Happiness

What Makes You Happy?

What is the mysterious substance of happiness? What is happiness to the human brain? What are characteristics and definitions of happiness? What makes people happy and what happens when it is absent and depression comes? What makes most of us happy over the long term?

Definitions and Nature/Nurture

What exactly does it mean to be happy? How do you distinguish it from contentment, satisfaction, or even pleasure? The truth is that we don't know. The words may all be describing something similar. That's another way of saying that semantic differences aren't necessarily biological ones. Words like “contentment” and “satisfaction” are separable phenomenon only if you don't look too closely, with “pleasure” probably having the most unique distinguishing characteristics from the happy pack.

The one characteristic that holds up well regardless of how you define happiness is that everybody seems to experience it differently. The concept is so dependent on individual experience that researches have come up with a different name; the word “happiness” is not generally used. More common are the words “subjective well-being” (SWB).

How does one define happiness in scientifically meaningful fashion? Doing so requires a great deal of asking people about their feelings. This is called self-report. Admittedly, basing research on self-report is not ideal because the data is not always reliable. There are researchers who think it's doable, though – and they get the definitions.

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand, amongst other things, you own intellectual and emotional landscape. Photo of an Icelandic volcanic stone by Elena.

One such researcher is psychologist Ed Diener, who describes SWB as “people's cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives.” Diener has used this definition in a courageous attempt to codify the experience across the United States, th around the world, despite stout intellectual headwinds.

Diener created a test where you can score your happiness and compare your scores to other people's scores from all around the world. It's called the satisfaction with life scale, originally published in the “Journal of Personality Assessment”. You can find this instrument online. There are many variables that go into your subjective sense of well-being, so tests like these have to be taken with a grain of salt. As usual, there are both nature and nurture issues to consider.

A thermostat is a perfect metaphor for the nature side of happiness. Some psychologists believe that we are born with a happiness set point, or set range, like a thermostat in a home. If your happiness is normally high, but then your girlfriend breaks up with you, you will be down for a while.

But at some point your set range gets violated, your feelings get too “low”, and your mood alarm goes off. As a result, you turn on some SWB heat. Eventually, you return to your natural happiness temperature. If your happiness is too “high” - for example, if you win the lottery – the system works in reverse, eventually turning on some SWB air-conditioning. You return eventually to the same happiness you had before winning.

Happiness set points are conceived by some researchers as being more or less a permanent feature of your personality. That means that your set range is in part biologically determined – genetic, perhaps – which means that it's mostly concerned with how well you chose your parents.

There is evidence to suggest that these some psychologists might be on to something. Studies of twins reveal that the SWB scores are experienced alike, regardless of the environment in which the twins are raised.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Our intelligence is a form of self-awareness, whereby you understand your assets and limitations, your strengths and weaknesses. Photo by Elena.