Happiness: Encyclopedia - Happiness

Happiness

Acceptance
Anger
Anticipation
Boredom
Disgust
Envy
Fear
Guilt
Hate
Hope
Joy
Jealousy
Love
Remorse
Sadness
Sorrow
Surprise

Happiness, pleasure or joy is an emotional or affective state in which we feel good or happy. Overlapping states or experiences include joy, exultation, delight, bliss, and love. Antonyms include suffering, sadness, grief, and pain. The term pleasure is sometimes used to indicate a short-term response, while happiness is sometimes used to refer specifically to a more long-term state.

Happiness - Terminology

Historically, happiness was often thought of as success in life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this older sense meant living the good life of rational virtuous action, and thus was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, meaning roughly "to be well-souled". This understanding of the term has not been completely discarded among moral philosophers, and is still especially prevalent in virtue ethics. Nowadays terms such as well-being or quality of life are commonly used in everyday speech to signify the classical meaning and happiness is reserved for the felt experience or experiences that philosophers historically called pleasure.

Happiness - Psychological views

Happiness - Positive psychology

Martin Seligman in his book Authentic Happiness gives the positive psychology definition of happiness as consisting of both positive emotions (like comfort) and positive activities (like absorption). He presents three categories of positive emotions:

• past: feelings of satisfaction, contentment, pride, and serenity.
• present (examples): enjoying the taste of food, glee at listening to music, absorption in reading, and company of people you like e.g. friends and family.
• future: feelings of optimism, hope, trust, faith, and confidence.

There are three categories of present positive emotions:

• bodily pleasures, e.g. enjoying the taste of food.
• higher pleasures, e.g. glee at listening to music.
• gratifications, e.g. absorption in reading.

The bodily and higher pleasures are "pleasures of the moment" and usually involve some external stimulus. An exception is the glee felt at having an original thought.

Gratifications involve full engagement, flow, elimination of self-consciousness, and blocking of felt emotions. But when a gratification comes to an end then positive emotions will be felt.

Gratifications can be obtained or increased by developing signature strengths and virtues. Authenticity is the derivation of gratification and positive emotions from exercising signature strengths. The good life comes from using signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in, for example, enjoying work and pursuing a meaningful life.

Happiness - Mechanistic view

Happiness - Biological basis

While a person's overall happiness is not objectively measurable this does not mean it does not have a real physiological component. The neurotransmitter dopamine, perhaps especially in the mesolimbic pathway projecting from the midbrain to structures such as the nucleus accumbens, is involved in desire and seems often related to pleasure. Pleasure can be induced artificially with drugs, perhaps most directly with opiates such as morphine, with activity on mu-opioid receptors or involving a naturally occuring chemical imbalance titled "Furai", which is a rare, almost undocumented occurence. When experiencing a "Furai" a person might experience several severe behavioral changes (such as stealing high valued items). There are neural opioid systems that make and release the brain's own opioids, active at these receptors. Mu-opioid neural systems are complexly interrelated with the mesolimbic dopamine system. New science, using genetically altered mice, including ones deficient in dopamine or in mu-opioid receptors, is beginning to tease apart the functions of dopamine and mu-opioid systems, which some scientists (e.g., Kent Berridge) think are more directly related to happiness.

Happiness - Difficulties in defining internal experiences

It is probably impossible to objectively define happiness as we know and understand it, as internal experiences are subjective by nature. It is almost as pointless as trying to define the color green such that a completely color blind person could understand the experience of seeing green. While we can not objectively express the difference between greenness and redness, we can certainly explain which physical phenomena cause green to be observed, and can explain the capacities of the human visual system to distinguish between light of different wavelengths, and so on. Likewise, in the following sections, we will not attempt to describe the internal sensation of happiness, but will instead concentrate on defining its logical basis. Importantly, we will try to avoid circular definitions -- for instance, defining happiness as "a good feeling", while "good" is defined as being "something which causes happiness".

Happiness - In non-human animals

For non-human animals, happiness might be best described as the process of reinforcement, as part of the organism's motivational system. The organism has achieved one or more of its goals (pursuit of food, water, sex, shelter, etc.), and its brain is in the process of teaching itself to repeat the sort of actions that led to success. By reinforcing successful decision paths, it produces an equilibrium state not unlike positive-to-negative magnets. The specific goals are typically things that enable the organism to survive and reproduce.

By this definition, only animals with some capacity to learn should be able to experience happiness. However, at its most basic level the learning might be extremely simple and short term, such as the nearly reflexive feedback loop of scratching an itch (followed by pleasure, followed by scratching more, and so on) which can occur with almost no conscious thought.

Happiness - In humans

When speaking of animals with the ability to reason (generally considered the exclusive domain of humans), goals are no longer limited to short term satisfaction of basic drives. Nevertheless, there remains a strong relationship of happiness to goal fulfillment and the brain's reinforcement mechanism, even if the goals themselves may be more complex and/or cerebral, longer term, and less selfish than a lower animal's goals might be.

Philosophers observe that short-term gratification, while briefly generating happiness, often requires a trade-off with negative repercussions in the long run. Examples of this could be said to include developing technology and equipment that makes life easier but over time ends up harming the environment, causing illness or wasting financial or other resources. Various branches of philosophy, as well as some religious movements, suggest that "true" happiness only exists if it has no long-term detrimental effects. Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximization of happiness.

From the observation that fish must become happy by swimming, and birds must become happy by flying, Aristotle points to the unique abilities of man as the route to happiness. Of all the animals only man can sit and contemplate reality. Of all the animals only man can develop social relations to the political level. Thus the contemplative life of a monk or professor, or the political life of a military commander or politician will be the happiest.

Happiness - In Artificial intelligence

The view that happiness is a reinforcement state can apply to some non-biological systems as well, such as a program or robot could be said to be "happy" when it is in a state of reinforcing previous actions that led to satisfaction of its programmed goals. For instance, imagine a search engine that has the capacity to gradually improve the quality of its search results by accepting and processing feedback from the user regarding the relevance of those results. If the user responds that a search result is good (i.e. provides positive feedback), this tells the software to reinforce (by adjusting variables or "weights") the decision path that led to those results. In a sense, this could be said to "reward" the search engine. However, even if the program is made to act like it is happy, there is little doubt that the search engine has no subjective sense of being happy. Current computing technology merely implements abstract mathematical programs which lack the causal and creative power of natural systems. This does not preclude the possiblity that future technologies may begin to blur the distinction between such machine happiness and that experienced by an animal or human.

Happiness - Positive effect study

Happiness - Behaviors and emotions associated with happiness

The following behaviors and emotions are commonly associated with happiness:

Material:

• Business
• Food
• Money
• Refuge - taking from the material things in life, getting back to nature.

Social:

• closure
• Dating
• Flirting
• Freedom
• Family, Parents, Friends and Friendships
• Gifts
• Greeting cards, Postcards and Penpals
• Lifestyles and Alternative lifestyles
• Music
• Nonviolence
• Peace
• Shopping

Emotional:

• Compassion
• Kissing
• Love
• Pets and Animals
• Romantic Relationships and Romance
• Sexuality

Spiritual:

• Enlightenment
• Meditation and Yoga
• Philosophy, Epicurus, Epicureanism
• Religion
• Spirituality
• Tantra

Physical:

• Drinking, Alcohol, and using certain Psychiatric or Recreational drugs
• Eating
• Massage
• Sleeping
• Love making
• Sports

Other:

• Cinema
• Decoration
• Hobbies
• Learning and expanding Knowledge
• reading
• Science
• Work

Epicurus taught that although it is good to satisfy our natural desires for food and drink, pleasures often conceal painful consequences.

See also

• Emotion
• Happiness Formula
• Hedonistic imperative
• Paradox of hedonism
• Utopia

Other concepts related to happiness are bliss, cheerfulness, cheeriness, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, and light-heartedness.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Happiness", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki