What makes people happy? East happiness The result of the intern personality Traits or external factors such as relationships, health and work satisfaction?
Researchers explored this question in a study recently published in Nature Human behavior.
Their objective was to better understand the source (s) of happiness in order to develop better approaches and programs of public policy to improve happiness at the societal level. “We must understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions”, ” said First author, Dr. Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California in Davis.
If happiness is mainly attributed to external factors, approaches to public policy to improve happiness should target improvement factors such as health and economic stability. However, if happiness is mainly motivated by internal factors such as personal qualities and attitudes, political approaches to improve happiness should focus on improving mental states through practices such as therapy,, meditationand / or mindfulness.
Scientists have gathered survey data of more than 40,000 people who had participated in previous surveys on life satisfaction over a period of up to 33 years. Respondents came from Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, and surveys have evaluated both the global satisfaction of life over time as well as satisfaction in five areas: relations, work, health, income and housing.
Their results showed that respondents fell into one of the roughly equal groups with regard to the main engines of their happiness: 1) internal personality traits (“top and bottom” model); 2) external factors (“ascending” model); 3) an interaction between internal and external factors; or 4) no clear connection with the internal and external factors.
According to Beck, “what comes out is that we see roughly equal groups that demonstrate each model. Some are from bottom to top; some are descendants, the domains do not affect their happiness; some are bidirectional and some are not clear.”
In the group where no clear link with internal and external factors have been found, the researchers applied that it is possible that there are other external factors which lead to their happiness which have not been captured by the five areas that have been studied.
These results show that the studies of happiness that the average data between whole populations do not reflect individual variability. Public policy strategies to improve happiness in society which focuses solely on approaches from top to bottom or on ascending approaches probably do not succeed. Instead, policies must provide the means to improve internal and external factors while being flexible enough to be adapted to individuals.