Before considering happiness, it should be said that specific positive emotions have not, in general, been dealt with as well as specific negative emotions. This is not the place to offer possible explanations for this other than to say that negative emotions have to be coped with; the aim is to regulate them, to get rid of them or at least to reduce their impact. Positive emotions are simply to be enjoyed rather than endured. It is therefore not surprising that psychologists and others have spent more time in an attempt to understand the negative than the positive emotions. However, with increasing attention being paid to emotion regulation, the matter of the maintenance of positive emotions becomes of greater moment.
One result of this bias is that, although there are some empirical investigations of the positive emotions and considerable attempts made to theorize about love (see later), other positive emotions have not received much theoretical attention. For example, it is hard to find clear distinctions between happiness, joy and elation. From the viewpoint of differential emotions theory, Izard (1991) concentrates on what he calls enjoyment and joy and distinguishes between the experience of joy and the experience of satisfaction or sensory pleasure. He characterizes joy as involving a sense of confidence and contentment, and often as including a feeling of either being lovable or, more specifically, loved.
Izard sees joy as a state that follows various experiences rather than as a direct result of action. So, we are likely to experience joy after stress or negative emotion has finished, or following creativity, for example. From an evolutionary perspective its effect is to help in maintaining us as social beings. Izard believes that joy and other emotions interact and can affect perception and cognition. It can not only slow down behaviour but can also induce a sort of open creativity. In one of his typically cogent analyses, Averill (Averill & More, 1993) considers happiness in general and argues that ideas about it have remained obdurately fuzzy because its scope is so broad. He believes that it does not help to deal with more circumscribed concepts such as joy, this merely substituting the part for the whole. Furthermore, Averill and More argue that happiness defies understanding because of its depths of meaning. For example, if happiness in its own right is considered the greatest good then it may well involve pain and suffering, which might seem anomalous. Anyway, in short, happiness is more difficult to conceptualize than many specific emotions because of both its breadth and its depth.
Averill and More distinguish between three approaches to understanding happiness, emphasizing, respectively, systems of behaviour, enabling mechanisms and personality characteristics. They argue that an understanding of happiness must take into account social/psychological as well as biological systems of behaviour. The psychological systems are those that help the development (or actualization) of self. From this perspective there are five matters that Averill and More believe must be considered:
- Happiness is associated with the optimal functioning of behavioural systems. So, although people might seek happiness it is not simply for its own sake.
- Systems are hierarchically ordered, and happiness at one level is informed by higher levels and given substance by lower levels. So, the levels interact.
- Happiness is closely linked to systems that are concerned with social order, systems that clearly involve values. So, in this sense happiness is related o values.
- Happiness often involves compromise in the sense that one system (say, the biological) may have to be sacrificed at the expense of another (the social or psychological). When this occurs, happiness cannot be associated with tranquillity, as is sometimes thought.
- Happiness is an individual matter, each person having a distinct propensity or capacity for it. It might be capable of relatively objective measurement, but it remains a subjective or individual construct.
From Averill's perspective, enabling mechanisms are concerned with the inner workings of happiness, or whatever the emotion might be, rather than its origins and functions. Again, any analysis can be made from a biological, psychological or social viewpoint. There has been recent emphasis on "gap" theories that derive from extrinsic mechanisms of happiness. Michalos (1985, 1986) describes the gaps as between what one wants and what one has, actual and ideal; actual and expected conditions; actual and best previous conditions; what one has and what others have; and personal and environmental attributes. Although they have an appeal to common sense, such gap theories are in fact rather weak on explanatory power. The final account of happiness is via personality mechanisms or, more properly, traits. Here, according to Averill and More the important theoretical questions concern the conditions under which happiness is related to specific personality traits. Their final position is that happiness is dynamic, it is never complete and is perhaps best seen as the optimal functioning of behavioural systems.
