What is happiness? How does one know if they are happy or not? In the peer-reviewed article ‘The Secret to Happiness: Felling Good or Feeling Right?’, by Maya Tamir, Shalom H. Schwartz, Shige Oishi and Min Y. Kim, it talks about different psychologist and their views on why people are happy. The most common view being if you have more pleasant emotions then you will be happy, but the view that the article argues is that you will be happier if you have the emotions you desire in life rather they are pleasant or unpleasant emotions. “Secret to Happiness May Include More Unpleasant Emotions” this is a media claim published by The American Psychological Association. This media claim explains how people’s happiness goes hand in hand with their …show more content…
The article describes two different views on why people are happy. For example, “Indeed, some psychologists argue that happiness involves maximizing pleasant emotions and minimizing unpleasant emotions (e.g., Diener, 1984; Kahneman, Diener, & Schwarz, 1999; Kuppens, Realo, & Diener, 2008; Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996). This approach has dominated the field of subjective well-being (SWB) over the last 30 years (see Diener, 2013, for a recent review). The present article explores another possible answer based on the Aristotelian approach. Aris- totle suggested that happiness involves feeling the right emotions.” (pg. 1448) this quote shows that some psychologist believe that happiness is found in all pleasant emotions, but explained in the article other psychologist believe that happiness is found in having the emotions you desire and value. It goes on to explain that a lot of why people are happy is because of different culture norms. These help determe why certain things can make one person happy but not another. This is shown on page 1449 in the peer-reviewed article, “In a cross-cultural study, we found that people desired emotions that were consistent with their core values. For instance, individuals who valued self-transcendence (benevolence, univer- salism) desired more love, trust, and compassion (i.e., self- transcending emotions) than others did, whereas those who valued self-enhancement (power, achievement) desired more pride, but also more anger, hatred and contempt (i.e., self-enhancing emo- tions) than others did.” This quote helps explain that people’s values and what they desire to have in life has a huge role on their happiness. Therefore, you cannot say that happiness is only when you have positive or pleasant emotions because all people are different and have different