Personal Happiness

Personal happiness is a key life goal for most of us. After decades of research on the nature, causes, and effects of personal happiness, most social psychologists agree that such evaluations involve four basic components:

1. Global life satisfaction - Feeling general happy with our lives
2. Satisfaction with important life domains - Being satisfied with our work, relationships, and family
3. Positive feelings - Experiencing positive emotions and moods often
4. Negative feelings - Experiencing negative feelings or emotions less often or, preferable rarely

Happiness seems to rest on several foundations, and to the extent, these are present in our lives, they strongly influence how happy we are and the extent to which we see our lives as meaningful and fulfilling. (Krause in Baron & Branscombe, 2012:420)

Personal Happiness: Refers to subjective well-being, which involves global life satisfaction, satisfaction with specific life domains, frequent positive feelings, and relatively few negative feelings. (Baron & Branscombe, 2012:420)

How happy are people in general?

Surprisingly, despite hugely varied living conditions around the world, most people – no matter they live, their standard of living, gender, age, and health – report that they are quite happy.

According to large-scale surveys done by the European Values Study Group & World Values Survey Association in 2005 found that about 80% of all respondents indicate that they are very happy and satisfied. (Diener et.al. in Baron & Branscombe, 2012:421)

Factors that influence happiness

What makes people happy with their lives, even their lives are filled with grinding poverty and deprivation? Social psychologists found the following:

1. Happy people report experiencing higher levels of positive emotion and lower levels of negative emotion than less happy people.
2. Good social relations with other people – close friends, family, romantic partners – appear to be an important ingredient for being happy.  Such close relationships are available to people everywhere, in all cultures, regardless of personal wealth.

In fact, close family relationships may be more the rule in less wealthy societies than in wealthy ones, where people move around frequently and may live hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from their relatives, whom they often have to leave behind when they take a new job elsewhere or move for other reasons.

Additional findings (Diener et.al.) suggest that personal happiness may be influenced by other factors, too. One of these includes having goals and the resources necessary to reach them. Studies indicate that people who have concrete goals, especially goals that they have a realistic chance of reaching, and who feel (realistically or otherwise) that they are making progress toward these, are happier than people lacking in such goals.

Is wealth an important ingredient in personal happiness?

Does money equal happiness? Findings by Diener (2010) indicate that there is some connection between wealth and happiness, at least at certain points in the income distribution, but that it is far from powerful as many people assume, for instance:

–That if you can have anything you want and live any lifestyle you wish that it will make you happy.

Around the globe, household income is related to global feelings of well-being, and so is gross national product per capita, but primarily at the low-income levels. If you are worried about how you are going to feed your family or pay your rent, lack of money is likely to make you unhappy; without it, you cannot meet your basic needs. At higher income levels, however, income is not strongly correlated with happiness. People already have all the basics and some of the luxuries, so increasing wealth still further does not strongly increase their happiness or life satisfaction. In sum, although wealth – both at the individual and societal level – does play some role in personal happiness, it has a much smaller one than many people guess.

Furthermore, wealth is not associated with positive feelings, another component of happiness. Diener et.al. (2010) research indicates that wealth is not clearly linked to the social side of life and happiness. One reason this is the case is that such factors as being treated with respect and having family one can count on in an emergency are independent of income. In fact, many countries high in societal wealth (gross domestic product) are relatively low in terms of social measures or positive feelings, which is typically derived from having strong community ties.

Countries ranked high in income do not necessarily rank high in social prosperity or in positive feelings.

So wealth does not automatically generate all components of happiness
(Baron & Branscombe, 2012:422)

In fact, it was found that “Some nations that do well in economic terms do only modestly well in social psychological prosperity, and some nations that rank in the middle of in economic development are stars in social psychological prosperity” (Diener et.al. in Baron & Branscombe, 2012:422)

Watch “Gross National Happiness” by Morten Sondergaard, on YouTube

So why doesn’t wealth necessarily result in personal happiness?

Boyce et.al (2010) found that it is not wealth that matter most. But people seem to care more about how their income (wealth) compares with that of others than they do about its absolute level. When individuals were asked to report on the number of people in their society who have income worse than or better than theirs, these relative judgments were in fact strongly related to life satisfaction. On the other hand, absolute income was not. It seems that we care about doing better than others, not just being wealthy ourselves – again social comparison plays a role in our subjective well-being. Raising standards of living in a society do not always help because the people we compare against also experience a rise in income. “Rising tide may indeed float all boats, but doesn’t make the people in the boats happier.”

In addition, while wealth may give us the material possessions and comforts we want, it may take away the capacity to savor and enjoy the little pleasures of life. Quoidbach et.al. (2010) gave participants in their study a piece of chocolate and then observed their reactions as they ate it. Before they received the chocolate the participants were exposed to either photo of the local currency or a neutral photo unrelated to money. Observers rated the amount of enjoyment shown by the participants as they at the chocolate. Results were clear: Those who had looked at the photos of money and were primed to think about wealth enjoyed the chocolate less and spent less time eating it than those who saw the neutral photo. Although money may provide many of the things we want, it may actually reduce our ability to savor life’s pleasures. (Baron & Branscome, 2012:423)

Is happiness having what you want or wanting what you have?

Larsen & McKibben (2008) had participants report on what they had (in terms of material possessions) and how much they wanted (enjoyed) these items. Information on these issues was used to predict their life satisfaction (an important component of personal happiness), and results were clear:

Both having what you want and wanting what you have played a role in this aspect of happiness.

The basic meaning of these findings is that neither things nor having them, are closely related to happiness. Rather happiness comes from valuing the things we have – being grateful for them and enjoying them.

Many people, however, seem to lose the latter capacity when they attain wealth. They continue to believe that if they obtain just one more thing – new car, new and larger home, one more tool for their workshop, one more piece of jewelry – they will finally attain the happiness they seek.

But, if they obtain these possessions, the happiness they experience is fleeting, and they are soon focusing on the next item needed to complete their happiness. Which could end up to be a never-ending cycle of seeking happiness!

The benefits of happiness

Being happy certainly feels good and it is a state that most of us would prefer to be in most of the time. However, evidence by research groups suggests that happy people generally experience many tangible benefits related to their high levels of life satisfaction. With regard to work, people high in subjective well-being are more likely to experience better work outcomes, including increased productivity, higher quality of work, higher income, more rapid promotions, and greater job satisfaction.

Research also indicates that happy people have a higher quality of social relationships – more friends, more satisfying romantic relationships and stronger social support networks – than less happy people. In addition, has been found that happy people tend to report better health and fewer unpleasant physical symptoms, and deal with illness more effectively when it does occur. Additional health-related benefits associated with higher levels of well-being included increased resistance to cold and flu viruses, better ability to deal with pain, a lower incidence of depression and improved recovery from surgery and most intriguing of all happy people seem to live longer. (Baron & Branscombe, 2012:424)

Can we increase personal happiness?

Initial research on happiness seemed to suggest that it is relatively fixed: because of a large genetic component – people are born with strong tendencies to be happy or unhappy. One source of evidence comes from the idea that emotions, including happiness, vary but do so around a set point that is fairly stable throughout life. For instance, after experiencing emotion-generating events – winning the lottery or receiving harsh criticism from one’s boss – people tend to return to their basic set point. Although genetic factors do play an important role in happiness, however growing evidence points to the more optimistic conclusion that it can be changed.

Happiness varies considerably across individuals and there are three primary types of factors that determine happiness:

1. The set point
2. Life circumstances
3. Intentional activity

Research has found that genetic factors account for about 50% of happiness, and external life circumstances account for approximately 10% and up to a significant 40% is determined by a person’s thoughts and actions, and is therefore subject to change.

Interventions targeting intentional activity have been shown to produce relatively lasting effects on happiness. Research has confirmed that relatively simple behavioral interventions, such as asking participants to exercise regularly or be kind to others, and cognitive interventions – like having people pause to count their blessings- can exert lasting effects on measures of happiness. We can increase our level of happiness through interventions that target intentional activity (what people think and do in their daily lives).

Steps you can take to increase your personal happiness:

Step 1: Start an upward spiral

Experiencing positive emotions appears to be one way of getting the ball rolling. Positive emotions help us adopt effective ways of coping with life’s unavoidable problems, and can, in turn, generate even more positive emotions. So the hardest step may be the first: Once you begin experiencing positive feelings, it may quickly become easier to experience more of them.

Step 2: Build close personal relationships

It is clear that one of the most important ingredients in being happy is good, mutually supportive relations with friends, family members, and romantic partners - Knowing that we have others who care about us and will be there for us if we need them. Developing and maintaining good relationships requires a lot of hard work and may involve joining several groups, but the rewards appear to make this effort worthwhile. In fact, this may be one of the most important things you can do to increase your own happiness.

Step 3: Build personal skills that contribute to being happy

Happy people possess a number of personal characteristics that contribute to their happiness. These include:

• being friendly and outgoing (extroverted),
• Agreeable (approaching others with the belief that you will like and trust them)
• Emotionally stable.

So figure out where you stand on these dimensions, and then begin working on them – preferably with the help of close friends.

Step 4: Stop doing counterproductive things

Because everyone wants to be happy, we all take many steps to enhance our positive emotions. Some of these are helpful (like mentioned before) others not as much – abusing drugs, worrying about anything and everything, trying to be perfect, setting impossible goals for yourself etc. They may work temporarily, but in the long run, they will not contribute to your personal happiness.

References:

• Baron, R.A. & Branscombe, N.R. (2012) Social Psychology. 13th ed. Boston: Pearson
• What is "Gross National Happiness"? Explained by Morten Sondergaard: Available online: http://youtu.be/7Zqdqa4YNvI