By Ruut Veenhoven (auth.)
This booklet is ready the measure to which individuals enjoy lifestyles: briefly 'happiness'. It attempts to spot stipulations that prefer a favorable appreciation of existence. therefore it hopes to shed extra mild on a longstanding and interesting ques tion and, most likely, to lead makes an attempt to enhance the human lot. through the previous a long time an increasing number of investigations have handled this factor. for this reason there's now a large physique of information. but it's fairly tough to make feel of it. there's a litter of theories, options and signs, and lots of of the findings appear to be contradictory. This publication makes an attempt to convey a few order into the sector. The learn attracts on a list of empirical investigations which concerned legitimate signs of happiness; 245 experiences are concerned, which jointly yield a few 4000 observations: for the most half correlational ones. those effects are provided in complete element within the at the same time released 'Databook of Happiness' (Veenhoven 1984). the current quantity distils conclusions from that wealth of knowledge. It attempts to evaluate the truth worth of the findings and the measure to which correlations mirror the stipulations of happiness instead of the implications of it. It then makes an attempt to put the scattered findings in context. As such, this paintings isn't really a standard examine of literature on happiness.
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Extra info for Conditions of Happiness
Sample text
Several investigators have shown this to be so. , 1979). It exists even in brain-injured patients, who have lost their abstract capacity and therefore cannot make up a balance of their life (Goldstein, 1951 :370). Probably animals do experience hedonic tone as well. As we cannot ask them we will never know for sure, however. The average hedonic level of affect of a person can be assessed over different periods of time: an hour, a week, a year as well as over a lifetime. The concept does not presume subjective awareness of this level.
The concept of happiness still applies to these people. If a person calls himself happy one day and claims to be unhappy the day after, then he is unhappy at the second day; whether he had good reasons for his change or not. Thus not all happiness judgements are equally stable. Definiteness. When people cannot decide on whether to judge their life favorably or not, they cannot be said to be either happy or unhappy. Once they do make a judgement, the concept of happiness applies; even if that judgement is a very provisional one.
Obviously many more matters can be confused with happiness. Several of these possibilities were investigated by Andrews & Withey (1976), who performed a factor analysis on sixty-eight different measures of perceived life quality. These measures concerned evaluations of 'life-as-a-whole' as well as evaluations of 'specific life-domains', and 'overall-evaluations' as well as 'aspect-evaluations'. The set also included 'long range evaluations' as well as 'short range' ones, and strictly 'personal evaluations' as well as 'evaluations of life quality in comparison with others'.