Raise of Happiness Following Raised Awareness of How Happy One Feels: A Follow-Up of Repeated Users of the Happiness Ind
- PDF / 1,631,046 Bytes
- 35 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 108 Downloads / 137 Views
Open Access
Raise of Happiness Following Raised Awareness of How Happy One Feels: A Follow-Up of Repeated Users of the Happiness Indicator Website Arnold Bakker 1 & Martijn Burger 2 & Pieter van Haren 3 & Wido Oerlemans 4 & Ruut Veenhoven 5,6 Accepted: 13 March 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
The Happiness Indicator (https://www.happinessindicator.com) is an online tool designed to make people more aware of their own happiness. The theory behind the website is that a keener awareness of one’s own happiness helps one find an optimal lifestyle and consequently promotes happiness among users of the website. In this paper, we describe this tool and explore its effectiveness. Users periodically record how happy they feel on the present day and how happy they have felt over the past month, using the Happiness Comparer. They also have the option of indicating in the Happiness Diary how happy they felt during the various activities of the previous day. Users receive instant feedback in the form of a comparison with their earlier scores and with the average scores of similar users. The website has been online since January 2011; 5411 participants have participated at least twice, and 64% of them used the Happiness Diary one or more times. These numbers are now high enough to permit a first check to see whether repeated use of the Happiness Indicator is followed by the expected rise of the participants’ happiness. We found that the use of the Happiness Comparer was followed by a small non-significant increase in happiness, while using the Happiness Diary was followed by a greater increase and statistically significant upturn. Using the Happiness Diary 10 times, was followed by an average increase in happiness of 1,5%. In addition, we found that the relationship between diary use and rise of happiness was particularly strong for those who felt less happy when they first used the Happiness Indicator. Keywords Happiness . Hedonic level of affect . Life satisfaction . Mood awareness . Self-
help . E-help . Life style . Day reconstruction method DRM
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 5th conference of Positive Psychology in Montreal, Canada, July 13–16, 2017, and published as an EHERO working paper 2015/1. A shortened version of his paper was published as chapter 1 in VanZyl, L. & Rothmann, S. (Eds.) Positive Psychology Interventions: Theories, methodologies and applications within multi-cultural contexts, Springer International, 2019.
* Ruut Veenhoven [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology
1 Introduction 1.1 In Search of Greater Happiness It is in our nature to prefer feeling good over feeling bad (Grinde 2002) and this tendency extends to a universal quest for a satisfying life, commonly called ‘happiness’ (Veenhoven 2011). Currently we pursue happiness probably more than in the past. One reason for this greater weight given to happiness is that our chances of living a satisfying life have increased con
Data Loading...
