It’s been over 3 weeks since I said I’d start a small project. And here I am, finally starting the project. Please don’t ask me, “what took you so long?” Because I don’t have an answer – I know, it’s not cool. well, I’m not cool ;-p
So… here’s the first study I want to introduce in my blog.
Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientation to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 25-41.
BTW, anyone wondering what the heck this complicated reference style, I’m using the APA style (American Psychological Association style). It’s just what I’m used to, so please bear with me.
I found (and still do) this study interesting because it combined two of my research interests, happiness and flow, in a somewhat unexpected way.
Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005) believed there were three ways to be happy: through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Before this study, typically there were two conceptions of happiness: hedonism (or the life of pleasure) and eudemonia (or the life of meaning). Inspired by Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Peterson et al. added a third one, engagement. (Some might not agree with Peterson et al. though; e.g., Waterman, 1993).
Based on this conceptualization of happiness, the researchers conducted a study to answer the following questions:
- Are these three orientations to happiness (meaning, engagement, pleasure) empirically distinguishable individual differences?
- Is an orientation to pleasure incompatible with an orientation to engagement, or is it possible to pursue these different ways of being happy?
- Do these three orientations each contribute to life satisfaction, or are some more important than others?
- Are there interactions between or among these orientations with respect to life satisfaction?
They surveyed 845 adults online asking questions about their happiness orientation, life satisfaction, etc.
They discovered the following:
- The younger, the less educated, or the unmarried were somewhat higher in their endorsement of an orientation to pleasure.
- Each of the orientations to happiness predicted life satisfaction, from small (pleasure) to moderate (engagement, meaning) degrees.
- Respondents simultaneously low on all three orientations reported the least life satisfaction. According to the authors, they may be called to have “empty life”.
- Respondents simultaneously high on all three orientations reported the greatest life satisfaction. They can be seen as having “full life” and were more likely to be older, to be married, and to be more highly educated.
Interesting, isn’t it? Of course, one might say this study doesn’t prove pursuing all three happiness orientations make you happy. In other words, this study didn’t reveal that the pursuit of meaning, engagement, and pleasure indeed resulted in full life.
Still, the results of this study provide more insights on happiness. There are (at least) three ways we can define and pursue happiness. (This probably explains why my sister and I often got into an argument when we talked about happiness, when I was 20!). You can be happy by pursuing the life of pleasure, engagement, or meaning. But your life might get fuller when you pursue the life of pleasure, engagement, and meaning.
Like Seligman once said, when you think of happiness as a cake, meaning and engagement make up the two bottom layers and pleasure makes the icing on the cake. So, you need (or want) them all! ;)
If you’re curious what your happiness orientations are or how full your life is, go check it out. www.authentichappiness.com (”Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire”)