Experience Of Happiness Research Articles

Sir Gawain’s Fortunate Fall

This paper aims to study the spiritual and moral nature of Sir Gawain’s journey to the Green Chaple including Bercilak’s temptations and the Green Knight’s beheading game. In his spiritual quest for self-knowledge and his arduous pursuit of the chivalric and Christian ideals, Sir Gawain is put to the test and sadly fails despite his moral pride and confidence. Thanks to the blessing of the felix culpa, or fortunate fall, and truly tormenting penance, Gawain realizes his human weaknesses and finally achieves moral redemption. Only at this moment of humiliating repentance is Sir Gawain’s transformation made from a formality-bound proud knight into a humble Christian knight whose sin purges him of moral pride. His artificial chivalric code becomes reconciled with his Christian principles as well as with his frail human nature in full harmony. This sad but happy experience makes him wiser and morally stronger as the sin alone can purify the sin itself through penance, which is the central theme of the poem. The final decision to wear the girdle as the symbol of imperfection and penance instead of the pentangle is an indication of his moral development.

Factors Affecting Suicidal Ideation Among Middle–Aged Korean Women in an Urban–Rural Province

PurposeThis study aimed to investigate the factors that affect suicidal ideation among middle–aged Korean women in an urban–rural province. MethodsThis study used a convenience sample consisting of 196 middle–aged Korean women who live in Gyeonggi Province. Data were collected between November 2013 and January 2014. ResultsThere were significant correlations among social relationships (r=−.18, p=.013), previous experiences of violence (r=.15, p=.032), subjective happiness (r=−.36, p<.001), depression (r=.44, p<.001), and suicidal ideation. Economic status, subjective happiness, and depression were found to have an effect on suicidal ideation (R2=.26). ConclusionsThe study's results demonstrate that there needs to be greater focus on middle-aged women when considering mental health interventions in rural areas of Korea. The results may also contribute to the development of improved interventions for psychological health care.

A balanced and systematic leisure education service delivery model: connections to Eastern and Western perspectives

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to present a balanced and systematic leisure education service model using Eastern and Western perspectives. The term leisure education describes a multi-faceted, dynamic process that promotes exploration of perspectives and opportunities intended to develop an ethic of positivity and savouring that is conducive to flow, arousal, and leisure. Leisure education is designed to stimulate self-awareness, promote acquisition of leisure-related knowledge, and encourage skill development that enhances self-determination by meeting needs for autonomy, competence, and social connections, which are influenced by a variety of factors and people including family members, educators, leisure service providers, and neighbours. These leisure education services are applied across diverse audiences in various venues across the world designed to facilitate the interrelated positive experiences of leisure, happiness, and flourishing.

Prominent Feelings and Self-Regard Among Survivors of Suicide

This cross-sectional study explores associations between elapsed time since the loss and outcomes of main feelings surrounding the loss and self-regard among 187 help-seeking survivors bereaved by suicide. Chi-square tests were conducted to examine the aforementioned relationships. In examining suicide survivors' main feelings over time, this study found mixed results in early bereavement. This study showed that at 25 to 59 months of elapsed time since the loss, both fear and happiness were significant for suicide survivors. No significance was found before 25 to 59 months, suggesting a change in suicide survivors' main emotions following 2 years of elapsed time since the loss. In later bereavement (i.e., 5 + years), suicide survivors' experiences of happiness was significant. The aforementioned results suggest that following 2 years of elapsed time since the loss, this sample of survivors bereaved by suicide experienced a change in their grief experience.

Prioritizing positivity optimizes positive emotions and life satisfaction: A three-wave longitudinal study

Prioritizing positivity, which reflects the extent to which individuals organize their lives in ways that would maximize their experience of happiness, has been found to be associated with higher levels of well-being via positive emotions. However, previous research on this construct has been cross-sectional in nature which has made the temporal sequence of effects ambiguous. Moreover, previous studies have not explored the reciprocal relations among key constructs. In this study, we addressed these gaps using a three-wave longitudinal study which assessed the extent to which prioritizing positivity relates with positive emotion and life satisfaction among 408 Filipino secondary school students. Cross-lagged analysis indicated that T1 prioritizing positivity positively predicted T2 positive emotions which in turn predicted T3 life satisfaction after controlling for autoregressor effects. Notably, T2 positive emotions mediated the relations between T1 prioritizing positivity and T3 life satisfaction. We also found evidence of reciprocal effects with prior positive emotions predicting subsequent prioritizing positivity. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

What does wellbeing do? An approach to defamiliarize keywords in youth studies

ABSTRACTWellbeing has become a keyword in youth and social policy, a construct deployed as a measure of a good life. Often associated with physical and mental health, wellbeing encompasses numerous indicators, from subjective experiences of happiness and satisfaction to markers of economic prosperity and basic human needs of security. This article examines wellbeing as an organizing concept in discourses on young people and argues for defamiliarizing its truth claims and cultural authority by investigating what wellbeing does. We begin by examining the rise of wellbeing, drawing attention to its conceptual muddiness and ambiguity. Framed by the Foucauldian notion of problematization, the analysis proceeds along two routes: first, through an historical consideration of wellbeing as a relational concept with antecedents, focusing on ‘self-esteem’; and second, through a reading of wellbeing in contemporary educational policy. Informed by Somers' historical sociology of concept formation and Bacchi's critical policy analysis, we illuminate the mixed dimensions of wellbeing's reach, placing it within longer traditions of youth studies and psy-knowledges and showing its transformative promise as well as its individualizing effects. In doing so, we elaborate a methodological approach that can be adapted to examine other keywords in youth studies and social policy discourse.

Meaning as a Subjective Experience

This article provides conceptual and operational definitions of the subjective experience of meaning. It reviews some of my empirical evidence showing how the experience of meaning is different from the experience of happiness. It then moves into metaphysics and attempts to characterize the nature of meaning on a much deeper level, one that must be understood using the intuitive rather than scientific aspect of the human mind.

Influences of State and Trait Affect on Behavior, Feedback-Related Negativity, and P3b in the Ultimatum Game.

The present study investigates how different emotions can alter social bargaining behavior. An important paradigm to study social bargaining is the Ultimatum Game. There, a proposer gets a pot of money and has to offer part of it to a responder. If the responder accepts, both players get the money as proposed by the proposer. If he rejects, none of the players gets anything. Rational choice models would predict that responders accept all offers above 0. However, evidence shows that responders typically reject a large proportion of all unfair offers. We analyzed participants’ behavior when they played the Ultimatum Game as responders and simultaneously collected electroencephalogram data in order to quantify the feedback-related negativity and P3b components. We induced state affect (momentarily emotions unrelated to the task) via short movie clips and measured trait affect (longer-lasting emotional dispositions) via questionnaires. State happiness led to increased acceptance rates of very unfair offers. Regarding neurophysiology, we found that unfair offers elicited larger feedback-related negativity amplitudes than fair offers. Additionally, an interaction of state and trait affect occurred: high trait negative affect (subsuming a variety of aversive mood states) led to increased feedback-related negativity amplitudes when participants were in an angry mood, but not if they currently experienced fear or happiness. We discuss that increased rumination might be responsible for this result, which might not occur, however, when people experience happiness or fear. Apart from that, we found that fair offers elicited larger P3b components than unfair offers, which might reflect increased pleasure in response to fair offers. Moreover, high trait negative affect was associated with decreased P3b amplitudes, potentially reflecting decreased motivation to engage in activities. We discuss implications of our results in the light of theories and research on depression and anxiety.

The effect of focusing missing on instant happy experience

The effect of focusing missing on instant happy experience

Techniques of happiness

This article seeks to tease apart some of the different factors and cultural practices that lead toward and away from happiness in particular social and cultural contexts. It considers happiness as experienced in the community of Masho in the Gamo Highlands of southwest Ethiopia at two different points in time. It starts by exploring the traditional Gamo concept of happiness and the way that happiness was experienced in the mid-1990s mainly as peaceful sociality and nonreflexive present-time consciousness. It then charts the move toward a more market-based socio-economic reality that has taken place over the last twenty years and shows how the concomitant decrease in peaceful sociality and increase in inequality has led to a decrease in happiness of most people. However, it then considers the way that conversion to Pentecostal Christianity has created new avenues of happiness by bringing about a radical transformation of the self and by deeply reconfiguring emotional lives. In charting the way that happiness shifts from being imbued in the social fabric to being more about deep interior spaces, this article argues that happiness is configured differently in different social and cultural contexts and that different experiences of happiness are fundamentally linked to different experiences of the self.

Imago Dei

Abstract Theological anthropology determines the human being as image of God. He/she is a social being directed towards a counterpart. This is plausible from a psychological perspective as well: the experiences of meaning, happiness, longing and love define the life of the individual in an essential way; these sentiments can be experienced primarily in relation with others or with nature and culture. Based on such existential considerations, religious pedagogy can devote itself to (more) concrete questions and human experiences. It is thereby leaving the traditional scheme of given teaching content and addressee behind, which cannot convince any longer and which is neither overcome by elementarization nor by performative religious didactics. Religion is symbolic interpretation of life; therefore religious pedagogy is plausible inasmuch as it takes questions of (the meaning of) life as its start and brings them to a religious interpretation.

Ambivalent happiness and virtuous suffering

This article advances an analysis of those affective, mooded, and worldly happenings that define the limits, contingencies, and possibilities of happiness. More specifically, drawing from sustained ethnographic research, ambivalent orientations to experiences of happiness are examined in Yapese communities in the Federated States of Micronesia. For many, happiness is experienced as an ambivalent object of concern inasmuch as it stands in tension with local ethical modalities of being that emphasize virtuous forms of suffering.

On happiness, values, and time

All of the contributors to this collection on happiness provide us with accounts in which the usual ethnographic focus on what we might call the “thick temporal middle” gives way to discussions of people’s concerns with intense momentary experiences of happiness, on the one hand, or very long-term judgments about the happiness of whole lives, on the other. More than this, many of the contributors examine how people try to connect these two time-spans, often taken to be representative of hedonic and eudaimonic versions of happiness, respectively. Starting from these observations, I work to develop an account that relates happiness to values and then both to temporality. Drawing on Durkheim’s rarely noted account of the way in which effervescence creates or reveals values, I suggest a model of how the connection between happiness and temporality is constructed in social life, and I consider differences in this process of construction in societies dominated by tendencies toward value pluralism and those dominated by value monism. Along with aiming to bring out some of the key collective findings of this collection on happiness, then, this essay aims to make a contribution to the recent resurgence of value theory in anthropology.

Materialism, affective states, and life satisfaction: case of Croatia.

In recent years, a number of studies have used Material Values Scale (MVS) to assess beliefs about importance to own material things. The aims of this study were to validate the MVS scale and to explore the relationships between materialistic values and well-being of Croatian citizens. The study was carried out on a representative sample of N = 1129 Croatian citizens. We used the short 9-item version of the MVS, life satisfaction rating, ratings of two positive (Positive affect) and four negative emotions (Negative affect) over the past month, and demographic variables (age, gender, income). The original dimensionality of the MVS was not confirmed; confirmatory factor analyses yielded two instead of three factors, Happiness and Centrality/Success. When controlled for income, gender and age, the Happiness dimension predicted Life satisfaction and both Positive and Negative affect, indicating that people who believed that the material goods in ones life leads to happiness reported to have lower life satisfaction, lower level of positive affect and higher level of negative affect over the past month. The Centrality/Success dimension was positively related to Positive affect, indicating that the belief that possessions play a central role in enjoyment leads to more frequent experiences of happiness and satisfaction over the past month.

Big Five Personality and Different Meanings of Happiness of Consumers

IntroductionHappiness is an increasingly important topic worldwide, and many countries are moving their focus of economic policy toward happiness gradually. Unlike in the past, consumers around the world are pursuing happiness rather than just wealth or social status (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Lipovetsky, 2009). Countries are making a variety of efforts at the national level, including introducing a happiness index to find ways of improving quality of life of their citizens (Ura, 2012; Frey, 2008).Beginning from the 1970s, research on happiness has been actively conducted in various academic fields as well, including philosophy, psychology, economics, and sociology. Especially in the field of marketing and consumer behavior, the relationship between consumption and happiness has been firmly established (Myers, 2000; Hsee et al., 2009). Many studies have also attempted to find the characteristics of consumption that can increase consumers' sense of happiness the most. Recently, the importance of experiential consumption such as of cultural and art products is growing along with the improvements in economic and social well-being of people around the world (Carter et al., 2010).Still, research on happiness to date has limitations of being restricted in scope compared with other topics of social science (DeNeve et al., 1998; Mogilner et al., 2010). Among many studies, a notable recent work by Mogilner et al. (2012) showed that the meaning of happiness can vary across individuals, and proposed two different definitions of happiness accordingly. The difference in the definitions was based on different levels of arousal (i.e., high and low levels of arousal of positive affect) that consumers experience, and the authors investigated the effects of the difference on consumer behavior.The present study expands the above-mentioned study in order to enhance the understanding of consumers' definitions of happiness. Specifically, this study aims to test empirically whether personality influences consumers' definitions of happiness. For this, a text mining approach is taken that utilizes psycho-linguistic features of texts. Online blog articles that describe the happy experiences of people are collected and analyzed to see whether the personality characteristics of the texts have significant relationship with the different meanings of happiness manifested in the texts. The Big Five model of personality was chosen considering its wide adoption in social science (Gomez et al., 2002).This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical background of this study. Section 3 presents the research hypotheses. Section 4 presents the research method and the key findings. Section 5 presents the conclusions and future research directions.1. Literature Review1.1. Definition of HappinessThe concept of happiness has become increasingly important in economy and consumer-related fields. This is because it is an important challenge to deliver more meaningful values to consumers by determining the degree of happiness consumers experience during consumption (Lipovetsky, 2009). Studies have also found that the sense of happiness consumers experience toward a brand has a positive influence on the perceived service quality, commitment level, and brand loyalty, clearly showing the close relationship between happiness and consumption (Hsee et al., 2009; Hellen et al., 2011).Various perspectives exist regarding the determinants of the consumers' happiness levels. First, there is a perspective that happiness means the same to all individuals, as it is a combination of objective external environmental factors (Layard, 2005). In other words, this perspective is based on objectivity, claiming that happiness is determined by external inputs consistently. A typical example is the approach to verify the degree of happiness by measuring physiological phenomena, such as electroencephalography (EEG) (Frey et al. …

Facial expressions during an extremely intense emotional situation: Toreros’ lip funnel

Since Darwin, emotions have been defined as adaptive reactions that increase the probability of survival. In this framework, a situation in which individuals fight for their life with an imposing, aggressive animal should be an ideal elicitor of emotions and their corresponding facial expressions. We tested the correspondence between the facial expressions of 22 bullfighters (toreros) and their reported emotions at different stages of the fight. Toreros reported intense experiences of happiness or fear, but there were no observable instances of the facial expressions predicted for these emotions (e.g. smiles). Instead toreros displayed frowning, nostril dilatation, parted lips, and, protruding funneled lips in particular. In a second study we found that 149 judges could not recognize toreros’ facial movements as expressions of emotion. Absence of a universal signal value strongly suggests that toreros’ expressions are not an undescribed expression of basic emotions. The observed non-correspondence between intense reported emotions and their predicted expressions casts doubt on one of the most popular assumptions in contemporary psychology and provides new evidence for an alternative theoretical view. In this view, facial expressions are not signals of emotion, but actions that are roughly coextensive with other processes and structures in the framework of an emotional episode.

English

In order to identify specific, shared sources of meaning and mechanisms with which individuals attempt to make meaning, the objectives of this study were to explore the way in which secondary school teachers perceive, conceptualise and attain meaning in their work. A qualitative design with a phenomenological strategy was used with a convenience sample (n = 20) of teachers. Semi-structured, one-to-one interviews with open-ended questions were used to gather data. Participants were asked to diarise related issues for five working days following the interview, in order to strengthen and validate the interviews’ results. The results showed that the participants conceptualise meaning as purpose and significance, and that the main sources of meaning related to work include the transfer of knowledge, and making a positive difference in the learners’ lives. Forming relationships based on trust and receiving feedback was also important. The main mechanisms identified were putting effort into preparations, while this group of participants reported that meaning leads to the experience of happiness and personal satisfaction. Although most of these findings support those in the broader literature, there are differences in the emphasis placed on some of the findings, due to the context of education in South Africa. From the results, recommendations were made to create opportunities for teachers to experience more meaning in their work. Keywords : education sector; meaning in work; meaning-making mechanisms; sources of meaning; teachers

Effects of Distress and Eustress on Changes in Fatigue from Waking to Working.

As a potential indicator of strain, fatigue is an important outcome in occupational health research. The current study examined the influence of positive (eustress) and negative (distress) work experiences on changes in fatigue from morning to at-work. It was expected that within-person changes in fatigue from waking to working would be moderated by employees' experiences of stress, pain, happiness, and meaningfulness at work. Data on 1,195 full-time working adults were collected through the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2010 American Time Use Study (ATUS) using a day reconstruction method to assess fatigue at two time points (morning and during work) and employees' eustress and distress experiences during work. Multilevel modeling showed that the indicators of distress, stress and pain, predicted higher morning fatigue and stronger increases in fatigue during the workday. The indicators of eustress, happiness and meaningfulness, predicted lower fatigue at both time points but not temporal changes. These results contribute to understanding changes in employees' fatigue and suggest that the differential effects of distress and eustress experiences at work may be important to consider in fatigue management interventions.

Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder

Awe and wonder are theorised to be distinct from other positive emotions, such as happiness. Yet little empirical or theoretical work has focused on these emotions. This investigation explored differences in language used to describe experiences of awe and wonder. Such analyses can provide insight into how people conceptualise these emotional experiences, and whether they conceptualise these emotions to be distinct from other positive emotions, and each other. Participants wrote narratives about experiences of awe, wonder and happiness. There were differences in the language used to describe these positive emotional states, consistent with the theorised functions of each emotion. Awe was related to observing the world, reflected in greater use of perception words. Wonder was related to trying to understand the world, reflected in greater use of cognitive complexity and tentative words. Language use for both emotions reflected an environmental focus, whereas language use for happiness reflected a social/relationship focus.

Welfare, preferences and the reconstruction of desires

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that relates the desire for justice with welfare.Design/methodology/approach– The point of departure, elaborated in the first part of the paper, is the observation that we have no sense-organs for experiencing welfare and the experiences of happiness being, in general, transient if they emerge at all. Desires drive our behavior and motivate our decisions. The author will analyze conditions so that desires can be related to welfare, making use of results of social choice theory. There is some (technical) similarity between aggregating individual preferences and editing (“reconstruction”) desires.Findings– In special cases, desires are well ordered and can be represented by preference orderings, ready for deriving “rational choices.” However, desires may be circular. Then, of course, the satisfaction of a particular desire will never trigger happiness because there is always a “higher valued” (or “more prominent”) desire unsatisfied. In these cases, desires and welfare cannot be matched. However, there are social desires, such as the desire for justice (as fairness), that can have welfare-enhancing consequences if satisfied even when private desires are circular, as desires for justice contain a social component.Originality/value– This issue will be elaborated in the second part of the paper using a formal model, borrowed from Fehr and Schmidt (1999), in order to illustrate the underlying reasoning.