Final Essay-There Are Many Different Ways to Be Happy and Psychological Science Can Help Us to Cultivate More Happiness for Everyone.
Final Essay-There are many different ways to be happy and psychological science can help us to cultivate more happiness for everyone.
‘Two thousand years ago, the sages sensed that it would be possible for people to increase their happiness. Today, thanks to the astonishingly productive field of neuroscience, there is no longer any doubt: we can learn to be happy.’ (Klein, 2006, p.xx). Happiness, for a long time was a subject where many psychologists were reluctant to explore but of late, there has been much research and this is known as ‘positive psychology’. Researchers in this field ask questions such as: How do we define happiness and how do we get there? (Wen, 2000). This question is the basis of this paper and due to the recently extensive research of many psychologists there have been numerous different opinions and evidence on what the answer to this question is. There are many different approaches on researching this topic for example, Stefan Klein (2006) takes a neuroscientific approach. He equates the undercurrents of neurobiological systems (i.e. dopaminergic, opiate) to happiness. The idea is that, researches could use brain scans to classify neural correlates for emotions this would then tell us additional information about what makes people happy (Klein, 2006). Although there are many different theories on how to cultivate happiness for everyone, the same few evidence keeps emerging: leisure, optimism and social interaction (relationships) with others. This paper is going to discuss the evidence for each of these in detail and hopefully show that psychological science has and is helping to understand what makes people happy and how we can cultivate more happiness for everyone.
It may appear obvious to associate leisure with happiness and a sense of well-being but we need evidence to support this assumption. Psychologists have researched this area extensively and investigated how leisure is related to life satisfaction and happiness. Different
‘Two thousand years ago, the sages sensed that it would be possible for people to increase their happiness. Today, thanks to the astonishingly productive field of neuroscience, there is no longer any doubt: we can learn to be happy.’ (Klein, 2006, p.xx). Happiness, for a long time was a subject where many psychologists were reluctant to explore but of late, there has been much research and this is known as ‘positive psychology’. Researchers in this field ask questions such as: How do we define happiness and how do we get there? (Wen, 2000). This question is the basis of this paper and due to the recently extensive research of many psychologists there have been numerous different opinions and evidence on what the answer to this question is. There are many different approaches on researching this topic for example, Stefan Klein (2006) takes a neuroscientific approach. He equates the undercurrents of neurobiological systems (i.e. dopaminergic, opiate) to happiness. The idea is that, researches could use brain scans to classify neural correlates for emotions this would then tell us additional information about what makes people happy (Klein, 2006). Although there are many different theories on how to cultivate happiness for everyone, the same few evidence keeps emerging: leisure, optimism and social interaction (relationships) with others. This paper is going to discuss the evidence for each of these in detail and hopefully show that psychological science has and is helping to understand what makes people happy and how we can cultivate more happiness for everyone.
It may appear obvious to associate leisure with happiness and a sense of well-being but we need evidence to support this assumption. Psychologists have researched this area extensively and investigated how leisure is related to life satisfaction and happiness. Different
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