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From the hedonistic to the eudemonistic understanding of happiness

Thursday, 27 December 2012 18:42 | Hits: 93230 |

Евгений Осин

In your opinion, which psychological study done or published within the last 10 years (2002 - 2012) is the most significant and important?

Answers Eugene Osin, candidate of psychological sciences, docent at the faculty of psychology of the National Research University “Higher School of Economics”:

For me, the most important appears to be that positive psychology in the last 10 years has eventually moved from the, as F. Vasilyuk called it, “ontology of the isolated individual” – psychology that studies the human as they were in a vacuum, separated from all their life circumstances and relationships – to studying the human as an essentially social being, linked to other humans. And studies emerge that support these ideas, which were voiced long ago by E. Fromm, S. Rubenstein, and other authors.

A couple of examples:

Barbara Frederickson's loving-kindness meditation experiments: if a human spends time and makes efforts directed at building inside themself a positive outlook on other people, learns to treat them with love and kindness, it significantly improves their own emotional state and facilitates his development.*

Correlational studies by Edward Deci and his colleagues on maintaining autonomy, which show that outlook on others, when a person does not strive to control their friend, partner, colleague, students, etc., but instead allows them to be themselves, supports their autonomy, are related to higher levels of psychological health and success.**

All this leads us towards building of an understanding of happiness, which goes beyond the limits of happiness that is understood as pleasure from satisfaction of needs. Diner at al. have shown the existence of a so-called hedonic treadmill: the more you satisfy needs, the more you need to consume to satisfy them, and the level of happiness does not change.

The eudemonistic happiness, however, which is related to the nature of interaction of the person with the outside world and with other people, is a much more complex process: it may include different emotions, not only positive, but also negative (anguish, sympathy), but brings the stable feeling of fulfillment. I think that in the coming years we will see such an understanding of happiness emerge.

It is towards this goal that the study results of Ilona Bonneville and myself, which will soon be published, are directed: with the aid of a survey, we operationalized the eudemonistic happiness as three closely connected emotional experiences:

1) The feeling of great happiness and satisfaction from life;

2) The feeling that you are on the right track, on your personal life path;

3) The feeling that your life is tied to something bigger, than just yourself.

And we have shown that the origins of this emotional experience are: on one hand, autonomy, which is based on the ability to make efforts to delay satisfaction of needs; and on the other hand, meaning, which becomes the result of being open to the world, and the result of the latter – the feeling that your life makes an input into something bigger (the world, society, lives of other people, etc.)

The Eudemonistic life can be defined as life associated with making an effort directed towards the well-being of others, which brings about a stable feeling of happiness and makes a contribution to something greater.

Eugene Osin
Moscow (Russian Federation), 2012

* Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek,J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions,Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1045–1062. doi:10.1037/a0013262 [Full Text]

** Deci, E. L., La Guardia, J. G., Moller, A. C., Scheiner, M. J., & Ryan, R. M. (2006). On the benefits of giving as well as receiving autonomy support: Mutuality in close friendships.Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 313–327. doi: 10.1177/0146167205282148 [Full text]

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