PSYCHOLOGY OF HAPPINESS
To psychological researchers, happiness is life experience marked by a preponderance of positive emotion. Feelings of happiness and thoughts of satisfaction with life are two prime components of subjective well-being (SWB). The scientific pursuit of happiness and positive emotion is also the first pillar of the new positive psychology first proposed in Martin E. P. Seligman's 1998 American Psychological Association presidential address. Positive psychologists also study positive character strengths and virtues and positive social institutions.
Assessing Happiness
Psychologists assess people's happiness with varied measures. The simplest is a single item that has been posed to hundreds of thousands of representatively sampled people in many countries: "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days─would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"
Other investigators employ multi-item happiness measures. Some tap into the "cognitive" component of happiness (i.e., judgments of high life satisfaction) and others assess the "affective" component (i.e., the experience of frequent positive emotions and relatively infrequent negative emotions). For example, the popular Satisfaction With Life Scale asks respondents five questions about their feelings regarding their lives (e.g., "In most ways my life is close to my ideal.") Other measures assess the affective component of happiness in different ways. The Affect Balance Scale invites people to report how frequently they have experienced various positive and negative emotions over the last 30 days. The Experience Sampling Method uses a pager to occasionally interrupt people's waking experience and to sample their moods, and the Day Reconstruction Method requires respondents to review their previous day hour by hour and to recall exactly what they were doing and how they were feeling during each hour.
Multi-item global measures of happiness are also frequently used by researchers. The Subjective Happiness Scale asks people to rate the extent to which they believe themselves to be happy or unhappy individuals (e.g., "In general, I consider myself...," with the options being somewhere between "not a very happy person" and "a very happy person").