Surprisingly, after some research, I discovered that happiness can be measured, and I was one of those millions of people who thought that happiness cannot be measured. Psychology today magazine have stated that “professors, researchers, and the public never doubt that you can measure depression, anxiety, and stress.
But many are reluctant to accept that happiness is measurable.” From this, I can suggest that psychologists are developing their research and getting better results so that the future of research can be improved so I can say it’s a good sign towards the future. Researchers have attempted to measure happiness with five approaches which helped them access happiness differently but for them, it wasn’t easy nor simple, the process was as follows:
One way can be using the Biological way. Includes hormones and neurotransmitters, which are one of the main reasons that helped the researcher to measure happiness and come with unexpected outcomes such as the more dopamine hormone a human being has, the happier in the future the person will be. Unfortunately, there was a very minimum success in identifying the biological markers in happiness but as time drifted by psychologists discovered that the markers for depression are not the same as happiness.
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The magazine stated again after very elongated research “that low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin can envisage and predict depression, high levels of serotonin don’t predict happiness therefore, this made researched puzzled and baffled at the same time. This is important as it helped to suggest that happiness and depression are not opposite ends of a single continuum, but those words are just the antonym of each other which made people link them together.
A second way that can alternatively be used is the Behavioural way. Unbelievably incredible, researchers today can identify and analyse the behaviour of an individual which may help estimate someone’s happiness? They do this by measuring the frequency of laughing, smiling and the way you interact with others this can be examined to know the level of happiness in the individual.
With today’s advanced technology, the simplest thing which can be used is simply the type of emoji used and the way the emoji used could determine someone’s personality and behaviour towards others which could then be used for advanced research like to decide whether you are a happy person in a certain day. Some studies proved that when texting using emoji this could prove that the human being is in the happiest state. Also, when hundreds of tweets are analysed, researchers found out that on Mondays the tweets are linked to low levels of happiness, and at holidays the tweets seem to be more linked to happiness.
A third method can be using some Implicit Measures by doing some disguised measures, it can be very disguised, in which people will not know there is disguised on for their happiness to be assessed upon and to see whether it has been developed. Implicit measures are typically measuring that can help assess reaction times to connect positive and negative terms to oneself and to others. Unfortunately, implicit measures haven’t proven some effective outcomes in assessing happiness.
Another simple way which may be effective is using reports, it’s a way where you have to ask other to rate their happiness, and this method has been useful and has obtained some very accurate results. For example, to rate the happiness of some young children, some questions could be asked to their teachers and parents or relative to rate their child or student’s happiness. Some people may find this method time-consuming, but it might be worth it at the end.
Lastly, this method is very similar to the previous but it’s a self-report which gives the individual their thought about whether they are happy lively individual or far from the word happiness. These reports can be done using multiple-item scales or a single question. For some people, they take happiness as a subjective state because happiness is not an ongoing feeling it is that feeling which correlates to the place the person’s in and the people you are surrounded by.
