Psychology & Psychiatry

What we learned from teaching a course on the science of happiness

When you deliver a university course that makes students happier, everybody wants to know what the secret is. What are your tips? What are your top ten recommendations? These are the most asked questions, as if there is some ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Happiness can be learned, but you have to work at it, study finds

We can learn to be happy, but only get lasting benefits if we keep practicing, a new study has revealed. "Long‑term analysis of a psychoeducational course on university students' mental well‑being," was published in Higher ...

Happiness

Happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources.

Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this older sense was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, and is still used in virtue ethics. In everyday speech today, however, terms such as well-being or quality of life are usually used to signify the classical meaning, and happiness usually refers[citation needed] to the felt experience or experiences that philosophers historically called pleasure.

While direct measurement of happiness presents challenges, tools such as The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire have been developed by researchers. Positive psychology researchers use theoretical models that include describing happiness as consisting of positive emotions and positive activities, or that describe three kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Research has identified a number of attributes that correlate with happiness:[citation needed] relationships and social interaction, parenthood, marital status, religious involvement, age, income (but mainly up to the point where survival needs are met), and proximity to other happy people.

Happiness economics suggests that measures of public happiness should be used to supplement more traditional economic measures when evaluating the success of public policy.

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