizens.

Presentations by the Happiness Research Institute have taken place globally and featured at more than 1000 international events to share knowledge about what drives happiness, wellbeing, and quality of life.

The Happiness Research Institute analyses the somewhat separate components of the different cognitive, affective and eudaimonic dimensions of happiness, wellbeing and quality of life in order to explore these complex concepts. As previously explained, the cognitive dimension refers to the appraisal of overall life satisfaction, while the affective dimension focuses on the emotions that people experience on a daily basis.

Finally, the eudaimonic dimension looks at Aristotle’s perception of the ‘good life’ and is centered on purpose and meaning.

The reason that the Happiness Research Institute measures happiness is in order to shift policy priorities and therefore try and improve quality of life in societies, that will facilitate, in turn, the achievement of goals such as longevity and productivity. The Institute focuses not on the factors that cannot be changed (i.e. genetics, biology) but rather policies (that can be changed over time) and behavior (that can be changed immediately).

By examining the policies related to overall life satisfaction (i.e. the cognitive dimension of happiness) the Happiness Research Institute can explain 75% of the variance between more than 150 countries which were included in the 2018 World Happiness Report. The Institute also hopes to highlight the overlooked dimension of inequality in wellbeing, and increase the awareness and understanding of this inequality. The Happiness Research Institute is accessible via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Meik Wiking is the CEO.

Professor Paul Dolan was coined ‘the happiness professor’ in The Telegraph in July, 2018. Professor Dolan is the Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a leading expert in the fields of human behaviour and happiness.

Prof Dolan wrote the best-selling book , Happiness by Design and, more recently, Happy Ever After . His work is centred around two themes:

• The development of measures of happiness and subjective wellbeing that can then be used in policy, and by individuals who are looking to be happier.
• Utilising work from behavioural science that can be used to understand and change individual behaviour, and contribute more to this evidence base.

What would positive psychology be without its founding fathers , and other famous contributors?

Martin Seligman:

Dr. Seligman was born in 1942, and is credited as being the ‘father of Positive Psychology’ (The Pursuit of Happiness, 2018). Seligman suggests that there are three kinds of happiness:

• Pleasure and gratification
• Embodiment of strengths and virtues
• Meaning and purpose

One can remember that, as discussed earlier, happiness – or, subjective wellbeing – had three similar, distinct components like Seligman suggested. In his book , Authentic Happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment , Seligman (2002) says:

‘[Positive Psychology] takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose’

Seligman also wrote a book titled Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life . He is an acclaimed author, and psychologist, also known for his work on ‘learned helplessness’ which has been popular within the discipline of psychology.

Michael W. Fordyce

Fordyce (December 14, 1944 – January 24, 2011) was a pioneer in the subject of happiness research (Friedman, 2013). In 1977, in the journal Social Indicators Research, the Fordyce Happiness Scale was published. In his multitude of research, Fordyce demonstrated that happiness can be measured statistically, and that also, by engaging in ‘volitional behavior’, happiness can also be deliberately increased (Friedman, 2013).

Diener was born in 1946, and is also known as ‘Dr. Happiness’ (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018). He is a leading researcher in the field of positive psychology. Diener is perhaps best known for coming up with the term “subjective wellbeing”, which is the component of happiness that can be empirically measured (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018). Diener believes that happiness has a strong genetic component, and thus is relatively stable. He also developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale.

Sonja Lyubomirsky

Lyubomirsky is a research psychologist who writes the Psychology Today blog titled ‘ The How of Happiness ’ (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2019). She is a professor and vice chair at the University of California, Riverside. Lyubomirsky is the author of two books : The How of Happiness , and The Myths of Happiness .

Daniel Gilbert

Gilbert, a social psychologist, is also referred to as Professor Happiness at Harvard University (Dreifus, 2008). He is in charge of a laboratory that has been set up to investigate the nature of happiness. Gilbert’s main work centres around the fact that relationships with family and friends, and that the time spent investing in these social relationships contribute more to happiness than material possessions (Dreifus, 2008).

He suggests that more pleasure can be found in experiences, rather than goods or objects – perhaps, he argues, because experiences can be shared with others whereas possessions are generally not shared (Dreifus, 2008).

The psychology of happiness – WOBI

Research has suggested that there might be a causal relationship between positive affect and success … that not only does success bring happiness but, interestingly, that a happy person is more likely to achieve success (Psychology of Happiness, 2019). These three articles provide an account of success and happiness:

• Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Does happiness promote career success? Journal of Career Assessment, 16 , 101–116.
• Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131 , 803–855.
• Uusiautti, S. (2013). On the positive connection between success and happiness. International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology , 1–12.

[Reviewer’s update:

Since this post was originally published, additional research has come out suggesting that the original theory at the heart of Uusiautti’s (2013) research doesn’t seem to hold true. As a replacement, you may want to check out the article by Okabe-Miyamoto et al. (2021), who recently found that increasing the variety of experiences to escape the hedonic treadmill may actually result in smaller boosts in wellbeing – not larger ones.]

In recent times, a wealth of research has been published into the topic of happiness, such as:

• Diener, E., Heintzelman, S. J., Kushlev, K., Tay, L., Wirtz, D., Lutes, L. D., & Shigehiro, O. (2017). Findings all psychologists should know from the new science on subjective well-being. Canadian Psychologist, 58 , 87 – 104
• Oerlemans, W. G. M., & Bakker, A. B. (2018). Motivating job characteristics and happiness at work: A multilevel perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103 , 1230 – 1241.
• Kaufman, M., Goetz, T., Lipnevich, A. A., & Pekrun, R. (2018). Do positive illusions of control foster happiness? Emotion, September 20, no pagination specified .
• Hoffman, J., Gander, F., & Ruch, W. (2018). Exploring differences in well-being across occupation type and skill. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 4 , 290 – 303.
• Piff, P. K., & Moskowitz, J. P. (2018). Wealth, poverty, and happiness: Social class is differentially associated with positive emotions. Emotion, 18 , 902 – 905.
• McGuirk, L., Kuppens, P., Kingston, R., & Bastian, B. (2018). Does a culture of happiness increase rumination over failure? Emotion, 18 , 755 – 764.
• Warr, P. (2018). Self-employment, personal values, and varieties of happiness-unhappiness. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 23 , 388 – 401.
• Liao, K Y-H, & Weng, C-Y. (2018). Gratefulness and subjective well-being: Social connectedness and presence of meaning as mediators. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65 , 383 – 393.
• Blanke, E. S., Riediger, M., & Brose, A. (2018). Pathways to happiness are multidirectional: Association between state mindfulness and everyday affective experience. Emotion, 18 , 202 – 211.
• Fuochi, G., Veneziani, C. A., & Voci, A. (2018). Differences in the way to conceive happiness relate to different reactions to negative events. Journal of Individual Differences, 39 , 27 – 38.
• Weber, S., & Hagmayer, Y. (2018). Thinking about the Joneses? Decreasing rumination about social comparison increases well-being. European Journal of Health Psychology, 25 , 83 – 95.
• Felsman, P., Verduyn, P., Ayduk, O., & Kross, E. (2017). Being present: Focusing on the present predicts improvements in life satisfaction but not happiness. Emotion, 17 , 1047 – 1051.
• Tamir, M., Schwartz, S. H., Oishi, S., & Kim, M. Y. (2017). The secret to happiness: Feeling good or feeling right? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146 , 1448 – 1459.
• Phillips, J., De Freitas, J., Mott, C., Gruber, J., & Knobe, J. (2017). True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happiness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 165 – 181.
• Chopik, W. J., & O’Brien, E. (2017). Happy you, healthy me? Having a happy partner is independently associated with better health in oneself. Health Psychology, 36 , 21 – 30.
• Gross-Manos, D., & Ben-Arieh, A. (2017). How subjective well-being is associated with material deprivation and social exclusion on Israeli 12-year-olds. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 87 , 274 – 290.

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

The Positive Psychology Toolkit© is a groundbreaking practitioner resource containing over 500 science-based exercises , activities, interventions, questionnaires, and assessments created by experts using the latest positive psychology research.

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“The best positive psychology resource out there!” — Emiliya Zhivotovskaya , Flourishing Center CEO

Follow the links below to some intriguing research in PDF form!

• How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being? – Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kristin Layous (Access here )
• The How, Why, What, When and Who of Happiness: Mechanisms Underlying the Success of Positive Activity Interventions – Kristin Layous & Sonja Lyubomirsky (Access here )
• Variety is the Spice of Happiness: The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) Model – Kennon M. Sheldon, Julia Boehm, Sonja Lyubomirsky (Access here )
• Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change – Lyubomirsky, S, Sheldon, K M, Schkade, D (Access here )
• A measure of subjective happiness: Preliminary reliability and construct validation – Lyubomirsky, S, Lepper, HS (Access here )
• Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all? – Richard A. Easterlin (Access here )
• Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? – Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (Access here )

This article provides a snapshot of a huge topic which is, in fact, the overarching focus of positive psychology: happiness. It has been shown that subjective wellbeing is the closest thing to a scientific equivalent to happiness, which can be measured. The main feature of this article is that it has provided a range of resources which you can refer to in the future, including 16 key papers published in the last two years.

So, happiness… an elusive phenomenon, which we all seem to strive for. Hopefully this article has provided an overview of what is, undoubtedly, a very important issue. We all strive to be happier.

What is your understanding of happiness? What do you think makes happy people happy? Do you think that happiness can be measured, or, like some argue, do you think it is purely subjective?

What do you think about the recent articles shared? Please feel free to discuss this interesting topic further! I hope you have claimed some important take-home messages on happiness. Thanks for reading!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Happiness Exercises for free .

• Argyle, M. (2001). The Psychology of Happiness . Routledge.
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11 , 227 – 268.
• Delle Fave, A., Brdar, I., Freire, T., Vella-Brodrick, D., & Wissing, M. P. (2011). The eudaimonic and hedonic components of happiness: Qualitative & quantitative findings. Social Indicators Research, 100 , 185 – 207.
• Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95 , 542 – 575.
• Dreifus, C. (2008). The smiling professor. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/science/22conv.html
• Ford, B. Q., Shallcross, A. J., Mauss, I. B., Floerke, V. A., & Gruber, J. (2014). Desperately seeking happiness: Valuing happiness is associated with symptoms and diagnosis of depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 33 , 890 – 905.
• Fordyce, M. W. (1977). Development of a program to increase personal happiness. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 24 , 511 – 521.
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. American Psychologist, 56 , 218 – 226
• Freud, S., & Riviere, J. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents . New York: J Cape & H Smith.
• Friedman, H. L. (2013). The legacy of a pioneering happiness researcher: Michael W. Fordyce (Dec 14, 1944 – Jan 24, 2011). Journal of Happiness Studies, 14 , 363 – 366
• Happiness (2019). In Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/happiness
• Haybron, D. M. (2003). What do we want from a theory of happiness? Metaphilosophy, 34 , 305 – 329
• Kahneman, D. (1999). Objective happiness. In Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwartz (Eds). USA: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Kesebir, P., & Diener, E. (2008). In pursuit of happiness: Empirical answers to philosophical questions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 , 117 – 125.
• Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2010). The Neuroscience of Happiness and Pleasure. Social Research (New York) , 77, 659 – 678.
• Lyubomirsky, S. (2019). Sonja Lyubomirsky. Retrieved from http://www.sonjalyubomirsky.com/
• Lyubomirsky, S., & Lepper, H. S. (1999). A measure of subjective well-being: Preliminary reliability and construct validation. Social Indicators Research, 46 , 137 – 155.
• Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Dickerhoof, R. (2006). The costs and benefits of writing, talking, and thinking about life’s triumphs and defeats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 90, 692 – 708.
• Nelson, S. K., Kurtzy, J. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (in press). What psychological science knows about happiness . In S. J. Lynn, W. O’Donohue & S. Lilienfeld (Eds.) Better, stronger, wiser: Psychological science and well-being. New York: Sage
• Norrish, J. M., & Vella-Brodrick, D. A. (2008). Is the study of happiness a worthy scientific pursuit? Social Indicators Research, 87 , 393 – 407.
• Okabe-Miyamoto, K., Margolis, S., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2021). Is variety the spice of happiness? More variety is associated with lower efficacy of positive activity interventions in a sample of over 200,000 happiness seekers.  The Journal of Positive Psychology.
• Psychology of Happiness (2019). Psychologist World. Retrieved from https://www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/psychology-of-happiness-positive-affect
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52 , 141 – 166.
• Samuel, L. R. (2019). The Psychology of Happiness (Circa 1929). Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/psychology-yesterday/201901/the-psychology-happiness-circa-1929
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the new Positive Psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment . New York, NY: Free Press.
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish . New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
• Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive Psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55 , 5 – 14.
• Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60 , 410 – 421
• Sheldon, K. M., Abad, N., Ferguson, Y., Gunz, A., Houser-Marko, L., Nichols, C. P., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2010). Persistent pursuit of need-satisfying goals leads to increased happiness: A 6-month experimental longitudinal study. Motivation and Emotion, 34 , 39 – 48.
• The Pursuit of Happiness (2019). Retrieved from https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org
• Tkach, C., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). How do people pursue happiness? Relating personality, happiness-increasing strategies and well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7 , 183 – 225.

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What our readers think.

I am impressed by the organization of ideas and materials on happiness. I would be interested to get more materials on happiness if you can supply me, with or refer me to some articles or books.

Hi Mohammad,

Thank you for your kind words and interest in learning more about happiness. I’m glad to hear that you found our resources helpful.

In addition to the article you mentioned, we have a wealth of resources on the psychology of happiness. Here are some additional articles that you may find useful:

– “ The Science of Gratitude: How It Improves Your Health and Happiness “: This article explores the benefits of practicing gratitude, including improved relationships, better physical health, and increased happiness. It also includes practical tips for cultivating gratitude in your daily life. – “ The Power of Positive Self-Talk: How It Can Improve Your Mental Health “: This article explores the benefits of positive self-talk, including increased self-esteem and reduced anxiety. It also provides practical tips for cultivating positive self-talk.

And here are some additional book recommendations on happiness: – “ The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want ” by Sonja Lyubomirsky: This book is based on years of scientific research on the psychology of happiness and provides evidence-based strategies for increasing happiness and life satisfaction. – “ Stumbling on Happiness ” by Daniel Gilbert: This book explores the science of happiness and why humans often struggle to predict what will make them happy. Gilbert provides insight into the psychological processes that influence our happiness and offers practical tips for living a more fulfilling life.

Hope this helps! Kind regards, Julia | Community Manager

Were you happy while typing this article? How did you feel throughout the entire writing process?

in precise… PHENOMENAL SNAPSHOT.

Thank you for the snapshot on the concepts and theories of happiness . It is really helpful for my thesis writing.

Nice article, but incomplete . You should have discusses ed neurobiochemistry. How dopamine , endorphins serotonin & oxytocin are invested by nature in happiness circuitry. How have we evolved to incorporate release of these chemicals through daily activities

Thank you for this article. I’m sure that it’ll help me to defining happiness in my research.

This article is a really informative overview of Happiness, the subject that I believe is the most important driver of life advancement. Focusing on happiness and its pursuit as a positive discipline instead of focusing on ailments and pathologies that need to be “treated” or “cured” to find some happiness is the best approach. I recently published my book, “America, The Happy” addressing the pursuit happiness and its role in American life. I would have liked to have found this piece earlier, but I’ll reference it in my next one. Very good work.

Thank you so much for this overview it’s contributing greatly to my research into happiness.

A Happiness ‘Recipe’ In its rudiments a neuro-anatomy of happiness maps positive affective states of attentive arousal and pleasure to neurological processes, respectively the activity of dopamine and opioid systems. These systems can be hijacked by addictive drugs, but I submit that they can also be conjointly activated by simple cognitive protocols detailed below. This is achieved through opioid/dopamine interactions induced from concurrent contingencies that induce relaxation and attentive arousal. This simple, innocuous, and easily falsifiable procedure is in short a ‘recipe’ for happiness that conforms with commonplace notions that happiness is coextensive with a committed and meaningful life. My work is largely based on the latest iteration of incentive or discrepancy-based models of motivation representative of the work of Dr. Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan. Berridge is a renowned bio-behaviorist and neuroscientist who has contributed significantly to the neuroscience of happiness (see link below) and was kind to vet and endorse the little book I have linked below. My explanation and argument are tiered into three parts, for a lay audience (pp.7-52), an expanded academic version (pp.53-86), and a formal journal article published on the topic in the International Journal of Stress Management. The procedure is a variant of mindfulness practice but entails a new definition of mindfulness based on affective neuroscience. Still, all is moot if the procedure is ineffective. A brief summary of my argument In discrepancy models of motivation (or bio-behaviorism), affect is schedule dependent. VR (variable-ratio) schedules of reinforcement or reward (gaming, gambling, creative behavior) are characterized by moment to moment positive act-outcome discrepancy or uncertainty between what is expected and what actually happens, which parallels the release of the neuro-modulator dopamine that is felt a state of attentive arousal, but not pleasure. However, heightened pleasurable affect as well as heightened attentive arousal is also reported while performing under VR schedules, but only when the musculature is in a state of inactivity or relaxation. Relaxation induces the activity of mid-brain opioid systems and is felt as pleasure. Because dopamine and opioid systems can co-activate each other, concurrent contingencies which induce relaxation (mindfulness protocols) and attentive arousal (purposive or meaningful behavior) will result in a significant spike in affective tone as both dopaminergic and opioid activity will be much higher due to their synergistic effects. The procedure to do this, outlined on pp. 47-52, has several important characteristics. Behavior Analytic- no appeal to events outside of objective behavior. Simple – explained in five minutes, and refutable as quickly. Cognitive Behavioral – coheres to CBT principles, and is structured, brief, and rational. Also, as a layman (though academically trained in behavioral psychology, I am an executive for a tech company in New Orleans), I am most curious to see if this procedure is effective. Formal test is not at first necessary, but informal exposure is since the procedure is simple in aspect but possibly very useful in practice. (But again, I may be wrong!) https://www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing https://www.scribd.com/doc/121345732/Relaxation-and-Muscular-Tension-A-bio-behavioristic-explanation Berridge, Kringelbach article on the neuro-anatomy of happiness https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3008353/ And Holmes’ Article on Meditation and Rest from ‘The American Psychologist’ https://www.scribd.com/document/291558160/Holmes-Meditation-and-Rest-The-American-Psychologist

I am amazed at no mention of BROADEN AND BUILT THEORY by Barb Frederickson, nor of DR PAUL WONG’S POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 2. Thank you for your amazing work.

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The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being

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The pursuit of happiness is a defining theme of the modern era. But what if people aren't very good at it? This and related questions are explored in this book, the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of happiness in the contemporary psychological sense. In these pages, Dan Haybron argues that people are probably less effective at judging, and promoting, their own welfare than common belief has it. For the psychological dimensions of well-being, particularly our emotional lives, are far richer and more complex than we tend to realize. Knowing one's own interests is no trivial matter. As well, we tend to make a variety of systematic errors in the pursuit of happiness. We may need, then, to rethink traditional assumptions about human nature, the good life, and the good society. Thoroughly engaged with both philosophical and scientific work on happiness and well-being, this book will be a definitive resource for philosophers, social scientists, policy makers, and other students of human well-being.

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The pursuit of happiness.

The idea of happiness has become so deeply embedded in American culture that it sometimes disappears from sight.

The idea of happiness has become so deeply embedded in American culture that it sometimes disappears from sight. It is everywhere and nowhere, an implicit assumption that colors a world view, hardly an idea at all. But an idea it very much is, and, if seen from the perspective of the history of ideas, it has a long and impressive pedigree.

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More from this issue, operation public relations, should japan rearm, can labor come back, research reports.

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I became a millionaire at 21 after winning the lottery. It changed my life, but I sometimes felt like a walking ATM.

• Tim Schultz won the lottery in 1999 while working as a gas station attendant when he was 21. 
• Schultz put himself through college and retired immediately, but some of his relationships suffered.
• He said money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can buy you time, opportunities and reduce stress. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Timothy Schultz, who won the Powerball Lottery in 1999. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

A few months before I won the $28 million Powerball jackpot, I had a vivid dream that I'd already won. It felt so real that it convinced me it was going to happen.

It was 1999, and I was a gas station attendant studying part-time at a liberal arts university in Iowa. I lived in my parents' basement, making minimum wage.

I started playing the lottery once or twice weekly, buying a single ticket. I visualized winning and told people about it. They said, "Well if anyone's going to win, you're going to win."

Then I did.

After I won, I was walking on cloud nine

I woke up to my father banging on my bedroom door on February 10, 1999, screaming that someone won the Powerball lottery. He asked whether I purchased a ticket. I immediately remembered telling several people I had the winning ticket the night before.

I was frantic, rummaging through papers, and eventually found the ticket crumpled in a little ball. After unraveling it, I ran upstairs to the kitchen and compared the numbers to those in the newspaper.

When they matched, it felt like I was still dreaming. My father hugged me, and we jumped up and down like kids in a candy store.

I called my mom, who initially thought I was joking. We also called financial advisors and attorneys. They said to put the ticket somewhere secure and set up a time to redeem it at the lottery office; I felt like I was walking on cloud nine.

A press conference announced I had won the $28 million Powerball lottery. After that, our phone was inundated with messages. People I knew congratulated me, but there were stacks of letters from strangers, some of whom asked for money.

At the press conference itself, I felt like a deer in headlights. It was exhilarating and terrifying. I'd never been the center of attention for millions of people. However, part of me enjoyed it. I think it helped inspire my pursuit of broadcast news and podcasting.

I'd always imagined what I'd do if I ever won: pay off debt and put myself through college, but I'd never thought about how it would change my life.

From gas attendant to millionaire

Suddenly, I'd gone from a gas station attendant to retired at 21. I felt like I was holding a magic wand. Everything was possible, but I also wanted to be financially responsible.

Before turning in the ticket, I consulted with wealth professionals to understand how much I could afford to spend and give to others. I helped many people but also wanted to live within my means.

Before I received the money, I set up a plan with advisors to invest it. We invested conservatively so the returns could last me over a lifetime.

Related stories

But as a 21-year-old, the first thing I bought was the latest video game system. A luxury I couldn't afford before winning.

I mostly invested in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds with my money. I helped my family, bought vehicles, and traveled. I went back to college to study film and broadcast journalism, a dream come true.

How it impacted my relationships

I was a struggling college student, just like my peers, and then I became an outlier: the rich kid. At the time, I felt obligated to pay for friends' vacations, meals, or anything we did together.

Most people didn't ask for money, but I felt that I could and, perhaps morally, should pay for them because I had won the lottery.

People were supportive, but some treated me differently. Some tried to get closer to me, which made me feel like a walking, talking ATM. I constantly feared people didn't want to be friends with me for the right reasons. When people didn't change how they behaved around me, I knew I could trust them. I also had family and friends who seemed concerned about how wealth would impact me, which further cemented my trust.

When you win the lottery, people don't view the money as something you've earned. A family member explicitly told me I got something for nothing by winning the lottery and should keep giving them and others money.

I had to learn to say no to stay fisicially responsible. When I put my foot down, it damaged my relationships with some family members who I loved very much.

After winning, I initially felt isolated and lonely. I had a really hard time opening up to new people. My dating life was better before I won the lottery. I moved to a different house in a new state because so many people knew my story, and I felt uncomfortable.

It was a steep learning curve navigating the social aspect of winning the lottery.

How I spent the money

Within the first year of winning, for fun, my friends and I threw a dart at a map and said we'd go wherever the dart landed. It landed in the middle of Canada, so we went on an outdoor adventure trip north.

I retired instantaneously, but I've kept working on passion projects.

After winning the lottery, I thought hard about what makes me happy. Sitting on a beach drinking margaritas is fun, but the novelty wears off.

I needed a reason to wake up in the morning and a goal to achieve. That is why I went back to college to earn a degree, work on several productions, and pursue my desire to entertain and inspire people positively; I love it, and it drives me.

I produced a documentary and a couple of animations, helped with other people's independent films, and created a film festival. I also started my "Lottery, Dreams and Fortune" podcast where I interview other major prize and lottery winners. It's very cathartic for me to meet and interview people and understand their lottery journeys.

These days, I spend most of my free time working on my podcast and YouTube channel or exercising. I'm typically running, lifting weights, or training if I'm not producing a video. YouTube brings in some money, but I can live off my investments.

Reflecting on his win

People ask all the time, "Does money buy happiness?" Money doesn't necessarily change who you are. It can affect happiness by buying time, providing opportunities, and alleviating stress about debt. But it doesn't change who you are. Some very wealthy people are very unhappy as well.

I wish I had invested in bitcoin a few years ago, but that's my only regret about how I've spent the winnings. Shortly after winning, I purchased new vehicles and other big purchases.

These days, I don't buy anything too crazy. Like many people, I live within a budget. If you win hundreds of millions, your budget could be quite different. It's all relative. I am just grateful for what I got.

At 21, I had no idea what to do with that kind of money and was lucky I sought professional guidance. I didn't want to become a statistic of lottery winners going broke within a few years.

While I didn't have a choice in 1999 whether I wanted to claim the prize publicly, knowing where I am now, I wouldn't do it differently. I have spoken to media outlets and can talk about my experiences publicly.

But if I were 21 now and had the option, I would consider claiming the prize anonymously, especially if it was a large prize. You never know what impact that would have on your life.

When you win the lottery, your whole world instantly turns upside down. I encourage people to play responsibly; it only takes one ticket for a chance, but anything is possible.

Watch: How Elon Musk makes and spends his billions

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Pursuit of Happiness Analysis

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About this sample

Words: 630 |

Published: Mar 25, 2024

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Taylor Swift: a Musical Phenomenon

This essay about Taylor Swift’s remarkable achievements in the music industry and beyond. It highlights her unparalleled success in album sales, songwriting, and connection with her audience. Swift’s ability to craft deeply personal lyrics and melodies has earned her a dedicated fanbase and numerous awards. Additionally, her philanthropic efforts and activism showcase her commitment to making a positive impact on the world. Swift’s influence as a musician and advocate transcends generations, solidifying her legacy as one of the most influential figures in contemporary pop culture.

How it works

Taylor Swift, a name that resonates with millions across the globe, stands as a testament to the power of talent, determination, and relentless pursuit of excellence in the realm of music. With a career spanning over two decades, Swift has not only dominated the charts but has also redefined the landscape of contemporary pop music. Her accomplishments are as diverse as they are impressive, cementing her status as one of the most influential figures in the industry today.

At the heart of Taylor Swift’s success lies her remarkable ability to connect with her audience on a deeply personal level.

Through her introspective lyrics and soulful melodies, she has carved out a niche for herself as a storyteller, weaving tales of love, heartbreak, and self-discovery that resonate with listeners of all ages. Swift’s authenticity and vulnerability have endeared her to millions, earning her a fiercely loyal fanbase that spans generations.

One of Swift’s most notable accomplishments is her record-breaking album sales. With multiple multi-platinum albums to her name, she has consistently topped the charts and shattered numerous records along the way. From her breakout debut album “Taylor Swift” to her critically acclaimed releases such as “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” and “1989,” each album has showcased Swift’s evolution as an artist and solidified her position as a musical powerhouse.

Beyond her commercial success, Taylor Swift has also been recognized for her songwriting prowess. Her ability to craft catchy hooks and poignant lyrics has earned her numerous accolades, including several Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Album of the Year. Swift’s songs have become anthems for a generation, with their universal themes resonating with listeners around the world.

In addition to her musical achievements, Taylor Swift has also made a significant impact in the realms of activism and philanthropy. From advocating for LGBTQ+ rights to supporting causes such as education, disaster relief, and cancer research, Swift has used her platform to effect positive change in the world. Her generosity and compassion have inspired countless fans to join her in making a difference, further solidifying her legacy as not just a musical icon, but also a force for good.

In conclusion, Taylor Swift’s accomplishments are as vast and varied as her talents. From her chart-topping albums to her philanthropic endeavors, she has left an indelible mark on the world of music and beyond. As she continues to evolve as an artist and advocate, one thing remains certain: Taylor Swift’s influence will be felt for generations to come.

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Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon. (2024, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/

"Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon." PapersOwl.com , 1 Jun 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/ [Accessed: 2 Jun. 2024]

"Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon." PapersOwl.com, Jun 01, 2024. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/

"Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon," PapersOwl.com , 01-Jun-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/. [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Taylor Swift: A Musical Phenomenon . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/taylor-swift-a-musical-phenomenon/ [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

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