Happiness surveys based on self-report can generate unreliable data due to respondents’ imperfect retrospection, vulnerability to context, and arbitrariness in measuring happiness. To overcome these problems, this article proposes to incorporate a method of measuring happiness, which is developed by Ng (1996) based on Edgeworth’s notion of “Just Perceivable Increment” of happiness, with the Day...

Older adults have been shown to describe their happiness as lower in arousal when compared to younger adults. In addition, older adults prefer low arousal positive emotions over high arousal positive emotions in their daily lives. We experimentally investigated whether or not changing a few words in the description of happiness could influence a person's rating of their happiness. We randomly a...

It may be suggested that the representation of happiness in online media is collective in nature because it is a picture of happiness communicated by relatively few individuals to the masses. The present study is based on articles published in Swedish daily online newspapers in 2010; the data corpus comprises 1.5 million words. We investigated which words were most (un)common in articles contai...

Past studies have shown that personal subjective happiness is associated with various macro- and micro-level background factors, including environmental conditions, such as weather and the economic situation, and personal health behaviors, such as smoking and exercise. We contribute to this literature of happiness studies by using a geospatial approach to examine both macro and micro links to p...

The pursuit of happiness is a preoccupation for many people. Yet only the pursuit can be promised, not happiness itself. Can science help? We focus on the most tractable ingredient, hedonia or positive affect. A step toward happiness might be gained by improving the pleasures and positive moods in daily life. The neuroscience of pleasure and reward provides relevant insights, and we discuss how...

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health? Tackling this question has largely been the preserve of philosophers. In this article, we find out just h...