Saturday, January 28, 2012

Measuring the Nation’s Well-being: Authentic Happiness and Well-being Theory

The topic of measuring national well-being was the subject of a recent BBC Radio 4 programme: The pursuit of happiness. One of the first questions asked was “what is happiness and can it measure national well-being?’”Most of you will have read Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness (2002) which brought positive psychology out of the shadows and into the mainstream.
In Authentic Happiness, Seligman describes a compellingly simple model of happiness based on three pathways:

■Positive emotion – leading to a pleasant life

■Flow – leading to an engaged life

■Purpose – leading to a meaningful life

In short, the Authentic Happiness model suggested that you can achieve happiness in your life by pursuing one or more of these three pathways. This means that even if, for example, you don’t experience much positive emotion in your life, you can still be happy by doing activities which engage or absorb you fully, or by finding meaning in life by using your strengths in service of something larger. This conclusion was probably quite a relief to Seligman, who freely acknowledges in the book that until relatively recently he himself had been a bit of a grouch.

In the past decade or so since positive psychology was launched, hundreds of scientific experiments have been carried out which are moving the field forward. So it’s exciting to hear that the original Authentic Happiness model has also been developed to embrace two further pathways, relationships and accomplishment. This new well-being theory (aka PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment) is described in Seligman’s forthcoming book, Flourish: A new understanding of happiness and well-being – and how to achieve them.

Incorporating a relationships/ connections component makes sense on the basis that social support has been recognized as one of the most influential determinants of well-being. University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson put it succinctly: ‘other people matter.’ Students of positive psychology will already be familiar with Ed Diener and Martin Seligman’s 2002 paper entitled Very Happy People, which is often used to highlight the finding that the difference between very happy people (which means the upper 10% of consistently very happy people) and those who are average or unhappy (which means the rest of us) is their relationships and social connections. When we are talking about national well-being, the frequency and quality of our interactions with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers, as well as our experience of trusting others and feeling like we belong, are all central to our level of well-being. As the 17th Century English poet John Donne said, ‘no man is an Island.’
           
Source: By on February 26, 2011


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