It seems like from ancient philosophers and poets, the topic of “happiness” always interested the humankind. In the past two decades, research regarding the topic of “emotions” sparked even greater interest and was explored intensively by psychologists, particularly focusing on the topic of “happiness”. There are many approaches to “happiness”, with three very dominant ones: 1) psychologists want to understand exactly what is felt, 2) neuroscientists want to discover the brain’s responses to awards, and 3) economists want to find out values of humans. All over the world, from small-scaled environments such as schools and workplaces, to larger scaled environments such as countries, professionals are working hard on measuring and increasing the happiness felt by folks.
Despite popular beliefs, happiness is not that difficult to measure, despite its subjectivity. There are many ways in which this can be measured, from scaling factors, to MRI imaging to measure cerebral blood flow, and even electromyography to measure how active the muscles that allow someone to smile is being active on the face. Even though it is incredibly easy to measure, the degree of accuracy and precision is hard to remain constant. Someone’s 6 out of 10 in happiness, may be equivalent to another’s 5 out of 10. However, like any statistical tests, the more results are obtained, the more accurate and precise results are, therefore, despite how inappropriate the results are, certain trends can still be obtained by measuring from a large group of people.
The results that are obtained match with many hypotheses that scientists have made, including: healthier people are happier than unhealthy, people engaged in a romantic relationship are happier than those who are not, etc. However, something that came as a complete shock was how inadequate humans are at predicting to what extent something makes them happy, or how long that particular thing will allow them to stay happy for. When encountering a positive event, it was revealed that many expect them to cause much more happiness than in reality. In fact, only a few experiences allow humans to stay happy for longer than 3 months.
A coin is termed, named “synthetic happiness”, where it is man-made happiness. It is real happiness, just not natural. It is the happiness that is produced when something has an undesirable outcome, whereas natural happiness is produced naturally during an experience. None is better than the other, and simply have no differences in what they allow humans to do, only in where they originated from.
When measuring happiness, it was also revealed that the frequency at which one feels happiness is a much better predictor for happiness than the extent at which one feels happy. In other words, an individual who experiences many different happy events in a day is more likely to feel generally more happy than an individual who experiences extreme happiness once in a day. Therefore, doing very small events can help one to feel much more happier, though they may seem insignificant.
As research regarding happiness is increasing, there is no doubt that people will feel much more happy. Though the concept of “happiness” is understanded with much more detail, big questions are still remaining: What type of happiness is more beneficial? Is unhappiness required to truly experience happiness? How to live a desired lifestyle for humans increase happiness will eventually be able to be determined by science, however, whether or not that lifestyle is desired is still different from individual to individual.
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Written by: Erin Zhang
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References:
“The Science Behind the Smile”. (n.d.). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.
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