thesis of happiness

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

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.

• Adler, Matthew D., 2019, Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Adler, M. D., and M. Fleurbaey (eds.), 2015, The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Ahuvia, A., et al., 2015, “Happiness: An Interactionist Perspective,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 5(1): 1–18.
• Alexandrova, A., 2005, “Subjective Well-Being and Kahneman’s ‘Objective Happiness’,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 6: 301–324.
• –––, 2008, “First-Person Reports and the Measurement of Happiness,” Philosophical Psychology , 21(5): 571–583.
• –––, 2017, A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Alexandrova, A. and D. M. Haybron, 2012, “High Fidelity Economics,” in The Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology , W. Hands and J. Davis (eds.). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
• –––, 2016, “Is Construct Validation Valid?,” Philosophy of Science , 83(5): 1098–1109.
• Almeder, R., 2000, Human Happiness and Morality , Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press.
• Andreou, C., 2010, “A Shallow Route to Environmentally Friendly Happiness: Why Evidence That We Are Shallow Materialists Need Not Be Bad News for the Environment(Alist),” Ethics, Place & Environment , 13(1): 1–10.
• Ang, J. M. S., 2019, “Can Existentialists Be Happy? Authentic Life, Authentic Happiness,” Science, Religion and Culture , 6(1): 122–129.
• Angier, T., 2015, “Happiness: Overcoming the Skill Model,” International Philosophical Quarterly , 55(1): 5–23.
• Angner, E., 2009, “The Politics of Happiness,” Philosophy and Happiness , L. Bortolotti (ed.), New York: Palgrave, 1–26.
• –––, 2010, “Are subjective measures of well-being ‘direct’?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 89(1): 115–130.
• –––, 2011, “The Evolution of Eupathics: The Historical Roots of Subjective Measures of Well-Being,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 1(1): 4–41.
• –––, 2013a, “Is it possible to measure happiness?,” European Journal for Philosophy of Science , 3(2): 221–240.
• –––, 2013b, “Is Empirical Research Relevant to Philosophical Conclusions?,” Res Philosophica , 90(3): 365–85.
• –––, 2016, A Course in Behavioral Economics , second edition, London: Palgrave.
• Annas, J., 1993, The Morality of Happiness , New York: Oxford.
• –––, 2011, Intelligent Virtue , New York: Oxford.
• Argyle, M., 1999, “Causes and Correlates of Happiness,” Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology , D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds.). New York: Russell Sage Foundation: 3–25.
• –––, 2002, The Psychology of Happiness , New York: Routledge.
• Austin, A., 2015, “On Well-Being and Public Policy: Are We Capable of Questioning the Hegemony of Happiness?,” Social Indicators Research , 127(1): 1–16.
• Badhwar, N., 2008, “Is Realism Really Bad for You? A Realistic Response,” The Journal of Philosophy , 105(2): 85–107.
• –––, 2014, Well-Being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2015, “Happiness,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being , ed. G. Fletcher, New York: Routledge, 323–35.
• Bagaric, M., and J. McConvill, 2005, “Goodbye Justice, Hello Happiness: Welcoming Positive Psychology to the Law,” Deakin Law Review , 10(1): 1–26.
• Barrow, R., 1980, Happiness and Schooling , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• –––, 1991, Utilitarianism: A Contemporary Statement , Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar.
• Beck, B., and B. Stroop, 2015, “A Biomedical Shortcut to (Fraudulent) Happiness? An Analysis of the Notions of Well-Being and Authenticity Underlying Objections to Mood Enhancement,” Well-Being in Contemporary Society , J. H. Søraker, et al. (eds.), Berlin: Springer, 115–34.
• Becker, L. C., 2012, Habilitation, Health, and Agency , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Belliotti, R. A., 2004, Happiness Is Overrated , New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• –––, 2013, “The Seductions of Happiness,” The Oxford Handbook of Happiness , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Benditt, T. M., 1974, “Happiness,” Philosophical Studies , 25: 1–20.
• –––, 1978, “Happiness and Satisfaction – A Rejoinder to Carson,” The Personalist , 59: 108–9.
• Besser, L. L., 2014, Eudaimonic Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• Besser-Jones, L., 2013, “The Pursuit and Nature of Happiness,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 103–21.
• Billon, A., 2016, “Irrationality and Happiness: A (Neo-) Shopenhauerian Argument for Rational Pessimism,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy , 11(1): 1–27.
• Bishop, M., 2012, “The Network Theory of Well-Being: An Introduction,” The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication , 7: 1–29.
• –––, 2015, The Good Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Biswas-Diener, R., 2018, “The Subjective Well-Being of Small Societies,” Handbook of Well-Being , E. Diener, S. Oishi, and L. Tay (eds.), Salt Lake City: DEF Publishers.
• Biswas-Diener, R., J. Vittersø and E. Diener, 2005, “Most People are Pretty Happy, but There is Cultural Variation: The Inughuit, The Amish, and The Maasai,” The Journal of Happiness Studies , 6(3): 205–226.
• Blackson, T., 2009, “On Feldman’s Theory of Happiness,” Utilitas , 21(3): 393–400.
• Block, N., 1995, “On a Confusion About A Function of Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 18: 227–247.
• Bloomfield, P., 2014, The Virtues of Happiness , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bognar, G., 2010, “Authentic Happiness,” Utilitas , 22(3): 272–284.
• Bok, D., 2010a, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Bok, S., 2010b, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Bortolotti, L. (ed.), 2009, Philosophy and Happiness , New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Bosch, M. van den, and W. Bird, 2018, Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health: The Role of Nature in Improving the Health of a Population , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bramble, B., 2016, “The Experience Machine,” Philosophy Compass , 11(3): 136–45.
• Brandt, R. B., 1959, Ethical Theory , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• –––, 1979, A Theory of the Good and the Right , New York: Oxford.
• –––, 1989, “Fairness to Happiness,” Social Theory & Practice , 15: 33–58.
• –––, 1992, Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Brülde, B., 2007, “Happiness theories of the good life,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 8(1): 15–49.
• –––, 2015, “Well-Being, Happiness and Sustainability,” Well-Being in Contemporary Society , Happiness Studies Book Series, J. H. Søraker, et al. (eds.), Berlin: Springer, 157–76.
• Brannmark, J., 2003, “Leading lives: On happiness and narrative meaning,” Philosophical Papers , 32(3): 321–343.
• Bruni, L., F. Comim, and M. Pugno (eds.), 2008, Capabilities and Happiness , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Buss, S., 2004, “The Irrationality of Unhappiness and the Paradox of Despair,” Journal of Philosophy , CI(4): 171–200.
• Cahn, S. M. and C. Vitrano (eds.), 2008, Happiness: Classical and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy , New York: Oxford.
• –––, 2015, Happiness and Goodness: Philosophical Reflections on Living Well , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Campbell, R., 1973, “The Pursuit Of Happiness,” Personalist , 54: 325–337.
• Capaldi, C. A. et al., 2015, “Flourishing in Nature: A Review of the Benefits of Connecting with Nature and Its Application as a Wellbeing Intervention,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 5(4): 1–16.
• Capuccino, C., 2013, “Happiness and Aristotle’s Definition of Eudaimonia,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 1–26.
• Carson, T. L., 1978a, “Happiness and Contentment: A Reply to Benditt,” The Personalist , 59: 101–7.
• –––, 1978b, “Happiness and the Good Life,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy , 9: 73–88.
• –––, 1979, “Happiness and the Good Life: a Rejoinder to Mele,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy , 10: 189–192.
• –––, 1981, “Happiness, Contentment, and the Good Life,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 62: 378–92.
• Cashen, M, 2012, “Happiness, Eudaimonia, and The Principle of Descriptive Adequacy,” Metaphilosophy , 43(5): 619–35.
• Cavallaro, M., and G. Heffernan, 2019, “From Happiness to Blessedness: Husserl on Eudaimonia, Virtue, and the Best Life,” HORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology , 8(2): 353–388.
• Chappell, T., 2013, “Eudaimonia, Happiness, and the Redemption of Unhappiness,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 27–52.
• Charry, E. T., 2010, God and the Art of Happiness , Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company.
• Chekola, M., 2007, “Happiness, Rationality, Autonomy and the Good Life,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 8(1): 51–78.
• Christakis, N., J. Fowler, Simon, i. Schuster, P. D. Audio and L. Findaway World, 2009, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives , New York: Little, Brown and Co.
• Clark, A., et al., 2018, The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cohen Kaminitz, S., forthcoming, “Looking Good or Feeling Well? Understanding the Combinations of Well-Being Indicators Using Insights from the Philosophy of Well-Being,” Social Indicators Research , online first 12 February 2020. doi:10.1007/s11205-020-02289-9
• David, S., Boniwell, I., and A. Ayers (eds.), 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Happiness , New York: Oxford.
• Davis, W., 1981a, “Pleasure and Happiness,” Philosophical Studies , 39: 305–318.
• –––, 1981b, “A Theory of Happiness,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 18: 111–20.
• de Boer, J., 2014, “Scaling Happiness,” Philosophical Psychology , 27(5): 703–18.
• De Brigard, F., 2010, “If You like It, Does It Matter If It’s Real?,” Philosophical Psychology , 23(1): 43–57.
• de Lazari-Radek, K., and Singer, P., 2014, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Den Uyl, D. and T. R. Machan, 1983, “Recent Work on the Concept of Happiness,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 20: 115–34.
• Diener, E., 2008, “Myths in the Science of Happiness, and Directions for Future Research,” The Science of Subjective Well-Being , M. Eid and R. J. Larsen (eds.), New York: Guilford Press: 493–514.
• Diener, E. and R. Biswas-Diener, 2008, Happiness: unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Diener, E. and C. Diener, 1996, “Most People Are Happy,” Psychological Science , 7(3): 181–185.
• Diener, E., R. E. Lucas, U. Schimmack and J. F. Helliwell, 2009, Well-Being for Public Policy , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Diener, E., R. E. Lucas and C. N. Scollon, 2006, “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being,” American Psychologist , 61(4): 305–314.
• Diener, E., W. Ng, J. Harter and R. Arora, 2010, “Wealth and happiness across the world: Material prosperity predicts life evaluation, whereas psychosocial prosperity predicts positive feeling,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 99(1): 52–61.
• Diener, E. and M. Seligman, 2004, “Beyond Money: Toward an economy of well-being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest , 5(1): 1–31.
• Diener, E. and E. M. Suh (eds.), 2000, Culture and Subjective Well-Being , Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
• Diener, E., E. M. Suh, R. E. Lucas and H. L. Smith, 1999, “Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress,” Psychological Bulletin , 125(2): 276–302.
• Dolan, P., and L. Kudrna, 2016, “Sentimental Hedonism: Pleasure, Purpose, and Public Policy,” Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being , J. Vittersø (ed.), Berlin: Springer, 437–52.
• Dolan, P. and M. P. White, 2007, “How can measures of subjective well-being be used to inform public policy?” Perspectives on Psychological Science , 2(1): 71–85.
• Doris, J. M., 2002, Lack of Character , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2009, “Skepticism about persons,” Philosophical Issues , 19(1): 57–91.
• –––, 2015, Talking to Our Selves , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Easterlin, R. A., 1974, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz , P. A. David and M. W. Reder (eds.), New York: Academic Press.
• –––, 2003, “Explaining Happiness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 100(19): 11176–11183.
• –––, 2005, “Building a Better Theory of Well-Being,” Economics and Happiness , L. Bruni and P. L. Porta (eds.), New York: Oxford, 29–65.
• Ebenstein, A. O., 1991, The Greatest Happiness Principle: An Examination of Utilitarianism , New York: Garland.
• Edgeworth, F. Y., 1881, Mathematical Psychics: an Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences , London: Kegan Paul.
• Eid, M. and R. J. Larsen (eds.), 2008, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , New York: Guilford.
• Elster, J., 1983, Sour Grapes , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, The Manual, and Fragments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
• Euler, S. S., 2019, “Psychological Universals in the Study of Happiness: From Social Psychology to Epicurean Philosophy,” Science, Religion and Culture , 6(1): 130–37.
• Everett, D. L., 2009, Don’t sleep, there are snakes: Life and language in the Amazonian jungle , New York: Random House.
• Feldman, F., 2004, Pleasure and the Good Life , New York: Oxford.
• –––, 2010, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? , New York: Oxford.
• –––, 2019, “An Improved Whole Life Satisfaction Theory of Happiness?,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 9(2):1–7.
• Flanagan, O., 2007, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Flanagan, O., M. Letourneau, and W. Zhao, 2019, “Particulars of Well-Being,” Science, Religion and Culture , 6(1): 1–5.
• Fletcher, G., 2013, “A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory of Well-Being,” Utilitas , 25(2): 206–20.
• Fleurbaey, M., and D. Blanchet, 2013, Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Fogel, R. W., 2005, “Changes in the disparities in chronic diseases during the course of the 20th century,” Perspectives in biology and medicine , 48(1 Supplement): S150-S165.
• Fraser, C., 2013, “Happiness in Classical Confucianism: Xúnzǐ,” E. Minar (ed.), Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 53–79.
• Frederick, S. and G. Loewenstein, 1999, “Hedonic Adaptation,” Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology , D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds.), New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press: 302–29.
• Fredrickson, B. L., 2004, “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 359(1449): 1367–1377
• Fredrickson, B. L. and D. Kahneman, 1993, “Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 65(1): 45–55.
• Fredrickson, B. L. and M. F. Losada, 2005, “Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing,” American Psychologist , 60(7): 678–686.
• Frey, B. S., 2008, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Frumkin, H., 2001, “Beyond toxicity: Human health and the natural environment,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine , 20(3): 234–240.
• Gilbert, D., 2006, Stumbling on Happiness , New York: Knopf.
• Gilovitch, T., D. Griffin and D. Kahneman (eds.), 2002, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Glaeser, E. L., 2006, “Paternalism and Psychology,” University of Chicago Law Review , 73(1): 133–156.
• Goldman, A. H., 2016, “Happiness is an Emotion,” The Journal of Ethics , 21(1): 1–16.
• –––, 2019, Life’s Values: Pleasure, Happiness, Well-Being, and Meaning , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Goldstein, I., 1973, “Happiness: The Role of Non-Hedonic Criteria in Its Evaluation,” International Philosophical Quarterly , 13: 523–34.
• –––, 1981, “Cognitive Pleasure and Distress,” Philosophical Studies , 39: 15–23.
• –––, 1989, “Pleasure and Pain: Unconditional, Intrinsic Values,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 50(2): 255–276.
• Goldstein, I., 2002, “Are emotions feelings? A further look at hedonic theories of emotions,” Consciousness and Emotion , 3(1): 21–33.
• Graham, C., 2009, Happiness around the world: The paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Graham, M., 2017, “A Fate Worse Than Death? The Well-Being of Patients Diagnosed as Vegetative With Covert Awareness,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 20(5): 1–16.
• Griffin, J., 1979, “Is Unhappiness Morally More Important Than Happiness?” Philosophical Quarterly , 29: 47–55.
• –––, 1986, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2000, “Replies,” Well-Being and Morality , R. Crisp and B. Hooker (eds.), New York: Oxford: 281–313.
• –––, 2007, “What Do Happiness Studies Study?” Journal of Happiness Studies , 8(1): 139–148.
• Griswold, C., 1996, “Happiness, Tranquillity, and Philosophy,” Critical Review , 10(1): 1–32.
• Haidt, J., 2001, “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review , 108(4): 814–834.
• Hare, R. M., 1963, Freedom and Reason , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hausman, D. M., 2010, “Hedonism and Welfare Economics,” Economics and Philosophy , 26(3): 321–44.
• –––, 2011, Preferences, Value, Choice, and Welfare , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hausman, D. M. and B. Welch, 2009, “Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 18(1): 123–136.
• Hawkins, J., 2008, “Well-Being, Autonomy, and the Horizon Problem,” Utilitas , 20(2): 1–27.
• –––, 2014a, “Well-Being, Time, and Dementia,” Ethics , 124(3): 507–542.
• –––, 2014b, “Well-Being: What Matters Beyond the Mental?,” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (Volume 4), M. Timmons (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2016, “The Experience Machine and the Experience Requirement,” The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Well-Being , G. Fletcher (ed.), New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2019, “Well-Being, The Self, and Radical Change,” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol 9 , M. Timmons (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 251.
• Haybron, D. M., 2001, “Happiness and Pleasure,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 62(3): 501–528.
• –––, 2003, “What Do We Want from a Theory of Happiness?” Metaphilosophy , 34(3): 305–329.
• –––, 2005, “On Being Happy or Unhappy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 71(2): 287–317.
• –––, 2007, “Do We Know How Happy We Are?” Nous , 41(3): 394–428.
• –––, 2008a, “Happiness, the Self, and Human Flourishing,” Utilitas , 20(1): 21–49.
• –––, 2008b, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being , New York, Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, “Central Park: Nature, Context, and Human Wellbeing,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 1(2): 235–254.
• –––, 2013a, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2013b, “The Proper Pursuit of Happiness,” Res Philosophica , 90(3): 387–411.
• –––, 2014, “Adventures in Assisted Living: Well-Being and Situationist Psychology,” The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness , N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno (eds.), New York: Routledge, 1–25.
• –––, 2016, “Mental State Approaches to Well-Being,” The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy , M. D. Adler & M. Fleurbaey (eds.), New York: Oxford, 347–378.
• Haybron, D. M., and A. Alexandrova, 2013, “Paternalism in Economics,” Paternalism: Theory and Practice , C. Coons and M. Weber (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 157–77.
• Haybron, D. M., and V. Tiberius, 2015, “Well-Being Policy: What Standard of Well-Being?,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 1(4): 712–33.
• Headey, B., 2007, The Set-Point Theory of Well-Being Needs Replacing: On the Brink of a Scientific Revolution? , DIW Berlin: German Institute for Economic Research.
• –––, 2008, “The Set-Point Theory of Well-Being: Negative Results and Consequent Revisions,” Social Indicators Research , 85(3): 389–403.
• Hersch, G., 2015, “Can an Evidential Account Justify Relying on Preferences for Well-Being Policy?,” Journal of Economic Methodology , 22(3): 1–13.
• –––, 2017, “Ignoring Easterlin: Why Easterlin’s Correlation Findings Need Not Matter to Public Policy,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 19(8): 2225–2241.
• –––, 2020, “No Theory-Free Lunches in Well-Being Policy,” The Philosophical Quarterly , 70(278): 43–64.
• Hill, S., 2007, “Haybron on Mood Propensity and Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 10(2): 215–28.
• Hindriks, F., & Douven, I., 2018, “Nozick’s experience machine: An empirical study,” Philosophical Psychology , 31(2): 1–21.
• Ho, S. M., W. Duan, and S. C. Tang, 2014, “The Psychology of Virtue and Happiness in Western and Asian Thought,” The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness , N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno (eds.), New York: Routledge, 223–46.
• Houlden, V., et al., 2018, “The Relationship between Greenspace and the Mental Wellbeing of Adults: A Systematic Review,” PLOS ONE , 13(9): 1–35.
• Hsee, C. K. and R. Hastie, 2006, “Decision and experience: Why don’t we choose what makes us happy?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 10(1): 31–37.
• Hurka, T., 2010, The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Huxley, A., 1932 [2005], Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited , New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• Inglehart, R., R. Foa, C. Peterson and C. Welzel, 2008, “Development, freedom, and rising happiness: A global perspective, 1981–2007” Perspectives on Psychological Science , 3(4): 264–285.
• Inglehart, R. and H.-D. Klingemann, 2000, “Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness,” Culture and Subjective Well-Being , E. Diener and E. M. Suh (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 165–183.
• Intelisano, S., Krasko, J., & Luhmann, M., 2019, “Integrating Philosophical and Psychological Accounts of Happiness and Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 8: 1–40.
• Jebb, A. T., L. Tay, E. Diener, and S. Oishi, 2018, “Happiness, Income Satiation and Turning Points around the World,” Nature Human Behaviour , 2(1): 33–38.
• Joshanloo, M., 2013, “A Comparison of Western and Islamic Conceptions of Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 14(6): 1857–74.
• –––, 2014, “Eastern Conceptualizations of Happiness: Fundamental Differences with Western Views,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 15(2): 475–93.
• Joshanloo, M., and D. Weijers, 2019, “A Two-Dimensional Conceptual Framework for Understanding Mental Well-Being,” PLoS ONE , 14(3): e0214045.
• Kagan, S., 1992, “The Limits of Well-Being,” Social Philosophy and Policy , 9(2): 169–89.
• –––, 1994, “Me and My Life,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 94: 309–324.
• Kahane, Guy, 2011, “Reasons to Feel, Reasons to Take Pills,” Enhancing Human Capacities , J. Savulescu, R. Ter Meulen, and G. Kahane (eds.), Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 166–78.
• Kahneman, D., 1999, “Objective Happiness,” Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology , D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds.), New York: Russell Sage Foundation: 3–25.
• Kahneman, D. and A. Deaton, 2010, “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 107(38): 16489–16493.
• Kahneman, D., E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds.), 1999, Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology , New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press.
• Kahneman, D., B. L. Fredrickson, C. A. Schreiber and D. A. Redelmeier, 1993, “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science , 4(6): 401–405.
• Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky (eds.), 2000, Choices, Values, and Frames , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kauppinen, A., 2013, “Meaning and Happiness,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 161–185.
• Kazez, J., 2007, The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Kekes, J., 1982, “Happiness,” Mind , 91: 358–76.
• –––, 1988, The Examined Life , Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
• –––, 1992, “Happiness,” Encyclopedia of Ethics , L. C. Becker and C. B. Becker (eds.), New York: Garland: 430–435.
• Kellert, S. R. and E. O. Wilson (eds.), 1995, The Biophilia Hypothesis , Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
• Kelman, M., 2005, “Hedonic Psychology and the Ambiguities of ‘Welfare’,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 33(4): 391–412.
• Kenny, A. and C. Kenny, 2006, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility , Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.
• Keyes, C. L., 2002, “The mental health continuum: From languishing to flourishing in life,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior , 43(2): 207–222.
• Kim, R., 2020, Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-Being , New York: Routledge.
• Klausen, S. H., 2015, “Happiness, Dispositions and the Self,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 17(3): 777–780.
• –––, 2019, “Understanding Older Adults’ Wellbeing from a Philosophical Perspective,” Journal of Happiness Studies , online first.
• Kraut, R., 1979, “Two Conceptions of Happiness,” The Philosophical Review , 138: 167–97.
• –––, 2018, The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kristjánsson, K., 2010, “Positive psychology, happiness, and virtue: The troublesome conceptual issues,” Review of general psychology , 14(4): 296.
• –––, 2012, “Positive Psychology and Positive Education: Old Wine in New Bottles?” Educational Psychologist , 47(2): 86–105.
• –––, 2018, “The flourishing–happiness concordance thesis: Some troubling counterexamples,” The Journal of Positive Psychology , 13(6): 541–552.
• Krueger, A., D. Kahneman, C. Fischler, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz and A. Stone, 2009, “Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S,” Social Indicators Research ,(93): 7–18.
• Larsen, R. J. and Z. Prizmic, 2008, “Regulation of Emotional Well-Being: Overcoming the Hedonic Treadmill,” The Science of Subjective Well-Being , M. Eid and R. J. Larsen (eds.), New York: Guilford Press: 258–289.
• Lauinger, W., 2015, “A Framework for Understanding Parental Well-Being,” Philosophia , 43(3): 847–868.
• Layard, R., 2005, Happiness: Lessons from a new science , New York: Penguin.
• LeBar, M., and D. Russell, 2013, “Well-Being and Eudaimonia: A Reply to Haybron,” Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective , 21: 52.
• Lin, E., 2015, “How to Use the Experience Machine,” Utilitas , 28(3): 314–32.
• Loewenstein, G. and E. Haisley, 2008, “The Economist as Therapist: Methodological Ramifications of ‘Light’ Paternalism,” The Foundations of Positive and Normative Economics , A. Caplin and A. Schotter (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 210–248.
• Lucas, R. E., 2008, “Personality and Subjective Well-Being,” The Science of Subjective Well-Being , M. Eid and R. J. Larsen (eds.), New York: Guilford Press: 171–194.
• Lucas, R. E., A. E. Clark, Y. Georgellis and E. Diener, 2004a, “Re-Examining Adaptation and the Setpoint Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 84: 527–539.
• –––, 2004b, “Unemployment alters the set point for life satisfaction,” Psychological Science , 15(1): 8–13.
• Luhmann, M., and S. Intelisano, 2018, “Hedonic Adaptation and the Set Point for Subjective Well-Being,” Handbook of Well-Being , E. Diener, S. Oishi, and L. Tay (eds.), Salt Lake City: DEF Publishers.
• Lumber, R., M. Richardson, and D. Sheffield, 2017, “Beyond Knowing Nature: Contact, Emotion, Compassion, Meaning, and Beauty Are Pathways to Nature Connection,” PLOS ONE , 12(5): e0177186.
• Luo, S., 2018, “Happiness and the Good Life: A Classical Confucian Perspective,” Dao , 71(2): 1–18.
• Lykken, D. and A. Tellegen, 1996, “Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon,” Psychological Science , 7(3): 186–9.
• Lyubomirsky, S., 2007, The How of Happiness , New York: Penguin.
• Lyubomirsky, S., L. King and E. Diener, 2005, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?” Psychological Bulletin , 131(6): 803–855.
• Lyubomirsky, S., K. M. Sheldon and D. Schkade, 2005, “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology , 9(2): 111–131.
• MacLeod, A. K., 2015, “Well-Being: Objectivism, Subjectivism or Sobjectivism?,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 16 1073–1089.
• Martin, M. W., 2012, Happiness and the Good Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
• May, T., 2015, A Significant Life Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Mayerfeld, J., 1996, “The Moral Asymmetry of Happiness and Suffering,” Southern Journal of Philosophy , 34: 317–338.
• –––, 1999, Suffering and Moral Responsibility , New York: Oxford.
• McFall, L., 1989, Happiness , New York: Peter Lang.
• McMahon, D. M., 2005, Happiness: A History , New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
• McPherson, D., 2020, Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Metz, T., 2014, “Gross National Happiness: A Philosophical Appraisal,” Ethics and Social Welfare , 8(3): 218–32.
• Meynell, H., 1969, “Human Flourishing,” Religious Studies , 5: 147–154.
• Millgram, E., 2000, “What’s the Use of Utility,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 29(2): 113–136.
• Mitchell, P., 2018, “Adaptive Preferences, Adapted Preferences,” Mind , 127(508): 1003–25.
• Moller, D., 2011, “Wealth, Disability, and Happiness,” Philosophy & Public Affairs , 39(2): 177–206.
• Montague, R., 1967, “Happiness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 67: 87–102.
• Morris, S., 2011, “In defense of the hedonistic account of happiness,” Philosophical Psychology , 24(2): 261 – 281.
• –––, 2015, Science and the End of Ethics , New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Mulligan, K., 2016, “Happiness, Luck and Satisfaction.,” ARGUMENTA , 1(2): 133–45.
• Mulnix, J. W., & Mulnix, M. J., 2015a, Happy Lives, Good Lives: A Philosophical Examination , Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
• ––– (eds.), 2015b, Theories of Happiness: An Anthology , Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
• Murphy, M. C., 2001, Natural Law and Practical Rationality , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Myers, D. G. and E. Diener, 1995, “Who Is Happy?” Psychological Science , 6(1): 10–19.
• Nettle, D., 2005, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Noddings, N., 2003, Happiness and Education , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Nozick, R., 1974, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , New York: Basic Books.
• –––, 1989, The Examined Life , New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Nussbaum, M. C., 2000, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008, “Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology,” The Journal of Legal Studies , 37(s2): S81-S113.
• Oishi, S., Choi, H., Buttrick, N., et al., 2019, “The psychologically rich life questionnaire,” Journal of Research in Personality , 81: 257–270.
• Parducci, A., 1995, Happiness, Pleasure, and Judgement: The Contextual Theory and Its Applications , Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.
• Parfit, D., 1984, Reasons and Persons , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Paul, L. A., 2016, Transformative Experience , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pavot, W., 2008, “The Assessment of Subjective Well-Being: Successes and Shortfalls,” The Science of Subjective Well-Being , M. Eid and R. J. Larsen (eds.), New York: Guilford Press, 124–140.
• Phillips, J., L. Misenheimer and J. Knobe, 2011, “The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (and Others Like It),” Emotion Review , 71: 929–937.
• Phillips, J., S. Nyholm, and S. Liao, 2014, “The Good in Happiness,” Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy (Volume 1), T. Lombrozo, S. Nichols, and J. Knobe (eds.), 253–93.
• 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 , 146(2): 165–181.
• Posner, E. and C. R. Sunstein (eds.), 2010, Law and Happiness , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Purcell, S., 2013, “Natural Goodness and the Normativity Challenge: Happiness Across Cultures,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , 87: 183–94.
• Quong, J., 2011, Liberalism Without Perfection , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Raibley, J., 2010, “Well-being and the priority of values,” Social Theory and Practice , 36(4): 593–620.
• –––, 2011, “Happiness is not Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies , 13(6): 1105–1121.
• –––, 2012, “Health and Well-Being,” Philosophical Studies , 165(2): 469–89.
• –––, 2013, “Values, Agency, and Welfare,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 187–214.
• Rawls, J., 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Raz, J., 1986, The Morality of Freedom , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2004, “The Role of Well-Being,” Philosophical Perspectives , 18(1): 269–294.
• Rescher, N., 1972, Welfare: The Social Issues In Philosophical Perspective , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• –––, 1980, Unpopular Essays on Technological Progress , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Ricard, M., 2006, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill , New York: Little, Brown and Co.
• Roberts, R. C., 2019, “Joys: A Brief Moral and Christian Geography,” Faith and Philosophy , 36(2): 195–222.
• Rodogno, R., 2014, “Happiness and Well-Being: Shifting the Focus of the Current Debate,” South African Journal of Philosophy , 33(4): 433–46.
• –––, 2015, “Prudential Value or Well-Being,” Handbook of Value , T. Brosch and D. Sander (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 287–312.
• Rodogno, R., Krause-Jensen, K., & Ashcroft, R. E., 2016, “‘Autism and the good life’: a new approach to the study of well-being,” Journal of Medical Ethics , 42(6): 401–408.
• Ross, L. and R. E. Nisbett, 1991, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Rossi, M., 2018, “Happiness, Pleasures, and Emotions,” Philosophical Psychology , 31(6): 898–919.
• Rossi, M., & Tappolet, C., 2016, “Virtue, Happiness, and Well-Being,” The Monist , 99(2): 112–127.
• Russell, D., 2013, Happiness for Humans , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Ryan, R. M. and E. L. Deci, 2001, “On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being,” Annual Review of Psychology , 52: 141–166.
• Ryff, C. D., 1989, “Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 57(6): 1069–1081.
• Samson, C., 2019, “Indigenous and Western Views of Happiness: An Essay on the Politics of Contentment,” Regimes of Happiness: Comparative and Historical Studies , B. Turner, J. T. Jen, and Y. Contreras-Vejar (eds.), London: Anthem Press, 219–34.
• Savulescu, J., R. Ter Meulen, and G. Kahane, 2011, Enhancing Human Capacities , Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
• Scanlon, T., 1999, What We Owe to Each Other , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Schooler, J. W., D. Ariely and G. Loewenstein, 2003, “The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness Can Be Self-Defeating,” The Psychology of Economic Decision , I. Brocas and J. Carillo (eds.), New York: Oxford University.
• Schultz, B., 2017, The Happiness Philosophers , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Schwartz, B., 2004, The Paradox of Choice , New York: HarperCollins.
• Schwarz, N. and F. Strack, 1999, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology , D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds.), New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press: 61–84.
• Schwitzgebel, E., 2008, “The Unreliability of Naive Introspection,” Philosophical Review , 117(2): 245–273.
• –––, 2011, Perplexities of Consciousness , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Schwitzgebel, E. and R. T. Hurlburt, 2007, Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Scruton, R., 1975, Reason and Happiness. Nature and Conduct , R. S. Peters (ed.), New York: Macmillan: 139–61.
• Seligman, M., 2002, Authentic Happiness , New York: Free Press.
• –––, 2011, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being , New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Sen, A., 1987a, Commodities and Capabilities , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1987b, On Ethics and Economics , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• –––, 2009, The Idea of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sidgwick, H., 1907 [1966], The Methods of Ethics , New York: Dover Publications.
• Silventoinen, K., S. Sammalisto, M. Perola, D. I. Boomsma, B. K. Cornes, C. Davis, L. Dunkel, M. De Lange, J. R. Harris and J. V. B. Hjelmborg, 2003, “Heritability of adult body height: a comparative study of twin cohorts in eight countries,” Twin Research , 6(5): 399–408.
• Singer, P., 1972, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1(3): 229–243.
• Singh, R., and A. Alexandrova, forthcoming, “Happiness Economics as Technocracy,” Behavioural Public Policy , first online 12 Dec 2019: doi:10.17863/CAM.46854
• Sizer, L., 2010, “Good and good for you: An affect theory of happiness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 80(1): 133–163.
• Skidelsky, E., 2014, “What Can We Learn From Happiness Surveys?,” Journal of Practical Ethics , 2(2): 20–32.
• –––, 2017, “Happiness, Pleasure, and Belief,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 95(3): 435–446.
• Slote, M., 1982, “Goods and Lives,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 63: 311–26.
• –––, 1983, Goods and Virtues , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Smart, J. J. C., 1973, “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics,” Utilitarianism: For and Against , J. J. C. Smart and B. Williams, New York: Cambridge University Press: 3–74.
• Snow, N. E., and Trivigno, F. V., 2014, The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness , New York: Routledge.
• Sosis, C., 2012, “Happiness: The Potential Power of Environment,” The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication , 7: 1–10.
• –––, 2014, “Hedonic possibilities and heritability statistics,” Philosophical Psychology , 27(5): 681–702.
• Spahn, A., 2015, “Can Technology Make Us Happy?,” Well-Being in Contemporary Society , J. H. Søraker, et al. (eds.), Cham: Springer, 93–113.
• Sprigge, T. L. S., 1987, The Rational Foundations of Ethics , New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• –––, 1991, “The Greatest Happiness Principle,” Utilitas , 3(1): 37–51.
• Stenberg, J., 2019, “The All-Happy God,” Faith and Philosophy , 36(4): 423–41.
• Stevenson, C. M., 2018, “Experience Machines, Conflicting Intuitions and the Bipartite Characterization of Well-Being,” Utilitas , 30(4): 383–98.
• Stevenson, B. and J. Wolfers, 2008, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , Spring 2008: 1–87.
• Stiglitz, J. E., J.-P. Fitoussi, and M. Durand, 2019, Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being , New York: New Press.
• Stiglitz, J. E., Amartya. Sen, and J.-Paul. Fitoussi, 2009, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress , Paris: Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
• Sugden, R., 2008, “Capability, Happiness, and Opportunity,” Capabilities and Happiness , L. Bruni, F. Comim, and M. Pugno (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 299–322.
• Suikkanen, J., 2011, “An Improved Whole Life Satisfaction Theory of Happiness,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 1(1): 1–18.
• –––, 2019. “The Advice Models of Happiness: A Response to Feldman,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 9(2), available online , doi:10.5502/ijw.v9i2.837
• Sumner, L. W., 1996, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2000, “Something In Between,” Well-Being and Morality , R. Crisp and B. Hooker (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1–19.
• Tatarkiewicz, W., 1976, Analysis of Happiness , The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Telfer, E., 1980, Happiness , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Thaler, R. H. and C. R. Sunstein, 2008, Nudge : improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Thomas, D. A. L., 1968, “Happiness,” Philosophical Quarterly , 18: 97–113.
• Tiberius, V., 2006, “Well-Being: Psychological Research for Philosophers,” Philosophy Compass , 1: 493–505.
• –––, 2008, The Reflective Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014, Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction , New York: Routledge
• –––, 2018, Well-Being As Value Fulfillment , New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
• Tiberius, V. and A. Plakias, 2010, “Well-Being,” The Moral Psychology Handbook , J. Doris, G. Harman, S. Nichols, et al . (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press.
• Trout, J. D., 2005, “Paternalism and Cognitive Bias,” Law and Philosophy , 24: 393–434.
• –––, 2009, The Empathy Gap: Building bridges to the good life and the good society , New York: Viking Press.
• Trout, J. D., and S. A. Buttar, 2000, “Resurrecting ‘Death Taxes’: Inheritance, Redistribution, and the Science of Happiness,” Journal of Law & Politics , 16(4): 765–847.
• van der Deijl, Willem, 2016, “What Happiness Science Can Learn from John Stuart Mill,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 6(1): 164–79.
• –––, 2017a, “Are Measures of Well-Being Philosophically Adequate?,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 47(3): 209–34.
• –––, 2017b, The Measurement of Wellbeing in Economics: Philosophical Explorations , Ph.D. Dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
• –––, 2017c, “Which Problem of Adaptation?,” Utilitas , 29(4): 474–92.
• van der Rijt, J.-W., 2013, “Public Policy and the Conditional Value of Happiness,” Economics and Philosophy , 29(3): 381–408.
• –––, 2015, “The Political Turn Towards Happiness,” Well-Being in Contemporary Society , J. H. Søraker, et al. (eds.), Cham: Springer, 215–31.
• Veenhoven, R., 1984, Conditions of Happiness , Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
• –––, 1997, “Advances in Understanding Happiness,” Revue Québécoise de Psychologie , 18: 29–79.
• –––, 2005, “Is Life Getting Better? How Long and Happily Do People Live in Modern Society?” European Psychologist , 10(4): 330–343.
• Velleman, J. D., 1991, “Well-Being and Time,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 72(1): 48–77.
• Verhoef, A., 2018, “Paul Ricoeur: Philosophy, Theology and Happiness,” Stellenbosch Theological Journal , 4(2): 151–66.
• Vitrano, C., 2010, “The subjectivity of happiness,” Journal of Value Inquiry , 44(1): 47–54.
• –––, 2014, The Nature and Value of Happiness , Boulder: Westview Press.
• Višak, T., 2015, “Sacrifices of Self Are Prudential Harms: A Reply to Carbonell,” The Journal of Ethics , 19(2): 219–29.
• Vittersø, J., ed., 2016, Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being , Berlin: Springer.
• Von Wright, G. H., 1963, The Varieties of Goodness , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Walker, M., 2011, “Happy-People-Pills for All,” International Journal of Wellbeing , 1(1): 1–22.
• Waterman, A. S., 1993, “Two Conceptions of Happiness: Contrasts of Personal Expressiveness (Eudaimonia) and Hedonic Enjoyment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 64(4): 678–691.
• –––, ed., 2013, The Best within Us: Positive Psychology Perspectives on Eudaimonia , Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Weijers, D., 2013, “Intuitive Biases in Judgments about Thought Experiments: The Experience Machine Revisited,” Philosophical Writings , 41(1): 17–31.
• –––, 2014, “Nozick’s experience machine is dead, long live the experience machine!,” Philosophical Psychology , 27(4): 513–535.
• White, M. D., 2013, “Can We—and Should We—Measure Well-Being?,” Review of Social Economy , 71(4): 526–33.
• White, M. P. and P. Dolan, 2009, “Accounting for the Richness of Daily Activities,” Psychological Science , 20(8): 1000–1008.
• White, N. P., 2006, A Brief History of Happiness , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Wierzbicka, A., 2004, “‘Happiness’ in cross-linguistic & cross-cultural perspective,” Daedalus , 133(2): 34–43.
• Williams, B., 1981, Moral Luck. Moral Luck , New York, Cambridge University Press: 20–39.
• Wilson, J., 1968, “Happiness,” Analysis , 29: 13–21.
• Wodak, D., 2019, “What If Well-Being Measurements Are Non-Linear?,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 97(1): 29–45.
• Wong, D. B., 2013, “On Learning What Happiness Is,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 81–101.
• Wren-Lewis, S, 2013, “Well-Being as a Primary Good: Towards Legitimate Well-Being Policy,” Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly , 31(2): 2–9.
• –––, 2014, “How successfully can we measure well-being through measuring happiness?,” South African Journal of Philosophy , 33: 417–432.
• –––, 2019, The Happiness Problem: Expecting Better in an Uncertain World , Chicago, IL: Policy Press.
• Zamuner, E., 2013, “Happiness, Consciousness, and the Ontology of Mind,” Philosophical Topics , 41(1): 237–54.
• Zhang, E. Y., 2019, “Forgetfulness and Flow: ‘Happiness’ in Zhuangzi’s Daoism,” Science, Religion and Culture , 6(1): 77–84.

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 >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Happiness Defined

What is happiness.

Coming up with a formal definition of happiness can be tricky. After all, shouldn’t we just know it when we feel it? In fact, we often use the term to describe a range of positive emotions, including amusement, joy, pride, and contentment.

But to understand the causes and effects of happiness, researchers first need to define it. For most, the term happiness is interchangeable with “subjective well-being,” which is typically measured by asking people about how satisfied they feel with their lives (evaluative), how much positive and negative emotion they tend to feel (affective), and their sense of meaning and purpose (eudaimonic). In her 2007 book The How of Happiness , positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky elaborates, describing happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

However, it’s important to note that social and cultural factors also influence how we think about happiness. For example, studies by William Tov and others have found that people from cultures that embrace more collectivist ideals think about happiness more in terms of harmony and contentment, while more individualistic-minded people connect it to feelings of exuberance and joy. Happiness levels are also shaped by social groups, like families; happier people increase the happiness of people around them.

Though people around the world have different ways of thinking about happiness and perhaps even experience it in different ways, most involve feeling positive generally and about life overall.

What are the Limitations?

Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You

Can feeling good ever be bad? New research says yes—and points the way to a healthier,…

Variety Is the Spice of Emotional Life

A new paper finds that cultivating a diversity of emotions—positive or negative—can…

How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Own Happiness?

Social conditions and inequality affect well-being. So, why do we keep insisting "happiness…

Featured Articles

A New Way to View Money and Happiness

New research of rural, predominantly Indigenous villages challenges the assumption that the more money you have, the happier you are.

What If You Pursued What’s Interesting Instead of Happiness?

A new book explores why we should seek a “psychologically rich life” and how to do it.

How to Stop Overthinking Your Happiness

The search for happiness can make you unhappy—but there is a research-tested solution.

Your Happiness Calendar for September 2024

This month, look for reasons to be hopeful.

Is Contentment an Underrated Goal in Life?

A new study suggests that contentment is a positive emotion with some unique benefits for people who seek it.

How Does Your Personality Affect Your Happiness?

Findings from a new study suggest that your personality may have quite a strong influence on your life satisfaction.

Why Practice It?

Many studies have found that happiness actually improves other aspects of our lives. Here is an overview of some of the good stuff that research has linked to happiness.

• Happiness is good for our health : Happier people are less likely to get sick, and they live longer.
• Happiness is associated with more satisfying romantic relationships as well as stronger friendships .
• Happier people make more money and are more productive at work .
• Happier people are more generous .
• Happier people cope better with stress and trauma .
• Happier people are more creative and are better able to see the big picture .

Of course, there will be times in life when happiness feels out of reach. That’s OK. Our unpleasant emotions are appropriate responses to difficult situations; they’re there to guide our responses and help us make meaning from challenges and adversity.

Indeed, there is a great deal of research suggesting that trying to feel or falsely express happiness in bad situations is harmful to mental and physical health—and that striving to feel constantly happy can actually diminish your overall happiness in life. Multiple studies suggest that experiencing and embracing a range of emotions, not just the positive ones, is good for our mental and physical health. It’s also important to note that injury and illness can make happiness harder to achieve. For example, concussions and long COVID are both associated with depression.

In short, happiness in life is a worthy aspiration, and there are benefits to feeling happy—but it’s not realistic or healthy to expect a constant stream of positive emotions. When you do feel unhappy, it’s important to listen to that signal. Perhaps it’s time to change what you’re doing or thinking, seek support from a friend or therapist, or work to address a challenge you are facing. During especially hard times in life, suggests the research, you might look for meaning or psychological richness in your experiences, instead of trying to force yourself to be happier.

“Aim for noticing how you really feel right at that moment—and embrace all your diverse feelings,” suggests James Baraz. This will pave the way to happiness down the line.

How Do I Cultivate It?

Our happiness is shaped by genetics, life experience, social forces,  and culture, as well as individual choices. While your control over most of those domains is limited, there are steps you can take on a personal level to increase your chances of experiencing happiness in life. And all of us can act to change culture and address inequalities that affect happiness on a collective level.

Here are some of the keys to happiness identified by researchers, along with some specific, science-based activities for strengthening skills of happiness, in ourselves and in society.

Build relationships: Perhaps the dominant finding from happiness research is that social connections are fundamental. Try these practices to strengthen trust, mutual support, and affection in your relationships:

• Best Possible Self for Relationships : Imagine your relationship going as well as it possibly could.
• Mental Subtraction of Relationships : Visualize what your life would be like without the people around you.
• Gift of Time : Invest in your relationships by spending quality time with people you care about.
• Learn more ways to strengthen relationships on our website Greater Good in Action.

Practice different kinds of appreciation. Life can be hard, because negative events and emotions are inevitable. But we can bolster our resilience by shining the light of our attention on the good things.

• Savoring Walk : Take a walk and pay attention to positive feelings and experiences, to deepen and extend them.
• Gratitude : Count your blessings on a regular basis, whether by writing a letter, keeping a journal, or just saying thanks.
• Time Capsule : Create a collection of positive experiences to surprise your future self.
• Mental Subtraction of Positive Events : Visualize what your life would be like without the good things you have.

Pay attention. Studies find that people who practice mindfulness —the moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and external circumstances—score higher on measures of happiness, and lower on measures of anxiety and distress.

• Mindful Breathing : This meditation is the most basic way to cultivate mindful attention.
• Raisin Meditation : You can put your busy life on pause by spending a few minutes feeling and tasting a raisin in your mouth.
• Self-Compassion Break : Stressed? Self-critical? Take just a moment to speak kindly to yourself.
• Get more mindfulness exercises on Greater Good in Action.

Practice kindness. Researchers believe generosity feels good because it highlights and incentivizes positive social interactions and strengthens the social bonds that support happiness. Here are some ways to be kind.

• Do nice things for other people: Neuroscience research shows that when we do nice things for others, our brains light up in areas associated with pleasure and reward.
• Compassion Meditation : This meditation fosters feelings of compassion and concern for others by training you to notice suffering and strive to alleviate it.
• Spend money on other people: Similarly, research by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues finds that people report greater happiness when they spend money on others than when they spend it on themselves.
• Learn more ways to practice kindness at Greater Good in Action.

Move your body—and then rest. Exercise isn’t just good for our bodies; it’s good for our happiness. So is sleep!

• Get physical: Studies show that regular physical activity increases happiness and self-esteem, reduces anxiety and stress, and can even lift symptoms of depression. “Exercise may very well be the most effective instant happiness booster of all activities,” writes Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness .
• Spend time in nature : People who are more connected to nature tend to experience more positive emotions, vitality, and life satisfaction.
• Then get rest: Research has consistently linked lower sleep to lower happiness . What’s more, a study of more than 900 women, led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, found that getting just one more hour of sleep each night might have a greater effect on happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.

Address inequalities. More egalitarian countries consistently rank among the happiest in the world—and there is evidence that economic, racial, and gender inequality hurts the happiness of disadvantaged groups . Fortunately, there are steps we can take to address these inequalities.

• Remove barriers to voting. Inequality depresses the vote of low-income people, which reduces their political power. You can help address that situation by supporting organizations dedicated to voter mobilization and reform.
• Work against racial prejudice and xenophobia. There are many research-tested ways to address racial inequality , on individual and collective levels.
• Work for gender and LGBTQ+ equality. There are also evidence-based ways to reduce inequality between men and women, and to expand and protect the human rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people.
• Support efforts to address poverty. “Economic wealth matters across cultures,” says researcher William Tov. “In every culture, wealthier people generally are happier than less wealthy people.” Fortunately, volunteering and political activism—or more specifically, the sense of meaning and purpose those involve— seem to be good for both mental and physical health . If we can help our society address poverty, says the evidence, then everyone benefits .

Of course, happiness-boosting activities don’t work equally well for everyone . Understanding yourself better can help you choose practices and exercises that align with your personality, your situation, and your goals.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

The Science Behind the Smile

Artwork: Yue Minjun, Untitled, 2005, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner […]

Reprint: R1201E

Only recently have we been able to apply science to one of the world’s oldest questions: “What is the nature of happiness?” In this edited interview, the author of the 2006 best seller Stumbling on Happiness surveys the field. Gilbert explores the sudden emergence of happiness as a discipline, reviews the major findings (including the mistakes we all make in predicting how happy or miserable we’ll be), and examines the role of happiness in productivity on the job. He describes what makes us truly happy—it’s not a promotion or a new house—and sketches out a “happiness diet” that emphasizes small, routine efforts.

Looking forward, Gilbert discusses the breakthrough work of his colleague Matthew Killingsworth, whose iPhone-enabled real-time surveys of people’s moods are providing an ultra-high-resolution picture of how our emotional states shift from minute to minute. A sidebar by Killingsworth offers a preliminary look at his findings and their implications for our personal and workplace lives.

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness . His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert surveys the field of happiness research and explores its frontiers.

Partner Center

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

The different meanings

Study and assessment, predictors of happiness, other determinants.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Frontiers - The Art of Happiness: An Explorative Study of a Contemplative Program for Subjective Well-Being
• Academia - The Concept of Happiness
• WebMD - Choosing to be Happy
• Open Library Publishing Platform - PSYC 100: Principles of Psychology F23 - Happiness: The Science of Subjective Well-Being
• Psychology Today - Happiness
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Happiness
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Happiness
• Verywell Mind - What is Happiness?
• Social Sci LibreTexts - Happiness- The Science of Subjective Well-Being
• Table Of Contents

Recent News

happiness , in psychology , a state of emotional well-being that a person experiences either in a narrow sense, when good things happen in a specific moment, or more broadly, as a positive evaluation of one’s life and accomplishments overall—that is, subjective well-being. Happiness can be distinguished both from negative emotions (such as sadness, fear, and anger) and also from other positive emotions (such as affection, excitement, and interest). This emotion often co-occurs with a specific facial expression: the smile .

People from around the world tend to have a similar concept of happiness and can recognize happiness in others. As a result, the specific emotion of happiness is often included as one of a small number of basic emotions that cannot be broken down into more fundamental emotions and that may combine to form other, more complex emotions (in fact, it is sometimes the only positive emotion that is considered to be basic). Thus, happiness is an important concept for researchers who study emotions.

An entire field of research has developed around the more inclusive concept of subjective well-being, which is characterized by a broad collection of happiness-related phenomena rather than a specific momentary emotion. As one might expect, people who are happy in this way tend to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions. This broader form of happiness is not purely emotional, however: it also has a cognitive component. When happy people are asked to think back on the conditions and events in their lives, they tend to evaluate these conditions and events positively. Thus, happy people report being satisfied with their lives and the various domains in their lives.

Interestingly, these different components of happiness do not always co-occur within the same person. It is possible that someone could experience a great deal of negative emotions yet still acknowledge that the conditions of his or her life are good ones. For example, someone who works with the poor, the sick, or the destitute may experience frequent negative emotions but may also feel satisfied with life because the work is worthwhile. Similarly, people who spend lots of time engaging in hedonistic pleasures may experience frequent momentary positive emotions, but they may also feel that life is empty and meaningless. Subjective well-being researchers are interested in the various factors that influence these distinct components.

Psychologists are interested in happiness for two reasons. First, psychologists study happiness because laypeople are interested in happiness. When people from around the world are asked to list the things that are most important to them, happiness consistently tops the list. People rank attaining happiness as being more important than acquiring money, maintaining good health, and even going to heaven. Psychologists believe that they can help people achieve this goal of being happy by studying the factors that are associated with happiness.

A second reason why psychologists study happiness is because a person’s evaluative responses to the world may provide information about the basic characteristics of human nature . One of the most basic principles guiding psychological theory is that people and animals are motivated to approach things in the world that cause pleasure and to avoid things in the world that cause pain . Presumably, this behavior results from adaptive mechanisms that guide organisms toward resources and away from dangers. If so, the evaluative reactions of many people about the world should be useful and revealing. For instance, some psychologists have suggested that human beings have a basic need to experience strong and supportive social relationships. They point to evidence from the field of subjective well-being to support their claim—a person’s social relationships are reliably linked to his or her happiness. Thus, cataloging the correlates of happiness should provide important information about the features of human nature.

The results of scientific studies reveal several trends. For instance, when researchers ask people to report on their happiness, their answers tend to be consistent over time: people who say they are happy now also tend to say that they are happy when asked again in the future. Because the conditions in people’s lives don’t usually change that frequently, the stability of happiness measures provides support for the idea that these measures truly do tap this important construct. In addition, research shows that when life events do occur, people’s reports of happiness change in response.

Perhaps more importantly, when psychologists try to assess happiness in a variety of different ways, these measures all seem to converge on the same answer. For instance, when researchers ask people to provide self-reports of happiness, they tend to agree with informant-reports of happiness—that is, ratings provided by friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, psychological tests—such as those that ask subjects to list as many positive memories as they can within a minute—may also determine who is happy without even asking for an explicit judgment of happiness, and, again, these measures tend to agree with self-reports. Psychologists can even find evidence of happiness in the brain: certain patterns of brain activity are reliably associated with happiness.

When psychologists track people’s levels of happiness, most people report being in mildly positive moods most of the time. In addition, when psychologists ask people to rate their overall life satisfaction, most people report scores that are above neutral. This research finding is not limited to relatively well-off samples (like the college students who are often asked to participate in psychological studies). Instead, it has been replicated in many different populations in many nations around the world. Thus, when psychologists study the correlates of happiness, they are usually looking for factors that distinguish the very happy from the mildly happy rather than the happy from the miserable.

Psychologists have arrived at several surprising conclusions in their search for predictors of happiness. Many of the factors that may first come to mind do not seem to play a major role in happiness. For example, although people strive to acquire high-paying jobs and dream about winning the lottery, income is not strongly correlated with happiness. Wealthy people are happier than poorer people, but the difference is not very large. As one might expect, the association between money and happiness is strongest among very poor groups and among poor countries. Income leads to smaller and smaller gains in happiness as income levels rise.

Health also plays a role in subjective well-being, but the associations are, again, surprisingly small. Surveys of representative populations show that objective measures (including doctors’ reports, hospital visits, and lists of symptoms) are very weakly correlated with happiness. Subjective reports (such as a person’s own evaluation of his or her health) tend to correlate more strongly, but even these associations are, at most, moderate in size. In addition, although people with major health problems, such as paralyzing spinal-cord injuries, are quite a bit less happy than uninjured people, the difference is not as large as some might expect. Even people with very serious illnesses tend to report happiness scores that are above neutral.

The factor that has been most closely linked to high levels of happiness is social relationships. Research consistently shows that people who have strong social relationships tend to report higher levels of well-being. As with other domains, subjective reports of relationship quality and relationship satisfaction tend to exhibit the highest correlations with subjective well-being. But even more objective measures, including the number of close friends a person has, the number of social organizations to which the person belongs, and the amount of time the person spends with others, all show small to moderate correlations with happiness. As one might expect based on this research, specific types of social relationships are also important for subjective well-being. For instance, marital status is one of the strongest demographic predictors of happiness. Married people consistently report higher levels of happiness than single people, who report greater happiness than the widowed, divorced, or separated. Interestingly, however, it does not appear that marriage itself causes higher levels of subjective well-being. Longitudinal studies show that people only receive a small boost in happiness around the time they get married, and they quickly adapt to baseline levels. The differences between married and unmarried people are due primarily to the lasting negative effects of divorce and widowhood, along with selection effects that might actually predispose happy people to marry.

Other demographic characteristics also show weak associations with happiness. Religious people tend to report greater happiness than nonreligious people, though the size of these effects varies depending on whether religious beliefs or religious behaviors are measured. Factors such as intelligence, education, and job prestige are also only slightly related to well-being. Happiness does not seem to change dramatically over the course of the life span, except perhaps at the very end of the life when declines are somewhat steep. In addition, sex differences in subjective well-being are not large.

In contrast to the relatively weak effects of external circumstance, research shows that internal factors play a strong role in subjective well-being. Individual differences in happiness-related variables emerge early in life, are stable over time, and are at least partially heritable. For instance, behavioral genetic studies show that identical twins who were reared apart are quite a bit more similar in their levels of happiness than are fraternal twins who were reared apart. This suggests that genes play an important role. Most estimates put the heritability of subjective well-being components at around 40–50 percent for positive emotional states and between 30–40 percent with respect to the negative emotional states of depression and anxiety .

Personality researchers have shown that at least some of these genetic effects may be due to the influence of specific personality traits on happiness. For example, the stable personality trait of extraversion is moderately correlated with positive affect (that is, the feeling of a positive emotion) and, to a lesser extent, with life satisfaction and negative affect (that is, the feeling of a negative emotion). People who are outgoing, assertive , and sociable tend to report more intense and more frequent positive emotions. This association is so robust that some psychologists have even suggested that the two constructs—extraversion and positive affect—are controlled by the same underlying physiological systems. Similarly, researchers have shown that the basic personality trait of neuroticism is moderately to strongly correlated with negative affect (and again, to a lesser extent, with life satisfaction and positive affect). This and other research on the links between happiness and traits (including factors such as optimism and self-esteem) show that personality plays a strong role in people’s subjective well-being.

There is a popular notion that the way that people view the world should influence their happiness. Some people always look for the silver lining in things, and presumably this positive outlook shapes the emotions that they feel. Psychologists, too, believe that the way that one thinks about the world is related to characteristic levels of happiness. A great deal of research has been conducted to examine the cognitive processes that affect a person’s subjective well-being.

For instance, many researchers examine the role that social comparison processes play in happiness. Initially, psychologists thought that people evaluated the conditions in their own lives by comparing them with the conditions in other people’s lives. Those individuals who are worse off than the people around them (in other words, people who experience upward comparisons) should experience unhappiness; those individuals who are better off than the people around them (in other words, people who experience downward comparisons) would experience happiness. Although this effect can occur, other research suggests that the processes are a bit more complicated. For one thing, both upward and downward comparisons can lead to either increases or decreases in happiness. People may look to someone who is better off and think either that they are performing terribly in comparison or that the other person serves as an example of an achievement toward which they can strive . Obviously, these two interpretations should lead to different effects on happiness. In addition, research shows that happy and unhappy people often choose different people for comparison. Happy people may choose comparison people who serve to maintain their happiness; unhappy people may choose comparisons that lead to less happiness. Thus, social comparison affects happiness in complicated ways.

Psychologists have also shown that goals and aspirations influence happiness. Not surprisingly, people who are rapidly approaching a goal tend to experience higher levels of happiness than people who are approaching a goal more slowly. But research also shows that simply having important goals is associated with greater happiness. Presumably, the sense of purpose that these goals create may protect people from the negative effects of temporary setbacks. Interestingly, the specific goals that people choose may also affect their happiness. Research suggests that choosing goals that are a challenge but not unachievable is important.

Although people tend to think about happiness as an outcome that they desire rather than as a tool that can be used to achieve additional goals, psychologists have begun to ask what function happiness serves. One of the best known theories, developed by American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson in 1998, posits that the function of happiness (or more precisely, the function of positive emotions) is to broaden one’s thinking and to build one’s resources. According to this theory, positive emotions lead people to think creatively and to try new things. As a result, happy people can develop new ways to approach the world, new interests, new social relationships, and even new physical skills. All of these effects lead to positive outcomes in people’s lives.

Psychologists have begun using experimental and longitudinal studies to determine whether positive affect plays a role in future positive outcomes. These studies provide evidence that happy people are more sociable and cooperative than unhappy people, are healthier than unhappy people, and earn more money than unhappy people. A number of studies have even shown that happy people live longer than unhappy people (and this is not just due to the fact that happy people tend to be healthy). Thus, although most people want to be happy because it feels good, this desired goal may lead to other positive outcomes in their lives.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

The PMC website is updating on October 15, 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Perspect Med Educ
• v.12(1); 2023
• PMC10253238

What about Happiness? A Critical Narrative Review with Implications for Medical Education

Fabienne schwitz.

1 Cardiologist and medical educator, Department of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, Medical Sciences Building, Suit 102A, London, Canada

2 Department of Cardiology, Inselspital Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, CH 3010 Bern, Switzerland

Jacqueline Torti

3 Department of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, Medical Sciences Building, Suit 102A, London, Canada

Lorelei Lingard

Introduction:.

Despite abundant scholarship and improvement initiatives, the problem of physician wellbeing persists. One reason might be conceptual: the idea of ‘happiness’ is rare in this work. To explore how it might influence the conversation about physician wellbeing in medical education, we conducted a critical narrative review asking: ‘How does happiness feature in the medical education literature on physician wellbeing at work?’ and ‘How is happiness conceptualized outside medicine?’

Following current methodological standards for critical narrative review as well as the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles, we conducted a structured search in health research, humanities and social sciences, a grey literature search, and consultation with experts. After screening and selection, content analysis was performed.

Of 401 identified records, 23 were included. Concepts of happiness from the fields of psychology (flow, synthetic happiness, mindfulness, flourishing), organizational behaviour (job satisfaction, happy-productive worker thesis, engagement), economics (happiness industry, status treadmill), and sociology (contentment, tyranny of positivity, coercive happiness) were identified. The medical education records exclusively drew on psychological concepts of happiness.

Discussion and Conclusion:

This critical narrative review introduces a variety of conceptualizations of happiness from diverse disciplinary origins. Only four medical education papers were identified, all drawing from positive psychology which orients us to treat happiness as individual, objective, and necessarily good. This may constrain both our understanding of the problem of physician wellbeing and our imagined solutions. Organizational, economical and sociological conceptualizations of happiness can usefully expand the conversation about physician wellbeing at work.

Introduction

For more than 30 years, we have been discussing the issue of physician wellbeing at work. Scholarship on physician wellbeing and related concepts such as life satisfaction and wellness has: analysed contributors and impacts of burnout [ 1 , 2 , 3 ], identified health problems among physicians and potential solutions [ 1 , 4 , 5 ], explored wellness and the pursuit of balance [ 6 , 7 , 8 ], and implemented interventions to improve resilience among physicians [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. This scholarship has informed a movement to improve wellbeing in medical education and medicine [ 13 , 14 ]. Main dimensions of this movement are: changing of organizational strategies [ 1 , 12 ], promoting the wellbeing of physicians in training through faculty development [ 13 , 15 ] and systematic strengthening of individual factors [ 1 , 12 , 15 ].

Despite this wealth of scholarship and improvement initiatives, the problem of physician wellbeing seems to have improved very little [ 15 ]. Data from the Association of American Medical Colleges Graduation Questionnaire and Year 2 Questionnaire from 2016 to 2019 show no sign of improvements among medical students despite targeted efforts [ 16 , 17 ]. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education also surveys residents and faculty annually, but changes to wellbeing in recent years are challenging to analyze due to a change in the structure of the questionnaire and the onset of the pandemic. What is clear is that mental illness and suicide among doctors has increased [ 18 ], supported by data highlighting high rates of mental health symptoms among physicians [ 19 ]. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have worsened the situation. Its potential impact on the mental wellbeing of health workers has been studied [ 20 ], with consistent reports of stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms among healthcare professionals [ 21 ]. Thus, the question of why physician wellbeing efforts are unsuccessful is particularly pressing.

One reason might be conceptual. Amid the suite of concepts around which physician wellbeing work has formed, the notion of ‘happiness’ does not strongly feature. Happiness is a richly theorized construct in other domains. It is used for a number of different constructs [ 22 , 23 ], and a distinction between affective wellbeing and eudaimonia or eudaimonic wellbeing (meaning and purpose of life) has been recognised since antiquity [ 22 ]. While the two conditions, wellbeing and happiness, are related (or even perhaps conflated) in the literature, their relationship is not clear. This review arises from our assumption that the term ‘happiness’ may carry additional, distinctive meanings that could influence the conversation about physician wellbeing in medical education. Other scholars have had similar ideas: e.g., Alan Peterkin has noted that ‘pleasure and happiness are neglected in our training and in our work’ [ 24 ]. Thus, we conducted a critical narrative review guided by two questions: ‘How does happiness feature in the medical education literature on physician wellbeing?’ and ‘How is happiness conceptualized outside medicine?’ We aim to describe whether and how happiness features in medical education, how the construct of happiness is understood in other select domains, and how we might adopt understandings from other domains to enrich the scholarship of physician wellbeing at work going forward.

This critical narrative review followed the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles (SANRA) procedure [ 25 ] and was also informed by Kahlke’s work [ 26 ]. Our goal has been to explore a wide-ranging literature and to be deliberately selective in highlighting works that allow us to achieve the key contribution of a narrative review: deepened understanding that advances the scholarly conversation [ 27 ].

Our review began with the question ‘How does happiness feature in the medical education literature on physician wellbeing?’ ‘Happiness’ is a broad and multifaceted concept, one which a single review would struggle to comprehensively capture; given our interest in physician happiness at work, we used the term “workplace happiness” to focus our inquiry. We conducted a structured literature search in the medical literature for ‘workplace happiness AND physicians’ in the databases PubMed, CINHAL and PsycINFO with librarian assistance. In the screening process, we excluded records that contained the term ‘happiness’ (or derivatives such as ‘happy’) in passing, without definition or conceptualization. For example, one article mentioned that 52% of pathologists are ‘happy’ with their job but did not describe how happiness was understood [ 28 ].

Having identified the records in medical education, our next step was a humanities and social sciences literature search to address the second question, ‘How is the term happiness used outside medicine?’ We searched using purposeful combinations of ‘workplace happiness’ and ‘happiness’ in Web of Science, Embase and Scopus. Searches in the grey literature covered a broad spectrum from Google Scholar to TED Talks. Discussion with experts from psychology, sociology, philosophy, women studies and medical education helped us identify relevant sources. We did not use synonyms for happiness in our search, as our intent was not a full exploration of the conceptualization of happiness but rather an understanding of how these disciplines use the term happiness.

The authors judged the sufficiency of our database on two levels. First, we sought to represent a range of disciplines in which happiness is theorized. Because our structured search returned sources from sociology, psychology, economics and organizational behaviour, these became the focus of our results. Critical narrative review involves compiling a selective rather than comprehensive set of records; we judged this range of disciplines sufficient to provide useful insights on which to base future research. The second point of sufficiency relates to how many and which records from each discipline are necessary to represent key notions around happiness. Rather than setting a threshold for a specific number of records, the authors instead considered whether the records offered a sufficiently robust description of the concept. As we analysed selected records, we judged them sufficient once we could explain the concept and recognize redundancies in additional records. Where we could not make this judgment, we sought additional records. Overall, we justified the choice of literature based on its ability to support a description of different conceptualizations of happiness that could advance our thinking on the topic in medical education. This process is the essence of rigour in critical narrative reviews [ 26 ].

Screening and selection were shaped by the orientations of our research team members. Our group includes a senior medical education researcher with disciplinary roots in the humanities, an early career medical education researcher with roots in public health and health promotion, and a cardiology educator completing a masters in medical education. We brought to the review different degrees of familiarity and comfort with the disciplines we were searching: for instance, we were all familiar with medical education scholarship, but two of us were also familiar with scholarship and vocabulary from social sciences, psychology and organizational behaviour, while none of us were familiar with economics scholarship. This invariably influenced our insights and enthusiasms for particular concepts retrieved in our search, but together we endeavoured to address all retrieved records with the same attention and support each other to interpret those we were less familiar with.

After screening and selection of records for both the focused medical education search and the broader, multi-discipline search, content analysis was done to enhance the trustworthiness of the study. Content analysis offered a way to arrange the data systematically into distinct categories, including definitions and conceptualizations of happiness, disciplinary origin of ideas, connections and similarities, and differences or tensions. Concept mapping enabled us to visualize the relationships among these categories, and informed our interpretation of these relationships.

Our searches retrieved 401 records. After abstract and title screening, 28 were selected for full-text review, of which 13 were included. An additional 10 were included from hand-searching and grey literature for a total of 23. Our focused medical education search yielded 4 records. Our second, broader search yielded records from psychology (8), organizational behavior (6), economics (2) and sociology (3). While such disciplinary categories are necessarily simplifications, we use them in the following sections as organizing structures to highlight disciplinary patterns in how the records characterize happiness ( Figure 1 : Disciplinary patterns in the characterization of happiness). Because our analysis of the medical education records showed that this scholarship exclusively employed psychological concepts, we have included these records (which address our first research question) in that section. Because of the small number of medical education records, the bulk of our results address our second research question. Terminologies vary and are used interchangeably in this literature (Cromby cited in Frawley) [ 29 ]; however, for consistency we deliberately use the term ‘happiness’ except when quoting from a record that uses another term.

Disciplinary patterns in the characterization of happiness.

Happiness as a psychological concept

Psychological concepts of happiness have in common a predominantly individual approach. In this section, we highlight four psychological concepts that have particular relevance in the context of physician wellbeing at work, including those that have already been taken up in medical education.

The first concept is flow theory [ 30 ], which states that you need a flow feeling – a state of ideal balance between challenges and abilities—to be happy. Flow is a state of being focused; having a sense of ecstasy, inner clarity and serenity; knowing that an activity is doable; feeling timelessness and intrinsic motivation [ 31 ]. Flow tends to occur at work more than in leisure time [ 32 ]: e.g., a musician could reach a flow state during a concert. The concept of flow has its origin in positive psychology. The initial study about flow theory by psychologist Csíkszentmihályi included surgeons, and the concept of flow has been taken up in medical education in a paper about enhancing career enjoyment, performance and workplace happiness [ 33 , 34 ]. This work supported flow through training in individual interventions such as coaching, psychological skills training, mental skills training or stress management training [ 33 ]. While supporting flow in health care is recognized to require supplementary system-level interventions, such as increasing time for patient care, minimizing administrative tasks, and promoting constructive learning environments, scholarship at the system level is less common [ 33 , 35 ].

The second concept from positive psychology is synthetic happiness. The term was coined by Daniel Gilbert in a 2004 TED Talk, although his subsequent writings do not use it. Contrasted with ‘natural happiness’ which is what we feel when we get what we want, ‘synthetic happiness is what we make when we do not get what we want’ [ 36 ]. A term coined by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, synthetic happiness acts like a psychological immune system, to ‘[strike] a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it’ [ 36 , 37 ]. We convince ourselves that we have is what we would have chosen anyway. For instance, clinical clerkship students acknowledge what they like or dislike about each specialty as they rotate through them, but during residency their choice is already made, so they are likely to convince themselves that they are happy with it. Synthetic happiness helps us to find a way to like what we have. However, synthetic is not ‘false’; Gilbert argues that ‘synthetic Happiness is as real and enduring as the natural happiness’ [ 36 ], suggesting it could have implications for being happy in an imperfect workplace.

Finally, two related concepts from positive psychology occurred in our records: flourishing and mindfulness [ 38 , 39 ]. Flourishing draws on the metaphor of flower growth, and refers to a lifestyle determined by optimal living, mastering life’s tasks, kindness, personal growth, and resilience. Five pillars are required: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment [ 40 ]. These factors form the basic precondition for a life of profound fulfilment. Mindfulness is described as a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness. While it shares features with flourishing, it is the practice of non-judgmental attention in the moment. Only one record used mindfulness as part of a suite of interventions to ‘increase happiness’ 4 ; the others did not articulate increased happiness as an explicit goal of mindfulness.

Happiness as an organizational concept

Organizational approaches to happiness arise from the premise that individuals spend most of their adult lives working. As such, happiness in the workplace is a key component of overall happiness in life. In this section, we highlight key concepts in our records that were associated with happiness at work, including job satisfaction, productivity, and employee engagement.

A common idea in the organizational literature about happiness is ‘job satisfaction’. Components of job satisfaction that contribute to employee happiness include aspects at the transient, individual (employee) and organizational or collective level [ 41 , 42 ]. Transient-level contributions to workplace happiness include momentary affect, emotion at work and flow state [ 43 ]. Employee-level contributions to workplace happiness include job security, meaningful work, positive relationships with coworkers, recognition, autonomy and engagement [ 44 ]. The organizational aspects that contribute to workplace happiness include opportunities for growth, compensation, job flexibility, a positive work environment, work-life balance, and organizational culture [ 44 ]. Both the employer (leader) and the individual (follower) play a strong role in shaping organizational aspects that contribute to happiness through constructive dissensus [ 45 ]. Constructive dissensus refers to a mutual understanding between leaders and followers, including shared beliefs and values, leading to improved quality of life at work. Interventions aimed at improving workplace happiness should be multi-faceted and focus both on improving individual happiness as well as the organizational aspects to enhance job performance and employee retention [ 45 ].

The happy-productive worker thesis states that all things being equal, happy workers perform better than those who are less happy. This idea has been the holy grail of management and organizational psychology research for two decades. With roots in positive psychology, the happy-productive worker thesis explicitly focuses on ‘productivity as a consequence of happiness at work’ [ 46 ]. Happiness in this thesis was operationalized by a diversity of constructs (affect, wellbeing, burnout, life satisfaction, growth and purpose), which may explain the inconclusive nature of the empirical literature, which finds that people who are happy in general are more productive, but people who are happy specifically at work are not necessarily so.

‘Engagement’ was a crucial dimension of measuring happiness at work [ 47 ]. Workplace engagement is defined as a persistent affective state that includes how employees express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally at work. The physical aspect of engagement focuses on the energy expended by individuals to perform their job, while the cognitive aspect focuses on employees’ beliefs about their organization and the emotional aspect focuses on how employees feel towards the organization [ 48 ]. Workplace happiness is the ‘positive outcomes at the workplace which are a result of many interlinked factors ranging from employee-work relation within the organization to the end results of efficient production and customer satisfaction’ [ 47 ]. The organizational behavior literature connects engagement to productivity. Describing engagement as having a positive correlation with constructs like organization growth, lower operational costs, lower absenteeism, and decreased intentions to turnover [ 47 ], the organizational literature begins to articulate an economics of happiness which is even more explicit in the economic records we analyzed.

Happiness as an economic concept

Economic approaches to happiness arise from the position that happy workers improve the economy. Therefore, the search for happiness has also become more and more of a business. In this section, we highlight the aspects related to the ‘happiness industry’.

Happiness is a central concept in economics. Global institutions such as the World Bank and the World Health Organization embrace the relationship between subjective happiness and economic wellbeing [ 29 ], and, since 2012, the World Happiness Report has tracked the happiness of countries as a marker of economic health. ‘Happiness economics’ conceives of happiness as an objective, measurable entity, something that can be ‘reduced to calculable units’ [ 29 ]. Happiness is calculated at individual and group levels, with the goal of converting happiness into familiar kinds of economic capital like gross domestic product, consumer spending, and employment rates.

With the rise of the happiness industry, the interaction between happiness and the markets becomes a central concern of economics. As a marketing device, happiness is strategic. Consumer groups must be poised ‘between pleasure and pain’: just happy enough to sustain the idea that products bring happiness and just unhappy enough to feel the need to buy more [ 49 ]. However, economic growth compulsion can have a negative impact on happiness, as consumers are confronted with the agony of choice. Multiple options can only contribute to happiness as long as the number of options is still manageable. Once a certain threshold is reached, additional options do not bring further happiness. And purchasing power is not the solution.

Studies of the relationship between income and happiness suggest that, despite economic growth and increased prosperity, people are not happier. At the same time, however, critical economic scholars warn against extrapolating that poorer means happier (Pender cited in Frawley) [ 29 ], and raise concern that the emphasis on the subjective sensations of the populace can deflect attention from objective realities like insufficient food. Furthermore, the relationship between money and happiness is complex: the ‘status treadmill’ concept captures the notion that it is relative, not absolute, income that can lead to happiness, and we are happier when our relative income is higher than our peers [ 50 ]. In relation to physician happiness at work, these economic concepts suggest a complex, nonlinear relation between physician income and happiness.

Happiness as a social concept

Sociological approaches to happiness arise from the position that the predominantly psychological treatment of happiness fails to attend to the affordances and impediments to happiness that exist at a structural level. In this section, we highlight two concepts – the crisis of contentment and happiness as coercion – that arose in our records.

In the book, Deconstructing Happiness, McKenzie describes a crisis of contentment. They distinguish happiness, which is an individual characteristic, from contentment, which is ‘a collective social project’ [ 51 ] arising from ‘committing to something greater than the self’ [ 51 ]. Contentment is socially defined and motivated, standing in contrast to pleasure-driven, temporary and individual forms of happiness. With this distinction, the author argues that we are currently experiencing a ‘crisis of contentment’ (not of happiness) in modern society. Our lives are ‘filled with an almost unending range of products, services and self-help books that will lead to happiness’ but ‘people do not seem to be as happy as they SHOULD be’ [ 51 ] because individual happiness cannot provide meaning and long-term satisfaction without context. The values and norms of the social world provide this context. Therefore, ‘how the individual is able to positively place him-or herself with regard to social values and norms’ [ 51 ] is the basis of contentment.

The concept of a crisis of contentment moves us away from concerns about the individual’s happiness or lack thereof. Instead, we must be concerned with the social, political and economic factors that shape the relationship between the individual and society [ 51 ]. In particular, we need to critique our expectations of happiness [ 29 ]. Some sociologists have argued that the idea of happiness is part of a widespread ‘tyranny of positivity’ in modernity, pressuring individuals ‘to conform to culturally sanctioned ideals of behavior and disposition’ [ 51 ]. A growing body of work challenges the ‘epistemological fallacy that happiness ‘has’ a kind of essence’ and argues instead that the concept of happiness is a relational construct, gaining meaning from socio-historical context and attendant social norms’ [ 51 ]. Happiness, they argue, is not a neutral concept.

Happiness as coercion is an instance of its lack of neutrality, as argued by critical feminist scholarship. For instance, Sara Ahmed considers happiness as a ‘world-making device’ [ 52 ]: the world is made by prescribing what is appropriate ‘happiness’ based on largely unacknowledged social values and norms. Happiness, then, is an instrument for reorienting the individual toward a common good. Thus, as ‘an idea or aspiration within everyday life’ happiness can lead to ‘forms of coercion …such that one person’s happiness is …made conditional on their willingness to be made happy by the same things as other people’. Happiness, therefore, makes demands on us [ 50 ]. It demands that we accept, with a smile, the social values that have dictated what happiness is. Using the example of ‘happy housewife’ of the 1950s, she argues that this notion of female happiness enforces ‘gendered forms of labour’ and encourages us to consider the possibility of refusing to be happy in the ways that society prescribes. What would it mean instead to ‘claim the freedom to be unhappy’ [ 52 ]?

This critical narrative review has articulated multiple conceptualizations of happiness that could inform the way we approach physician wellbeing at work in medical education. In this section, we provide three main insights about these conceptualizations of happiness and consider their implications for scholarship and improvement efforts related to physician wellbeing in the workplace.

Happiness is not only individual: it is also social

The four medical education papers we analysed that explored physician happiness at work all relied upon concepts of happiness based in positive psychology. And while efforts to promote physician flow and mindfulness at work are valuable, they represent a partial view of the phenomenon due to their focus on the individual. Even in the Canadian Medical Association Journal call to consider ‘Physician health: beyond wellness to happiness’, the emphasis is on personal attributes such as stoicism and perfectionism. However, as McKenzie argued, ‘the individual approach to happiness is both incomplete and inherently flawed’ [ 51 ]. We would argue that we’ll never fully understand physician happiness by exclusively emphasizing individual psychology. We need to also address the relationship between the individual and society by considering the concept of contentment, which requires paying attention to social, political and economic factors. As McKenzie has suggested, with this shift ‘the goal is no longer supporting individual attempts to find happiness, rather [it is] experiencing the ups and downs of life within a meaningful social narrative’ [ 51 ]. Given this, we might ask, what would it mean to have ‘a meaningful social narrative’ for physicians to experience the ups and downs of their work?

A first step might be to normalize these ups and downs and openly discuss how we make sense of them, paying attention to the social, political and economic factors that shape this sense-making. Economics, for instance, is part of this social narrative, but absolute income is less important than relative income [ 50 ]. Attention to such factors might helpfully complicate discussions about the place of physician income in wellbeing at work and draw our attention to questions of the relative value of health professions and medical specialties in inter and intra professional workplaces. Other social factors that matter for a meaningful social narrative of the ups and downs of physician work include ‘a thriving and collaborative group identity’ [ 49 ] which this literature connects to the promise of constructive dissensus. To further explore this promise, scholarship might begin to connect the wellbeing conversation to the conversation about teamwork to understand how the ability to negotiate shared meaning in moments of conflict influences physician contentment.

Individual happiness is not objective, it is subjective

The definition of happiness is multifaceted. Terminologies vary, and there remain no standardised definitions [ 29 ]. But what most terms have in common is that they approach happiness as an objective thing – something we can ‘get’ more or less of. However, our results suggest agreement that happiness is subjective: it is something we perceive and even something we manufacture thanks to our psychological immune system. Knowing that happiness is subjective, unstable, situated – even synthetic – calls into question our insistence on measuring it. Most of the records about physician happiness from medical education were measurement-focused. A critical examination of both our insatiable appetite to measure and the individual measures themselves is necessary if we are to avoid oversimplifying the construct of happiness as we integrate it more fully into medical education. Notwithstanding the question of whether happiness can be measured at all, our results suggest that understanding happiness may have more to do with measuring expectations and interpretations than experiencing happiness. Given this, we might explore the expectations and interpretations medical trainees bring to the profession, how they change over time, and how these changes influence happiness at work.

Happiness is not straightforwardly good; it is also potentially coercive

Critical sociological approaches to happiness draw our attention to the role of happiness as ‘a central pacifying rhetoric and important technolog[y] for the management of subjectivity to ensure … the perpetuation of the existing order of things’ [ 29 ]. Such critiques of happiness remind us that, amid our efforts to promote the happiness of individual physicians, we must also be critically reflexive. We need to ask questions such as: Who defines ‘happiness’ for physicians? What social norms and power relations does that definition serve? Does our conceptualization of physician happiness acknowledge cultural contingencies? We are not suggesting that we should abandon initiatives that seek to improve happiness; however, as we pursue them, we must also ask ourselves how these perpetuate an existing structural and political order that is ‘coercive’, sustaining unacknowledged power relations. To use Ahmed’s term, do we cast as ‘killjoys’ [ 52 ] physicians who refuse to perpetuate the existing order by refusing to be happy-as-prescribed? Do we support physicians to be unhappy in the face of tragedy, or demand that they suppress that emotion and be happy (or at least neutral)? Recognizing that dominant understandings of happiness might disempower some physicians based on culture, gender, race or other minority factors, we should consider whether and how the prevalent conceptualization of happiness takes equality, diversity, inclusion and decolonisation (EDI-D) into account. As Slavin has recognized, ‘wellbeing programming has been a one-size-fits-all approach and has not adequately acknowledged and addressed the additional threats to wellbeing and satisfaction faced by many in our community’ [ 15 ]. To advance the conversation about physician happiness at work, we need to recognize how conventional definitions of physician happiness may be coercive, especially for minorities and equity deserving groups. We should be alert to physician unhappiness as a symptom not a disease – and even, perhaps, as a form of resistance to prescribed narratives.

Limitations

A critical narrative review of happiness is, by design, selective and positioned rather than exhaustive and neutral [ 53 ]. We have chosen to highlight disciplines and concepts of happiness specifically related to our focus on physician happiness in the workplace. Consequently, our review examines the concept of workplace happiness as one important component of happiness in medical education: other aspects of happiness beyond ‘workplace happiness’ are likely relevant but are not captured in this work. We have focused on a subset of disciplines (psychology, sociology, economics, organizational behavior), and we acknowledge that our review of concepts of happiness in each discipline is selective rather than comprehensive: it reflects the records our search returned and there may be other insights about happiness in these disciplines that future work building on our own could explore. Furthermore, the inclusion of additional disciplines would probably enrich and expand the conceptualizations of happiness we have described in this work. A particular gap is the lack of philosophy records captured in our search, which initially surprised us. After consulting with a philosophy scholar, we determined that this was because the terminology in philosophy differs significantly from our search terms. Likely other disciplines, such as religious studies or history, were also outside the scope of our initial search due to differences in terminology for the happiness construct. This is a challenge for any review: reviewers need to decide how far from their original search terms to venture and where to draw the line. For this first narrative review of ‘happiness’ as it relates to physician happiness at work, we decided to remain consistent in our search terms and we therefore acknowledge that our results cannot be comprehensive of all treatments of the concept in all published literature. Finally, our review of included disciplines was not intended to be exhaustive, but to describe some key conceptualizations of happiness as they relate to understanding physician happiness at work. Undoubtedly there is much more to be learned about the history and nuances of each of these fields’ approaches to happiness.

This critical narrative review has revealed that medical education rarely incorporates the concept of happiness in the workplace and, when it does, it draws exclusively from positive psychology. This disciplinary emphasis orients us to treat happiness as individual, objective, and necessarily good. Understanding organizational, economic and social aspects of happiness can usefully expand the conversation about physician wellbeing at work to include the insights that happiness is also social, subjective, and potentially coercive. With such insights, we might imagine different solutions to the persistent problem of physician wellbeing – in fact, we might even redefine the problem itself.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

What Does Happiness Really Mean?

It's not the same for everyone

Verywell/ Jiaqi Zhou

How to Cultivate Happiness

How to be a happier person.

Happiness is something that people seek to find, yet what defines happiness can vary from one person to the next. Typically, happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction. 

When most people talk about the true meaning of happiness, they might be talking about how they feel in the present moment or referring to a more general sense of how they feel about life overall.

Because happiness tends to be such a broadly defined term, psychologists and other social scientists typically use the term ' subjective well-being ' when they talk about this emotional state. Just as it sounds, subjective well-being tends to focus on an individual's overall personal feelings about their life in the present.  

Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are:

• The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.
• Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.

Another definition of happiness comes from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, who suggested that happiness is the one human desire, and all other human desires exist as a way to obtain happiness. He believed that there were four levels of happiness: happiness from immediate gratification, from comparison and achievement, from making positive contributions, and from achieving fulfillment. 

Happiness, Aristotle suggested, could be achieved through the golden mean, which involves finding a balance between deficiency and excess.

Signs of Happiness

While perceptions of happiness may be different from one person to the next, there are some key signs that psychologists look for when measuring and assessing happiness.

Some key signs of happiness include:

• Feeling like you are living the life you wanted
• Going with the flow and a willingness to take life as it comes
• Feeling that the conditions of your life are good
• Enjoying positive, healthy relationships with other people
• Feeling that you have accomplished (or will accomplish) what you want in life
• Feeling satisfied with your life
• Feeling positive more than negative
• Being open to new ideas and experiences
• Practicing self-care and treating yourself with kindness and compassion
• Experiencing gratitude
• Feeling that you are living life with a sense of meaning and purpose
• Wanting to share your happiness and joy with others

One important thing to remember is that happiness isn't a state of constant euphoria . Instead, happiness is an overall sense of experiencing more positive emotions than negative ones.

Happy people still feel the whole range of human emotions—anger, frustrastion, boredom, loneliness, and even sadness—from time to time. But even when faced with discomfort, they have an underlying sense of optimism that things will get better, that they can deal with what is happening, and that they will be able to feel happy again.

"Even people who have experienced terrible trauma can still also experience happiness," says Hannah Owens, LMSW , "though it is important to recognize that it might be more difficult for them to obtain the balance generally associated with overall happiness, and that their happiness might look very different from others' who have not had to deal with such challenges."

Types of Happiness

There are many different ways of thinking about happiness. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction between two different kinds of happiness: hedonia and eudaimonia.

• Hedonia: Hedonic happiness is derived from pleasure. It is most often associated with doing what feels good, self-care, fulfilling desires, experiencing enjoyment, and feeling a sense of satisfaction.
• Eudaimonia: This type of happiness is derived from seeking virtue and meaning. Important components of eudaimonic well-being including feeling that your life has meaning, value, and purpose. It is associated more with fulfilling responsibilities, investing in long-term goals, concern for the welfare of other people, and living up to personal ideals.

Hedonia and eudemonia are more commonly known today in psychology as pleasure and meaning, respectively. More recently, psychologists have suggested the addition of the third component that relates to engagement . These are feelings of commitment and participation in different areas of life.

Research suggests that happy people tend to rank pretty high on eudaimonic life satisfaction and better than average on their hedonic life satisfaction.  

All of these can play an important role in the overall experience of happiness, although the relative value of each can be highly subjective. Some activities may be both pleasurable and meaningful, while others might skew more one way or the other.

For example, volunteering for a cause you believe in might be more meaningful than pleasurable. Watching your favorite tv show, on the other hand, might rank lower in meaning and higher on pleasure.

Some types of happiness that may fall under these three main categories include:

• Joy: A often relatively brief feeling that is felt in the present moment
• Excitement: A happy feeling that involves looking forward to something with positive anticipation
• Gratitude: A positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative
• Pride: A feeling of satisfaction in something that you have accomplished
• Optimism: This is a way of looking at life with a positive, upbeat outlook
• Contentment: This type of happiness involves a sense of satisfaction

While some people just tend to be naturally happier, there are things that you can do to cultivate your sense of happiness. 

Pursue Intrinsic Goals 

Achieving goals that you are intrinsically motivated to pursue, particularly ones that are focused on personal growth and community, can help boost happiness. Research suggests that pursuing these types of intrinsically-motivated goals can increase happiness more than pursuing extrinsic goals like gaining money or status.  

Enjoy the Moment

Studies have found that people tend to over earn—they become so focused on accumulating things that they lose track of actually enjoying what they are doing.  

So, rather than falling into the trap of mindlessly accumulating to the detriment of your own happiness, focus on practicing gratitude for the things you have and enjoying the process as you go. 

Reframe Negative Thoughts

When you find yourself stuck in a pessimistic outlook or experiencing negativity, look for ways that you can reframe your thoughts in a more positive way. 

People have a natural negativity bias , or a tendency to pay more attention to bad things than to good things. This can have an impact on everything from how you make decisions to how you form impressions of other people. Discounting the positive—a cognitive distortion where people focus on the negative and ignore the positive—can also contribute to negative thoughts.

Reframing these negative perceptions isn't about ignoring the bad. Instead, it means trying to take a more balanced, realistic look at events. It allows you to notice patterns in your thinking and then challenge negative thoughts.

Avoid Social Comparison

Another way to cultivate happiness and to make sure that you are able to maintain your happiness, Owens says, is to stop comparing yourself to others.

"No two lives are alike, and focusing on what others have is a sure-fire way to feel envy and regret. Focus on the good things in your own life, and you'll be more likely to find contentment in them," she says.

Impact of Happiness

Why is happiness so important? Happiness has been shown to predict positive outcomes in many different areas of life including mental well-being, physical health, and overall longevity.

• Positive emotions increase satisfaction with life.
• Happiness helps people build stronger coping skills and emotional resources.
• Positive emotions are linked to better health and longevity. One study found that people who experienced more positive emotions than negative ones were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period.
• Positive feelings increase resilience. Resilience helps people better manage stress and bounce back better when faced with setbacks. For example, one study found that happier people tend to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and that these benefits tend to persist over time.
• People who report having a positive state of well-being are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as eating fruits and vegetables and engaging in regular physical exercise.
• Being happy may make help you get sick less often. Happier mental states are linked to increased immunity.

Some people seem to have a naturally higher baseline for happiness—one large-scale study of more than 2,000 twins suggested that around 50% of overall life satisfaction was due to genetics, 10% to external events, and 40% to individual activities.

So while you might not be able to control what your “base level” of happiness is, there are things that you can do to make your life happier and more fulfilling. Even the happiest of individuals can feel down from time to time and happiness is something that all people need to consciously pursue.

Cultivate Strong Relationships

Social support is an essential part of well-being. Research has found that good social relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness. Having positive and supportive connections with people you care about can provide a buffer against stress, improve your health, and help you become a happier person.

In the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that looked at participants over 80 years, researchers found that relationships and how happy people are in those relationships strongly impacted overall health.

So if you are trying to improve your happiness, cultivating solid social connections is a great place to start. Consider deepening your existing relationships and explore ways to make new friends. 

Get Regular Exercise

Exercise is good for both your body and mind. Physical activity is linked to a range of physical and psychological benefits including improved mood. Numerous studies have shown that regular exercise may play a role in warding off symptoms of depression, but evidence also suggests that it may also help make people happier, too.

In one analysis of past research on the connection between physical activity and happiness, researchers found a consistent positive link.  

Even a little bit of exercise produces a happiness boost—people who were physically active for as little as 10 minutes a day or who worked out only once a week had higher levels of happiness than people who never exercised.

Show Gratitude

In one study, participants were asked to engage in a writing exercise for 10 to 20 minutes each night before bed.   Some were instructed to write about daily hassles, some about neutral events, and some about things they were grateful for. The results found that people who had written about gratitude had increase positive emotions, increased subjective happiness, and improve life satisfaction.

As the authors of the study suggest, keeping a gratitude list is a relatively easy, affordable, simple, and pleasant way to boost your mood. Try setting aside a few minutes each night to write down or think about things in your life that you are grateful for.

Find a Sense of Purpose

Research has found that people who feel like they have a purpose have better well-being and feel more fulfilled.   A sense of purpose involves seeing your life as having goals, direction, and meaning. It may help improve happiness by promoting healthier behaviors. 

Some things you can do to help find a sense of purpose include:

• Explore your interests and passions
• Engage in prosocial and altruistic causes
• Work to address injustices
• Look for new things you might want to learn more about

This sense of purpose is influenced by a variety of factors, but it is also something that you can cultivate. It involves finding a goal that you care deeply about that will lead you to engage in productive, positive actions in order to work toward that goal.

Challenges of Finding Happiness

While seeking happiness is important, there are times when the pursuit of life satisfaction falls short. Some challenges to watch for include:

Valuing the Wrong Things

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but there is research that spending money on things like experiences can make you happier than spending it on material possessions. 

One study, for example, found that spending money on things that buy time—such as spending money on time-saving services—can increase happiness and life satisfaction.  

Rather than overvaluing things such as money, status, or material possessions, pursuing goals that result in more free time or enjoyable experiences may have a higher happiness reward.

Not Seeking Social Support

Social support means having friends and loved ones that you can turn to for support. Research has found that perceived social support plays an important role in subjective well-being. For example, one study found that perceptions of social support were responsible for 43% of a person's level of happiness.  

It is important to remember that when it comes to social support, quality is more important than quantity. Having just a few very close and trusted friends will have a greater impact on your overall happiness than having many casual acquaintances.

Thinking of Happiness as an Endpoint

Happiness isn’t a goal that you can simply reach and be done with. It is a constant pursuit that requires continual nurturing and sustenance.

One study found that people who tend to value happiness most also tended to feel the least satisfied with their lives.   Essentially, happiness becomes such a lofty goal that it becomes virtually unattainable. 

“Valuing happiness could be self-defeating because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed,” suggest the authors of the study.

Perhaps the lesson is to not make something as broadly defined as “happiness” your goal. Instead, focus on building and cultivating the sort of life and relationships that bring fulfillment and satisfaction to your life. 

It is also important to consider how you personally define happiness. Happiness is a broad term that means different things to different people. Rather than looking at happiness as an endpoint, it can be more helpful to think about what happiness really means to you and then work on small things that will help you become happier. This can make achieving these goals more manageable and less overwhelming.

History of Happiness

Happiness has long been recognized as a critical part of health and well-being. The "pursuit of happiness" is even given as an inalienable right in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Our understanding of what will bring happiness, however, has shifted over time.

Psychologists have also proposed a number of different theories to explain how people experience and pursue happiness. These theories include:

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

The hierarchy of needs suggests that people are motivated to pursue increasingly complex needs. Once more basic needs are fulfilled, people are then motivated by more psychological and emotional needs.

At the peak of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualization, or the need to achieve one's full potential. The theory also stresses the importance of peak experiences or transcendent moments in which a person feels deep understanding, happiness, and joy. 

Positive Psychology

The pursuit of happiness is central to the field of positive psychology . Psychologists who study positive psychology are interested in learning ways to increase positivity and helping people live happier, more satisfying lives. 

Rather than focusing on mental pathologies, the field instead strives to find ways to help people, communities, and societies improve positive emotions and achieve greater happiness.

Finley K, Axner M, Vrooman K, Tse D. Ideal levels of prosocial involvement in relation to momentary affect and eudaimonia: Exploring the golden mean . Innov Aging . 2020;4(Suppl 1):614. doi:10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2083

Kringelbach ML, Berridge KC. The neuroscience of happiness and pleasure .  Soc Res (New York) . 2010;77(2):659-678.

Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework; Committee on National Statistics; Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council; Stone AA, Mackie C, editors. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience [Internet]. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US).

Lee MA, Kawachi I. The keys to happiness: Associations between personal values regarding core life domains and happiness in South Korea . PLoS One . 2019;14(1):e0209821. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209821

Hsee CK, Zhang J, Cai CF, Zhang S. Overearning . Psychol Sci . 2013;24(6):852-9

Carstensen LL, Turan B, Scheibe S, et al. Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling . Psychol Aging . 2011;26(1):21‐33. doi:10.1037/a0021285

Steptoe A, Wardle J. Positive affect and biological function in everyday life . Neurobiol Aging . 2005;26 Suppl 1:108‐112. doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2005.08.016

Sapranaviciute-Zabazlajeva L, Luksiene D, Virviciute D, Bobak M, Tamosiunas A. L ink between healthy lifestyle and psychological well-being in Lithuanian adults aged 45-72: a cross-sectional study . BMJ Open . 2017;7(4):e014240. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014240

Costanzo ES, Lutgendorf SK, Kohut ML, et al. Mood and cytokine response to influenza virus in older adults . J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci . 2004;59(12):1328‐1333. doi:10.1093/gerona/59.12.1328

Lyubomirsky S, Sheldon KM, Schkade D. Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change . Review of General Psychology. 2005;9 (2):111–131. doi:0.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111

The Harvard Gazette. Good genes are nice, but joy is better .

Zhang Z, Chen W. A systematic review of the relationship between physical activity and happiness . J Happiness Stud 20, 1305–1322 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-9976-0

Cunha LF, Pellanda LC, Reppold CT. Positive psychology and gratitude interventions: a randomized clinical trial . Front Psychol . 2019;10:584. Published 2019 Mar 21. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00584

Ryff CD. Psychological well-being revisited: advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia . Psychother Psychosom . 2014;83(1):10‐28. doi:10.1159/000353263

Whillans AV, Dunn EW, Smeets P, Bekkers R, Norton MI. Buying time promotes happiness .  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2017;114(32):8523‐8527. doi:10.1073/pnas.1706541114

Gulacti F. The effect of perceived social support on subjective well-being . Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences . 2010;2(2):3844-3849. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.602

Mauss IB, Tamir M, Anderson CL, Savino NS. Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? [corrected] Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness [published correction appears in Emotion. 2011 Aug;11(4):767]. Emotion . 2011;11(4):807‐815. doi:10.1037/a0022010

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• Essay Guides
• Other Essays
• Happiness Essay: Definition, Outline & Examples
• Speech Topics
• Basics of Essay Writing
• Essay Topics
• Main Academic Essays
• Research Paper Topics
• Basics of Research Paper Writing
• Miscellaneous
• Chicago/ Turabian
• Data & Statistics
• Methodology
• Admission Writing Tips
• Admission Advice
• Other Guides
• Student Life
• Studying Tips
• Understanding Plagiarism
• Academic Writing Tips
• Basics of Dissertation & Thesis Writing

• Research Paper Guides
• Formatting Guides
• Basics of Research Process
• Admission Guides
• Dissertation & Thesis Guides

Happiness Essay: Definition, Outline & Examples

Table of contents

Use our free Readability checker

A happiness essay is an academic paper that explores the concept of happiness, and how it can be achieved and maintained in our lives. The purpose of a happiness essay is to explore the psychological, social, and cultural factors that contribute to happiness. On this type of essay, students should provide insights into how individuals can cultivate a happy and fulfilling life.

In this article, we will explore the definition of happiness and its various components and outline the key elements of happiness essay structure. Whether you are seeking how to write a happiness essay or want to know more about this feeling, this is the right article. You will also find en example for your inspiration. Struggling with your writing? Say goodbye to stress and let our experts handle your ' write my essay for me ' challenge. Our team of skilled writers is ready to tackle any topic and deliver top-notch papers tailored to your instructions.

What Is a Happiness Essay?

The definition of a happiness essay can differ, but in general, a happiness essay is a paper that examines emotions, experiences, and perspectives related to the pursuit of contentment. Likewise, it may explore the philosophical and psychological aspects of delight and how it is affected by factors like wealth, relationships, and personal circumstances. A happiness essay provides a deeper understanding of enjoyment, how it can be achieved, and its influence on society. It is an opportunity to take readers on a reflective and stimulating journey, exploring the essence of joy. Writing a thematic essay on happiness is also a chance for writers to share their thoughts and observations with other people. Let's dive in and explore what delight really means to you!

Purpose of an Essay on Happiness

The reason for writing an essay about happiness is to explore the concept of delight to understand what it means to different people. For example, many believe it primarily depends on external factors such as wealth, success, or material possessions. However, it can be illustrated that true joy largely comes from internal factors, like one's outlook, personal growth, and relationships, especially with family and friends. A happiness essay helps to dispel common misconceptions about what satisfaction truly is. Writing a paper on this subject can describe a deeper, healthy understanding of this universal pursuit.

Ideas to Write a Happiness Essay on

When you want to write a happiness essay , first, it is important to ask: What is happiness to you? How can it be understood? One approach is to define happiness and examine its various dimensions, such as psychological, emotional, and physiological.  For example, career satisfaction is a crucial factor in achieving contentment. When people enjoy their jobs and feel fulfilled, they tend to report higher levels of delight. It's worth exploring the link between happiness and career satisfaction and how people can find meaning in their work.  Another idea of how to be happy would look at factors like relationships, personal growth, and achievement. Besides, the connection between money and happiness can also be a significant factor in the quality of life. Can you buy satisfaction?  The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental aspect of life, and analyzing its various dimensions can help us gain valuable insights into what leads to a happy life.

Happiness Essay Outline

An outline for a happiness essay serves as a roadmap for writers to keep their paper organized. It helps to break down researched content into manageable sections while ensuring that all necessary information is included.  The essay outline on happiness example might look something like this:

• Topic definition
• Topic importance
• Thesis statement
• Topic sentence
• Supporting evidence
• Concluding sentence, connected to your thesis
• Summarizing main points
• Final thoughts and future recommendations
• Encouraging readers to reflect on their delight

This outline provides a comprehensive format for an essay about happiness, ensuring that articles are well-structured, easy to understand, and cover all the necessary information.

Structure of a Happiness Essay

Happiness essay structure is critical to a successful article because it helps to organize the ideas clearly and coherently. It is easier for readers to follow and understand writers' perspectives on this complex and multifaceted topic if the essay has the following sections: Introduction:  provides context for the topic with a clear thesis statement. Body:  delves into the details while providing evidence to support the thesis. Conclusion:  summarizes the main points while restating the thesis statement in a new way. By following this structure, writers can produce compelling essays on happiness in life that engage and inform readers.

Happiness Essay Introduction

The introduction of a happiness essay is critical to setting the stage for the article’s body. Good introductions should have three key elements: a hook, background information, and a thesis statement.  The hook draws readers in and keeps them engaged, but a boring or generic one may make them lose interest. The background information provides context for the topic and gives the audience a better understanding of why the essay is being written. Lastly, the thesis statement states the writer's stance on contentment, providing a roadmap for the rest of the essay.  An essay about happiness introduction is an important part that sets the tone and lays the foundation for the paper. By following this structure, authors can ensure that the introduction of their paper is well-organized, concise, and effective in drawing the readers into their piece.

Happiness Essay Introduction Example

An introduction to your paper should be engaging, interesting, brief, and to the point. It clearly states the objectives of the research and introduces readers to the key arguments that will be discussed. Here is an example of a happiness essay introduction:

Satisfaction is never a straightforward and easily attainable idea. It has intrigued philosophers, religious figures, and people alike for centuries. Some say contentment is found inside a material wealth lifestyle, and others believe it is a state of mind or a result of spiritual fulfillment. But what is happiness, really? And how can we cultivate it in our own lives?

Happiness Essay Thesis Statement

A happiness essay thesis statement is the backbone of an article and a crucial element in your paper. A good thesis statement about happiness should be arguable, specific, and relevant to the topic. It is important for defining the scope of an article and highlighting its focus while also identifying what it will not cover.  Finally, the thesis statement tells readers the writer's point of view and sets a standard for judging whether the essay achieves its goal. By creating an effective statement, writers can significantly impact their paper's quality by providing direction and focus to the author’s argument.

Happiness Thesis Statement Example

This thesis statement defines the pursuit of delight and outlines its contributing factors. Here is an example of a happiness essay thesis statement sample:

True happiness comes from family, friends, and learning to be content in life, while money can only purchase momentary happiness.

Happiness Essay Body

A happiness body paragraph is a component of the body section of an article that provides evidence, examples, and supporting arguments to develop an essay's central idea. Good paragraphs cover a topic in-depth and engage readers, prompting them to reflect on what brings joy and how to pursue it. A paragraph about happiness should be well-structured and focused, analyzing factors contributing to contentment in a logical and coherent manner. A well-crafted essay body on happiness includes several paragraphs, each focused on specific aspects of enjoyment while supporting an article's overall argument. Following these guidelines, writers can create persuasive essay paragraphs.

Happiness Body Paragraph Example

Body paragraphs should provide a deeper understanding of the topic while engaging readers with relevant, thought-provoking information. Happiness body paragraph example:

Contentment brings a smile to our faces, peace to our hearts, and a skip in our steps. It's what many of us strive for every day, and it turns out it's not just good for our spirits but our health too! Studies have linked contentment to lower stress, reduced risk of heart disease, and elevated life satisfaction. Delight can come from doing what you love, being with loved ones, or having a sense of purpose. Or, it may simply be found in everyday moments like a sunny day, a good meal, or a breathtaking sunset. Although joy can be fleeting and affected by life events, we can still work to cultivate it in our lives.

Happiness Essay Conclusion

A conclusion is the last section of an essay that summarizes the main points while offering a final perspective on the topic. To write a strong conclusion on a happiness essay, consider these key elements: 

• summarize the main arguments
• provide closure
• include a final thought or reflection
• leave a lasting impression
• avoid introducing new information.

A good conclusion can make the difference between a forgettable essay and one that stays with the reader long after they've finished. Following these guidelines ensures that your essay conclusion about happiness effectively wraps up the argument and provides readers with memorable final impressions.

Happiness Essay Conclusion Sample

Conclusion helps readers better understand the topic by providing a sense of resolution or insight. Here is an example of a happiness essay conclusion:

In conclusion, delight is a difficult and multi-faceted concept that can influence various factors, including personal relationships, life events, and individual perspectives. The pursuit of contentment is a common initiative for all humans, and it is evident that becoming content requires a perfect balance and order of internal and external factors. This article presents evidence that helps you see clearly that contentment is not a fixed state. It is a journey that needs effort, reflection, and self-awareness to enjoy. I hope this paper has helped you realize a deeper understanding of this topic and become better equipped to embark on your pursuit of joy. 

How to Write an Essay on Happiness?

If you want to write an essay on happiness, remember that it can be a hard yet rewarding experience. Whether you are doing it for a class assignment, a job, a scholarship application, or personal growth, exploring what contentment means to you can be the journey of self-discovery.  You should clearly understand the topic and have a well-structured plan. The steps to effective happiness essay writing include defining satisfaction, conducting research, and organizing thoughts. When writing, it's crucial to consider factors that contribute to delight and obstacles that can hinder the process. Following the steps below, you can craft an article that effectively communicates your perspective on this topic.

1.  Pick a Topic About Happiness

Choosing a topic about happiness essay can be daunting, but with some guidance and creativity, you may find a subject that is both interesting and relevant. When brainstorming for happiness essay topics, follow these steps:

• Start with a broad idea related to your issue. Narrow the focus to a specific aspect, gather information, list potential cases, evaluate options, refine the matter, and check for relevance to your audience.
• Gather information, consider the different perspectives, and take note of the arguments you come across.
• Come up with five to ten potential concerns and evaluate each, asking questions such as if it is interesting, has enough information available, and if you can find a unique approach.
• Refine your chosen discussion to make it specific, focused, relevant, and interesting to your audience.

2. Do In-Depth Research

Gathering information from credible sources is crucial when writing an essay about happiness. Here are some tips to ensure that you collect accurate and relevant facts:

• Research from trustworthy sources like academic journals, books by experts, and government websites.
• Evaluate information's credibility and reliability. When you are reading, take notes on the information that you find. Write down the author, title, and publication date of each source to keep track of your research.
• Use multiple sources to broaden your understanding of your topic.
• Organize your research with a citation manager or bibliography.

Following these tips, you can delve into a wealth of credible sources for your happiness essays to elevate your article to new heights of insight.

3. Create an Outline for a Happiness Essay

Crafting an outline is essential in writing an essay on happiness and can give your work the structure and direction it needs to succeed. Here's how to create an effective happiness essay outline:

• Framework Start by outlining the main sections of your essay - introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Pinpoint your ideas Determine the key points you want to convey in each section.
• Supplement with specifics Add details that reinforce and support your ideas under each main point.
• Follow the guide Use the happiness essay outline example above as a starting point, but feel free to customize depending on the situation.

By following these steps and utilizing an essay outline , you'll have a clear map to guide you as you craft your paper, ensuring that your ideas are coherently organized, and your writing flows effortlessly.

4. Write an Essay About Happiness

In this essay about happiness, we will delve into the elusive and complex nature of this emotion. Here is an example to follow when you write your happiness essay.

Contentment is a subjective experience that varies significantly from person to person. It is often considered the ultimate goal of human life, and many people spend their entire lives searching for it. Despite its elusive nature, it is a crucial component of well-being and has been linked to numerous benefits for physical, mental, and emotional health. The reasons to smile or experience joy are varied and can be both internal and external. Some individuals find joy in the simple things in life, like being with family, pursuing their passions, or exploring new experiences. On the other hand, others may find it through accomplishing personal goals, acquiring material goods, or attaining financial security. Nonetheless, it's crucial to keep in mind that these external sources of happiness may not always be possible and may not alleviate suffering. Conversely, true joy comes from within and is characterized by a sense of being content, satisfied, and with purpose. It can be cultivated through mindfulness, gratitude, and self-reflection. By focusing on personal growth, forming meaningful relationships, and finding meaning and purpose in life, individuals, including children, can develop a deep sense of satisfaction that is not dependent on external circumstances and is not easily disturbed by life's problems. In conclusion, delight is a complex and multifaceted experience that both internal and external factors can influence. While external sources can bring temporary joy, true and lasting contentment can only be found within. Individuals can create a foundation for joy that will endure throughout their lives by focusing on personal growth and cultivating a positive mindset.

5. Proofread Your Happiness Essay

When proofreading your happiness essay, make sure to take your time and approach it methodically. Follow these steps:

• Read through the entire essay to get a sense of its overall structure and flow.
• Pay close attention to the introduction, as this sets the tone for the entire piece.
• Look for typos, grammatical errors, and awkward phrasing .
• Ensure your paragraphs are well-organized, with clear transitions between ideas. Check that your happy essay accurately reflects your thoughts and clearly conveys the message you want.
• Finally, read the paper out loud to yourself, or have someone else read it to you.

This can help you pick up on any errors that you might have missed during your initial proofreading. Finally, the article will leave a lasting impression on your reader and enhance your credibility as a writer.

Happiness Essay Examples

If you're looking to write truly captivating happiness essays, it's always helpful to seek inspiration from various sources. Consider checking out these excellent essay examples about happiness:  Happiness essay example 1

Essay example about happiness 2

Happiness essay sample 3

Essay on happiness example 4

Example of a happiness essay 5

They offer a rich tapestry of perspectives on what enjoyment truly means. Whether you draw on your own experiences or delve into the experiences of others, a happiness essay example will serve as a valuable resource as you strive to make your mark on this timeless topic.

Happiness Essay Writing Tips

When writing a happiness essay, there are key tips to keep in mind to help you create a compelling piece of work. Here are a few suggestions to get you started in happiness essays writing:

• Explore the concept from a cultural or historical perspective, looking at how attitudes towards your topic have changed over time across different societies.
• Consider how relationships, community, and social connections shape our enjoyment. How can these factors interact?
• Weigh the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches, such as positive or negative thinking, mindfulness, and self-care, offering a well-rounded perspective on the topic.
• Reflect on the connection between happiness and success, considering whether one necessarily leads to the other or can be pursued independently of success.
• Incorporate humor and lightheartedness into your writing, making your essay entertaining.

By going about integrating these unique tips into your writing day by day, you'll be able to craft essays on happiness that are both original and memorable, capturing the reader's imagination from start to finish. Students can explore a vast range of topics through our platform, from an essay about true friendship  and a  family essay to an illustration essay that will show how to convey complex ideas in a clear and engaging way.

Bottom Line on Happiness Essay Writing

To write a happiness essay, you should consider providing long and in-depth ways to explore what truly brings us joy. Instead of repeating common knowledge, take a personal approach and reflect on the things that delight you. Consider the fact that relationships, gratitude, mindfulness, and activities all contribute to shaping our joy. Your happiness essays should also showcase your introspective side. Examine any challenges or obstacles you have faced in your journey toward contentment. This will make your paper not only unique but also relatable and insightful. The goal is to create a piece that offers a fresh perspective on the concept of happiness and a true reflection of your experiences.

Buy custom essay online from StudyCrumb and get a happiness paper delivered on time. Top-notch quality is guaranteed!

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

You may also like

Journal of Happiness Studies

An Interdisciplinary Forum on Subjective Well-Being

The international peer-reviewed Journal of Happiness Studies is devoted to theoretical and applied advancements in all areas of well-being research. It covers topics referring to both the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives characterizing well-being studies. The former includes the investigation of cognitive dimensions such as satisfaction with life, and positive affect and emotions. The latter includes the study of constructs and processes related to optimal psychological functioning, such as meaning and purpose in life, character strengths, personal growth, resilience, optimism, hope, and self-determination. In addition to contributions on appraisal of life-as-a-whole, the journal accepts papers investigating these topics in relation to specific domains, such as family, education, physical and mental health, and work.  The journal provides a forum for three main areas in happiness research: 1) theoretical conceptualizations of well-being, happiness and the good life; 2) empirical investigation of well-being and happiness in different populations, contexts and cultures; 3) methodological advancements and development of new assessment instruments. The journal addresses the conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of happiness and well-being dimensions, as well as the individual, socio-economic and cultural factors that may interact with them as determinants or outcomes.  

This is a transformative journal , you may have access to funding.

• Antonella Delle Fave

Latest articles

How curiosity enhances performance: mechanisms of physiological engagement, challenge and threat appraisal, and novelty deprivation.

• Lukasz D. Kaczmarek
• Todd B. Kashdan
• Jolanta Enko

Imprecision in the Estimation of Willingness to Pay Using Subjective Well-Being Data

• Lukas Leitner

Inequalities and Social Capital as Factors of Subjective Well-Being: Case Study from Western Province, Zambia

• Martin Schlossarek
• Jaromír Harmáček
• Lenka Suchá

The Quality of Society and Happiness: Fairness, Trust, and Community in China

• John Knight
• Ramani Gunatilaka

The Role of Resilience in Fostering Late Adolescents’ Meaning-Making Process: A Latent Profile Analysis

• Michela Zambelli
• Adriano Mauro Ellena
• Elena Marta

Journal updates

Obituary ed diener.

Professor Ed Diener's passing is a tremendous loss for the field of subjective well-being. His work has pushed the boundaries of quality of life studies in multiple ways, influencing and inspiring many scholars, both inside and outside the field of happiness. More.......

Journal information

• ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide
• Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences
• Google Scholar
• OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service
• Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
• Social Science Citation Index
• TD Net Discovery Service
• UGC-CARE List (India)

Rights and permissions

Editorial policies

© Springer Nature B.V.

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

What Is Happiness and Why Is It Important? (+ Definition)

It seems like an odd question, but is it? Do you know how to define happiness? Do you think happiness is the same thing to you as it is to others?

What’s the point of it all? Does it even make a difference in our lives?

In fact, happiness does have a pretty important role in our lives, and it can have a huge impact on the way we live our lives. Although researchers have yet to pin down the definition or an agreed-upon framework for happiness, there’s a lot we have learned in the last few decades.

This article will dive into the science of happiness, what it actually is, and why it matters.

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 Look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s Definition of Happiness

What is the Meaning of Happiness in Positive Psychology?

The psychology behind human happiness, 8 examples that describe what a happy life looks like, why is happiness so important, 6 videos that explain happiness, a take-home message, a look at the oxford english dictionary ‘s definition of happiness.

First, let’s take a look at the definition of happiness so we’re all on the same page.  Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happiness” is a simple one: “ The state of being happy .”

Not exactly what we were looking for, was it? Perhaps we need to dive a little deeper.  Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happy” is a little more helpful: “ Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment .”

That’s better! So, happiness is the state of feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. From this definition, we can glean a few important points about happiness:

• Happiness is a state, not a trait; in other words, it isn’t a long-lasting, permanent feature or personality trait, but a more fleeting, changeable state.
• Happiness is equated with feeling pleasure or contentment, meaning that happiness is not to be confused with joy, ecstasy, bliss, or other more intense feelings.
• Happiness can be either feeling or showing, meaning that happiness is not necessarily an internal or external experience, but can be both.

Download 3 Free Happiness Exercises (PDF)

These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to discover authentic happiness and cultivate subjective well-being.

Download 3 Free Happiness Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

• Email Address *
• Your Expertise * Your expertise Therapy Coaching Education Counseling Business Healthcare Other
• Comments This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

The meaning of happiness in Positive Psychology really depends on who you ask.

Happiness is often known by another name in positive psychology research: subjective wellbeing, or SWB.

Some believe happiness is one of the core components of SWB, while others believe happiness is SWB. Regardless, you’ll frequently find SWB used as a shorthand for happiness in the literature.

And speaking of the literature, you will find references to SWB everywhere. A quick Google search for the word “happiness” offers over 2 million results (as of January 6th, 2019). Further, a scan for the same term in two of psychology’s biggest online databases (PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES) returns 19,139 results from academic and other journals, books, dissertations, and more.

Is it difficult to define scientifically?

With so many takes on happiness, it’s no wonder that happiness is a little difficult to define scientifically; there is certainly disagreement about what, exactly, happiness is.

According to researchers Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, and their colleagues (2005), there are three main ways that happiness has been approached in positive psychology:

• Happiness as a global assessment of life and all its facets;
• Happiness as a recollection of past emotional experiences;
• Happiness as an aggregation of multiple emotional reactions across time (Kim-Prieto, Diener, Tamir, Scollon, & Diener, 2005).

Although they generally all agree on what happiness feels like—being satisfied with life, in a good mood, feeling positive emotions , feeling enjoyment, etc.—researchers have found it difficult to agree on the scope of happiness.

However, for our purposes in this piece, it’s enough to work off of a basic definition that melds the OED ‘s definition with that of positive psychologists: happiness is a state characterized by contentment and general satisfaction with one’s current situation.

Pleasure vs. happiness

The association between the two makes sense, and it’s common to hear the two words used interchangeably outside of the literature; however, when it comes to the science of positive psychology, it is important to make a distinction between the two.

Happiness, as we described above, is a state characterized by feelings of contentment and satisfaction with one’s life or current situation. On the other hand, pleasure is a more visceral, in-the-moment experience. It often refers to the sensory-based feelings we get from experiences like eating good food, getting a massage, receiving a compliment, or having sex.

Happiness , while not a permanent state, is a more stable state than pleasure. Happiness generally sticks around for longer than a few moments at a time, whereas pleasure can come and go in seconds (Paul, 2015).

Pleasure can contribute to happiness, and happiness can enhance or deepen feelings of pleasure, but the two can also be completely mutually exclusive. For example, you can feel a sense of happiness based on meaning and engagement that has nothing to do with pleasure, or you could feel pleasure but also struggle with guilt because of it, keeping you from feeling happy at the same time.

Happiness vs. meaning

Happiness and meaning have an even more distinct line between the two. Rarely are happiness and meaning confused or used interchangeably, and for good reason—they describe two very different experiences.

Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.

Roy Baumeister et al. (2013)

Unlike happiness, meaning is not a fleeting state that drifts throughout the day; it’s a more comprehensive sense of purpose and feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself.

As the quote from Baumeister and colleagues (2013) suggests, there are important distinctions between the methods of searching for and the benefits of experiencing happiness and meaning. Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American (2016) outlines these distinctions that Baumeister and his fellow researchers found between the two:

• Finding one’s life easy or difficult was related to happiness, but not meaning;
• Feeling healthy was related to happiness, but not meaning;
• Feeling good was related to happiness, not meaning;
• Scarcity of money reduced happiness more than meaning;
• People with more meaningful lives agreed that “relationships are more important than achievements;”
• Helping people in need was linked to meaning but not happiness;
• Expecting to do a lot of deep thinking was positively related to meaningfulness, but negatively with happiness;
• Happiness was related more to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaning was related more to being a giver than a taker;
• The more people felt their activities were consistent with the core themes and values of their self, the greater meaning they reported in their activities;
• Seeing oneself as wise, creative, and even anxious were all linked to meaning but had no relationship (and in some cases, even showed a negative relationship) to happiness (Kaufman, 2016).

Basically, although the two overlaps and each can contribute to the experience of the other, the two can be mutually exclusive (Baumeister et al., 2013).

Relevant reading: 19 Cliché Happiness Quotes & The (Lack Of) Science Behind Them

The origins and etymology of happiness (Incl. root words)

According to Etymology Online  (n.d.), the word for “happy” in most languages came from the word for “lucky.” This suggests an interesting trend—perhaps our ancestors believed that happiness was largely a by-product of luck?

It also points to a possible difference of general opinion between earlier generations and our own 20th and 21st-century generations: that happiness was not a vital factor in a good life, but essentially a bonus that some lucky individuals got to experience.

Here’s what author Darrin McMahon writes about the origins and root words of the word “happiness:”

“It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.”

(McMahon, 2006)

What does self-happiness mean?

Although the term is not used very often, “self-happiness” refers to a sense of happiness or satisfaction with one’s self. It is often associated with self-confidence, self-esteem, and other concepts that marry “the self” with feeling content and happy.

In general, it means that you are pleased with yourself and your choices, and with the person that you are.

Happiness can be defined as an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment, and other positive emotions, but also of a sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued (Lyubomirsky, 2001).

Happiness energizes us and is a highly sought after state of being. But, what components make up happiness?

Martin Seligman (2002) argued that happiness has three dimensions that can be cultivated:  

• The regular experience of pleasantness (the pleasant life)
• The frequent engagement in satisfying activities (the engaged life)
• The experience of a sense of connectedness to a greater whole (the meaningful life)

Although each dimension is important, the happiest people tend to be those who pursue the full life— they infuse their life with pleasure, engagement, and meaning (Seligman et al., 2005).

Building on Seligman’s three dimensions of happiness, Sirgy and Wu (2009) added the balanced life dimension.

According to these authors, balance in life is another key factor contributing to happiness because the amount of satisfaction derived from a single life domain is limited. One needs to be involved in multiple domains to satisfy the broad spectrum of human needs. As a result, cultivating a sense of balance is crucial for juggling these life domains.

Now that we know what happiness is, let’s dive a little deeper. What does psychology have to tell us about happiness?

There are many different theories of happiness, but they generally fall into one of two categories based on how they conceptualize happiness (or well-being):

• Hedonic happiness/well-being is happiness conceptualized as experiencing more pleasure and less pain; it is composed of an affective component (high positive affect and low negative affect) and a cognitive component (satisfaction with one’s life);
• Eudaimonic happiness/well-being conceptualizes happiness as the result of the pursuit and attainment of life purpose, meaning, challenge, and personal growth; happiness is based on reaching one’s full potential and operating at full functioning (AIPC, 2011).

Some theories see happiness as a by-product of other, more important pursuits in life, while others see happiness as the end-goal for humans. Some theories state that pursuing happiness is pointless (although pursuing other important experiences and feelings may contribute to greater happiness), and some assume that happiness can be purposefully increased or enhanced.

Although they differ on the specifics, these theories generally agree on a few points:

• It’s good to be happy, and people like being happy;
• Happiness is neither a totally fleeting, momentary experience nor a stable, long-term trait;
• At least some portion of our happiness is set by our genetics, but the amount varies from about 10% up to 50%;
• The pursuit and attainment of pleasure will rarely lead to happiness;
• There are many sources that contribute to or compose happiness (AIPC, 2011).

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.

Updated monthly. 100% Science-based.

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

What sources create true personal happiness?

Taking together all the various theories and findings on happiness, we know that there are at least a few factors that are very important for overall happiness:

• Individual income;
• Labor market status;
• Physical health;
• Social relationships;
• Moral values;
• Experience of positive emotions (AIPC, 2011).

All of these factors can contribute to a happy life, but research has found that good relationships are a vital ingredient (Waldinger & Schulz, 2010).

When we are happy in our most important relationships (usually our spouse or significant other, our children and/or our parents, other close family members, and our closest friends), we tend to be happier.

We have some control over how our relationships go, so that leads us to an interesting and important question: can we increase our own happiness?

Can individuals learn how to be happy?

The answer from numerous studies is a resounding YES—you CAN learn how to be happier.

The degree to which you can increase your happiness will vary widely by which theory you subscribe to, but there are no credible theories that allow absolutely no room for individual improvement. To improve your overall happiness, the most effective method is to look at the list of sources above and work on enhancing the quality of your experiences in each one of them.

For example, you can work on getting a higher salary (although a higher salary will only work up to about $75,000 USD a year), improve your health , work on developing and maintaining high-quality relationships, and overall, find ways to incorporate more positive feelings into your daily life. This does assume basic access to safety as well as social equality.

Of course, what it looks like will depend on the individual—a happy life for one person may be another’s nightmare!

However, there are a few examples that can display a wide range of lives that can be conducive to happiness:

• A woman who lives alone, has excellent relationships with her nieces and nephews, gives to charity, and finds meaning in her work;
• A man who is happily married with three healthy children and a relatively low-paying job;
• A widow who enjoys regular visits with her children and grandchildren, along with volunteering for local charities;
• A cancer patient who has a wonderful support system and finds meaning in helping others make it through chemotherapy;
• A social worker who works 70-hour weeks with no overtime pay, to ensure the children on her caseload are in good hands;
• An unmarried man in a monastery who has no earthly possessions and no salary to speak of, but finds meaning in communing with his god;
• A teenager in a foster home who has several close friends and enjoys playing football on his school’s team;
• A man who lives with several pets, enjoys a high salary, and loves his job.

Each of these was pulled from real-world examples of people who are happy. They may not seem like they have it all, but they all have at least one of the ingredients from the list of sources mentioned earlier. We don’t need to have everything we want in order to be happy—true happiness can be obtained by finding joy in what we already have, however much or little that may seem.

What are some visions you associate with happiness? Are there any similarities with these dreams?

You might be wondering why happiness is considered such an important aspect of life, as there are many components of a meaningful life.

In some ways, science would agree with you. It appears that  life satisfaction , meaning, and well-being can be linked with happiness, but happiness is not necessarily the overarching goal for everyone in life. It is still important because it has some undeniably positive benefits and co-occurring factors.

June Silny at Happify outlines 14 answers to the question, “ What’s so great about happiness, anyway? ”

• Happy people are more successful in multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.
• Happy people get sick less often and experience fewer symptoms when they do get sick.
• Happy people have more friends and a better support system.
• Happy people donate more to charity (and giving money to charity makes you happy, too).
• Happy people are more helpful and more likely to volunteer—which also makes you happier!
• Happy people have an easier time navigating through life since optimism eases pain, sadness, and grief.
• Happy people have a positive influence on others and encourage them to seek happiness as well, which can act as reinforcement.
• Happy people engage in deeper and more meaningful conversations.
• Happy people smile more, which is beneficial to your health.
• Happy people exercise more often and eat more healthily.
• Happy people are happy with what they have rather than being jealous of others.
• Happy people are healthier all around and more likely to be healthy in the future.
• Happy people live longer than those who are not as happy.
• Happy people are more productive and more creative, and this effect extends to all those experiencing positive emotions.

The relationship between mental health and happiness

As you can probably assume from the list above, there is a strong relationship between mental health and happiness! When happy people are healthier, have better relationships, make friends more easily, and find more success in life, it’s easy to see why happiness and mental health are related.

The sources that contribute to happiness are the same as those that provide people with a buffer or protection against mental illness, which explains the close relationship between the two.

A recent study explored the association between happiness and mental health in college students and found that a relatively strong, positive correlation connects the two factors (Shafiq, Nas, Ansar, Nasrulla, Bushra, & Imam, 2015). This correlation held, even when gender and socio-demographic variables were added to the mix.

The close tie between mental health and happiness is reason enough to make happiness an important priority for parents, educators, researchers, and medical professionals alike, along with the simple fact that we all like to feel happy!

17 Exercises To Increase Happiness and Wellbeing

Add these 17 Happiness & Subjective Well-Being Exercises [PDF] to your toolkit and help others experience greater purpose, meaning, and positive emotions.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

If you’re interested in learning more about happiness from a scientific perspective, there are a few videos you might want to check out, including:

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar from WGBH Forum.

Shawn Achor – The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance TEDTalk from TEDx Talks

Positive Psychology – Happier by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. from FightMediocrity

How to be Happy – The Science of Happiness and Feeling Positive in Life from Memorize Academy

The Surprising Science of Happiness TED Talk by Dan Gilbert from TED

How to Be Happy – The Secret of Authentic Happiness – Martin Seligman from Practical Psychology

I hope this piece was helpful and informative for you, and that you learned something new about the scientific study of happiness. It’s a fascinating area of research, and new findings are coming out all the time. Make sure you stay up to date on the happiness literature , as the findings can be of great use in helping you to live your best life!

What are your thoughts on happiness? Would you define it differently? What do you find is the most important ingredient for your own happiness? Let us know in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading, I hope you are all finding happiness in all your life journeys.

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

• AIPC. (2011). Happiness and positive psychology. Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors Article Library . Retrieved from https://www.aipc.net.au/articles/happiness-and-positive-psychology/
• Baumeister, R., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Gabinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8 , 505-516.
• Joseph Sirgy, M., & Wu, J. (2009). The pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life: What about the balanced life? Journal of Happiness Studies, 10 , 183-196.
• Kaufman, S. B. (2016). The differences between happiness and meaning in life. Scientific American . Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-differences-between-happiness-and-meaning-in-life/
• Kim-Prieto, C., Diener, E., Tamir, M., Scollon, C. N., & Diener, M. (2005). Integrating the diverse definitions of happiness: A time-sequential framework of subjective well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6 , 261-300.
• Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Why are some people happier than others? The role of cognitive and motivational processes in well-being. American Psychologist, 56(3) , 239.
• McMahon, D. (2006). Happiness: A history . Grove Press.
• Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.). Happy . Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
• Paul, M. (2015). The difference between happiness and pleasure. Huffington Post: Life . Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-difference-between-happiness-and-pleasure_b_7053946
• Seligman, M. E. (2002).  Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment . Simon and Schuster.
• Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5) , 410.
• Shafiq, S., Naz, R. A., Ansar, M., Nasrulla, T., Bushra, M., & Imam, S. (2015). Happiness as related to mental health among university students. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 5 , 124-132.
• Silny, J. (n.d.). What’s so great about happiness, anyway? (The answer: plenty!). Happify Daily . Retrieved from https://www.happify.com/hd/whats-so-great-about-happiness/
• Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2010). What’s love got to do with it?: Social functioning, perceived health, and daily happiness in married octogenarians. Psychology and Aging, 25 , 422-431.

Share this article:

Article feedback

What our readers think.

His article was extremely helpful and enabled me to grasp the concept of the confusing question of what it means to be happy and the general meaning of happiness. I’m so glad I found this article to be honest.

I disagree with your comment that ‘Happiness is not a state but a trait.’ I see happiness as a purely internal construct. I choose to be happy regardless of the people or things going on around me. Those people who look for happiness in others, outside of themselves, bounce back and forth between some fleeting form of happiness and unhappiness. If they would instead see happiness as an internal construct, man vs himself, they wouldn’t be dependent on someone else for their personal feelings of happiness. Because really, you don’t have the power to change others… But you do have all the power you need to change how you choose to see and react to what’s around you. The ball of your happiness is 100% in your court.

The article was very helpful and informative

Just finished your article on happiness, or SWB and meaning . As stated in your article, happiness is fleeting and subject to feel good material goods and personal objectives. Having sex, kids, buying a new car, an opioid response. However, I thought life was supposed to have meaning that would contribute to my happiness. I chose a career based on what I thought I could contribute to my own and others lives. Rather naïve on my behalf and futile at this stage. I’m 72 years old and understand less now about the world as it is than ever before. I’ve seen the horrors of war and have moved forward from those days to marrying, having a family and building a career, the dopamine response, however I’ve lost the meaning of life and find myself unhappy, angry, reclusive and frustrated. I have done drugs, tried meditation and read books searching for meaning and happiness, which has been elusive at times. Your article helped put certain expectations of others and myself in perspective and what I need to do to achieve happiness and meaning. Thank you!

Thanks for this article. Nowadays, i do gratitude exercice in the morning, midday and before sleep. It’s help me stay more in positive thoughts. I like soo much.

I write: I am grateful for … ( 10x )

Thank you so much for this very insightful article. It really taught me a lot.

Thank you very much for the article. I think it will help me a lot. It has given me clear ideas of how I can try and attain some degree of happiness, and hence greater contentment. Happiness is important in individuals – I believe it is a key to tolerance and a stable society.

Let us know your thoughts Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Related articles

Embracing JOMO: Finding Joy in Missing Out

We’ve probably all heard of FOMO, or ‘the fear of missing out’. FOMO is the currency of social media platforms, eager to encourage us to [...]

The True Meaning of Hedonism: A Philosophical Perspective

“If it feels good, do it, you only live once”. Hedonists are always up for a good time and believe the pursuit of pleasure and [...]

Happiness Economics: Can Money Buy Happiness?

Do you ever daydream about winning the lottery? After all, it only costs a small amount, a slight risk, with the possibility of a substantial [...]

Read other articles by their category

• Body & Brain (52)
• Coaching & Application (39)
• Compassion (23)
• Counseling (40)
• Emotional Intelligence (22)
• Gratitude (18)
• Grief & Bereavement (18)
• Happiness & SWB (40)
• Meaning & Values (26)
• Meditation (16)
• Mindfulness (40)
• Motivation & Goals (41)
• Optimism & Mindset (29)
• Positive CBT (28)
• Positive Communication (23)
• Positive Education (37)
• Positive Emotions (32)
• Positive Leadership (16)
• Positive Parenting (14)
• Positive Psychology (21)
• Positive Workplace (35)
• Productivity (16)
• Relationships (46)
• Resilience & Coping (39)
• Self Awareness (20)
• Self Esteem (37)
• Strengths & Virtues (29)
• Stress & Burnout Prevention (33)
• Theory & Books (42)
• Therapy Exercises (37)
• Types of Therapy (54)

• Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

3 Happiness Exercises Pack [PDF]

The New York Times

Opinionator | the dangers of happiness.

The Dangers of Happiness

Whenever­ we talk about happiness we also talk about something else: morality. We may not know what happiness itself signifies, but we do know how it has been evoked historically — to set out a template for a moral life. As we rush to make happiness the ultimate aim both for ourselves and society at large, we might want to recall some of the wonderfully rich and depressingly contradictory history of the concept. This might help us better understand our own time and the moral values we subscribe to today.

In his book “Happiness: A History,” the historian Darrin M. McMahon provides an account of how the notion was expressed and embraced over time, going back to the birth of Western civilization, as many such accounts do, in ancient Greece.

Aristotle, one of the first to pay significant attention to the topic, thought that happiness consisted of being a good person. The happy life, what the Greeks called eudaemonia, was one lived ethically, guided by reason and dedicated to cultivating one’s virtues. Soon after, the Epicureans would connect happiness to pleasure. They argued that a good life should be devoted to whatever brought pleasure. They were no hedonists, though, and preached a strict regulation of desire. To be happy, Epicurus himself said, he needed no more than a barley cake and some water.

The Stoics gave no elevated status to pleasure, arguing that a person had the capacity to be happy no matter how daunting and painful the circumstances of life might be. Much later, Christianity, as preached and practiced throughout the Middle Ages, shunned pleasure altogether and regarded pain as the more useful path to, if not a happy life, then a sort of divine union in the afterlife. That desired state could not be attained in life on earth, but only as a gift from God, in heaven.

The Renaissance, though, brought happiness from heaven back to earth. It was not until the Enlightenment that it became a right — something that each and every person was able to pursue and attain. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the pursuit of happiness was an unalienable right, he did not just intend to say that man should pursue pleasure, but that he should also have the right to acquire and possess property.

What we esteem today, in the rich West, has its own distinct flavor.

Contrary to the message of Christianity, according to which we abandon ourselves to achieve divine union, we are now asked to pursue union with ourselves. To be happy in a time when we prize authenticity and narcissism, we need to express our true inner self, get in touch with our deeper feelings, and follow the path set by ourselves.

We are also far from the Epicureans, who were famously reluctant to engage in physical activity. Today we pursue happiness by worshiping our bodies, building them up through long-distance running, punishing boot camps, ironman triathlons and kettlebell swinging.

And unlike the work-shy Greeks of antiquity, we are assumed to find happiness through work and by being productive. We are required to curate our market value, manage ourselves as corporations and live according to an entrepreneurial ethos. When no sin is greater than being unemployed and no vice more despised than laziness, happiness comes only to those who work hard, have the right attitude and struggle for self-improvement.

These are some of the moral values that seem to underlie happiness today: Be real, be strong, be productive — and most important, don’t rely on other people to achieve these goals, because your fate is, of course, in your own hands.

This is a popular message, and has been for some time. It is drummed into the unemployed and poor who are led to believe that their misfortunes are symptoms of their inferior attitudes and inability to take ownership over their lives. They are, as Jeb Bush might claim, not working hard enough.

When happiness is recast as an individual choice, attitude becomes everything and circumstances are made irrelevant. Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, has worked hard to spread this message, referring to studies that suggest that victims of car crashes are, on the whole, neither less nor more unhappy than lottery winners.

Even if we find such insights interesting or inspiring, they do not form a particularly helpful basis when we seek to make happiness the goal of politics. If we may all be equally happy, irrespective of our circumstances, then that would equip politicians like Mr. Bush with a convenient excuse to stop looking at structural issues like class, social and economic inequality or poverty.

It is tempting to see the Conservative British prime minister David Cameron’s sudden interest in happiness in this light. When he decided a few years ago to initiate a so-called happiness index, he did so at the height of austerity, when public spending was being cut, and the “circumstances” were made worse for many people, especially those on benefits. As it happens, this survey was inspired by Mr. Seligman, producing an echo of the “circumstances make no difference” mantra.

When happiness has become championed and talked about incessantly, as it is today, the best we can hope for is that it raises other universal issues — like equality, justice, truth and ethics, which we desperately need to discuss. The worst that can happen — and this is unfortunately already underway — is that happiness becomes a Trojan horse used to normalize inequality and oppression. Poor people may then be sent to happiness courses to improve their attitudes, or assigned personal life coaches, as Paul Ryan once proposed in his bizarre anti-poverty plan.

“We believe that every American and in every community has a right to pursue happiness,” Jeb Bush said in a speech delivered in Detroit in February, presenting his plan to address income inequality. “They have a right to rise.”

Be wary. When politicians suggest that happiness be made the ultimate aim for society we should remember that they are probably not talking about happiness at all. They are talking about ideology: their own political agendas in disguise.

Carl Cederstrom is an associate professor of organization studies at Stockholm University. He is a co-author of “The Wellness Syndrome,” with André Spicer, and “Dead Man Working,” with Peter Fleming.

What's Next