Why Happiness Is Known as Key Factor for Our Life!'

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 determinants

Other demographic characteristics also show weak associations with happiness. As one might expect, people who are happy in this way tend to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions. 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. Presumably, this behavior results from adaptive mechanisms that guide organisms toward resources and away from dangers. Surveys of representative populations show that objective measures (including doctors’ reports, hospital visits, and lists of symptoms) are very weakly correlated with happiness. Obviously, these two interpretations should lead to different effects on happiness. Interestingly, however, it does not appear that marriage itself causes higher levels of subjective well-being. Individual differences in happiness-related variables emerge early in life, are stable over time, and are at least partially heritable. Many of the factors that may first come to mind do not seem to play a major role in happiness. Interestingly, the specific goals that people choose may also affect their happiness. 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. 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). 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. Instead, it has been replicated in many different populations in many nations around the world. 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. For one thing, both upward and downward comparisons can lead to either increases or decreases in happiness. That’s more than all the other vertebrates (amphibians, birds, reptiles, and mammals) combined.

See All Good Facts

Psychologists have begun using experimental and longitudinal studies to determine whether positive affect plays a role in future positive outcomes. All of these effects lead to positive outcomes in people’s lives.

ONE GOOD FACT

There are 34,000 different species of fish. 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. This emotion often co-occurs with a specific facial expression: the smile.

The different meanings

People from around the world tend to have a similar concept of happiness and can recognize happiness in others. But research also shows that simply having important goals is associated with greater happiness. 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. 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. Thus, social comparison affects happiness in complicated ways.

Psychologists have also shown that goals and aspirations influence happiness. In addition, 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. In addition, when psychologists ask people to rate their overall life satisfaction, most people report scores that are above neutral. Thus, cataloging the correlates of happiness should provide important information about the features of human nature.

The results of scientific studies reveal several trends. Research consistently shows that people who have strong social relationships tend to report higher levels of well-being. If life is to be worth living, he argues, it must surely...

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. 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. As with other domains, subjective reports of relationship quality and relationship satisfaction tend to exhibit the highest correlations with subjective well-being. 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. 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. In addition, research shows that happy and unhappy people often choose different people for comparison. 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. Wealthy people are happier than poorer people, but the difference is not very large. According to this theory, positive emotions lead people to think creatively and to try new things. This research finding is not limited to relatively well-off samples (like the college students who are often asked to participate in psychological studies). 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. 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. Research suggests that choosing goals that are a challenge but not unachievable is important.

Functions

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. 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. When people from around the world are asked to list the things that are most important to them, happiness consistently tops the list. 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. 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). 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. 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. Married people consistently report higher levels of happiness than single people, who report greater happiness than the widowed, divorced, or separated. This broader form of happiness is not purely emotional, however: it also has a cognitive component. 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. 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. For example, although people strive to acquire high-paying jobs and dream about winning the lottery, income is not strongly correlated with happiness. 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. Factors such as intelligence, education, and job prestige are also only slightly related to well-being. Although this effect can occur, other research suggests that the processes are a bit more complicated. Some people always look for the silver lining in things, and presumably this positive outlook shapes the emotions that they feel. 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. People who are outgoing, assertive, and sociable tend to report more intense and more frequent positive emotions. 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. 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). If so, the evaluative reactions of many people about the world should be useful and revealing. 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.

Predictors of happiness

Psychologists have arrived at several surprising conclusions in their search for predictors of happiness. 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. First, psychologists study happiness because laypeople are interested in happiness. Happy people may choose comparison people who serve to maintain their happiness; unhappy people may choose comparisons that lead to less happiness. This suggests that genes play an important role. 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. Thus, although most people want to be happy because it feels good, this desired goal may lead to other positive outcomes in their lives.

. 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. 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. Psychologists, too, believe that the way that one thinks about the world is related to characteristic levels of happiness. Presumably, the sense of purpose that these goals create may protect people from the negative effects of temporary setbacks. Initially, psychologists thought that people evaluated the conditions in their own lives by comparing them with the conditions in other people’s lives. 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. As one might expect, the association between money and happiness is strongest among very poor groups and among poor countries. Subjective well-being researchers are interested in the various factors that influence these distinct components.

Study and assessment

Psychologists are interested in happiness for two reasons. People rank attaining happiness as being more important than acquiring money, maintaining good health, and even going to heaven. As a result, happy people can develop new ways to approach the world, new interests, new social relationships, and even new physical skills. For instance, marital status is one of the strongest demographic predictors of happiness. 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. 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). As one might expect based on this research, specific types of social relationships are also important for subjective well-being. 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. 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. 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. For instance, some psychologists have suggested that human beings have a basic need to experience strong and supportive social relationships. Thus, happiness is an important concept for researchers who study emotions.

Aristotle: Happiness

Aristotle’s approach to ethics is teleological. 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). 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. 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.