1.5 History of happiness and success definitions and research
Happiness can be seen as a function of space and time because the way happiness has been viewed and researched over the last few thousand years was constantly changing, depending on geographical area and time period.
The psychological and philosophical pursuit of happiness began nearly 2500 years ago in China with philosophers and teachers like Confucius, Mencius and in Greece with Socrates, and Aristotle. “The happy,” said Aristotle, “are the happy few.” Aristotle distinguished between happiness and amusement, as happiness could be achieved through contemplation, but amusement not. Socrates thought of happiness as something at least partially within one’s control, especially through the education of desire as key to happiness.[12]
For most people at most times in human history, happiness was not something that one could expect to control. It was in the hands of the gods. It was dictated by fate or fortune and controlled by the stars. Consequently ordinary people could not count on making it for themselves. Happiness, literally, was what happened to one, and so to be happy was to be lucky. Even those who were lucky commonly expected a turn for the worse. In fact, in every European language, the root of the word for happiness is some older word that meant "luck". Most often the word happiness can be derived from the Old Norse and Old English word "hap", and hap simply means "luck."[13]
In medieval times, early Christians saw happiness as something a soul was to be rewarded with in heaven and not something attainable in the world of mortals. In the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas shed light on the role of human effort in the process of happiness which he regarded as becoming closer to God. He stated that partial happiness could be achieved in this life via “the ‘theological virtues’ of charity, hope, and faith”.[14]
Then in the Renaissance, the definition and concept of happiness changed again and pleasure was equaled with happiness. The life question changed from ‘how to be saved’ to ‘how to be happy’. Already in 1776, by the time the American Declaration of Independence was written, the "pursuit of happiness" was declared an undeniable right, given by the creator. This was also the period in which the English philosopher and revolutionary John Locke declared that ‘the business of man is to be happy’. And it is also the period when Thomas Jefferson observes that “The pursuit of happiness is a self-evident truth.”
The first books and articles on happiness date back to the late 1800s. But the explicit concept and study of happiness appeared only in the 1940s, when the first surveys included questions related to happiness. However, only a few scientists studied happiness and related concepts at that time.
The first comprehensive review on the scientific research on “avowed happiness”, covering research mainly from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, appeared in Warner Wilson’s book on the correlates of avowed happiness in 1967.[15] However, this review had a limited impact on the field, despite the fact that it was published in Psychological Bulletin, one of the most prestigious journals in psychology. Most psychologists at the time still believed, that happiness was something that could not be scientifically investigated. Nevertheless, the antagonism against the scientific study of happiness decreased with the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1966 the famous Harvard Grant Study, which tracked hundreds of Harvard’s graduates for decades, was initiated.[16]
In 1969, Bradburn wrote an influential book on emotional well-being by introducing the new measure of positive and negative affect and showing the relative independence of positive and negative affect.[17] Since then, the notion of subjective well-being (SWB) has often been used in research literature as a substitute for the term ‘happiness'. SWB encompasses how people evaluate their own lives in terms of cognitive and affective explanations, and can be represented in the following way: SWB = SATISFACTION WITH LIFE + AFFECT. The first, cognitive part of subjective well-being is expressed by life satisfaction. Life satisfaction can be seen as one's assessment of one's own life. One is said to be satisfied when there is little or no discrepancy between the present situation and what is thought to be an ideal or deserved situation. On the other hand, dissatisfaction is a result of a considerable discrepancy or of comparing oneself with others. Affect represents the emotional side of SWB. The notion of affect comprises both positive and negative moods and emotions that are associated with our daily experiences. The Bradburn Scale of psychological well-being, also known as the Affect Balance Scale, is made up of two components, the positive affect and the negative affect component, each having 5 items. The scale asks participants if, in the past few weeks, they have felt certain emotions. The participant answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to each question. The ‘no’ score is subtracted from the ‘yes‘ score to create a positive/negative affect difference score.
Several years later, in 1978, Philip Brickman and colleagues published a paper on hedonic adaptation, one of the most famous papers in the history of subjective well-being research. It reports the surprisingly small difference in self-reported happiness between paraplegics and lottery winners.[18] Then, in 1984, Ed Diener published a wide-ranging review on subjective well-being, summarizing most practical and conceptual issues up to the early 1980s in Psychological Bulletin and finally legitimized the study of happiness in psychological science.[19]
Since the late 1990s, positive psychology has been promoted, especially by Martin E. P. Seligman and Chris Peterson and their colleagues. Subjective well-being has been a major component of positive psychology, and the increasing visibility of positive psychology has also helped to expand the scope of subjective well-being and happiness research. “Happiness is love. Full stop”, said George Vaillant, who directed the Harvard Grant Study about the keys to happiness for more than 30 years.[20]
In contrast to research on happiness, there are no large-scale studies on success. This might be explained by the fact that success is far more difficult to define than happiness and that there are also no long-term studies about the definition of success. The word ‘success’ originally comes from the Latin successus which means ‘advance uphill’ and ‘happy issue’ and was first used in 1537. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘success’ in two ways, as result/outcome, or as favorable result, attainment of wealth, favor or eminence.[21]
1.6 Measuring happiness and success on a global scale
It is important to stress that happiness is not a static state and that even the happiest people do have times when they experience negative emotions. And happiness is very subjective. What makes one person happy might not make another person happy. The way one person defines happiness might not be the way another person defines happiness. This causes problems for researchers trying to measure it scientifically, since objective measuring, for example by observing behavior patterns during controlled laboratory experiments, is not really possible. Due to the fact that no appropriate and uniform definition and thermometer of happiness exists, most researchers rely on self-reports, for example various self-report questionnaires.
The number of global measures of happiness is increasing, nevertheless there are three major happiness evaluation tools currently in use: the World Values Survey (WVS), the Gallup World Poll (GWP), and the European Social Survey (ESS) which focuses on European countries. The emphases of these surveys are responses to any combination of the following questions: “How happy are you now?”, “How happy were you yesterday?” and “How happy are you with your life as a whole these days?”[22]
The University of Michigan has collected data on the happiness in the world for more than 20 years in their World Values Surveys (WVS). The WVS measures the happiness of individuals by two different means. The first is to simply ask them how "happy" they are. The second