What is the science of happines: in 27 short summaries the most relevant articles

1 - Article summary with Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being - Diener, E. et al.

What is this article about?

The hedonic treadmill model is a model that supposes that good and bad events can only temporarily affect happiness. According to this model, everyone always adapts back to hedonic neutrality. This leads to the conclusion that it is pointless to try and increase happiness. The poorest diseased beggar with no social connections could be just as happy as the healthy billionaire with a lot of close and supportive relationships. But is this really true? This article will make five important revisions to the hedonic treadmill model:

1. Individuals' set points are not hedonically neutral.
2. People have different set points, partly depending on their temperaments.
3. A single person may have multiple happiness set points.
4. Well-being set points can change under some conditions.
5. Individuals differ in their adaptation to events.

What is the hedonic treadmill theory?

In 1971, Brickman and Campbell came up with the hedonic treadmill. According to them, processes similar to sensory adaptation occur when people experience emotional reactions to life events. Just like we get used to sensory input and are quickly not aware anymore of smells or sounds, we adapt to emotions as well. Myers added to this theory that every desirable experience is transitory. According to the original treadmill theory of Brickman and Campbell, people briefly react to good and bad events, but in a short time they return to neutrality. The theory is based on the automatic habituation model in which psychological systems react to deviations from one's current adaptation level. Automatic habituation processes are adaptive because they allow constant stimuli to fade into the background.

In 1978, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman offered initial empirical support for the treadmill model. Brickman had for example studied lottery winners and found that they were not happier than nonwinners. It was also found that people with paraplegia, an impairment in the motor and sensory function of the lower body, were not less happy than people who could walk. The idea of hedonic adaptation was appealing in psychology because it offered an explanation for the observation that people appear to be relatively stable in happiness despite changes in fortune. The theory was widely accepted in psychology. Evidence frequently supported the idea. There soon came longitudinal studies that tracked changes in happiness over time. These studies provided more direct evidence that adaptation can occur. For instance, Silver found that people with spinal cord injuries had strong negative emotions after their crippling accident, but that these negative emotions had already faded after two months.

What revisions can be made to the original hedonic treadmill model?

Are set points always neutral? 

The first revision that can be made, is that set points might not always be neutral. The original treadmill theory suggested that people return to a neutral set point after an emotionally significant event. Research now shows that this part of the theory is wrong. Most people are not neutral most of the time, but happy. So, if people adapt and return to a baseline, this baseline is a positive one and not a neutral one. 

This tendency to experience positive emotions may provide the motivation to explore one's environment and to approach new goals, so also to adapt to unpleasant experiences. 

Are set points the same across individuals?

The research since Brickman and Campbell's reveals that if people do have set points, they vary considerably across individuals. These individual differences are for a certain part due to inborn, personality-based influences. Research consistently shows that one's level of well-being is reasonably stable over time, moderately heritable and has strong correlation with personality factors. Thus, personality factors may predispose people to experience different levels of well-being. 

Does someone have only one happiness set point?

The idea of a happiness set point implies that well-being is a single entity with a single baseline. But research by Lucas, Diener and Suh in 1996 indicates that a global category of happiness is composed of separable well-being variables. There is no single set point but there are various components that exhibit differential stability. Research specifically show that stable individual baselines are more characteristic of negative affect than of positive effect. Research does show that over a longer period of a few years, life satisfaction, so positive affect, is also stable. 

Can happiness change?

This is perhaps the most drastic revision. The most controversial aspect of Brickman and Campbell's hedonic treadmill model is the idea that people cannot do much to change their long-term levels of well-being. Adaption would be inevitable and changes in life circumstances could never lead to lasting changes in happiness. Until recently, there have not been good longitudinal tests of this hypothesis. Questions have remained about the extent to which important life events can permanently alter individuals' happiness set points. 

Evidence for the hypothesis that life circumstance matter for well-being comes from the fact that well-being differs across nations. There are strong national differences in well-being that can be predicted from objective characteristics of the nations. This suggests that the stable external circumstances that vary across nations have a lasting impact on happiness. Happiness can and does change long-term.

It should be noted that the classic empirical findings of Brickman et al. were not as strong as evidence as many psychologists have assumed. The study of people with spinal cord injuries was done again and the researchers found that the difference between the spinal cord-injured people and control groups was about 0,75 standard deviations. Most psychologists would consider this a large effect. Individuals with spinal cord injuries are in fact less happy than are people in the general population.

It is a fact that there are people that live in negative circumstance and still report well-being scores that are above neutral. This is an interesting and important fact, but it should not be used as evidence that people inevitably adapt. To determine whether adaptation has occurred, it is necessary to compare individuals who have experienced an event or life circumstance with those who have not, ideally following the same individuals over time. 

Are there individual differences in adaptation?

The final revision that can be made is that of the implicit assumption of the hedonic treadmill theory that adaptation to circumstances occurs in similar ways for all individuals. Researchers have found individual differences in the rate and extent of adaptation that occurs even to the same event. For example, people with initially low baselines are more likely to benefit from marriage in the long run, as they reported more positive reactions to marriage and these positive reactions persisted long into the marriage.

By relying on very large samples, researchers in recent studies have been able to track individuals from before an event happens to the time of the event to many years after. Large longitudinal designs also allow for more precise measurement of changes in happiness over time and more powerful statistical methods that go beyond examinations of group means to reveal individual differences in adaptation. The representative samples of participants have also grown larger. This has led to much stronger tests of the hedonic treadmill theory.

What are the implications of the revised model?

Even though these revisions had to made to the original hedonic treadmill model, adaptation is still an important concept for psychological research. Recent studies have challenged the idea that adaptation is inevitable. We can now conclude that people do adapt to many life events, but there is a limit on the types of psychological processes that can account for the adaptation that does occur. The hedonic treadmill model should always be seen in the light of these revisions.

This is particularly important for the idea that we can do something about people's happiness. Interventions can cause lasting changes among individuals. This makes it possible to change the happiness of individuals and of a society as a whole. But we should also not be too optimistic in this possibility for change, because processes of adaptation must still be carefully considered. Factors that lead to lasting change need to be further researched.

2 - Article summary with Reevaluating the strengths and weaknesses of self-report measures of subjective well-being by Lucas, R.E.

What is this article about?

Well-being is subjective and because of that, all ways of evaluating well-being are subjective. The subjective nature of the construct makes self-report a natural method for assessing well-being. But there are problems with self-report measures. These problems will be reviewed in this article.

What is subjective well-being and how is it measured?

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a construct that focuses explicitly on subjective evaluations of one's quality of life as a whole. Different people may evaluate the same circumstances in different ways. The study of SWB relies on self-report measures. There is much debate on whether these measures are reliable and valid. There are some difficulties with self-report measures, but they are ultimately reliable and valid, as will be proven throughout this article. 

Many different self-report measures for evaluating SWB have been developed, but they all ask a person about the quality of one's life as a whole. Diener explained that there are affective components of how someone judges their life, based on how they feel, and cognitive components, based on how they cognitively reflect on their life. Traditionally, both the cognitive and affective components of SWB are assessed using global, retrospective measures that require respondents to think back on their lives and the characteristics of those lives.

Because of the potential for inaccurate reconstructions of one's affective experience earlier, some researchers believe that we should distinguish between measures that focus on retrospective evaluations and measures that capture people's emotional reaction to life as it is lived. This can be done with experience sampling methods, where respondents are signaled multiple times per day and asked to complete surveys about what they are doing, who they are with and how they are feeling. The downside of experience sampling methods, is that they are extremely time- and resource-intensive for both the researcher and the participants. This is why there are also mixed forms of methods.

Are subjective well-being measures reliable and valid?

There is no gold standard against which self-report measures of SWB can be compared. The evaluation of SWB is a subjective one and it captures internal thoughts and feelings that are not visible to outside observers. But this does not mean that SWB measures are unreliable or invalid. In general, SWB measures score well on quality of psychometric properties. Research has specifically shown that single-item measures of life satisfaction are mostly reliable. Reliability is one of the psychometric properties and is assessed with quantitative indexes. Validity is more complex and more difficult to establish in a definitive way. Validity is often defined as whether a test measures what it is supposed to measure, but it is difficult to prove that SWB is truly and totally measured. According to Diener et al. (2009) there are four types of validity that should be considered when evaluating self-report SWB measures:

• Face validity is the most simple form of validity and asks the question of whether a measure is asking the right questions. In this case: is the self-report SWB measure asking questions about SWB? Because SWB is so broad, SWB measures usually have face validity.
• Content validity: does a measure capture the breadth of the construct of interest, without including content that should be excluded. This is more difficult for SWB because there are a lot of things that might be part of SWB, but that we are not sure of yet. "Do you think you look attractive" might be connected to the question of SWB, but we are not sure what that connection is yet.
• Convergent and discriminant validity. Convergent validity reflects the extent to which a measure correlates strongly with other related measures. It is important to show that different measures of the same construct cohere even when assessed using different methods of assessment. Discriminant validity reflects the extent to which a measure correlates weakly or not at all with measures to which it should be unrelated. SWB measures tend to show reasonable levels of convergent and discriminant validity. 
• Construct validity is the most complicated form of validity to assess. Construct validity reflects the extent to which a measure behaves as it would be expected to behave, given theories about the construct itself. Because SWB is so broad and we still have a lot to learn about SWB, we don't always know what to expect. But this is a difficult form of validity for all measures and especially for measures that measure big concepts that have only recently been researched. 

What is the judgment model of subjective well-being?

A big challenge to the validity of SWB measures comes from the judgment model of SWB by Schwarz and Strack (1999). This model starts with the assumption that when asked about your well=being, you will not have a response stored in memory that can simply be accessed and reported. Instead, you will have to construct a response at the time of judgment. You will construct this on the basis of what domains of your life seem relevant at that moment and for that question, because you do not have the time or the capacity to consider all relevant domains of life. 

Because of this model, broad concerns have been raised about standard research practices in the field, especially within specific domains in social psychology. There is a lot of methodological critique that SWB measures can lead to high rates of false positive findings, because you only think about something because you are asked about it, but it does not actually play a big role in your life. When asked about your romantic relationship for instance, you will think about the last argument you had with your partner, even though your relationship is otherwise fine. You are simply not able to oversee the bigger picture and automatically think about the last big event. 

This is indeed a cause for concern, but researchers can keep this in mind by asking the right questions and taking the model in account in their conclusions. 

Existing research thus suggests that SWB measures typically have desirable psychometric properties, including relatively high levels of reliability and convergent, discriminant and construct validity. But SWB measures are not perfect. This is why researchers have to take the judgment model of SWB in account. Research on the properties of self-report measures can not only strengthen conclusions from research that uses those kinds of methods, but can also help clarify what SWB is and how people evaluate their lives.

3 - Article summary with Is the study of happiness a worthy scientific pursuit? by Norrish, J.M. & Vella-Brodrick, D.A.

What is this article about?

This articles is a critique on the view that the study of happiness is not a worthy scientific pursuit. It sets out to prove that the happiness set point and hedonic treadmill theories denote the complexity of increasing happiness levels due to genetic limitations and adaption. There is mounting evidence to suggest that happiness can be improved with the use of appropriate measures and specific interventions aimed at fostering strengths and virtues. Approaching human needs from a top down or holistic standpoint where individuals can use their strengths to overcome life's challenges is beneficial to health and well-being and thus worthy. 

The purpose of this article is thus to evaluate whether the increased investigation of positive aspects is a worthy, scientific pusuit. More specifically this article will examine the notion that the pursuit of happiness is a luxury, which neglects more important aspects of human suffering. And this article will evaluate two issues that pose significant challenges tot the justification of happiness research, being the happiness set theory and the difficulty in measuring happiness scientifically.

How can happiness be defined?

The terms happiness and subjective well-being are often used interchangeably with each other, the latter being the more scientific term. For evaluative purposes the subjective well-being that is discussed will invlude a cognitive component assessing overall satisfaction with life and an affective component which is further divided into the presence of positive affect and the absence of negative affect. Many recent perspectives of happiness are consistent with eudaimonic happiness. Eudaimonic happiness results from the actualisation of individual potential and from fulfulling one's true self. But other theorists look at happiness in a different way. 

What is the happiness set point?

The happiness set point theory is also called the dynamic equilibrium theory. It asserts that despite changes in individual's circumstances, happiness levels remain remarkebly constant over time. The happiness set point is believed to be caused in part by the human tendency to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. This process of adaptation is often referred to as the hedonic treadmill or homeostatic control. Recently, Diener et al. provided a revision of the hedonic treadmill theory (2006).

What is happiness as a trait?

Another way of looking at happiness, is by seeing it as a trait, a temperamental disposition reflecting a tendency to appraise events and situations in a particular way. According to Headey, personality traits such as extraversion, neuroticism and openness to experience predispose individuals to experience more or less positive and negative life events, which in turn influences subjective well-being. Changes in happiness reports over long periods of time provide evidence against this theory that happiness is a trait, but some psychologists still see it this way.

How relative is happiness?

Some theorists make the argument that happiness is relative. This argument proposes that individuals' happiness evaluations are based on subjective judgements of their situation compared with the situations of others, earlier situations and future goals and aspirations. Increasing happiness can be seen as a goal because changes in individual living situations coincide with changes in standards of comparison. Veenhoven poses an important objection to this argument; while changing standards of comparisons may influence the cognitive component of happiness, it does not change the affective component. It seems that subjective comparisons do not account for all variance in subjective well-being. 

How can happiness be increased?

If happiness is somethat malleable, happiness could be comprised of the individual's set happiness point (S), the individual's circumstances (C) and voluntary factors that are under the individual's control (V). This is Lykken's formula for happiness: Happiness = S + C + V. A lot of psychologists have developed specific strategies aiming to empower individuals to increase their happiness. These strategies involve the identification and communication of external conditions and internal cofnitieve habits. Further research is necessary to find out whether happiness interventions have a lasting positive effect on happiness. 

What is the role of gratitude and kindness for happiness?

There is some promising evidence that suggests that gratitude and kindness have positive ramifications on individual happiness. This again shows that happiness levels are not static. 

What is the relation between happiness, wealth and materialism?

It has been found that after basic human needs are met, happiness is not clearly associated with wealth or material affluence. This idea is consistent with the happiness set point theory and can be partly explained by hedonic adaptation. But recent research shows that perhaps there is even a negative correlation between happiness, wealth and materialism.

Also, it has been proven that people do not accurately predict the amount of happiness events will cause them (see the article Affective Forecasting: Knowing what to want below). This is consistent with the finding that materialism does not result in sustained increases in happiness, as potentially, consumers overestimate the pleasure they will get from purchasing a new product. 

What is happiness on a national level?

There is also a positive correlation between economic growth of a nation and individual well-being. Studies indicating that happiness in nations rise in times of economic growth and decrease in times of economic insecurity provide evidenve that happiness can be increased and counter the argument that this attempt is futile and wothless. 

How can happiness be measured empirically?

A common argument against the scientific investigation of happiness is that is impossible to objectively measure happiness. An opposing view that more and more scientists have is that happiness is subjective and can therefore be measured by asking people how happy they are. With questions regarding happiness, it is important for scientists to accuratly explain to both the participants and the scientific community what they see as "happiness". If this is done correctly, happiness can be measured empirically.

Is investigating happiness a worthy goal?

It is worthy to direct scientific inquiry to the investigation of positive aspects of human behavior because this provides a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of human experience, emotion and behavior. Studies have found that happiness has a positive effect on overall physical health, psychological resilience and growth, relationships and the greater community and economic production and politics. This makes investigating happiness a worthy goal of science. 

There are however limitations. Most importantly there is the problem that psychological research into happiness often utilises diverse definitions of happiness. It would be good for future research to explain explicitly what concept of happiness is used and why that form or idea of happiness is examined. 

It is also important to not only look at happiness, but also to look at a positive attitude in unhappiness. Negative emotions are important and there are some positive attitudes that can help to get rid of negative emotions and to become more happy in general. 

In conclusion, the study of happiness is useful and a worthy, credible and valuable sceintific goal.

4 - Article summary with Non-traditional measures of subjective well-being and their validity: A review by Scollon, C.N.

What is this article about?

This article is a review of a variety of methods for assessing subjective well-being beyond traditional global self-reports, which are the traditional measures of subjective well-being. The costs and benefits of non-traditional measures of SWB will be discussed. No measure is perfect, but with this knowledge researchers will be able to make better informed decisions in their research designs and projects.

How valid are brain activity measures of SWB?

Techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) have revolutionized the field of psychology. But can fMRI and EEG be used to measure SWB? There are studies that have tried to do this.

There is important information we can gather with fMRI and EEG, but it is often difficult to separate activation due to the emotion itself and activation due to other cognitive processes invoked during the emotion induction procedure. Neuroscience has yet to converge on any clear brain markers of happiness or any other emotion. Part of what makes it difficult to identify which brain structures are associated with happiness is that most structures are involved in multiple emotions and serve multiple functions. But as we learn more about the brain, brain activity measures will become more and more useful for measuring SWB.

How valid are smiling measures of SWB?

There have been promising studies of the connection between a smile and a person's happiness. Whether people smile genuinely in pictures, can reveal a lot about a person's SWB.

However, there are researchers that address the need for caution when making inferences about smiling. Not everyone smiles because they are happy. Some people smile because they want to become happy or portray a happy image. Smiling appears to be a valid indicator of SWB, but we need to study it with caution.

How valid are experience sampling method measures of SWB?

Experience sampling methodology (ESM) involves participants answering questions about their affect and activities in real-time several times a day over several days. The advantage is that there are less memory biases than for retrospective reports of well-being.

There is also a danger to ESM. Depressed people that were asked about how they felt a lot, actually became less happy over time (Conner & Reid, 2012). By contrast, happy people can become happier by ESM. ESM measures make people more aware of how they feel. This is important to keep in mind for researchers in order to go about their research in an ethical way.

There is also the problem of ESM that it is intensive and can be seen as invasive and irritating by participants, and that it depends on compliance from participants.

How valid are day reconstruction method measures of SWB?

The day reconstruction method (DRM) guides respondents through a detailed moment-by-moment reconstruction of the previous day's activities. Participants record the location, duration and affect experiences during each episode. DRM is designed to minimize memory biases.

DRM is less intensive than ESM, but still takes about one hour to complete, which makes it impractical for large scale studies. Another limitation of DRM is the common practice of weighting affect by duration of the episode. But one of the advantages of DRM over ESM is that DRM can provide nearly as much information as ESM without the intensity. But this is also changing because of smart phone apps that are making ESM less invasive.

How valid are memory measures of SWB?

A memory task can be a subtle, yet powerful way to assess SWB. Happy people tend to remember more positive things and unhappy people more negative things. If you make people recall all positive and negative things that have happened, you can make an assessment of how people are. 

This type of measuring is practical and low in costs. But to avoid priming effects, researchers should place memory tasks before other items that may influence accessibility of positive or negative information. Evidence shows memory task measures are valid, but they are still underused in literature.

How valid are cognitive accessibility measures of SWB?

Studies have suggested that people with higher SWB organize positive emotions differently from less happy people. Activation of happiness-related concepts may automatically lead to activation of other parts of an associative network in happy individuals.

There have not yet been studies to the validity of cognitive accessibility measures, but this research seems promising.

How valid are informant reports measures of SWB?

Informant reports measures are measures where the individual does not judge their own happiness, but other people in their live judge it.

There is some prove that this could work, but there is also the problem that the degree to which SWB is visible may vary by person and culture. So, it might not work for anyone, as some people don't show how they feel or present themselves in certain ways that don't reflect how they feel.

How valid are implicit measures of SWB?

The implicit association test (IAT) was first developed to measure implicit or unconscious racial bias, but is now also being used to measure SWB. The IAT for measuring SWB is called the implicit life satisfaction (ILS) and uses reaction times to measure the strength of positive and negative associations towards one's own life. 

Respondents can slow down their responses and with that suppress their implicit life satisfaction, but ILS is for the most part not susceptible to socially desirable responding. This makes it a valuable tool for measuring SWB.

How valid are big data measures of SWB?

One of the most exciting new areas to provide new insight in SWB is through big data from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and search engines such as Google.

Big data have high volume, velocity, and variety, making them rich sources of information about human behavior. But these new forms of data are raising some potentially serious ethical concerns for scientists regarding privacy, consent, and data ownership. There is also the problem of possible inequities in accessibility to big data and proprietary algorithms for public data that may be causes of over- or underrepresentation.

5 - Article summary with Well-being concepts and components by Tov, W.

What is this article about?

Well-being is a broad, complex, multifaceted construct. This article is a review of different ways of defining and measuring well-being and the implications that this has for understanding the correlates and causes of well-being. Different conceptions of well-being and specific components of them will be discussed.

What different conceptions of well-being are there?

There are different ideas on what it means to be well. There are two major approaches to conceptualizing well-being:

• Hedonic well-being (HWB) refers to the approach that emphasizes a person's own emotional and cognitive evaluations of their own life. HWB consists of frequent pleasant feelings, infrequent unpleasant feelings, and an overall judgment that life is satisfying. This is also referred to as subjective well-being. 
• Eudaimonic well-being refers to the approach that takes as its starting point that there are certain needs or qualities that are essential for one's psychological growth and development. Fulfillment of these needs enables a person to reach their full potential. This is also referred to as psychological well-being. Different eudaimonic approaches focus on different needs and/or qualities of life. 

Measures of HWB and EWB are highly correlated. This suggests that positive feelings and positive functioning tend to go hand in hand. This is why there are also approaches that try to measure both the HWB and the EWB.

What is the difference between affective and cognitive well-being?

Affective well-being (AWB) refers to the experience of pleasant and unpleasant feelings. Cognitive well-being (CWB) refers to an evaluation of how well one's life is going relative to an ideal state of affairs. CWB tends to be based on information that is more stable. The only thing that would suggest otherwise, is that personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism correlate more strongly with AWB.

Aspects of AWB that one would need to know to assess AWB are valence, frequency, and intensity. Valence is a quality that distinguishes between pleasant or positive affect and unpleasant or negative affect. Frequency refers to how often specific affect occurs and intensity to how intens it is when it occurs. Someone might feel happy overall because of one big enlighting life-changing thing that happened, or because a lot of small positive things that happened throughout their life. In addition to valence, frequency, and intensity, emotions may also be characterized by their level of arousal, the cultural calue or the degree to which they are interpersonally engaging.

Aspects of CWB that one would need to know to assess CWB are firstly that there are global measures to assess one's life as a whole, and domain specific measures to assess specific aspects of one's life. Secondly, there are top-down models and bottom-up models. A top-down models suggests that people who are happy, feel more satisfaction in different domains of their life. A bottom-up model suggests the opposite; that people who are satisfied with important domains of their life, feel more happiness.

What is the difference between a state conception of well-being and a trait conception of well-being?

Measures of well-being can be placed on a continuum ranging from state-like to trait-like. Trait levels of well-being reger to how a person feels or how satisfied they are in general or on average across time and situations. State levels of well-being refer to feelings and satisfaction at a particular moment in time or within a restricted period of time. 

Trait measures of well-being are mostly influenced by personality traits, cultural values, memory biases, and general beliefs about one's self. State measures mostly reflect unstable factors such as the day of the week, the temperature, or the nuances of a recent event or activity. Thus, state and trait measures of well-being involve different processes, are influenced by different factors, and are associated with distinct outcomes.

6 - Article summary with Scientific answers to the timeless philosophical question of happiness by Kesebir, P.

What is this article about?

This is an introduction to the science of happiness. It provides a catalogue of the main questions that have been posed about happiness across millennia. By doing this, it can explain why we look at happiness from a scientifical standpoint, not just from a philosophical standpoint. First, it will be explained what happiness is and how it can be measured. After that, the possibility, desirability, and justifiability of happiness will be explored. Lastly, this article will try to answer the question of how to be happy.

What is happiness?

In philosophy, there are roughly two ways of understanding happiness. Hedonic theories of happiness suppose happiness is "feeling good". Eudaimonic theories of happiness on the other hand, suppose happiness is "doing good". But there are still many ways to interpret feeling and doing good. Hedonic and eudaimonic happiness also overlap in a lot of ways. Empirical attempts to distinguish hedonic happiness from eudaimonic happiness have proved to be challenging and tend to yield inconsistent findings.

It is difficult to define happiness, but we need a single definition of happiness to be able to study it scientifically. Psychologists that started the study of happiness, were set to this test of defining happiness. They came up with the concept of subjective well-being. Subjective well-being refers to people's evaluations of their lives and encompasses both affective and cognitive elements. People's own evaluations are important in this definition, so that we can study it by self-report measures. Also important is that psychologists look at both affective and cognitive elements, so that they look at both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.

What are the possibility, desirability, and justifiability of happiness?

Is happiness possible and for whom?

If we want to find out if happiness is possible or not, we need to make the definition of happiness even clearer. If we see happiness as a perfect, pure, and perpetual state, a complete absence of negativity and constant positivity, it is impossible. Searching for this kind of happiness is even unhealthy, because it sets you up for disappointment, making you less happy in the long run. 

But if we look at happiness in a more realistic way, it seems entirely possible for people to experience predominantly positive emotions and be satisfied with their lives. This is what recent findings in the science of happiness suggest.

Happiness is thus possible, but for whom? There is an important second question in the possibility of happiness. Can anybody who sets their mind to it become happy? Early answers to this question were not very encouraging. But this comes from the fact that people used to see happiness as something that was bestowed on a person on the basis of fortune, fate, or God. You can see this in the etymology of the word happiness in most Indo-European languages. Think of the Dutch word "geluk" that means both luck and happiness. Happiness was not thought of as something that we can control ourselves. 

Recent studies have found that luck is an important part of happiness, but there is also a part of happiness that we can control. Lyubomirsky et al. thought that 50% of someone's happiness was genetically determined, 10% determined by life circumstances and 40% could be achieved with intentional activities. Different psychologists have used different numbers, but we can at least conclude that happiness is partly attainable for everyone. Someone with genes that make them very negative and sad, may never reach the same happiness as someone with "happy genes", but they can make themselves happier than they were before. 

Is happiness desirable?

Even though we are able to control our happiness to some extent, some people think we should not try to pursue happiness. The idea here is that the search for happiness is self-defeating; the harder we strive for happiness, the further we will retreat from it.

It is easy to see that the pursuit of happiness could thwart happiness under certain circumstances. We have already discussed the unrealistic versions of happiness that only disappoint people when they reach for it. Obsessions with happiness are not healthy. And no one will be happy all the time. It is much healthier and more effective for your overall happiness to accept negative feelings as well. 

But interventions to increase happiness do work. This suggests that deliberately pursuing happiness does not necessarily have to be self-defeating. Happiness can be desired and pursued, but we need to have and accurate understanding of what happiness entails. This is why the science of happiness is so important. It helps us to understand what exactly happiness is and to give people more realistic expectations in their pursuit of happiness. 

Is happiness justifiable?

Happiness might be possible and desirable, but is the pursuit of happiness also justifiable? Some people think that happy people are stupid, self-centered, or insensitive. But this is not backed up by scientific evidence. Happiness even helps people be more productive, form better social relationships and be more altruistic. Also, our personal happiness is deeply connected with other people's happiness. Happiness is not egocentric, but social. So yes, happiness is also justifiable.

How to be happy?

Now that we know that happiness is desirable, possible, and justifiable, we want to know where and how we can find it. There are some ideas about this that have been proven to be wrong by the science of happiness. These are the places we can not find happiness in:

• Pleasure. Seeking fulfillment in sensory, bodily pleasures, is not the way to reach true happiness. We also find happiness in having a meaningful life. We don't just want to have pleasant sensations, but we also want to have meaningful experiences that sometimes cost us unpleasant sensations. Think about the fears of being a parent, or the stress of having an important job, or the sadness of losing a loved one. We accept these pains because what we gain is worth much more. Another reason why chasing pleasures is a suboptimal happiness strategy lies in the fact that pleasures are fleeting. We can never keep having pleasant sensations, so the pursuit of this would be tiring and unfulfilling. 
• Money and consumption. Money can have a beneficial effect on well-being to a certain point. But valuing and wanting too much has a detrimental effect on our happiness. An adequate amount of money, having enough money to take care of yourself and your family and a little bit more to do fun things and to know that you will be all right even if something bad happens, helps a lot in making you happy. But after this amount, money does not make you happier. Materialism has been consistently linked to lower well-being.
• Fulfillment of desires. Desire fulfillment theories of well-being hold that well-being consists in the satisfaction of the desires or preferences of a person. But research suggests that people who believe fulfillment of their desires will make them happy, are only delaying their sense of happiness. People might think "I will be happy when I finish my studies." But after that, they have new desires, and so they think "I will be happy when I get a job." and after that "when I get a nice house", or "when I start a family", etc. With this mindset, you are never happy in the moment, because you will always have desires that can be met in the future. Furthermore, research shows that happiness is not the result of good things happening. It is not what happens to us, but how we deal with whatever happens, that makes us happy.

Now that we know where we should not search for happiness, we can take a look at the effective ways of achieving happiness:

• Health. Working on physical health by eating well, exercising, and getting enough sleep, makes people healthier in both their body and in their mind and is shown to make people happier.
• Self-esteem and self-compassion. A healthy relationship with oneself, makes people happier.
• Connection. A healthy relationship with others, also makes people happier.
• Virtues. The feeling of doing well and being a good person, is an important aspect of happiness. 
• Faith. The idea that there is a larger beyond, makes people happier. This can be religious faith, but it does not have to be. The mere idea that there is something bigger that we are a part of, can help us become happier. 

7 - Article summary with From the Paleolithic to the present: Three revolutions in the global history of happiness by McMahon, D.M.

What is this article about?

This article explains what the three crucial turning points or revolutions have been in the world history of happiness. All these revolutions have had a significant impact in how people experience and understand happiness. 

It is always difficult to measure happiness. There will never be a perfectly reliable instrument that allows us to measure another person's well-being with complete and total certainty. But there are a lot of tools that can be used to come close to measuring someone's happiness, such as scales, questionnaires, experience sampling and a range of physical measures. What is even more difficult, is measuring the happiness of the dead. Historians can make theories of how happy people were in certain times, but they can only use proxy data. Lower levels of slavery, war, or famine would probably correspond to higher levels of happiness in the general public. With this kind of research, there can be made out a history of happiness. If we understand how happiness was conceived, experienced, and defined in the past, we get a better grip on happiness in the present and the future.

What were the earliest developments of happiness?

The further into the history, the more difficult it is to give an answer to the question of how happy people were. There are a lot of myths of an initial paradise where people were completely happy. These myths do seem to match scientific research. Archeologists and anthropologists have found that early human existence, roughly 12,000 years ago, was surprisingly prosperous. The diet was abundant, varied, and nutritious. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors seem to have been relatively well-fed. It can be seen in skeletons and dental remains, that hunter-gatherers were less likely to experience starvation or malnutrition and were healthier than the farmer-peasants of later periods. Average life-expectancy for those who survived the first five years after childbirth was upwards of sixty years. This is more than most human societies up until the time of the industrial revolution. That the average life-expectancy plummeted after that, was due to infectious diseases and large-scale epidemics born of high-density populations and domesticated livestock, and also war because everything became scarcer as more people started to inhibit earth. Hunter-gatherers have also had the most average free time in history. 

It is important to stay aware of the fact that the life of hunter-gatherers was not nearly as perfect as we might imagine in our myths of paradise. Hunter-gatherers were very susceptible to attack by predators such as other big animals and other members of the genus Homo. Evidence of this is found in mass grave sites with skeletons with shattered skulls and severed limbs. There were also long winters in the ice ages that were difficult to live in. 

Agriculture permitted accumulation and surplus, which could then be transmitted to one's offspring, perpetuating status and power. Together with concentrated state power, that became necessary with the fast growing populations, this has created inequalities among people. Those who were able to concentrate the surplus wealth generated by farmers, benefited from this revolution. But the vast majority of people became lowly peasants and laborers that were tied to the land, had to work a lot more in harder and more monotonous jobs, lived in bad circumstances in crowded places and had a less varied and nutritious diet. History is not an inevitable march of progress. The first revolution of human happiness, our exit from our hunter-gatherer past, was an unhappy one. 

The earliest recorded words for happiness in almost every human language have a connotation with the word fortune or luck. For people who were always subject to twists of fate, such as plagues and wars, it was difficult to imagine happiness as something that could endure and even less as something that one could control. The worldview was hostile and unpredictable and suffering was the norm. In such a world, happiness is elusive and fleeting.

How did happiness develop in the Axial Age?

The Axial Age is a term coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers for the time period of 800-200 BC. This was the period that witnessed the emergence of the world's great religious and wisdom traditions. Other traditions would follow, but they were all based on the spiritual foundations already established. The Axial Age brought spiritual values to humanity.

A lot of scholars think that the Axial religions reconceived and redefined human happiness, although each in its own way. People started to think about what could be beyond their own life, making it possible to fantasize about better times. People also started to seriously question whether worldly prosperity would lead to more happiness.

The idea came up that genuine happiness required more than material wealth, like a connection to God(s), Goodness or Truth. "Ordinary" happiness was rejected. So hedonic happiness was rejected for eudaimonic happiness. Eudaimonic happiness is less a good feeling or enjoyment for its own sake, but more a well lived life, something to be proud of. Happiness could only be obtained by cultivation of strengths of character and mind. So, happiness did become something to work towards and hope for, not just a turn of the wheel of fortune, but it was still not expected or assumed.

What is the revolution in human expectations?

Around 1800 the economic condition of the average human being in the world was no better than it had been in the Stone Age. But then there was the Industrial Revolution. Scholars point out that around 1800 people began to speak and write more about how to create happiness in this life, instead of only in the afterlife. The benevolent God would also want us to be happy now. These changes in religious reflection made the pursuit of happiness on earth possible.

There was also the idea of the Enlightenment that we as rational beings are perfectly capable of understanding the world and making it better. Together, this created the idea that human beings were meant to be happy and that one should work on his happiness. This also motivated people to develop economically. The dramatic economic growth that followed, however imperfectly distributed between countries and classes, only fed the expectations that everyone who worked towards it could be happy and rich. 

The dominant ideological systems of the 19th and 20th centuries helped to spread the prospect of happiness to ever wider segments of the world. This had the result that today most people are being raised in environments that inspire the pursuit of earthly happiness and encourage expectations that it will be found.

8 - Article summary with Well-being in Normative ethics by Kagan, S.

What is this article about?

This is an explanation of well-being from the view of normative ethics. It tries to answer the question of what exactly "well-being" is and what it means for someone's life to go better or worse. Hedonism will be explained in all its forms and the most important rejections of it will be dealt with. This article is not an exploration of the causes of happiness, but of the definition of happiness.

What is well-being?

An important answer is that well-being consists in the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. A lot of people believe this. Pretty much everyone at least believes that the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain is at least one component of well-being. It is hard to deny this. But are pleasure and pain the only elements of happiness?

It is important to know that this "hedonism" is not the only way to use hedonism. Psychological hedonism claims that everyone's ultimate goal is to pursue pleasure and minimize pain. Ethical hedonism is the claim that everyone should try to do this. Value hedonism claims that pleasure is intrinsically good and pain intrinsically evil. But we are concerned with welfare hedonism. Welfare hedonism claims that pleasure and the lack of pain, is what happiness entails. 

In this form of hedonism, there is also quantitative and qualitative hedonism. Quantitative happiness suggests that the more pleasure we have, the more happiness we have. This leads to bizarre conclusions. Suppose pigs, wallowing in the mud, are filled with pleasure, a far greater quantity of pleasure that can be found in the life of a person, who has responsibilities and can never fully avoid suffering. Most of us would still not trade places with a pig. 

We prefer human life over porcine life because, even though pigs might have greater quantity of pleasure, humans have greater kinds of pleasure. Humans can experience love, friendship, and art, and can have the pleasures of discovery, creativity, and understanding. Such spiritual and mental pleasures could be of a higher quality than the bodily pleasures. Perhaps these higher pleasers are of greater intrinsic value than the lower pleasures. This is what qualitative hedonism suggests. 

Both qualitative and quantitative hedonism agree that your mental states are what determine your level of well-being, and that pleasant mental states have value. But not everyone agrees with this. People can either disagree with the mental state theory, or with the value of pleasure, or with both. 

An important critique of the mental state theory is the experience machine. If all that matters for our happiness, is what happens in our mental states, we would all want to be hooked up on a machine that makes us think and feel like we are experiencing pleasurable or happy events. But most people would not want to be hooked up to this machine. What matters more than mental states, are real lived experiences, even if they are less happy or pleasurable. This is what preference theory suggests. According to preference theory, well-being consists in having one's preferences satisfied.

There is also important critique of the preference theory. According to some theorists, this theory also yields unacceptable results. Your desires can be met in ways you are not aware of. If you have no idea that your desires are met, can you really say it has made you happier? The critics would answer this question with no. Happiness seems to have a cognitive and/or affective element as well. For example, someone cares about the environment and prefers environmentally friendly products. But they have been buying the same products in the supermarket. Now, the processes behind production and transport have been made more environmentally friendly. The customers have no idea that something has changed. The critics would argue that this person has not become happier because of the change, even though their desires are being met more.

9 - Article summary with Eudaimonia in the contemporary science of subjective well-being by Heintzelman, S.J.

What is this article about?

Aristotle had already introduced the concept of eudaimonia to reflect human flourishing as a reflection of virtue and the development of one's full potential, in contrast to the pleasure-centered hedonic theories of well-being. In the science of happiness, the definition of subjective well-being has also been expanded to include eudaimonia. This article is an exploration of eudaimonia or eudaimonic well-being.

What is eudaimonia?

Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia can be explained as a reflection of virtue, excellence, and the development of one's full potential. Eudaimonia is an objective standard of goodness and happiness. This concept of eudaimonia has also been impactful in the psychological study of well-being, the science of happiness.

But one key aspect of eudaimonia has been changed. In psychology, eudaimonia is now treated as a subjective state and this subjectivity is a central defining feature of this psychological construct. Eudaimonia is no longer the philosophical notion of doing what is worth doing, whatever that may be, but the empirical notion of feeling like one is doing something worthwhile. This eudaimonia can be tested by asking people how they feel about their lives. Eudaimonia has thus become something that fits the realm of science.

Is eudaimonia a valuable distinction in psychology?

There is mixed evidence regarding the divergence of eudaimonic well-being and hedonic well-being. Eudaimonia was used as a concept that could critique hedonism. Hedonism claims that happiness comes from pleasure. Hedonistic well-being can be seen as feeling well, and eudaimonic well-being as doing well. But a lot of recent findings suggests that the distinction is not as big as we once thought; people who feel more pleasure and less pain, regard their life as being more meaningful, and this also goes the other way around. Perhaps the distinction between hedonistic well-being and eudaimonic well-being is misleading. 

In psychology, we see happiness as subjective well-being. This subjective well-being entails both feeling well and doing well. Well-being is thus widened in its conceptualization. This might be a good solution to this debate, because it encompasses both eudaimonic well-being and hedonistic well-being. 

Recent scientifical findings have contributed a lot to the centuries-old concept of eudaimonia. The eudaimonic approach has widened the scope of well-being research to include concepts beyond simple pleasure seeking to encompass other parts of life as well, such as virtue and meaning. But examining eudaimonia from a scientifical perspective is still relatively new, so there is a lot that we don't know yet. Further research of eudaimonia and of well-being as a whole are needed in order to really answer the age-old questions of what makes us happy.

10 - Article summary with Cognitive outlooks and well-being by Margolis, S. & Lyubomirsky, S.

What is this article about?

The top-down approach to well-being focuses on how people attend and construe information and how these processes then affect their well-being. This article is a review of evidence that attention and construal, the way someone understands the world or a particular situation, influence well-being. Different cognitive outlooks will be reviewed in their association with well-being.

What are construal and attention?

Construal is someone's subjective perception and evaluation of a situation. Many researchers believe that the individual differences in the effects of life events on well-being, can be explained by construal. Construals are continuously formed throughout life. Construal predicts well-being, but also seems to influence well-being directly. 

Gross and Thompson came up with the modal model of emotion (2007) that indicates that someone must direct their attention to particular elements of something, before they are able to construe it. The modal model of emotion can be understood as the chain between the situation, attention, construal, and emotional response. Attention is the process by which people select a set of perceivable information to concentrate on or to construe. Attention selects the information that is to be construed. There is research that indicates that there is a bidirectional link between well-being and attention. This means that what we focus on, influences our well-being, and that how we feel, influences what seeks our attention.

What do we know from research of the relation between cognitive outlooks and well-being?

There is a lot of evidence that attention and construal impact well-being. Cognitive outlooks can be seen as specific types of attention and construal. The cognitive outlooks that are related to well-being are gratitude, self-esteem, autonomy, competence, connectedness, optimism, attributional style, and ruminative style. These outlooks have been researched and the results will be reviewed in this article.

What is the impact of appreciation and gratitude on well-being?

Appreciation and gratitude are closely related, but appreciation is viewed as a more general form of gratitude. Gratitude is the recognition of a positive outcome from an external source, including a felt sense of wonder of thankfulness. In research, there has been a focus on gratitude rather than the more general appreciation. 

People who are more grateful tend to be happier as well. Gratitude may cause someone to engage in positive reframing. This means that more grateful people tend to focus their attention on positive aspects of past events to construe the event in a better light. This boosts well-being. 

What is the impact of optimism on well-being?

Optimism is a lot like gratitude, but gratitude is about events in the past and optimism is about events in the future. People who are more optimistic expect the future to be more positive.

Optimism is positively associated with well-being, but there is little direct evidence of a causal effect. There have also not been any explicit theories of how optimism impacts well-being, but this could also come from the fact that we already believe this intuitively. The relationship between optimism and well-being seems self-evident, but we need more research of what exactly the relationship is. 

What is the impact of self-esteem on well-being?

Self-esteem is the overall evaluation of someone's own worth. People with higher self-esteem tend to believe that they are capable and that they deserve the good that may come to them.

Multiple studies have found a positive correlation between self-esteem and well-being, but none of these studies have used experimental methods to directly test for a causal effect. There is also some evidence that self-esteem can be boosted, which can make people happier. An example of how this can be done, is with self-compassion interventions that teach people to accept their shortcomings and focus on their strengths. Low self-esteem has also been found to be correlated with higher risks of depression. The link between low self-esteem and depression is bidirectional. 

What is the impact of autonomy, competence, and connectedness on well-being?

Self-determination theory suggests that people have three fundamental needs: connectedness, competence, and autonomy. If these needs are met, someone can achieve the highest form of well-being. Connectedness is also referred to as relatedness and indicates the extent to which people feel they are close to others. Competence indicates the degree to which people believe they possess mastery over their life and can bring about desired changes. Autonomy, also referred to as locus of control, indicates the degree to which people believe they control their own life, instead of being powerless against external factors.

Research supports the idea of the self-determination theory. Connectedness, competence, and autonomy seem to influence well-being. But further research using experimental methods is needed to prove the causal effects. 

What is the impact of one's attributional style on well-being?

An attributional style is a pattern of attribution. Attributional models of depression suggest that the way we attribute can influence well-being. Possible attributional styles are internal versus external, stable versus unstable, and global versus specific. People with internal attributional styles, believe they are generally the cause of bad things happening. People with stable attributional styles, believe things are generally permanent and cannot be changed. people with global attributional styles, usually believe that an outcome would have happened no matter what the context would be. 

People with internal, stable, and global attributional styles, have a higher risk of depression. This is because they blame themselves more easily and see negativity as inescapable and immutable. Research supports the attributional model of depression. But this research focuses on the correlation between attributinal style. We need more causal studies. 

There is also some interesting evidence that the internal, global, and stable attributional styles also correlate with decreasing depression in positive environments. This can be explained by the fact that not only the negative things seem like they are your fault and inescapable and immutable, but also the positive things seem like they are your merit and stable and certain. 

What is the impact of one's ruminative style on well-being?

Lastly, the impact of someone's ruminative style on their well-being has been researched. A ruminative style is how much you tend to focus your attention on something, Ruminative style is associated with the other cognitive outlooks we have discussed. People with a higher ruminative style, or people who ruminate more, have a higher risk of depression. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that rumination has detrimental effects on well-being in various ways. 

To conclude, all the cognitive outlooks that have been reviewed in this article have been found to relate to well-being. This is proof for the top-down approach, but we need more causal evidence to be sure.

11 - Article summary with Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want by Wilson, T.D. & Gilbert, D.T.

What is this article about?

This article explains affective forecasting and the impact bias. People often base their decisions on affective forecasts. Affective forecasts are predictions about their emotional reactions to future events.

In this affective forecasting, they often display an impact bias, meaning they overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to such events. People routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring and, as a result, sometimes work to bring about events that do not maximize their happiness.

One cause of this is focalism. Focalism is the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings. Another cause is people's failure to anticipate how quickly they can make sense of things that happen to them in a way that speeds up their emotional recovery. This is especially true for negative events.

What is the impact bias?

The impact bias makes people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events. This even happens when people are not in any extreme emotional state at the time of making their forecast. It also happens to both the happy and the unhappy feeling that is an expected result of some future event. Marketing is also based on this impact bias; you will be extremely happy if you buy this product and extremely unhappy if you don't. We are tended to buy into these sentiments. 

What is focalism?

A cause of the impact bias is focalism. Focalism is the tendency to overestimate how much we will think about the event in the future and to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings; only this specific event will have a great influence on our whole future. This focalism can be corrected to some degree by asking people to think carefully about the many other events that will demand their attention in the future. This was found in research by Wilson et al. in 2000.

How does sense making and people's ignorance of it work?

Another cause of the impact bias is that people fail to recognize how readily they will make sense of novel or unexpected events once they happen. This happens in attention, reaction, explanation, and adaption. First, people are likely to attend to events that are self-relevant but poorly understood. All our attention will be drawn to unexpected results or events. Second, people react emotionally to self-relevant, poorly understood events. Third, people attempt to explain or make sense of self-relevant, poorly understood events. Fourth, by making sense of events, people adapt emotionally to them.

Think about this for the example of a student who unexpectedly receives an A on an exam. The student will initially think of little else and feel overjoyed. Then the student will begin to search for reasons when she received a better-than-expected grade. After she has found explanations, she will think about it less and experience less happiness when she does think about it. 

Research suggests that people neglect to take these four processes into account when forecasting their future emotions. Beforehand, a student will believe they would be super happy about getting an A, but this happiness fades away quickly when she actually receives this good grade.

What is the pleasure paradox?

Making sense of positive events reduces the duration of the pleasure they cause. This would mean that inhibiting the sense-making process should prolong people's pleasure. There was a study by Wilson, Centerbar, Kermer, and Gilbert in 2005 where people were given an index card with a dollar coin attached. The participants predicted that they would be happier if the card explained why they received a dollar, but it turned out the participants that could not decipher why they received a dollar, were happier than the participants who got an explanation. People do not realize that making sense of unexpected positive events will make their positive emotions dissipate. The pleasure paradox refers to our idea that understanding events will make us feel better, when explanation actually drains things of their hedonic qualities that caused us to try and make sense of them in the first place. 

How does the impact bias work on negative events?

People are motivated to recover from negative emotional events and coping, psychological defences, and rationalization are forms of sense making. These defences are largely unconcious. Because people are generally unaware of the operation of these defences, they tend not to take them into account when predicting their emotional reactions. This oversight is called immune neglect. 

Immune neglect is people's failure to anticipate their natural tendency to make the best of bad outcomes. This immune neglect has some important consequences:

• Because people do not recognize that they have reduced the impact of negative events by making sense of them, they sometimes attribute their unexpected resilience to external agents, such as God. 
• When people make a decision that is difficult to reverse, they are more strongly motivated to rationalize the decision and make the best of it. This is why we tend to be happier with a purchase we cannot return than with a purchase we can return if we are not happy with it. 
• People are more strongly motivated to make sense of major traumas than of minor ones, which can cause the pain of minor traumas to last longer than more serious ones. We will recover from an insult by a close friend faster than from an insult by a stranger, because we will try harder to make sense of the insult by a friend. This is counter intuitive. 
• People weigh potential losses more heavily than corresponding gains, which leads to illogical decisions. Most people refuse to gamble with a 50% of winning 5 euro and a 50% of losing 3 euro, for example. They expect that losing 3 euro will hurt more than winning 5 euro will feel good. Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, and Gilbert found that this expectation of being more sad by losing money, even if it was less money, was incorrect. People were happier by winning than they had expected and less sad by losing than they had expected.

12 - Article summary with Very happy people by Diener, E. & Seligman, M.E.

What is this article about?

This is a research report of an experiment where 222 undergraduates were screened for high happiness. The upper 10% of consistently very happy people were compared with average people and very unhappy people. This study has tried to find out what some factor might be that influence high happiness: social relationships, personality and psychopathology, and variables that have been related to subjective well-being in correlational studies. It also examined whether there was a variable that was sufficient for happiness and a variable that was necessary for happiness (sufficient: everyone with the variable is happy, necessary: every happy person has the variable).

What were the results?

On a scale from 5 to 35, the very happy group scored about 30 on life satisfaction. The very happy people had virtually never thought about suicide, could recall many more good events in their lives than bad ones, and had many more positive than negative emotions on a daily basis. The very unhappy people were dissatisfied with life and had equal amounts of positive and negative affect on a daily basis. They reported this about themselves, but their friends and family also rated them dissatisfied. The average group was in the middle of these two groups. 

The biggest difference between the very happy group and the average and very unhappy group, was in their fulsome and satisfying interpersonal lives. The very happy people spent the least time alone and the most time socializing and valued their relationships the highest. Good social relationships might be a necessary condition for high happiness.

The very happy people also scored the lowest on psychopathology tests, virtually never in the clinical range. Almost half of the very unhappy group scored in the clinical range. 

Also good to note, was that the verry happy people never reported their mood to be "ecstatic", but they did score their mood with a 7, 8 or 9 most of the time.

Broader samples and longitudinal methods are needed to make strong conclusions from these results. These findings do suggest that very happy people have rich and satisfying social relationships and spend little time alone. But it is not yet clear what the causal relationship is here: perhaps happy people have better relationships because of their happiness, or happiness and good relationships are both caused by a third variable. What is clear is that social relationships might be a necessary but are not a sufficient condition for high happiness. Very happy people also experience unpleasant emotions and rarely feel euphoria or ecstacy. They are rather medium to moderatly happy most of the time.

13 - Article summary with A dark side of happiness? How, when, and why happiness is not always good by Gruber, J. et al.

What is this article about?

There has been a lot of research that has proven why the pursuit of happiness is good. There is no doubt that happiness is often beneficial. On the basis of the robust benefits of happiness, it is tempting to conclude that happiness is always beneficial and that people should aim to enhance their happiness in any way possible. This article is a review of the other, "dark side" of happiness. Four questions will be answered in this article:

1. Is there a wrong degree of happiness?
2. Is there a wrong time for happiness?
3. Are there wrong ways to pursue happiness?
4. Are there wrong types of happiness?

Is there a wrong degree of happiness?

An excessive degree of happiness can lead to undesirable outcomes in healthy populations and is also associated with psychological dysfunction in clinical populations. Excessive happiness can either mean extreme heightened degree of positive emotion or the relative absence of negative emotion. Studies have found that that extreme happiness can lead to dysfunctions and mania. These observations are consistent with the ideas of early philosophers who also believed that extreme levels of any mental experience, even of happiness, could lead to undesirable outcomes.

Is there a wrong time for happiness?

The presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions is beneficial in some circumstances, but not in all circumstances. When everything is going well, happiness can help people maintain and increase resources and form or strengthen social bonds. But negative emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness, also offer important benefits. People who are happy in all situations, don't get triggered to change their situation, like people would if they were scared, angry or sad.

Are there wrong ways to pursue happiness?

Pursuing happiness means trying to increase positive feelings and decrease negative feelings. This leads to positive outcomes if people are given the right tools to pursue happiness. These tools are flexible and adaptive emotion regulatory abilities, great awareness of what will make oneself happy, and engagement in happiness enhancing activities rather than directly pursuing happiness. These are successful ways of increasing happiness because they avoid the direct pursuit of happiness and instead lead people to make changes in their emotion regulation or in their activities. If people are too focused on the pursuit of direct happiness, they will not be able to gain lasting increases in happiness. This idea fits well with the self-determination theory. This theory holds that activities lead to greater happiness and well-being if they are engaged in for their own sake rather than for a reason extrinsic to the activity, even if this reason is as seemingly benevolent as gaining happiness.

Are there wrong types of happiness?

Research on the different types of happiness is relatively new and nothing is certain yet. But research does suggest that whether happiness has good outcomes can depend on the type of happiness. Types of happiness that engender negative social consequences or that are in conflict with a culture's norm do not appear to have exclusively positive long-term effects and they may even have negative effects.

14 - Article summary with Malleability and intentional activities by Layous, K.

What is this article about?

There is much debate about whether someone is able to change their level of happiness in a sustainable way or not. This article reviews literature on the sources of happiness to decide if evidence points to happiness being stable and malleable or not.

Research suggests that happiness is stable over time, but changes in certain life circumstances and the effortful practice of intentional happiness increasing activities can shift happiness. Research also suggests that increases in happiness are valuable because they trigger successful outcomes in important life domains, so not just because they make life more pleasurable. There is also research on the potential downsides of over-valuing happiness, so this needs to be kept in mind.

At the end of this article, intentional happiness increasing activities, or Positive Psychological Interventions, are discussed in their mechanisms, moderators, and areas for future research. The research as a whole suggests that happiness change is possible and desirable, but not easy.

Can people become happier?

Some of the most important sources of happiness are genetics, life circumstances, hedonic adaptation, and intentional activities. Given the heritability estimates of happiness, so the fact that genetics play an important role in happiness, there is evidence to support the claim that some people are simply born happier than others. But genetics only give people a "set-point" of happiness.

There are other factors that also play an important role in happiness, so even though some people start of happier than others, everyone can become happier or less happy because of life circumstances, hedonic adaptation, and intentional activities.

Life circumstances can also not really be influenced by a person themselves, but researchers have noted that life circumstances play a relatively small role in happiness. This small role is due to hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic adaptation is the process by which people adapt to the emotionally salient events or circumstances in their lives, so that they do not feel the emotions as intensely over time as they did when the event or circumstance first occurred. Because people have this hedonic adaptation, both positive and negative life circumstances have a smaller effect on happiness than we would imagine. Adaptation varies across people and is often incomplete for negative events. This is why some people handle negative circumstances a lot better than others. There are intentional ways someone could use their adaptational skills and make them stronger.

Part of behavior is caused by someone's character traits and can not really be changed, but it is possible that people boost happiness with intentional activities. Intentional activities could also positively affect the degree to which life circumstances explains individual differences in happiness, helping people extract more positivity out of life. At least part of happiness can be alterable via intentional activities.

Should people intentionally pursue happiness?

Even if it is possible to pursue happiness, should we do that? Happiness has a lot of benefits, as it can help people in their work, psychical health, and social domains. But happiness has important downsides if people value it too highly. Organizing your life around increased happiness is not inherently bad, but if you take it too far, it could have detrimental outcomes.

Being too focused on happiness, can even make people less happy in the long run, because they are never satisfied with their happiness levels. It is also important to note that most research was done on relatively mentally healthy samples. People with mental health problems might have other issues if they pursue happiness on their own instead of with the help of a clinician. So, people should pursue happiness, but always thoughtfully.

How can people effectively increase their happiness?

Given the processes of hedonic adaptation, the best route to sustained happiness change would be through intentional and effortful activities rather than changing life circumstances. Hedonic adaptation can apply to intentional activities as well, but intentional activities lend themselves more readily to variety, which can help sustain positive changes in well-being. Positive Psychological Intervention (PPI) is an umbrella term for al treatment methods or activities that are designed to foster happiness. PPIs can be seen as a type of emotion regulation strategy in which one seeks to upregulate positive emotions. 

PPIs are becoming more widely used. Because of this, we are able to research them, their efficacy, and their boundaries, better in the future. This can make all people, even the people who were not born happy, happier. Although challenging, increasing one's happiness is possible and the science of well-being is continually advancing to offer people more efficacious ways of doing so.

14 - Article summary with Revisiting the sustainably happiness model and pie chart: Can happiness be successfully pursued? by Sheldon, K.M. & Lyumbomirsky, S.

What is this article about?

This article is about the Sustainable Happiness Model (SHM). This is an influential model in positive psychology and the science of happiness. However, the 'pie chart of this model has received some valid critiques. This article agrees with many of these critiques, even though research also supports the most important premise of the SHM. This basic premise is that individuals can boost their well-being via their intentional behaviors, and maintain that boost in the long term. But such effects may be weaker than researchers initially believe. Three contemporary models that have descended from the thinking embodied in the SHM, will also be described.

How should the SHM pie chart be revised?

Research supports the claim that is made by the SHM that happiness can be successfully pursued. But this changing of happiness levels in a sustainable way is not as easy as the pie chart makes it seems. According to the pie chart, 50% of a person's happiness comes from his genetic set point, 10% from life circumstances, and 40% from intentional activity. Intentional activity has indeed been proven to be effective in changing happiness levels, but not everyone is able to do this at any given moment. 

There are three new models that are derived from the SHM and may be more useful than the old pie chart:

• The audaimonic activity model by Martela & Sheldon (2017) sees well-being as both doing well and feeling well. It supposes that eudaimonic well-being starts with doing well through eudaimonic activities, setting well-being conducive values, motivations, goals, and practices. This has an impact on the psychological need satisfaction of the needs autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This in turn also has an impact on subjective well-being, in terms of positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction. 
• The hedonic adaptation prevention model by Sheldon & Lyubomirsky (2012) sees positive change as affecting the amount of positive events, which affects the amount of positive emotions, which affects the sustained well-being boost. But in all these causal relations, there are moderating factors.
• The positive activity model by Lyubomirsky & Layous (2013) supposes a personal activity has a moderating effect on the relation between positive activity and increased well-being in activity features and person features. Positive activity also has an effect on increased well-being through positive emotions, positive thoughts, positive behaviors and need satisfaction. 

Growing research is revealing that the pursuit of happiness requires selecting self-appropriate and eudaimonic-type activities, rather than chasing after positive emotions directly, investing sustained effort in those activities, and practicing those activities in a varied and changing manner. By such means, people can create for themselves a steady inflow of engaging, satisfying, connecting, and uplifting positive experiences, thereby increasing the likelihood that they remain in the upper range of their happiness levels.

15 - Article summary with Cultivating subjective well-being through positive psychological interventions by Stone, B.M. & Parks, A.C.

What is this article about?

Positive Psychological Interventions (PPIs) are activities that have been found to cause a positive change in a population by increasing a positive variable. There are a lot of different types of these activities. Research has been focused on seven popular types of domains for PPIs. PPIs in these domains have been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms, increase pro-social spending and social connectedness, reduce suicidal ideation, increase subjective well-being or happiness, and many other positive changes. These will be discussed in this article, along with the discussion for future research and the limitations of current research.

How do Positive Psychological Interventions work in each domain?

PPIs that are designed to increase an individual's happiness and wellbeing generally fall into seven well-researched domains:

1. Meaning. Meaning-oriented interventions focus on clarifying an individual's sense of purpose, that which gives someone's life importance. There are many psychological benefits to finding meaning in life. But there are also problems with finding meaning for happiness; there can be distress when people feel like they do not live up to their calling. This is why it is important to not only focus on meaning, but also on realistic goals.
2. Gratitude. These interventions focus on exercising one's appreciation for the altruistic acts of another person. Gratitude plays a role in regulating the cost-benefit ratio between two individuals, but also helps to strengthen relationships, and to decrease stress and depressive symptoms. There have been found great cultural differences in how well these interventions work for people, so cultural values affect the outcome of gratitude interventions. This has to be kept in mind in both the interventions and in future research.
3. Strengths. Interventions that are based on strengths focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of a person, their strengths instead of their weaknesses. This helps with self-esteem. The only problem with this is that people may get the wrong idea that their strengths are permanent, which would make them feel inadequate if they lose certain strengths or are unable to show them in certain situations. Again, it is important to give people realistic expectations in these kinds of interventions.
4. Savoring. Savoring is focusing on neglected of forgotten details and experiences. There is promising research on the effects of savoring on well-being, but we need future research to examine the role of everyday savoring on the efficacy.
5. Optimism. Optimism-based interventions focus on developing a positive outlook of the future rather than a negative one. Optimism means an increase in positive and a decrease in negative emotions. This has been linked to a decrease in pain sensitivity and an increase in one's ability to adjust to painful stimuli, and to a faster recovery from serious surgeries and illnesses. But there is some evidence that a person's optimism levels cannot really be influenced because they are based on their personality for the most part. Evidence on this is contradictory, so we need more research on this.
6. Empathy. Empathy-based interventions focus on taking another person's perspective in order to develop a deeper understanding of the feelings another person is experiencing. Cultivating empathy is good for intimate relations but also professional relations. The concerns about these interventions are that higher empathy, also means quicker adaptation of negative traits and emotions of others.
7. Kindness. Interventions focused on kindness promote altruistic behaviors towards others with the intention of fostering positive emotions in the benefactor. Acts of kindness may increase the well-being of both the giver and the receiver. Future research is needed to decide whether you need to have intrinsic motivation to help others, or whether you can help others for your own benefit, and which of the two is more effective for well-being.

So, PPIs have theoretical and practical value for the science of happiness and for therapeutic settings and the general populations. Scientists are starting to get a good depth of knowledge on PPIs, but the field is only getting started so there are still many questions to guide future research. This is especially the case for realistic dissemination.

16 - Article summary with Assessing the impact of the size and scope of government on human well-being by Flavin, P. et al.

What is this article about?

This article is a research review about how public policies affect life satisfaction across the industrial democracies. Government spending, the size and generosity of the welfare state, and the degree of labor market regulation are considered as indicators of policy. There is evidence for the idea that citizens find life more satisgying as the degree of government intervention in the economy increases. This result is inelastic to changes in income.

What is examined?

Capitalism has come to structure not only economic production and exchange, but also the wider social order. There remains significant disagreement over the extent to which market forces should be allowed. This research is focused on the size and scope of government because of the presumed ultimate impact on the quality of life. In this paper the attention is thus not on any of the individual or particular effects of market interventions, but on quality of life itself. This type of empirical investigation is now possible because there is enough sophisticated literature devoted to the study of life satisfaction.

A growing sociology literature documents a relationschip between greater government intervention into the economy and lower levels of poverty, inequality, and unemployment. At the same time, a second, related set of studies show a relationship between lower levels of poverty, inequality, and unemployment and higher levels of subjective well-beings.

What data and methods are used?

The World Values Surveys (WVS) are used. The dependent variable, self-reported life satisfaction is measured using the following survey question: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"

The principal indipendent variable is a measure of the degree of government intervention into the market economy. There is considerable scholarly debate about how to accurately quantify the sice and scope of government interventions, so there are four different measures that are being used:

• The size of government, measured as the government's consumption share of a country's GDP.
• A country's total social welfare expenditures as z percentage of its GDP.
• A time-serial extension by Scruggs of the decommodifaction index, originally from Esping-Andersen, that measures welfare state generosity.
• The degree of labor market regulation, measured as an index of the overall level of "Employment Protection Legislation".

The relationship is analyzed in two ways. First, satisfaction is modelled as a function of the four measures of government intervention. Second, the mean level of life satisfaction for each country-wave in the survey is evaluated and modelled as a function of national-level factors using a random effects regression framework.

What are the results?

All four coefficients for government intervention are positive and statistically different from zero. As the degree of government intervention increases, individuals' subjective well-being increases as well. The magnitude of the effect is quite large but varies based on the independent variable in question. This means that government intervention matters, but it matters the most for specific policies, namely decommodification and labor market regulation, that seek to insulate citizens from the negative consequences of the market economy. Citizens living in countries where the government more actively intervenes in the market economy report higher levels of life satisfaction. The real-world impact of government intervention on whether individuals deem their lives satisfying is quite substantial.

Then it is examined whether the relationship between government intervention into the economy and life satisfaction varies across different groups of citizens. None of the results are statistically different from zero. This indicates that the effect of government intervention on life satisfaction is not moderated by individual income and that the four coefficients for government intervention affect the rich and poor alike. 

What may be the impact of this research?

This research can move one of the major debates in the scientific study of human happiness forward because previously, far too little attention has been devoted to theorizing about the range of social and political conditions that make life more enjoyable. In the focus on explicitly political conditions, there has been made an attempt to underscore the need for theories that more richly incorporate such determinants.

The market economy itself deserves renewed scholarly attention as a major factor in the empirical study of human happiness. The market system is a principal force determining the happiness of people and should be theoretically attended as such.

17 - Article summary with Well-being in metrics and policy by Graham, C. et al.

What is this article about?

This century has a lot of unprecedented economic development and improvements in longevity, health, and literacy. On the other side of the paradox, this century also deals with climate change, persistent poverty in the poorest countries, and increasing income inequality and unhappiness in many wealth countries. Economic growth measures are necessary but not sufficient to guarantee growth that is inclusive and politically and socially sustainable. Well-being metrices that are derived from large-scale surveys and questionnaires often provide a different picture. These metrics can provide key insights for economic and environmental sustainability. 

What are examples of paradoxical findings?

The United States have one of the wealthiest economies in the world, but life expectancy is falling. This comes from suicides and drug and alcohol overdoses. China is one of the most successful examples of rapid growth and poverty reduction, yet life satisfaction has fallen dramatically in the past decades. This is also the case for India, where the rapid economic success comes together with more unhappiness and ill-being.

Many studies demonstrate that non-income factors matter more to human welfare than standard economic models assume. Links between well-being, productivity, and health are critical to future sustainability.

How do we assess well-being?

There are three distinct dimensions of well-being in metrics that we use to assess well-being:

• Hedonic. Hedonic metrics capture individuals' affective states and the role these play in daily living. 
• Evaluative. Evaluative metrics are the most common. They assess individuals' satisfaction with their lives over their lifetime, including whether they can choose the kinds of lives they want to live.
• Eudaimonic. Eudaimonic metrics ask whether individuals have a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives. 

Of what use are well-being metrics?

There is an underlying consistency in well-being metrics. Well-being metrics do have limitations. They can only infer causality when tracking the same respondents over time. Otherwise, there is often two-way causality. But well-being metrics can contribute to policy design, monitoring, and evaluation. Well-being metrics can also inform on social issues. Policies based solely on income-based cost-benefit analysis may fail to capture important side effects that we would be able to predict with well-being metrics.

Well-being metrics can also influence environmental sustainability. Policy that people associate with higher well-being is more accepted and integrated in society than policy that people feel costs them in their well-being. This is why many scholars now think that happiness should be the primary objective of policy, not economic growth. Skeptics believe that well-being metrics are valuable but should not be the only measures of success. It is at least safe to say that well-being metrics can serve to point to vulnerabilities in particular places or groups of people and to positive trends that could provide broader lessons. Economic growth indicators and well-being indicators can and should coexist to play a role in public debates and in debates about policy.

18 - Article summary with Subjective well-being and national satisfaction: Findings from a worldwide survey by Morrison, M. et al.

What is this article about?

This is a research report of research examining the relationship between satisfaction in one's country, called national satisfaction, and subjective well-being utilizing data from a representative worldwide poll. The findings of this research invite new research directions and can inform quality-of-life therapies.

What method was used in the experiment?

The sample consisted of 132,516 individuals from 128 countries. The aim was to represent 95% of the world's adult population. Life satisfaction was assessed with Cantril's Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, also known as the Ladder of Life. National satisfaction was assessed using the same format as in the Ladder of Life, but country ratings were elicited in place of personal ratings. Participants were tested om different domains of satisfaction, such as satisfaction with their standard of living, personal health, and job. Respondents indicated whether planned to move from their area in the next 12 months. Several measures were used to examine the effects of individual life circumstances, such as household conveniences, household income and the gross domestic product per capita.

What were the results of the experiment? 

The results of the experiments were the following:

• National satisfaction was a strong positive predictor of life satisfaction across the world. This positive association was stronger among individuals with lower household income and fewer household conveniences and among individuals who were nonmobile.
• Life satisfaction was stronger among individuals with more conveniences. 
• The relation between national satisfaction and life satisfaction was strongest for participants living in countries with lower gross domestic product per capita. 
• The relation between life satisfaction and the domain satisfactions was strongest among participants in the richest nations.
• National satisfaction mattered more for life satisfaction in non-Western than in Western nations such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe.

So national satisfaction is a strong positive predictor of individual-level life satisfaction, and this relationship is moderated by household income, household conveniences, residential mobility, country gross domestic product per capita, and region (Western vs. non-Western). When individuals are impoverished or more bound to their region, national satisfaction is an even stronger predictor of life satisfaction. In contrast, reverse trends were found in analyses predicting life satisfaction from satisfaction in other domains such as health, standard of living and job. These patterns suggest that people are more likely to use proximate factors to judge life satisfaction where their conditions are helpful, or individualism is salient, but more likely to use perceived societal success to judge life satisfaction where life conditions are difficult, or collectivism predominates.

What are the implications of these results?

These results have implications for interventions designed to improve quality of life. This is usually based on the assumption that overall quality of life is the sum of satisfaction with important life domains. However, national satisfaction, which goes beyond community satisfaction, is missing. Adding might make models like the Quality of Life model by Frisch more effective.

This research also indicates that the feeling your country is doing well, may improve your sense of well-being. This can be used by governments and institutions. The strength of this relationship does depend on where you live, if you plan to keep living there, and what your standard of living is, so this needs to be kept in mind.

19 - Article summary with Can and should happiness be a policy goal? Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences by Oishi, S. & Diener, E.

What is this article about?

This article is a review of happiness research that demonstrates that self-reported happiness could be used to evaluate public policies. The thesis is that self-report well-being measures can be used to track objective societal and economic conditions and that we can use them to make society better in a variety of different ways. The ideal society is the society in which citizens are happy, fee satisfied, and find their lives meaningful.

Should happiness be a policy goal?

Since the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, how well a society is doing is being measured by their production value. The progress of a society is measured by economic progress in the form of national income as the net value of all economic goods produced by the nation. The gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP) are two of the most frequently used overall economic well-being measures.

The first problem with this is that pure economic indicators leave out many aspects of life that are central to residents' daily lives. The second problem with this is that economic indicators do not include harms and by-products of economic activities such as environmental pollution and occupational hazards. We are told we are doing well as a society as long as we are making money, but a lot of the times this doesn't align with how well we actually feel. The dissatisfaction with purely economic indicators of societal well-being led to the quality of life movement in the late 1960s. How overall well-being is defined and what measures people think should be used to measure it, has changed over the years. But the initial idea of the movement is still thriving: we need to make people's well-being a priority over economic welfare. 

In conclusion, the ultimate goal of public policy should be to enhance citizens' subjective well-being. Economic growth should serve people's well-being, well-being should not be at the expense of economic growth. By changing the focus from economic measures to well-being measures, we can make society better for everyone in every aspect of life, not just in how much money they have.

Can happiness be a policy goal?

The last question that remains, is whether happiness can actually be a practical goal, or whether it is more of an ideal. Self-reported well-being does turn out to be sufficiently reliable and valid. Self-report measures track objective societal and economic conditions fairly well. It can also help to quantify people's suffering. For example, we know from research that a severe disability is twice as detrimental for well-being as unemployment. If we use this kind of research, we can make better decisions on policy that can make people overall happier.

Self-reported well-being also helps to evaluate the effectiveness of specific public policies. For example, after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the happiness of single mothers increased significantly. By testing people's well-being, we are thus able to test the effectiveness of public policies. 

In conclusion, subjective well-being should and can be measured regularly to inform public policies. An ideal society is a society where citizens feel happy and there are efficient and reliable ways to test well-being and to enhance well-being through policy.

20 - Article summary with Accounts of psychological and emotional well-being for policy purposes by Sim, B. & Diener, E.

What is this article about?

This article reviews the reasons for including indicators of subjective well-being in national accounts of quality of life in nations, next to economic and social indicators, as Diener proposed in 2000. The policies that subjective well-being measures could influence, will be described. There will also be a response to some common objections towards implementing indicators of subjective well-being in national accounts.

What are reasons for including subjective well-being in national accounts?

Governments and businesses already have social and economic indicators to track the well-being of their constituents, so why would we need to include measures of subjective well-being? Here are some reasons:

• People believe subjective well-being is very important. Research suggests achieving well-being is often even the most important goal in a person’s life. Governments in modern democracies are instituted to serve the interests of the populace they govern. Governments should thus consider implementing subjective well-being measures in their national accounts.
• Current indicators are incomplete and insufficient. Economic and social measures provide important information about how nations are functioning, but both types of indicators have their limitations that can often be addressed by incorporating measures of subjective well-being in national accounts.
• Subjective well-being is beneficial for both the individuals and the society as a whole. People with higher well-being are often healthier, more successful, and have better social relationships. This also makes a society of happy people stronger and more productive than a society of less happy people.
• Indicators of subjective well-being are easy and inexpensive to implement. It is unlikely that it would cost governments and organizations more to use subjective well-being measurements than it would yield.

What types of policies could subjective well-being measures influence?

So, there are a lot of reasons for incorporating indicators of subjective well-being into national accounts. Indicators of subjective well-being provide us with a broad understanding of the factors that contribute to a person’s or a society’s well-being. These are some suggestions on what subjective well-being measures can be used for in policies, but the evidence is only preliminary. Area’s that affect well-being and can thus be focused on in policies:

• Economics. There is a robust, albeit complicated, relationship between income and subjective well-being and between unemployment and subjective well-being.
• Environment. There is also a proven relationship between a clean and green environment. This means policies should be focused on less air pollution and overall more green spaces in urban areas.
• Health. Indicators of subjective well-being could be used to monitor the physical and mental health of societies, in particular of youth and children.
• Social life. Social capital is the quality of social networks within a community. Societies with strong social capital al characterized by high levels of civic participation, high levels of trust, and strong norms for reciprocity. Social capital is positively associated with subjective well-being.

It is important in the policymaking to focus on differences in subjective well-being between different regions of a nation as well, because not just different nations differ drastically from each other in how happy people are, but also in different regions within a nation.

What are the most important objections to including subjective well-being in national accounts?

Some people think well-being is individual, and governments should not interfere with personal issues. This objection disregards the fact that governments already intervene in numerous aspects of their citizens’ lives and also the fact that well-being has legitimate consequences beyond the individual level. Well-being is not, nor should it be, just an individual concern.

Some also think that striving for high well-being is a luxury and not a basic need. This is thought by people who believe well-being is hedonistic. Numerous studies suggest that well-being is not purely hedonistic and also that well-being has an influence on other needs. The happier people are, the better their health, social relationships, and productive achievements.

In conclusion, national accounts of subjective well-being are important alongside economic and social indicators for how well nations are doing.

21 - Article summary with Materialism and living well by Kasser, T.

What is this article about?

Materialism refers to the extent to which someone believes that it is important to attain money, possessions, image, and status. Evidence has shown that materialism is a fundamental aspect of the human value system and that it stands in conflict with intrinsic values concerning personal growth, relationships and helping others. It turns out that people score lower on well-being tests when they prioritize materialistic values and goals. Not only is being too materialistic bad for one's own well-being, but it also has a negative impact on the well-being of others in the present and future. This article explains this, but it ends on a positive note, because recent studies have also shown that materialism can diminish when people receive interventions that encourage intrinsic values, that involve deep inward reflections, or that lead them to disengage from and question materialism.

So, the four goals of this article are the following:

1. To show that the construct of materialism can be understood as an aspect of the human value system.
2. To review the evidence which has documented that people experience lower levels of personal well-being to the extent they place a relatively high priority on materialistic values and goals.
3. To show that when people prioritize materialistic values, they are also likely to hold attitudes and behave in such ways that interfere with others' well0being. 
4. To describe some interventions that hold promises for decreasing materialism and in turn increasing well-being. 

Why is materialism part of the human value system?

You can look at materialism in different ways. It was introduced by Belk as a personality trait that had facets of possessiveness, non-generosity, and envy. Others look at it as a feature of someone's identity. Others see it as a construct composed of a set of attitudes about money and wealth. Most empirical work follows Richins and Dawson (1992) and Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996) who see materialism as a set of values, goals, or strivings.

Seeing it this way, that someone is materialistic means that the person believes it is important to have money and possessions that convey status and a desirable image, and that these aims in live are relatively high priorities compared to all the other aims for which a person might strive. Support for this conceptualization of materialism comes from research showing that such aims consistently emerge as a fundamental set of values across cultures. Recent research strongly supports that materialism is a set of values and goals that people have, and that the prioritizing of materialistic values comes at the cost of de-prioritizing certain other values.

Why is materialism bad for someone's own well-being?

People tend to think that materialism or prioritizing materialistic values is good for someone's own well-being. Studies seem to disprove this idea. A meta-analysis by Dittmar et al. (2014) showed that the relationship between materialism and well-being is small but consistently negative. Some measures of materialism show stronger results than others, but they all show the negative effect across different sorts of people and cultural circumstances. 

One possible explanation for this consistent negative correlation between materialism and well-being, is that trying to achieve a goal, can lead to disappointment when that goal is not reached. Having strong materialistic values would lead someone to always feel the pressure of having to achieve goals. But there is contradictory evidence for this goal-attainment hypothesis.

A second explanation is that materialistic values can make someone compare his own situation to that of others. If your goal is to be rich, there will almost always be someone you know that is richer than you. This can make you insecure. However, there is no support for the spill-over hypothesis. 

A third explanation is that materialism results in lowered levels of well-being when people find themselves in environments that are at odds with their values. This is the environmental congruence hypothesis. There is some proof for this hypothesis, but also some contradictory findings.

A fourth explanation is that people have inherent psychological needs to choose their own behavior, to feel connected to others, and to be efficacious at their valued behaviors. So, all people value autonomy, relatedness, and competence. The idea of the need-based hypothesis is that focusing on materialistic goals can make someone lose sight of his inherent psychological needs. There is some proof for this hypothesis. 

In sum, there is substantial empirical agreement on the idea that materialism is negatively associated with well-being, but there is no consensus as to why that is. The need-based hypothesis has the most supporting evidence. Further research is needed to examine the relationship between materialism and well-being further.

Why is materialism bad for someone else's well-being?

Materialistic values are not only bad for someone's own well-being, but they are associated with a variety of attitudes and behaviors that are likely to undermine others' well-being as well. This is because materialistic people are more selfish, have less close interpersonal relationship, engage less in pro-social activities, and care less about their environment or the harm that they are causing. Evidence shows that the more people prioritize materialistic values and goals, the less kindly they treat others and the planet.

What are types of interventions to decrease materialism?

It is important to develop ways to diminish the prevalence of materialism in people, organizations, and society. There are different types of interventions that can help with this:

• Encouraging people to more highly prioritize the intrinsic, self-transcendence, and spiritual values.
• Make people reflect on their values, for instance by mindfulness training. 
• Decreasing children's exposure to social models that proclaim the worth of materialistic aspirations, mostly commercial media. 

Materialism can be decreased through each of the three types of interventions described above. There is evidence for this, but more evidence is needed to prove this for samples from a wider range of backgrounds.

22 - Article summary with Affect and emotions as drivers of climate change perception and action: A review by Brosch, T.

What is this article about?

This is a review of recent findings concerning the role of affect and emotion in climate change perceptions and judgment as well as their potential as drivers of sustainable action. The affective responses people experience toward climate change are found to be strong predictors of risk perceptions, mitigation behavior, adaptation behavior, policy support, and technology acceptance. Communication and intervention studies show that inducing both positive and negative emotions may under certain conditions promote sustainable behavior. This follows from accumulating research in the affective sciences. The field of behavioral sciences could benefit from incorporation of these concepts and findings from affective psychology.

How can affect and emotion experiences be drivers of climate change perception and action?

Recent research has found that affect and emotions experiences toward climate change are among the most important predictors of climate change-related judgments and behaviors. Recent findings illustrate that affect and emotions play an important role across a wide range of climate change-related judgments and behavioral responses. Because of this, they have the potential to work as levers to promote sustainable behavior change.

Do keep in mind that this research is largely correlational. This means that it is not evident whether affect and emotions are antecedents or consequences of climate change judgments and behavior or whether both are driven by another proces. Understanding the causal relationship is crucial to assess whether the induction of affect and emotions can successfully promote sustainable action.

Multiple intervention strategies have been developed to induce emotions or amplify existing emotions in order to try to motivate sustainable actions. Climate change is sometimes too abstract and distant to elicit emotional responses via experience-based mechanisms. Listening to personal stories about how climate change is harming individuals is a promising way of increasing emotional engagement with climate change. Experimental studies have also investigated the effects of inducing collective guilt for environmental damages. These studies found that emotions need to be specifically related to the climate problem to have significant behavioral effects. It is also very important to keep in mind that there is usually a time delay between the emotion induction and the desired behavior. This is for example the case with purchases or enery saving. In a time delay of over an hour, there is already not much effect anymore of emotion induction and the desired behavior. It is good to consider the demporal dynamics of emotions by placing the message as closely as possible to the desired behavior or by including safeguard mechanisms such as pre-commitments. 

Both positive and negative emotions have been successfully leveraged in climate change communications and interventions to increase intentions and action. But the findings were mixed. This only illustrates that it is important to keep in mind the mechanisms underneath the emotions when designing the intervention. Only if we understand the human emotional systeem well, we can maximize the impact of communications and interventions. Also keep in mind that even thogugh negative emotional messages have also been shown to be effective, people tend to prefer messages without negative emotional content.

The recent findings also illustrate the importance of anticipated affect and emotions as intrinsic motivators of sustainable action. So, it might be good to emphasize the good feeling people will get from pro-environmental behaviors. Emphasizing the positive affect experienced after pro-environmental behavior has been shown to increase intentions to perform a subsequent pro-encironmental behavior. Emphasizing negative affect or guilt did not impact this type of behavioral spillover, which is more reason to focus on positive messaging.

23 - Article summary with Explaining the paradox: How pro-environmental behavior can both thwart and forster well-being by Venhoeven, L.A. et al.

What is this article about?

Pro-environmental behaviour is often believed to be difficult and threatening one’s quality of life. But recent studies suggest that people who behave in a more pro-environmental way are actually more satisfied with their lives than people who do not. This article tries to explain the apparent paradox between pro-environmental behavior and the increase in well-being. To explain this, the article explains the different views on what well-being entails and whether the focus is on hedonic well-being or eudaimonic well-being, so on feeling pleasure of feeling meaningful.

How should well-being be defined?

Before we are able to say anything about the relationship between pro-environmental behaviour and well-being, it is important to examine the definition of well-being. Hedonic well-being has its roots in the philosophy of Aristippus, who believed that the goal of life was to experience the maximum amount of pleasure. Eudaimonic well-being has its roots in the philosophy of Aristotle, who believed well-being meant “living well,” so using one’s best human capacities by actively pursuing virtues and excellences.

Hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are often seen as two distinct versions of well-being. Some people even state that the pursuit of one of the two, drives a person further away from the other. But the two concepts of well-being are not mutually exclusive and even show a great overlap. People who feel like they lead a good life, will also experience more pleasure, and people who experience a lot of pleasure, will also be more motivated and more effective in leading a good life.

What is the relationship between pro-environmental behavior and hedonic well-being?

Difficulty to judge the usefulness and effectiveness of one’s behaviour may have a negative consequence for the hedonic well-being of people who engage in pro-environmental behavior. The pursuit of goals that are perceived to be unattainable, because you cannot fix the environment on your own, can lead to psychological distress and reduced well-being. It is important to note that the goal pursuit only reduces hedonic well-being if the goal is perceived to be unattainable. Despite the uncertainty about whether and when the results will become visible, most people do feel like they can contribute to the protection of the environment. An easy way to make goals feel more attainable, is by reframing big goals into smaller goals. Small projects feel attainable and hedonic happiness can be found in the pursuit of attainable goals.

There are studies that have suggested that consumption increases hedonic well-being. Based on these findings, it might be implied that consuming in a more sustainable way would thus lead to a decrease in well-being. But this is not the care. Firstly, because sustainable consumption does not necessarily equate to consuming less, but rather to consuming differently. And secondly, because consumption is not the only way to gain well-being. There are other ways of experiencing pleasure. So, reducing our overconsumption and consuming more sustainably does not have to lead to a decrease in hedonic well-being.

It is difficult to establish whether better environmental conditions lead to increased hedonic well-being. It seems to make sense that pro-environmental action would bring more hedonic well-being by leading to better environmental conditions and thus giving people better conditions to live a comfortable life. But all studies that have tried to prove this, are correlational, so we are not sure. Furthermore, the change in conditions is slow, so the people who act pro-environmentally, are usually not the same people that live in the bettered environmental conditions.

Lastly, some pro-environmental acts are less pleasurable than their harmful counterparts. Adding pleasurable or hedonic aspects to pro-environmental behaviors can increase the hedonic well-being derived from these behaviors. Think about incorporating energy saving actions into a fun fame. But this may not be the most effective way to increase the well-being derived from pro-environmental behaviour in general, because one would have to add hedonic aspects to all separate pro-environmental behaviors. Also, it is not necessary to do this, because pro-environmental behaviour in general can already provide hedonic well-being by bringing people closer to reaching a goal.

What is the relationship between pro-environmental behavior and eudaimonic well-being?

Engaging in virtuous activities is expected to foster eudaimonic well-being. If you take the effort to engage in good behaviour, you feel like a good person and you are happier because of this. The positive link between well-being and doing good can also be inferred from research on pro-social behaviour. Doing the right thing contributes to eudaimonic well-being, especially when the choice for the right behaviour is intrinsically and autonomously motivated.

So, in order to provide a sense of meaning and bring eudaimonic well-being, it is important that pro-environmental behaviour is seen as “the right thing.” Most people feel like it is, but not everyone. Whether one sees pro-environmental behaviour as good behaviour may depend on the norms and values upheld by the social groups one belongs to. If people do not value environmental protection or do not think pro-environmental behaviour is the right thing to do, it is less likely that behaving in a pro-environmental way will add to their eudaimonic well-being.

How can policies increase pro-environmental behaviour?

To conclude this article, pro-environmental behaviour in itself does not have to result in a decrease of well-being. But this does not warrant that pro-environmental behaviour will thus have a positive influence on well-being. This article offers some general guidelines for how policy makers can increase the likelihood of a positive relation between pro-environmental behaviour and well-being.

“Forcing” people to act in a pro-environmental way will only be counterproductive. For pro-environmental behaviour to increase well-being, it is important to convince people that their behaviour is right and meaningful, and stimulate people to choose this behaviour of their own free will. Future research is needed to examine how intrinsic and autonomous motivation for pro-environmental behaviour can best be generated in order to form a positive link between pro-environmental behaviour and well-being.

24 - Article summary with Heathy social bonds: A necessary condition for well-being by Gable, S.L. & Bromberg, C.

What is this article about?

This article is an exploration of the question whether individuals need relationships with others to thrive. This has been researched a lot so there is a lot of evidence that can be reviewed. This evidence suggests that people do need social bonds, not only to thrive but even to just survive. How relationships might contribute to well-being, will be explained after the review of the research of the relationship between social bonds and well-being.

Do we need social bonds to thrive?

Historically, the punishment reserved for the worst offenders in a prison has been solitary confinement. This is not without reason; being cut off from all social bonds can be seen as a form of torture. Large scale epidemiological studies on predictors of mortality have consistently revealed that social isolation is a substantial risk factor for death. In addition to this evidence that links a lack of social ties to mortality and disease, there is evidence that the quality of one's social relationships is also linked to health. So not only do we need relationships with other people in order to survive, but we also need close relationships. The presence of social ties is not sufficient to lower the risks of mortality and disease. 

Social ties have also been linked to psychological health and well-being. Social isolation and loneliness are correlated with depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders, substance abuse and lower subjective well-being. Just like for physical health, it is not enough for mental health to just have social bonds with other people, the bonds need to be tight and need to feel meaningful. The social domain has even been proven to be a better predictor of well-being than any other domain of life, such as career and financial attainment. It also does not matter how old an individual is or in what stage of life they are; the effect of relationship quality on well-being remains strong throughout life. Much of the research has studied hedonic well-being, but there is also some evidence that eudaimonic well-being is also highly influenced by social bonds.

Why do we need social bonds to thrive and to survive?

There is a strong positive link between good social ties and well-being. This link could be explained in different ways. There is some evidence for all of the following theories, but it is difficult to prove them, so we still need more research. 

Firstly, you can see social relationships as a buffer against threats. If we do not have strong social bonds, we are in much more danger. This could be the reason why our body experiences all kinds of negative emotions when we are lonely. These negative emotions are possibly a motivation to go and find people that can keep you safe. 

Secondly, social support is important in the pursuit of personal goals and for shaping the self-concept. It turns out that people also feel strong emotions regarding (lack of) social support, even in situations where they do not feel threatened at all. This would suggest that there is another function of social bonds. There is evidence that social support is important for goal pursuit, but the conditions and ways in which such support functions still require elaboration. Feeney and Collins came up with the model of thriving through relationships (2015). This model proposes that support for the pursuit of personal goals and challenges is one pathway through which social support can help individuals thrive. There is a lot of evidence for the fact that receiving social support has immediate and long-term benefits. 

Thirdly, social relationships provide rewards. Social partners can create, maintain, and increase positive affective states. Positive affective states are an important part of well-being and also drive us towards more prosocial behavior, because we want the reward of the positive affect again. Love, gratitude, and capitalization (sharing your happiness with others) all give positive feelings that we want to pursue at all times. 

In conclusion, not only do people need social bonds to thrive, but they also need them to survive. And the social bonds need to be tight as well. The pathways through which social bonds have this strong impact on well-being may not be so obvious, but in this article, three general pathways were identified: buffering the impact of negative situations, contributing to intrapersonal goals and the self-concept, and increasing the experience of positive emotions. Through these and possible additional processes, social relationships have great potential for increasing or decreasing individual well-being.

Article summary with Social capital and prosocial behavior as sources of well-being by Helliwell, J.F. et al.

What is this article about?

This is a review of the evidence of the relationship between social capital, prosocial behavior, and subjective well-being. More prosocial behavior, deeper social connections, and higher levels of trust in others are linked to higher subjective well-being. Prosocial behavior is also linked to social capital. This is an exploration of how these relationships work.

25 - What is the impact of social capital on well-being?

What is the influence of social capital on an individual level?

Social connections in the workplace are an important predictor of overall well-being, because most people spend so much time at work. Higher trust in management even has a bigger impact on well-being than increase in income. Social capital refers to the networks of relationships among people, that enable that the groups can work or live effectively together. At the workplace, this is called workplace social capital. Workplace social capital seems more important for women than for men. People who see their immediate superior more as a partner than as a boss, are overall happier and show less fluctuations in happiness during the workweek and the weekend. These people also show less of a dip in their life satisfaction. Usually, people peak in life satisfaction in their 20s and in their 60s. The dip in between that is less grave for people with a good relationship with their superior. 

Marriage and cohabitation are also important predictors of overall well-being. This effect is a lot bigger in cultures where marriage is seen as very important, but it is positive no matter how people view marriage. Both marriage and friends are important sources of well-being, but the effects of marriage are twice as big for people who regard their spouse as their best friend.

What is the influence of social capital on a community level?

Social capital has an important role in the national well-being levels. There is a strong effect of social trust on the national well-being. So, the evidence supports the positive effects of social capital on well-being, both individually and collectively. Social capacity also provides a resource that can be tapped into collectively in times of need. Communities with higher social capital, particularly higher social trust, recover more quickly from natural disasters. This is because trusting each other helps with cooperation, so it can make a community much more efficient in dealing with problems. 

What is the influence of social capital on health?

Because of increasing pressures on budgets and capacities, a lot of people are getting less personal care. There is just no time or money to really get to know patients or clients. But research suggests that not only would the patients benefit from receiving more personal attention, but also the caregivers. It has also been proven that health improves faster when people feel cared for, and when the focus is on their well-being as a whole, not just on the issue that needed fixing in the first place. 

What is the influence of social capital on the provisions of public services?

Well-being depends more on the quality of services provided than on the funds devoted to their provision. It also does not seem to matter whether the political process is democratic or not, as long as people experience efficiency and integrity.

What is the impact of trust and generosity on well-being?

What is the influence of trust on well-being?

Trust can be seen as a part of social capital, but you could also look at it as independent but codetermined, with bidirectional links between the two concepts. Social trust is often measured with questions such as "do you think that other people can generally be trusted, or do you feel like you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?" Higher trust in the workplace and in communities have been said before to influence well-being levels and efficiency. People who are more trusting are also more capable of coming to the best possible outcome together. Trust and co-operation can be created and employed in ways that improve well-being.

What is the influence of generosity and other prosocial behavior on well-being?

We have seen that meaningful connections are one of the most reliable predictors of happiness. This also explains the positive link between generosity and other prosocial behavior and well-being. With prosocial behavior, you get better connections with people and this in turn makes you happier. Research suggests that the "givers" in prosocial acts, become even happier by those acts than the "receivers". Prosocial spending, using your financial resources to help others, is also associated with higher well-being. There are four key factors that help explain when prosociality is most likely to promote well-being:

• The prosocial behavior facilitates social connections.
• Generosity is motivated by altruistic, as opposed to selfish, motives.
• Volition; the prosocial behavior comes from someone's own will and is thus not compelled by others.
• Impact; the prosocial behavior has a notable effect.

26 - Article summary with Married... with children: The science of well-being in marriage and family life by Nelson-Coffey, S.K.

What is this article about?

Marriage and parenthood are thought of as opportunities for people to experience great joy, but also incredible disappointment. This article is a review of the current understanding of the relationship between the social structures marriage and parenthood to well-being. Well-being is understood here as including both cognitive and affective components, so high life satisfaction and frequent positive emotions and infrequents negative emotions.

Various methodological approaches have been implemented to better understand how family relationships are related to well-beings. The question of causality may not be directly answered, but there is interesting information we can draw from recent research. Current evidence provides strong support for the association between marriage and well-being, but the relationship between parenthood and well-being is complex.

Is marriage associated with happiness and why?

Cross-sectional studies have indicated that married people tend to be happier than unmarried people. But it is not yet perfectly understood which way this relationship goes. Perhaps happier people get married more, or the relationships of happier people are more stable. To examine this, there has also been research of people's happiness before and after they got married. This research suggests that getting married does have a causal effect on higher well-being. Getting married is associated with a boost in happiness, but that boost does diminish over time. The effect of marriage on well-being is also greater for some people than it is for others. The effect of marriage was also found to be stronger for women than for men. 

Why marriage is associated with happiness, is usually thought to be because of the impartance of relationships. Married people are happier than people who were never married, divorced people and widowed people. But it is still unclear wether married people are happier than cohabitating people. More research is needed. Also, more research is needed on the effect of same-sex marriage, as most research now is on traditional male-female marriages.

Is parenthood associated with happiness and why?

Parenthood is so complex and dynamic, that it should be seen as a fluid process that changes over time. The association between parenthood and well-being, depends on many different factors. Research has shown conflicting results. Longitudinal and daily experience studies do procide consistent support that parenthood could be associated with elevated levels of well-being, but these elevated levels seem to be temporarily. Evidence from cross-sectional studies is much less consistent. There are a lot of factors that could explain the individual differences in the effect of parenthood, such as age, gender, marital status, personality, and attachment. The effect of parenthood on well-being is bigger for fathers than for mothers. 

The positive effects of parenthood on happiness can be explained by elevated feelings of meaning in life, positive emotions, fulfillment of social roles and satisfaction of the psychological needs autonomy, competence, and connectedness. The negative effects can be explained by elevated negative emotions, financial strain, sleep disturbance, and lower relationship satisfaction. These theories have not yet been studied enough to make these conclusions though.

We need more research to the moderating factors of the effect of parenthood on well-being. We also need more research on different family structures, such as adoptive and blended families and same-sex partnerships.

27 - Article summary with Interpersonal mechanisms linking close relationships to health by Pietromonaco, P.R. & Collins, N.L.

What is this article about?

This article is about the relationship between close relationships and health. We know that this relationship exists and that it is important for well-being, but the specific mechanisms of why it exists remain mostly unknown. This is a review of recent research that sheds a light on these mechanisms.

How do social relationships affect health?

Both social connection and social disconnection shape biological responses and behaviors that are consequential for health. There is a lot of evidence to support this claim.

The types of social dynamics that are the most important for health, and the potential pathways through which they operate, are the following

• Psychosocial pathways. Psychosocial pathways are via emotion, cognition, behavior, and relationship satisfaction. Emotional responses to social connection or disconnection are likely to shape health outcomes, but also the way people appraise the world, evaluate their coping resources, and construe the self and others. Social connection or disconnection may also shape health outcomes through a variety of behavioral routes including patterns of coping ang self-regulation. Lastly, social connection and disconnection may shape health outcomes by influencing the development of secure and satisfying close relationships.
• Biological pathways. It is also possible that social connection and disconnection have an impact on health via biological pathways, but limited knowledge exists about whether biological responses actually predict health outcomes.

In the future, more research is needed to facilitate the translation of discoveries from relationship science into relationship-based interventions and public health initiatives. This research should be focused on developing finer grained theoretical models, investigation of potential mediating pathways such as dyadic influences on health behavior and on physiological coregulation. This research should also always take individual differences and contextual factors such as attachment style, gender, socioeconomic status, and culture in mind. There is also a pressing need for laboratory and field research to determine which types of interventions are both practical and effective.