Talk:Happiness

Request for edit

A person laughing

— Preceding unsigned comment added by GRPH3B18 (talk • contribs) 06:30, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Genetics of happiness

Wichers et al at The catechol-O-methyl transferase Val158Met polymorphism and experience of reward in the flow of daily life describe how the met met version of the COMT gene causes people to be twice as happy throughout the daily moments of their lives as others. The graph at the paper (Wichers COMT flow at pubmed) is impressive

research on happiness as a result of social scheduling

start school older than your grade peers BBC reports that people born during the summer are three times likelier to be considered doing badly at school, apparently purely a result of being the youngest or least developed amongst their grade peers, while those born during the month that makes them oldest at school do vastly better. Are there any papers on social schedule effect on happiness, are there other cases of this more chronologically mature or capable at a group effect — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.121.204.129 (talk) 21:13, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

This short section on buddhism appears quite good, and deserves respect

It deserves protection from careless editing. The choice of the word "craving" to indicate the form of desire that interferes with happiness, and distinction from other forms that do not, seems an unusually able and useful explanation.

I found the section on Buddhism exceptionally dubious, and think that associating Buddhism with happiness is completely at odds with Buddhism and betrays a perverse Western appropriation of Buddhism. Once I found that I couldn't edit the article (simply to add "dubious"), I came in to see the discussion and found this (^) even more unsubstantiated and dubious declaration, presumably by the author of the Buddhist section, who didn't even bother to use tildes. This is not up to Wikipedian standards. Knock-kneed (talk) 02:28, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I have added some tags to represent your criticisms. I did this, not because I know anything about Buddhism (I don't). But assuming good faith, I checked the sources to see what you were up against: they are both somewhat random websites. I hope those tags are a good start.-Tesseract²(talk) 03:26, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Scientific views

The "Happiness" page still has it's religious views, and actually it could use way more philosophical views. But I'm considering making the "Scientific views section" very, very brief - and moving the information onto the positive psychology page. Otherwise it's sort of redundant. Any objections?-Tesseract2 (talk) 17:12, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

There have been lots of very questionable edits to this article since the last time I looked at it, but certainly the proposal to remove scientific findings on happiness is a bad idea. This page can deal with broad themes that are not as detailed as the positive psychology article, but scientific views are - and should be - the core of this article. Otherwise (as with all other scientific endeavors) how does anyone know whether the information is reliable? With apologies, I've reverted Tesseract2's edits made today, and will look at the article in more detail tomorrow. -DoctorW 08:28, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Ya sorry I didn't explain. Basically there was a lot of redundancy between details here and details at Positive Psychology. Just make sure you check out what I DID end up writing for this page's scientific input; I feel I had provided a concise, but even broader coverage of science's input than there was before. Maybe I left out exercise... Anyway lemme know.-Tesseract²(talk) 05:30, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Since it has been a week without any changes or notices, I will go through with my edits. Again, it is all available at the Positive Psychology page- I've just opted to provide more of a summary here.

This time I've also linked to some ideas about how psychological and physiological factors impact moods-Tesseract²(talk) 16:38, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Dealing with the POV tag

It has come to my attention that there may still be debate over the NPOV of this article. It's just that throwing up tags and leaving them for months doesn't fix anything, so let's get discussing and editing so we can clean her' up. Maybe someone can justify the POV tag being applied to the whole article, instead of specifying sections that might be POV? Or better yet, list specific issues? -Tesseract2 (talk) 20:50, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

(update) If no one has any issues soon, I will remove the tag, again. And, again, anyone who at that time decides to put the tag back up should do it whilst mentioning issues on the talk page.-Tesseract2 (talk) 15:23, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Definition of Happiness

A simple view of the definition of happiness would be: "The love for certain actions is happiness". The definition lacks of experimenting the application of itself but for me it seems the easiest way to understand how you get fast/slow in a happy state. I came to this conclusion after thinking that love and happiness are hard to maintain, hazardous, because sometimes they both need luck, or hard working to achieve such things, they seem to share same construction. --TudorTulok (talk) 21:45, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Everyone Else's critique

1:Improving happiness

The Scientific Views section makes the following assertion, yet does not cite any source. "There is evidence suggesting that people can improve their happiness."

Either the source has to be cited or the assertion removed.

Everyone Else (talk) 07:02, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

2:Religion and happiness

The following assertion is made: "Research has generally found that religion may help make people happier by providing various important components (e.g. PERMA) in countries where there are many who share that religion."

1. The source for this assertion is not cited.

2. The phrasing implies that research has found a causal link between religion and happiness, whereas any such link would be correlational at best.

3. The sentence contains the word "may", which vitiates the science of the assertion. If the sentence is well-founded, it would say "religion helps make people happier" rather than "religion may help make people happier".

Everyone Else (talk) 07:42, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

3:Everyone can benefit

The "Scientific Views" section contains the following sentence: "Furthermore, the model suggests that everyone can benefit, to varying degrees, from the various habits and practices identified by positive psychology."

A "model" is an explanation not a source of scientific information. In order to assert that "everyone can benefit" from positive psychology, reproducible effects must be validated by peer-reviewed research.

To tie together what a "model" can "suggest" with the blanket assertion "everyone can benefit" does a disservice to the normal high standards of Wikipedia.

Everyone Else (talk) 08:01, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Repeating requests

{{edit semi-protected}}

Until someone does a representative summary of the state of science of happiness, this "Scientific Views" section should be eliminated.

I made serious criticisms of the "Scientific Views" section on September 4, 2011, which have not yet been addressed. They are the comments 8, 9, 10 on this talk page.

Apart from the particular points mentioned, the bulk of this section consists of the section quoted below, which promotes the work of only one point of view on the science of happiness (which already has its own Wikipedia page), and neglects to include the many important contributions made by others.

(A sampling of those who have been other major contributors appears below the quoted section.)

"Psychologist Martin Seligman provides the acronym PERMA to summarize many of Positive Psychology's findings: humans seem happiest when they have Pleasure (tasty foods, warm baths, etc.), Engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity), Relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness), Meaning (a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger), and Accomplishments (having realized tangible goals)."

Some of the other thinkers who have made important contributions to the scientific study of happiness, and a few cited works, can be found in the following; Charles Darwin William James Berridge, K. C. (2003). Comparing the emotional brains of humans and other animals. In R. J. Davidson, K. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective science (pp. 25–51). New York: Oxford University Press. Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2, 300–319. Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127, 249–266. Tomkins, S. S. (1984). Affect theory. In K. Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Approaches to emotion (pp. 163–195). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2007). Emerging insights into the nature and function of pride. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 147–150.

Everyone Else (talk) 00:40, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

That is a fine list: surely I could persuade you to provide each of those sources a summary on the actual Wikipage. It won't be perfect, and it will see much improvement and rewriting once it attracts interest, but that is all the more reason to get something, anything, on the page.

Jonathan Winters supposedly said "If your ship does not come in, swim out to meet it." -Tesseract²(talk) 12:07, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind doing it when I get the time, but I'm not authorized to edit the happiness page because it's semi-protected. The assertions without citations mentioned in my points 8 and 9 are violations of Wikipedia criteria. The extrapolation from an explanatory model (10) is unscientific and does not belong in a Scientific Views section. Everyone Else (talk) 04:55, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Summary of requests, again

{{Edit semi-protected}}

1. Please remove the sentence in "Scientific Views" section that says: "There is evidence suggesting that people can improve their happiness."

2. Please remove the sentence in "Scientific Views" section that says: "Research has generally found that religion may help make people happier ..."

3. Please remove the sentence in "Scientific Views" section that says: "There are various habits that have been correlated with happiness."

The above three assertions are stated without their source being identified.

Jimmy Wales has said explicitly on "Insist on sources", WikiEN-l, July 19, 2006: "I really want to encourage a much stronger culture which says: it is better to have no information, than to have information like this, with no sources."

4. Please remove the sentence in "Scientific Views" section that says: "Furthermore, the model suggests that everyone can benefit, to varying degrees, from the various habits and practices identified by positive psychology."

To tie together what a "model" can "suggest" with the blanket assertion "everyone can benefit" does a disservice to the normal high standards of Wikipedia.

Thanks.

Everyone Else (talk) 10:09, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

First, I see your account has gone red. I hope I did not some how do something terrible while I was re-organizing all your comments. I was just checking your contribution history, and I noticed you had 9 edits. I think 10 edits would have autoconfirmed you so you could have edited the page yourself. Anyway, maybe you deleted your account just now??

I also made a first pass at addressing your critiques.

The Religion comments did need to be made more concise, and tentative. Actually, I could add a source for the comment now being made. I am not sure I will bother, for the same reason mentioned below.

As far as habits go, a source is superfluous. The pages that cover the research in more detail are unambiguous; these are not professionally controversial issues. There is clear and convincing evidence that habits influence happiness, and that some tend to increase it. I suppose we could afford to look for a source that summarizes the research on religion and happiness, and another on habits and happiness; I am just saying it is not the urgent issue that you make it sound like.

About the claim that everybody can benefit: I think you are correct it was a little too sweeping.

I was going to ask you to provide summaries of those sources here on the talk page, and I could edit them in myself. Now, with your account red, I am not sure what to expect.

Thanks for you contributions here.-Tesseract²(talk) 15:12, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from Everyone Else, 9/11/11

{{Edit semi-protected}}

The first sentence and the last sentence of the largest paragraph in the Scientific Views section should be taken away.

The first sentence says: "There is evidence suggesting that people can improve their happiness." The citation is a Time magazine article from 2005.

The last sentence says: "Furthermore, the model suggests that many could benefit from the various habits and practices identified by positive psychology."

Time Magazine revisited this issue in 2009 in an article called: "The Science of Happiness Turns 10. What Has It Taught?" Here is the URL: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1908173,00.html

The Time Magazine update says, quoting the president of the International Positive Psychology Association, "some of the most popular findings on happiness have not held up to further study". The new Time Magazine review also says, quoting the Chairman of the the First World Congress on Positive Psychology, "There's a temptation to bullshit in positive psychology." (Pardon the language, but it's not mine.)

The Scientific Views Section as it stands now is mainly a promotion for the field of Positive Psychology, the major assertions of which have not withstood the test of time, and in any case, this field already benefits from its own Wikipedia page, disambiguations, and redirects.

The only substantive findings of this field have been correlations, not causations.

It's a misuse of Wikipedia to assert that any habit or practice can cause people to become more happy. As the Time Magazine 2009 review points out, the practices "become stale and stagnant" and those people most likely to chase happiness, the clinically depressed, can end up even "less happy".

I don't think this section warrants being called "Scientific Views", but it if it's not eliminated entirely until it's better done, at least the two sentences mentioned should be removed.

Thanks.

Everyone Else (talk) 22:11, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

_______________

NB Since my last entry on this page I've become authorized to edit the page, and made the requested elisions myself. Everyone Else (talk) 01:44, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

I've closed Everyone Else's edit requests now that EE can edit the article directly. Tesseract, the red colour on EE's username just means EE's user page does not exist, just as a red wikilink in an article indicates the target does not exist. As far as I can tell, it never did exist, so EE's name would have always been red. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 09:17, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Further Reading resource

ISBN-13: 978-1608195107 What's the Economy For, Anyway?: Why It's Time to Stop Chasing Growth and Start Pursuing Happiness David K. Batker (Author) and John de Graaf (Author), Publisher Bloomsbury Press (November 8, 2011) 97.87.29.188 (talk) 23:03, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Please consider linking with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_Ben-Shahar and his book "Happier" Tal Ben-Shahar (2007) Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, McGraw-Hill Professional. ISBN 978-0-07-149239-3 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.151.45.84 (talk) 01:23, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Is the Tal Ben-Shahar comment for a seperate section, Special:Contributions/24.151.45.84? 99.181.134.134 (talk) 04:04, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

(od) From Talk:Tim DeChristopher ... more 'further reading The Politics of Happiness: What Government can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (2010) by Derek Bok, and Derek's spouce Sissela Bok's Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale University Press, 2010). Also, appearently related is The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. 99.35.12.139 (talk) 05:54, 30 November 2011 (UTC)