Lecture 2 - Hedonic Happiness

Hedonic happiness is made up of three parts: life satisfaction + high positive affect + low negative affect. Life satisfaction is derived from the similarity of your reality to the ideal that you have for your situation. That is, if you are living a life that you imaged you should be living, you will have high life satisfaction. High positive affect means that you will have a lot of good emotions and good feelings, while low negative affect means that your life will be free from negative emotions and feelings. Therefore, life satisfaction is the cognitive component of subjective wellbeing, while high positive affect and low negative affect are the emotional components of SWB.

There are two arguments regarding SWB. Bottom-up arguments focus on the idea that certain characteristics or actions of people cause them to be happy, while top-down arguments are centered around the idea that wellbeing causes people to act a certain way. Many different circumstances revolving around subjective wellbeing could potentially be explained by either a top-down or bottom-up approach. For example, people getting married may cause them to be happy, while at the same time, happy people may be more likely to get married. In any case, both approaches focus on the cause-effect relationships that take place involving wellbeing, although they have opposing explanations.