With the final exam period fast approaching, stress levels of students will undoubtedly come close to their limits. Libraries get busier, personal hygiene declines, and all you can think about is how happy you will be once the semester is over (my apologies for anyone taking summer school, who must be suffering the most right now and deserve our sympathy).

Say hello to positive psychology: a broad field of science launched by psychologist Martin Seligman in the late 1990s which is concerned with what does and doesn’t make people satisfied with life, also whether optimism is associated with good physical health, less depression, longer life and greater happiness.

Focusing on the last topic, this raised the question: what is happiness, and how do you measure it? Seligman idenfitifed three important components of happiness: pleasure, engagement (depth of involvement with one’s family, work, romance, hobbies), and meaning (using personal strengths to serve some larger end). His underlying philosophy was that “mental health should be more than the absence of mental illness.”

An enormous amount of recent studies have looked into happiness, trying to figure out whether you can induce happiness states or at least promote the feeling of well-being. The results have been interesting; for example, some experiments show that greater wealth doesn’t necessarily make you happier once you have enough money to meet basic needs. Older people are more satisfied than younger populations. And married couples are happier than singles.

But the question still remains, how do you measure it? How do I compare some feelings of happiness to others?

Well, using EEG (electroencephalography) headsets, scientists seemingly developed a scale to quantify pleasure in everyday activities. They measured an individual’s brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, and created a linear scale enabling them place a numerical value on the pleasure one receives from different experiences.

The ratings out of 100 (most pleasurable) offer incredible insight into how we value certain things: the good fortune of finding money was associated with the highest score of 82.9, eating chocolate scored 65, and looking at pictures of smiling babies 50.9. Ever wonder how happy you can get from playing with the therapy dogs they bring to McLennan library? That would be 67.5.

The experiment also included a negative end to the scale, where looking at images of rotten teeth and crying babies scored -38.4, and the sound of a violin being played badly -55.7.

Several other self-report surveys measure happiness as being one part of an individual’s broader subjective well-being (SWB), which takes into account something called eudaimonia — a person’s optimism, quality of social relationships, freedom to make decisions, and self-worth. The Ryff Multidimensional Scales of Well-Being is an example of a eudaimonic scale measuring six dimensions of wellness: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, self-acceptance.

Interesting findings have emerged from the range of experiments conducted: aging tends to have a positivity effect, in that older people remember more positive than negative information; cultural norms and contextual considerations emphasize different emotional states (Asians and Asian Americans place less value on excitement than on states characterized by calmness); assessing ‘meaningfulness’ is sensitive to changing variables when reporting over time versus across cohorts in a cross-section.

Our overall life satisfaction, fulfillment and level of happiness is important in everything that we do. For example, a company’s productivity can be heavily influenced by how satisfied their employees are in their work environment. Yet we may never get closer to finding a single measurement for something as subjective and complex as happiness. The approaches currently being used are not fully assessable until further research is conducted in a range of contexts to account for the diverse outcomes.

However, what is known is that stress damages the body, and studies have shown that positive emotions are a protective factor in staving off diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. A little bit of happiness goes a long way, and might be just what is needed to help you make it through these last few days of school.