The Promise of Sustainable Happiness
Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (in press). The promise of sustainable happiness. In S. J. Lopez (Ed.), Handbook of positive psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press
The article suggests that, despite several barriers withholding people to increase their well-being, less happy people can successfully strive to be happier by learning a variety of effortful strategies and practicing these with determination and commitment. They use the sustainable happiness model (by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade, 2005) as theoretical framework. According to the model, three factors contribute to an individual’s happiness level:
The journey to happiness has always and still is of great interest, there is empirical evidence that it even leads to positive life outcomes such as a higher income and stronger relationships. The question, however, is whether people can actually attain a level of sustainable happiness.
To answer this question, we first we look at what happy and unhappy people are like:
The first thing that comes to mind is the difference between their ‘objective’ circumstances that could cause a difference in their level of happiness. Some examples include: marital status, age, sex, culture, income etc. It is shown, however, that these factors do not explain the variation in people’s level of well-being.
The article proposes that happiness and unhappiness is due to the subjective experience and construal of the world by people. They interpret their environment differently, leading the authors to explore an individual thoughts, behaviors and motivations. Happier people see the world in a more positive, and thus happiness-promoting, way. Research suggests that happy people are this way because of multiple adaptive strategies:
Construal
Research that involved having happy and unhappy people reflect on similar hypothetical situations / actual life events, revealed that happy people view these events as more pleasant, while unhappy people view these same events as unfavourable..
Social comparison
Findings suggest that people that are happy are less sensitive to feedback about another person or his or her performance (favourable and unfavourable feedback). When performing ‘better’ on a task, all participants became more confident about their skills; however when the other was better, happy people were unaffected while unhappy people were, negatively. Unhappy people seem to feel positive emotions when a peer has done worse than them, even if they both got negative feedback. When they got positive feedback but performed at a lower level than a peer, they felt negative emotions. This was the case in both individual and group settings.
Decision-making
When happy people make life-altering decisions, they tend to be satisfied with their possible options, and only express negative emotions when their sense of self is threatened. Conversely, unhappy people were generally unhappy withthe options offered to them. Happy and unhappy people also differ in how they make decisions in the face of many options. Research suggests that happy individuals are relatively more
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