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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 9
Lesson 3: How do scientists measure happiness?How do scientists measure happiness?
In this wireless philosophy video, Laurie Santos (Yale University, The Happiness Lab podcast) talks about the tools that scientists use to measure how happy we are.
View our happiness learning module and other videos in this series here:
https://www.wi-phi.com/modules/happy/. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
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?