How do scientists measure happiness?

Hi, I’m Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, and in this video I’ll be talking about how scientists measure happiness. Meet Maya and Kathy. They’ve been friends since college. Although Maya’s interests led her to another city several years ago, she’s back in town for one of her regular visits. She and Kathy are catching up over drinks when Maya confesses that she’s been feeling envious of her friends recently, Kathy included. Maya’s frustrated that, despite all her efforts and achievements, she’s still not not very happy. At least not in the way that Kathy and others seem to be. Although Kathy has seen a bit of her friend’s anxiety over the years, she’s gotten the impression that Maya’s been doing really well in her new hometown. Her life seems a lot like the kind she’s been shooting for. So Kathy is somewhat surprised that Maya isn’t happy. She’s also surprised that Maya envies her. Sure, Kathy thinks of herself as a pretty happy person. But is she really that much happier than Maya? Happy enough for Maya to envy her? True, she’s currently in a good relationship but who knows how long that will last? And Kathy’s lifestyle wouldn’t be nearly glamorous enough for Maya. As Kathy listens to Maya compare their happiness levels, she feels increasingly confused about how to make sense of this comparison. Some comparisons strike Kathy as fairly straightforward. She’d have no problem comparing her high school GPA to her college GPA, her own height to her mother’s height, or her three-point shot to her teammates’. But how much happier is she than Maya? She rarely asks herself questions like this, and now she’s not sure how to answer. Listening to Maya, Kathy realizes she’s not even sure that they have the same thing in mind when they think about “happiness”. What exactly is happiness? And how can we measure the amount of happiness we each have? These are fundamental questions in the science of happiness. Without a definition of happiness and a reliable way to measure it, scientists would be just as confused as Kathy about how to compare her happiness with Maya’s. And without being able to describe such differences, scientists wouldn’t be able to study what causes them. So what do scientists mean when they talk about “happiness”? While many definitions of happiness, or “subjective well-being", have been proposed, one compelling view is that happiness has two main components: Happiness in your life and happiness with your life. You’re happy in your life to the extent that your experience is dominated by positive emotions. And you’re happy with your life to the extent that you’re satisfied with your life so far when you compare it to what you want it to be. How, then, do scientists measure these happiness levels? Do they have happiness-meters that scan your body for physical data to determine the exact percentage of positive emotions you’re experiencing and your exact level of life satisfaction? Can they measure happiness objectively, like they measure temperature? Unfortunately, that's not the case. But happiness researchers have been able to make some fascinating discoveries about how happiness works by using “self-report” surveys to measure happiness. In these surveys, people answer a series of questions about themselves, and these self-reports are then used to calculate their happiness scores. Not long before making her confession to Kathy, Maya learned about these happiness questionnaires and realized that it could be helpful to get a more scientific assessment of her well-being. So, after reading up on a number of these surveys, Maya selected two of them to complete. To measure how happy she was in her life, Maya took a questionnaire called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule or PANAS This survey presented Maya with a list of ten positive emotions and feelings, as well as a list of ten negative emotions and feelings, asking her to indicate on a five-point scale how much she’s been experiencing each of these specific emotions or “affects” over the past week. Adding up her answers separately for the positive and negative emotions, Maya got her two separate PANAS scores. Her positive affect score was indeed much lower than she’d like only a 20 out of 50 while her negative affect score, 30 out of 50, was pretty high. To measure how happy she was with her life, Maya then took a survey called the Satisfaction with Life Scale. This questionnaire asked her to indicate how much she agreed or disagreed with a series of five statements about how her life was going so far. For each statement, Maya had to respond with a number between 1 and 7. When she summed up her responses to these five statements, Maya discovered that her total life satisfaction score was 25 out of a possible 35, meaning she’s “slightly satisfied” with her life. So when Kathy now asks Maya what she means when she says that she’s not very happy, Maya has a ready response: She tells Kathy about her troubling survey results. Surprised to hear Maya’s low happiness scores and wondering where she herself stands on the happiness spectrum Kathy decides to assess her own levels of positive and negative affect and life satisfaction. And it turns out that Kathy’s scores confirm what Maya has been saying: Despite her successes, Maya is not nearly as happy as Kathy. So what are your happiness levels? Do you go through your day feeling more positive or more negative emotionally? All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now?