Happiness: What Have We Learned?
Summarising 50 years of psychological research in one big article
Becoming happier
The science of happiness
Over the past few decades, the study of happiness has sought to bring clarity and empirical legitimacy to a subject that has traditionally been the domain of philosophy, theology and self- help.
In the 1970s, with his seminal paper on the happiness of lottery winners and people with disabilities, the psychologist Philip Brickman paved the way for what became known as the academic field of ‘positive psychology’ — the study of what makes people mentally healthy, beyond the absence of mental illness.
Around the same time, the economist Richard Easterlin compared the gross domestic product (GDP) growth of nations with their average levels of happiness. He showed that the latter does not necessarily follow from the former, which paved the way for the academic field of ‘happiness economics’ — the study of what makes people better off, beyond the accumulation of financial wealth.
Together, positive psychology and happiness economics form the backbone of the ‘study of subjective wellbeing’, which is often referred to as the ‘study of happiness’. This burgeoning interdisciplinary field of…
