Can you measure your happiness like your temperature?  Is it possible to accurately say who is happier than who?  When I told people I was writing an article on measuring happiness, I got skeptical reactions.  A lot of people don’t see happiness as something that can be measured.  They say it’s too abstract, too subjective, too hard to quantify.  So if you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you, but hopefully I can convince you otherwise.  

Methods of measuring happiness range from deceptively simple to rather complex.  The more complex the method, the more accurate the results are.  The simplest way is to just ask people how satisfied they are with their life on a scale of one to ten.  More complex ways involve questionnaires that are 20+ items long.  In the middle-ground are the ‘life-satisfaction’ questionnaires; these measure a specific definition of happiness, described here.  That’s the definition I’ll be using in this article.

When we’re very happy, it’s something we can feel physically.  Now, we could find a way to measure that physical feeling somehow: maybe with brain scans, heart/pulse rates, or something like that.  We’d then get a nice, objective way of measuring happiness.  But the problem is, there may be a discrepancy between the measurement of happiness and your subjective experience.  

For example, some people love adrenaline and get off on it, while others can really do without that kind of arousal.  An objective measurement can tell us the status of our physical body, but not how happy we are with that status.  Imagine believing you are happy but being assured that you are not, or vice versa; this seems OK for something like temperature, but incorrect for happiness.  

Any measurement of a person’s happiness has to include their evaluation of their own state.  We just need a way to quantify these evaluations.  This is why happiness is measured with questionnaires and scales – you’d miss important information if you measured it as a physical feeling.

Sources of static when measuring happiness

But now the problem of accuracy comes up; are people good judges of their happiness?  The problem is a slippery one, because we’re rejecting a purely objective definition of happiness.  We’re in the realm of subjectivity, where happiness cannot be completely separated from standards.  

Imagine two completely identical people, in two completely identical alternate universes.  They have the exact same lives, experiences and feelings, in every single way, except one; one of them is more pessimistic in his judgement of his life.  Our questionnaire measurement would show him as being less happy, but is he really less happy than his alternate self?

In one sense he cannot be, he has the exact same life, experiences the same good emotions, and feels the same amount of pleasure.  On the other hand, if his pessimism means he wants more, shouldn’t that dissatisfaction be included when measuring his happiness?  

In other words, shouldn’t people choose their own criteria of what they’re happy with?  They should, but standards can be fickle.  Today I’m happy with my house, tomorrow I want a bigger one.  Maybe the day after that I don’t want a big house anymore.  Our happiness measurement would detect these fluctuations; static picked up along with the signal.

This is not such a bad thing.  The way we consistently judge our lives affects our feelings of happiness.  If you regularly use a higher standard to judge your situation by than what you have achieved, you’ll get less happy.  This is called negative self-talk and it’s what some types of therapy work at fixing.  Likewise, if you lower your standards of judgement, you’ll tend to get happier with what you have; this is generally known as appreciation or gratitude.

There are other sources of static too, like ‘impression management’.  If someone going on a date asked you for advice, you’d be quite a troublemaker if you suggested they be as unhappy as possible.  Happy, positive people are attractive, so you might expect people to report a happiness score that they view as being attractive.  This explains why you get higher happiness scores if you do surveys by interview than by post, and even more so if the interviewer is of the opposite sex. (1)

Mood might also cause some static.  Imagine being asked how satisfied you are with your life when you’ve just had the best day of your life, compared with your worst.  You’d probably be rational to a point, because you’re specifically being asked to look at your life overall, but it would definitely have an impact.  

These sources of static cast a shadow of doubt of the measurements.  We need some more objective things to compare our scores with, to see if they compare sensibly.

Cleaning up the Signal

To find out how much signal is getting through the static, the self-reports of happiness must be compared with objective things that already we know are related to happiness.  Because such a large amount of research has been done in this area, I’ll only give a quick overview of this work.

Firstly, if you give someone a happiness questionnaire twice, one month apart, the results are very similar.  Of course they would not be identical,  but we would expect a correlation.   This consistency shows that people don’t just respond randomly, and it suggests there is more to the results than people’s mood at the time of answering. (2)

Emotions and feelings are processed in the brain, so that’s another good place to look.  As you probably know, the brain is split up into two hemispheres.  You might not know, that the left hemisphere is associated with positive emotions and feelings, and the right hemisphere with negative ones.  If you record brain activity when people watch funny films, the left side lights up; sad films, the right side activates.  People with injuries of the left side are more likely to become depressed, and people with damage on the right side can actually get an increase in good feelings.

So how do happiness questionnaires compare with brain scans?  Well, it turns out that people who score higher on happiness questionnaires actually have more activity in the left hemisphere. (3)

As mentioned, there’s a chance people say they’re happier than they are, to keep up appearances.  This can be tested by asking friends, family and independent observers to fill out the questionnaire as if they were the person in question.  My friends and family would know if I’m happy, and random people would have some idea.  They wouldn’t get the same exact score as me of course, because they aren’t in fact me (so few of us are).  But for happiness measurements to be taken seriously, they have to correlate with friend and observer reports – and they do. (4) 

You can also analyse people’s smiles.  Look at the picture below:

Real smiles, or ‘Duchenne’ smiles, involve the eyes. See the crow’s feet on the guy’s eyes, indicating a real smile. The girl is only smiling with the lips – no crow’s feet = not a real smile.

A ‘real’ smile, called a ‘Duchenne’ smile, is where the eyes wrinkle up on the outside along with the smile.  If someone isn’t smiling with the eyes, they’re probably faking it.  As you’d expect, people with higher happiness scores tend to give more Duchenne smiles than people with lower scores. (3) 

Hey, it works!

Even though it might have seemed far fetched to measure an abstract thing like happiness, with a questionnaire of all things, there really is a signal coming through the static.  All the evidence points to that signal being happiness; or at least, something it’s logical to label ‘happiness’.  It’s not a perfect method, but the signal to noise ratio is good enough that productive conclusions can be reached. 

So far so good then.  Happiness has been defined, and the measurements seem valid.  This is where the interesting part begins; the measurements can be compared with all kinds of other things.  

We can answer questions like, are men or women happier?  Are the rich happier than the poor?  Are married couples happier than singles?  What about religion, does finding God make you happy, or are atheists happier?  These are the questions I’ll be answering next.

References

(1) Nettle, D. (2005). Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile
. New York: Oxford (see page 53)

(2) Diener, E. (1994). Assessing subjective well-being: Progress and opportunities. Social Indicators Research, 31, 103-157.   

(3) Layard, R. (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.  USA: Penguin

(4) Diener, E & Suh, E. (1999). National Differences in Subjective Well-Being, in Kahneman et al (1999) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Happiness and Well-Being.