Principles of Pleasure, Positive Emotions, Happiness, and Well-being
Defining Emotional Terms
Affect: A person’s immediate, physiological response to a stimulus, typically based on an underlying sense of arousal.
Involves the appraisal of an event as painful or pleasurable (valence) and the experience of autonomic arousal (Frijda, 1999).
Emotion: Judgments about important things, where we appraise an external object as salient for our well-being, acknowledging our own neediness and incompleteness (Nussbaum, 2001).
Occurs as we become aware of painful or pleasurable experiences and associated autonomic arousal (affect; Frijda, 1999) and evaluate the situation.
Has a specific and “sharpened” quality with an object (Cohn & Fredrickson, 2009) and is associated with progress in goal pursuit (Snyder et al., 1991; Snyder, 1994).
Happiness: A positive emotional state that is subjectively defined by each person.
Rarely used in scientific studies due to lack of consensus on its meaning.
Subjective Well-Being: Subjective evaluation of one’s current status in the world.
Defined as a combination of positive affect (in the absence of negative affect) and general life satisfaction (subjective appreciation of life’s rewards) (Diener, 1984, 2000, 2013; Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2009).
Distinguishing the Positive and the Negative
Hans Selye (1936): Research on the effects of prolonged exposure to fear and anger.
Found that physiological stress harmed the body yet had survival value for humans.
Evolutionary functions of fear and anger have intrigued researchers.
Positive affects received scant attention historically because few scholars hypothesized that the rewards of joy and contentment went beyond hedonic (pleasure-based) values and had possible evolutionary significance.
David Watson (1988): He conducted research on the approach-oriented motivations of pleasurable affects.
Expanded Form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-X): Developed by Watson and Clark (1994) to study emotional experience.
Taps both “negative” (unpleasant) and “positive” (pleasant) valence.
Negative affective states: general distress.
Positive affect: joviality, self-assurance, and attentiveness.
Age-Old Definitions of Happiness
Aristotle: Eudaimonia (human flourishing associated with living a life of virtue), or happiness based on a lifelong pursuit of meaningful, developmental goals (“doing what is worth doing”), was the key to the good life (Waterman, 1993).
America’s founders: The pursuit of happiness was just as important as our inalienable rights of life and liberty.
Age-old definitions of happiness have influenced the views of twentieth-and twenty-first-century scholars.
Theories of happiness have been divided into three types:
Need/goal satisfaction theories.
Process/activity theories.
Genetic/personality predisposition theories (Diener et al., 2009).
Need/Goal Satisfaction Theories: Psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists (Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow) suggested that the reduction of tension or the satisfaction of needs lead to happiness.
Happiness as satisfaction makes happiness a target of our psychological pursuits.
Process/Activity Theories: Engaging in particular life activities generates happiness.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi: Proposed that people who experience flow (engagement in interesting activities that match or challenge task-related skills) in daily life tend to be very happy. Engagement in activity produces happiness.
Other process/activity theorists have emphasized how the process of pursuing goals generates energy and happiness.
Activities such as the practice of gratitude and kindness may also provide boosts in well-being for some groups.
Regular engagement in these types of positive acts can help individuals to improve their happiness over time by prescriptive use of tasks such as the writing of gratitude letters and purposeful acts of kindness.
Genetic and Personality Predisposition Theories of Happiness: Happiness as stable, whereas theorists in the happiness-as-satisfaction and process/activity camps view it as changing with life conditions.
Costa and McCrae (1988) found that happiness changed little over a 6-year period, thereby lending credence to theories of personality-based or biologically determined happiness.
The links between personality and happiness may be more idiographic than previously thought.
Multiple set points for positive emotion may exist for any one individual, and these set points may be able to be changed under some conditions.
Lucas and Fujita (2000) showed that extroversion and neuroticism, two of the Big 5 factors of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), were closely related to the characteristics of happiness.
Studies of the biological or genetic determinants of happiness have found that up to 40\% of positive emotionality and 55\% of negative emotionality are genetically based (Tellegen et al., 1988).
PERMA Model
The PERMA Model of Happiness is a concept developed by Martin Seligman which is an acronym for five key elements to maintaining happiness: Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments.
P – Positive Emotions:
Feeling joy, gratitude, love, and excitement in everyday life.
Focusing on optimism and enjoying the present moment.
E – Engagement:
Being fully involved in activities that absorb you.
Experiencing "flow"—when time flies because you are so immersed in what you’re doing.
R – Relationships:
Having strong connections with family, friends, and loved ones.
Giving and receiving support, love, and kindness.
M – Meaning:
Having a sense of purpose and feeling connected to something bigger than yourself.
This could be through religion, work, volunteering, or personal passions.
A – Accomplishment:
Setting and achieving goals, no matter how big or small.
Feeling proud of your efforts and growth.
Subjective Well-Being as a Synonym for Happiness
Diener considers well-being to be the subjective evaluation of one’s current status in the world.
Well-being involves our experience of pleasure and our appreciation of life’s rewards.
Diener defines subjective well-being as a combination of positive affect (in the absence of negative affect) and general life satisfaction.
Subjective well-being emphasizes people’s reports of their life experiences.
Determinants of Subjective Well-Being
Financial status was more highly correlated with satisfaction for students in poor nations than for those in wealthy nations (Diener & Diener, 1995).
The students in wealthy nations generally were happier than those in impoverished nations.
Within-nation examination of this link between income and well-being reveals that, once household income rises above the poverty line, additional bumps in income are not necessarily associated with increases in wellbeing.
There is a strong relationship between income and well-being among the impoverished but an insignificant relationship between the two variables among the affluent.
Married men and women alike report more happiness than those who are not married.
The link between subjective well-being and being married is different for people of all ages, incomes, and educational levels, and it also varies across racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Same-sex couples who have legalized unions (i.e., marriages and/or civil unions) also report greater levels of well-being (Rothblum, Balsam, & Solomon, 2011).
Marital quality also is positively associated with personal well-being (Sternberg & Hojjat, 1997).
The qualities of good mental health and good social relationships consistently emerged in the lives in the sample of happiest young adults.
Good social functioning among the happiest subset of students was a necessary but not sufficient cause of happiness.
Happiness + Meaning = Well-Being
Psychologists who support the hedonic perspective view subjective well-being and happiness as synonymous.
The scholars whose ideas about well-being are more consistent with Aristotle’s views on eudaimonia believe that happiness and well-being are not synonymous.
Well-being = happiness + meaning.
In order to subscribe to this view of wellbeing, one must understand virtue and the social implications of daily behavior.
This view requires that those who seek well-being be authentic and live according to their real needs and desired goals (Waterman, 1993).
Living a eudaimonic life goes beyond experiencing “things pleasurable,” and it embraces flourishing as the goal in all our actions.
Both hedonistic and eudaimonic versions of happiness have influenced the twenty-first-century definitions.
Twenty-First-Century Definitions of Happiness
Modern Western psychology has focused primarily on a post materialist view of happiness (Diener et al., 2002, 2009) that emphasizes pleasure, satisfaction, and life meaning.
The type of happiness addressed in much of today’s popular literature emphasizes hedonics, meaning, and authenticity.
Seligman suggest that a pleasant and meaningful life can be built on the happiness that results from using our psychological strengths.
A person’s chronic happiness level is governed by three major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices.
Genetics accounts for 50\% of population variance for happiness, whereas life circumstances (both good and bad) and intentional activity (attempts at healthy living and positive change) account for 10\% and 40\% of the population variance for happiness, respectively.
This model of happiness acknowledges the components of happiness that can’t be changed, but it also leaves room for volition and the self-generated goals that lead to the attainment of pleasure, meaning, and good health.
The extent to which a nation is more collectivist (i.e., cooperative and grouporiented) in orientation versus individualistic (i.e., competitive and individual focused) is one of the strongest predictors of differences in subjective well-being across nations, even when national income level was held constant.