Varying Happiness Assessment

Lyubomirsky defines happiness as the “experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile” (184). She challenges the myths that people can find happiness by changing their circumstances and that people either are “born happy or unhappy” (186). Happiness is not something that can be found or something that not everyone can have. People make their own happiness, despite the difficulties they may face. Happiness comes by “choosing to change and manage your state of mind” (185). Lyubomirsky gives cases of people who are happy even though they suffer from losses and setbacks. These are the people whose circumstances should make them unhappy, but their intentional actions bring them joy. She also gives cases of people who have not suffered any major losses but are still unhappy because they may see events negatively and feel helpless before them. Lyubomirsky asserts that “changes in our circumstances, no matter how positive and stunning, actually have little bearing on our well-being” (186). Even though a person’s circumstances may be positive, those circumstances do not make them happy. Lyubomirsky uses a Subjective Happiness Scale to measure happiness, which takes the average of numerical answers to four questions. She argues that in order to become happier, “you need to determine your present personal happiness level, which will provide your first estimate of your happiness

Jennifer Senior discusses her research concerning positive psychology and whether or not happiness is teachable and highlights some of the darker sides of happiness. To start the article, Senior reveals her score on her test from the Authentic Happiness Inventory. The test designed by Chris Peterson of the positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. This test is intended to numerically score ones level of happiness. In a scale of 1 to 5, Jennifer got a grade of 2.88. This indicated she was below average for most rankings such as “age, education level, gender and occupation” (422). Senior states she is at the 50 percent mark for her given zip code. She stated that liking her

Happiness is a popular topic that is constantly being discussed by experts around the world. In the article “Happy Like God”, written by Simon Critchley, Critchley proposes his view on happiness and its inability to be measured or found through sources outside of ones-self. In another piece written by Richard Schoch, titled “A Crtique of Positive Psychology”, Schoch also discusses the topic through a process of critiquing studies and experiments that claim to have the answer to happiness. Both of these texts not only make claims that happiness cannot be measured, but they also bring questions to the table that provide valuable insights on the wrong answers in order for us to find the right ones.

The journal that I had selected deals with the relationship between health behaviors and happiness. Through the use of cross-sectional survey of 800 randomly selected university students, researchers were able to analyze what it takes for students to remain happy when undergoing many life struggles.

The University of Pennsylvania website, Authentic Happiness, was developed by the Positive Psychology Center with the purpose of providing free resources where people can learn about Positive Psychology (Authentic Happiness). Positive Psychology, according to the Positive Psychology Center, is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. The Optimism Test and Satisfaction with Life Scale are two questionnaires offered on the website. “The Optimism Test measures optimism about the future and the Satisfaction with Life Scale measures life satisfaction” (Authentic Happiness). The purpose of taking these tests is to examine the similarities and differences I have with my peers, whether or not if I am in agreement with the scores and determine if there is a correlation between the scores of each test.

When looking at arbitrary metrics in psychology, it is important to point out that this may be largely due to self-report bias. Subjects rank happiness, for example, on a Likert scale. This may give us an indication of someone’s happiness, but we must keep in mind that everyone is different based on their life experiences and so on. So while the subject may rank their happiness level at a 0, meaning they are not happy at all, this may not be a true indicator of their mindset or overall happiness.

The premise of the article: Universal Happiness? Cross-Cultural Measurement Invariance of Scales Assessing Positive Mental Health, is that positive mental health compliments the emotional security and the psychosocial aspects of a person’s life into a single paradigm. The paradigm shows that people who have a good mental health status see themselves as having a distinct direction in their life and that their life has more purpose than those who allow their mental health to deteriorate. Along with direction and purpose people with a good mental health status also have lasting relationships, are more accepting of whom they are, and exhibit a more positive affect. Bieda et al (2016) illustrates this by utilizing the Positive Mental Health Scale,

Larsen and Prizmic argued that the balance of positive and negative affect (the Losada ratio) is a key factor in subjective well-being and in defining whether a person flourishes. Larsen and Prizmic discussed work by several authors (e.g. Fredrickson and Losada, 2005; Gottman, 1994) which suggested that to maintain an optimal level of emotional well-being and positive health, individuals need to experience approximately three times more positive than negative affect. Given thus background the conducted a study to address three questions: First, is there evidence that a specific positivity ratio distinguishes individuals with different mental health status and especially flourishing from non-flourishing individuals? Second, are there are differences in the positivity ratio when daily affect data are used? Third, does the proposed critical positivity ratio of 2.9 discriminate individuals with different mental health status equally well across the adult lifespan? (“The Ratio between Positive and Negative Affect and Flourishing Mental Health across

We hypothesized that there would be a positive correlation between individuals gratitude score and their reported happiness score. We ran a Person correlation and found a significant positive correlation between gratitude scores and happiness scores, r(51) =.46, p =.00.

Satisfaction with life is oftentimes highly correlated with happiness, but it is not by inherently the same as happiness. One may be satisfied with one’s life outcomes or satisfied with external factors, without being very happy. Once discovering a satisfaction with life rating, one may be able to determine if satisfaction with life is something one can control, and if it is, one may be able to maximize one’s life satisfaction. For instance, if one is typically not searching for a mate, and he or she scores low on this scale, one may be more willing in the future to seek a partner if he or she knows that statistically speaking, people with partners are more satisfied with his or her life.

The satisfaction or happiness of the human race has always been a central theme in the humanities. Life satisfaction is conceptualized as one of the cognitive components of subjective well being, and refers to the global judgments people make about the quality of their lives (Diener et al., 2003). This means that people can examine the condition in their lives, weigh the importance of these conditions and evaluate their lives on a scale ranging from satisfied to dissatisfied. The concept of life

Happiness and life satisfaction are often referred as interchangeable (Taskahashi, 2012). The people who attend government employment training schemes may not be having an enjoyable experience because there is a low score of life satisfaction. This is one of the benefits of using SWB as an evaluation tool because it allows you to explore people’s perspective and how they feel and view their daily situation in life.

Happiness can be defined as “life satisfaction” which is made up of your own overall feelings and attitudes about your life. Not the elusive state of emotional happiness, but rather your state of being, happiness at your core which does not wane day-to-day like emotions. Happiness reports are being used to show quality of life, and help governments to be able to pass legislature that improves the lives of all people in their countries. The World Happiness Report is a research-based paper that has been published by the United Nations for the past 3 years. They gather information from surveys, economic studies, health records, and national statistics. This information is gathered from every country in the world and is compiled and structured to find the most statistically happy country. In 2015 the top five happiest countries were Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Canada. Finding patterns on what makes people happy and optimistic in these places could be the key to figuring out how to create a truly successful and prosperous country.

In the first test I took the title of the quiz was Happiness Test, but when you look at the description of it before you even take it, it states, “An optimistic attitude benefits not only your mental health, but your physical well-being as well. Take this test to see where you fall on the optimism/pessimism continuum” (Psychology Today). But the title of the quiz is “Happiness Test” so is happiness tied in to being optimistic? It could be, to be optimistic is to be hopeful and confident about the future, so yeah maybe it does have something to do with being happy. But at the same time it’s about the future not the present. Being happy is more of in the present not the future. My result was cynicism which on a scale of 0-100 is a 32, which I will have to guess that zero is pessimistic and 100 is optimistic.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness is a visual novel adaptation of the popular anime with the same name developed by 5pb and published by NIS America. Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness tells the tale of a rogue A.I and the police-like enforcers and inspector's tribulations stopping it. And that begs the question, is Happiness Mandatory upon completion of Psycho-Pass?