ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly examines circumscribed positive emotions such as joy before proceeding to a more detailed discussion of happiness. Joy may be conceptualised as the emotional state that may be present in other animals. In humans joy is related to an appraisal that a valued goal has been achieved. The chapter examines the effects of positive mood or happiness on various types of cognitive processing. It explains the various roles of inhibition processes within Schematic Propositional Analogical and Associative Representational Systems (SPAARS). In order to claim that happiness is a function of optimal levels of goal fulfilment across the different domains of self, others and self plus others, a priori assumption is made that for most individuals all three of these goal domains are important. If happiness is a function of the optimal fulfilment of goals of both a higher order and a lower order and across all goal domains, then being happy is clearly a considerable achievement.
