PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 1 Running Head: Pursuing Happiness In Everyday Life Pursuing Happiness In Everyday Life: The Characteristics and Behaviors of Online Happiness Seekers Acacia C. Parks Reed College

Although the last decade has witnessed mounting research on the development and evaluation of positive interventions, investigators still know little about the target population of such interventions: happiness seekers. The present research asked three questions about happiness seekers: 1) What are their general characteristics?, 2) What do they purposefully do to become happier?, and 3) How do they make use of self-help resources? In Study 1, we identified two distinct clusters of online happiness seekers. In Study 2, we asked happiness seekers to report on their use of 14 types of happinessseeking behaviors. In Study 3, we tracked happiness seekers’ usage of an iPhone application that offered access to eight different happiness-increasing activities, and assessed their resulting happiness and mood improvements. Together, these studies provide a preliminary portrait of happiness seekers’ characteristics and naturalistic behaviors. PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 4 How Do People Pursue Happiness In Their Everyday Lives?: The Characteristics and Behaviors of Online Happiness Seekers Attaining long-term happiness is an important goal shared by many individuals world-wide (Diener, 2000; Diener, Suh, Smith, & Shao, 1995; A. B. Goldberg et al., 2009). Trumping more “objective” factors like material wealth or physical attractiveness, happiness is central to lay people’s beliefs about what makes life worth living (King & Napa, 2008). However, happiness is more than just a personally important goal or a set of pleasant mood states; a meta-analysis of 225 cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental studies found that happiness is related to, precedes, and causes a variety of favorable life outcomes (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Among other desirable benefits, both long-term and short-term positive affect is directly associated with superior job outcomes (e.g., Lucas & Diener, 2003), relatively more satisfying social relationships (e.g., Harker & Keltner, 2001), and fewer symptoms of psychopathology (e.g., Diener & Seligman, 2002). Not surprisingly, happiness-oriented self-help constitutes one of the most consistently lucrative markets for popular books. Unfortunately, however, the self-help genre is flooded with “pop psychology” that lack scientific grounding. Furthermore, recent work by Mauss and colleagues (2011) suggests that increasing happiness may be more complicated than it sounds, as valuing happiness too strongly can undermine one’s ability to pursue it successfully (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino, 2011). However, a growing number of studies conducted over the last decade have demonstrated the efficacy of techniques that target well-being (for a review and a meta-analysis, see Parks, Schueller, & Tasimi, 2011; Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). For example, randomized PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 5 controlled interventions have prompted people to write gratitude letters, savor happy memories, and do acts of kindness on a regular basis. A recent meta-analysis conducted by Sin and Lyubomirsky (2009) reported that such techniques lead to increases in happiness and small to moderate decreases in depressive symptoms (average effect size rs = .29 and .31, respectively). In short, researchers are well on their way to creating a science of increasing happiness. However, despite a substantial body of literature on the efficacy of happinessincreasing exercises, remarkably little discussion has focused on exactly for whom these exercises are intended. Furthermore, researchers know very little about what members of their target audience (i.e., “happiness seekers”) are doing on their own, prior to their becoming participants in research. A variety of descriptive questions remain unanswered by standard intervention research designs: When individuals seek to become happier, what are their starting points in terms of baseline happiness and distress? How much effort do happiness seekers expend on the pursuit of happiness in the absence of formalized instruction? How do happiness seekers balance the use of multiple exercises to increase their happiness, and how many activities do happiness seekers practice simultaneously? Last, whereas many activities that target well-being have been shown to lead to sustained improvements in laboratory or online settings, researchers have yet to offer persuasive evidence that happiness activities, as they are actually used in real-world settings, are beneficial. The goal of the present research is to address each of these questions in turn, with the aim of gaining an improved understanding of who happiness seekers are and what they are doing in the real world. In Study 1, we assessed the demographic and PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 6 psychological characteristics of a sample of happiness seekers. In addition to examining aggregate data, we used cluster analysis to test the hypothesis that the sample is not homogenous, but, rather, that different subsets of happiness seekers may exist. In Study 2, we asked happiness seekers about the extent to which they used 14 categories of happiness-increasing activities. We were particularly interested in the extent to which naturalistic use of happiness exercises mirrored the ways in which these exercises are used in experimental studies. In Study 3, we collected naturalistic data on happiness seekers’ usage of an iPhone application that offered access to eight different activities found to increase happiness in previous research. We also examined the extent to which certain patterns of usage—frequency of use both across and within individuals, and variety of activities practiced—led to increased self-reported happiness among users. Together, these three studies provide a preliminary portrait of the happiness seekers: Who they are, what they do when left to their own devices, how they utilize happiness-increasing tools in naturalistic settings, and how much they benefit from engaging in positive activities in the “real world.” It is our hope that these data will serve as the foundation for a new body of work describing this population. Study 1 The purpose of Study 1 was to provide a preliminary descriptive portrait of happiness seekers as a group. By drawing from a sample of individuals with an explicit interest in engaging in happiness-increasing behaviors, we can paint a picture of the attributes characteristic of this population—a population that, until now, has been largely PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 7 hypothetical in the literature. Specifically, we sought to clarify two aspects of happiness seekers. First, whereas the populations targeted by interventionists in the field of clinical psychology (e.g., those with depression or anxiety) are clearly defined and relatively easy to identify, positive intervention researchers know very little about the demographic characteristics of happiness seekers. Furthermore, whereas clinical intervention researchers place a high priority on testing interventions on the population for whom they are intended, the bulk of positive intervention research has been conducted not with happiness seekers, but with undergraduates or other general population samples. This practice assumes, perhaps falsely, that the average happiness seeker is, like the average person, somewhat happy and relatively free of depressive symptoms (Pavot & Diener, 1993; Radloff, 1977). In addition, the majority of positive intervention studies examine both sample characteristics and intervention efficacy at an aggregate level. This approach assumes that happiness seekers are homogeneous, and that responses to positive interventions will be similar for individuals along the entire continuum of baseline distress. However, little evidence supports either of these assumptions. Across most (if not all) mental health conditions, moderators such as personality and baseline symptom levels predict responses to different treatments; for example, individuals with mild-to-moderate depression do not benefit as much from medication as individuals with more severe depression (Fournier et al., 2010). The same may be true for happiness seekers. For example, a recent study of healthy undergraduates found that those who were initially mildly depressed benefited the most from a positive intervention (Layous & Lyubomirsky, 2011). In sum, while PURSUING HAPPINESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE 8 investigators are busy attempting to determine which exercises are most globally effective for the average person, they may be overlooking the existence of different subtypes of happiness-seeking individuals, each with distinct goals, motivations, and responsiveness to interventions. Study 1 addressed the two above concerns by first reporting on the demographic and psychological characteristics of happiness seekers, and then attempting to cluster happiness seekers into subtypes based on those characteristics. We had two objectives: 1) to report the characteristics of a sample of happiness seekers and 2) to explore whether there exist distinct “subgroups” of happiness seekers.