ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes some psychological work on happiness, offers a further initial orientation, on a subject that can be hard to pin down – without pretending that the result is a definitive, once-and-for-all statement. Psychology, in contrast, often implies a rather uniform human phenomenon, or purely individual variables. Many psychologists argue that there are certain “basic” emotions, innate to the human species that reveal themselves through standard facial expressions. Psychologists have tried to push beyond the fairly obvious proposition that happy people “feel good”. A happy person manages to maximize certain supportive or positive emotions, like joy and pride, and minimize emotions that are more painful. The hedonic argument sees happiness simply as maximization of pleasure and greatest possible avoidance of pain; and because each individual has his or her own definitions of pleasure and pain, this approach is fairly subjective.
