What are your associations with the word "happiness"?

Question

Age:
Gender:
Profession:
Country:

Perception:
Feelings: (what you feel...)
Picture:(mother,father ...)
Notion:(happiness is....)

Thank you ever so much for your participation!!!Diana

Answer 1

You need to provide a definiton for "happiness": long-term or short-term (fleeting)? Also, happiness (or lack thereof) seems to be a LEARNED APPROACH TO LIFE:

"What's happiness?
There are at least four meanings to the word "happiness":

1. A pleasant, passing emotion that arises from immediate circumstances, for example being hugged by your lover, eating a chocolate, or finding money.

2. A pleasant feeling of anticipation: "Oh boy, tomorrow is Christmas."

3. A feeling of relief from stress and unpleasant feelings, as in "I'll be glad when this assignment is turned in," or "Good news, I don't have to go to the dentist today after all."

4. Retrospective satisfaction with a long-term situation: "We've had a pretty happy marriage," or "I'm happy in this job."

It is the fourth meaning that the psychologists try to study. It is called a "a pervasive sense of psychological well-being" in the literature[1]. This is a reasonable choice. The first three kinds of happiness are fleeting. The second and third are set up by some preceding stress, so to create them you have to first create the stress. All these feelings are welcome when they come, but it wouldn't be practical to say "I want a life of more hugs, Christmas mornings, and cancelled dental appointments." However, it is practical to say, "I want a life such that, when I look back over it, I evaluate it as very satisfying."
Oddly enough, people's reports of this fourth kind of happiness turn out to be ridiculously flexible, easily influenced by their recent experiences of the first three.

Consequences of happiness as a feeling balance

The revolutionary point in this is that both the overall intensity of our feelings and the balance point between good and bad feelings are more closely related to our personality traits than they are to the external circumstances of life. Happiness depends less on what happens than on how we feel about what happens.

If happiness is determined by personality, a second outcome should be that, because personality is relatively stable over time, people should report consistent levels of happiness after a long interval, without any regard to any changes in their lives during that time. That is just the result from a number of longitudinal studies.

We can predict future happiness far more accurately from measures of past happiness than from such significant life circumstances as marital status, sex, race, or age.[7]

In other words, there are happy people and unhappy people, and they tend to remain happy or unhappy throughout their lives, no matter what happens to them.

Personality traits of happiness

What are the personality traits that determine long-term happiness? The late Angus Campbell made a career of measuring the sense of well-being. He identified two key personality traits. One was a sense of efficacy, or personal control; the second was self-esteem:

If we isolate that part of the population which expresses both a strong sense of personal control and a high level of satisfaction with self (about 15 percent of the total), we find that we have identified a group of people with extraordinarily positive feelings of well-being. Three out of five of these people describe themselves as "very happy," hardly any of them express themselves as dissatisfied with life in general, very few (4 percent) feel they have not received their reasonable share of happiness...[8]

Other studies isolated the balance of optimism versus pessimism as a key trait. David Myers, in his survey of happiness research[9], settles on a list of four general traits

1. Extraversion: the tendency to be sociable and outgoing. Costa and McCrea included "warmth" and "vigor" in this heading.

2. Self-esteem: the tendency to approve of yourself, to answer Yes to survey questions like "I am a loyal friend" or "People tend to like me."

3. Efficacy: a belief that you can control the circumstances of your life, so you answer Yes to questions like "I usually achieve what I set out to do," or "An individual can affect some government decisions."

4. Optimism: the tendency to see good events as likely to continue and to view bad events as temporary setbacks.

HOPE THAT HELPED!

Answer 2

What are your associations with the word "happiness"?
Age: 34
Gender: male
Profession: financial aid education
Country: u.s.a.

Perception: life is what you make it
Feelings: i feel and then it changes and then I feel again
Picture: mom, dad, sis, bro
Notion: happiness is when the sun catches your eye not enough to blind you painfully but enough to show you - when you feel it upon your skin and you can look up to see it but you don't. Not because you are afraid that it will hurt your eyes, but because you know that you don't have to.

Answer 3

Age: 36
Gender: Female
Profession: Dog Trainer
Country: Canada

Perception: unrealistic
Feelings: (what you feel...) curiosity
Picture:(mother,father ...) David Koresh's followers at Waco, Texas
Notion:(happiness is....) a myth

Contentment is more my style. I've not had a lot of happiness in my life. I prefer to be just content. The ever-smiling, dancing fools can have it.

Answer 4

Happiness is a voluntary state of mind..
You can control it pretty much independantly of
your circumstances & surroundings...
Work on it and just be happy...
Choose to be happy...

Answer 5

Your above topics have no bearing on happiness, what does, is, health, friends, family and enough money to meet ur needs.

Answer 6

peace
the rest, all those topics, are irrelevant to happiness
age, gender, etc, all insignificant.
peace (happiness) is an inside event

Answer 7

Wickedness, injustice, grief, pessimism, trouble, loneliness, fear, stress, frustration, distrust, unscrupulousness, anxiety, rage, jealousy, resentment, drug addiction, immorality, gambling, prostitution, hunger, poverty, social corruption, theft, war, struggle, violence, oppression, fear of death… News about these issues appear in the newspapers and on TV every day. The popular press devotes entire pages to these subjects, while others serialise articles about their psychological and social aspects. However, our acquaintance with these feelings is not limited solely to the press; in daily life, we, too, frequently come across such problems and, more importantly, personally experience them.
People and societies endeavour to liberate themselves from the distressing experiences, disorder and repressive social structures that have prevailed over the world for long periods. We only need to glance at ancient Greece; the Great Roman Empire; Tsarist Russia, or the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and even the 20th century-a century of misery which saw two world wars and world-wide social disasters. No matter upon which century or location you concentrate your research, the picture will not be appreciably different.
If this is the case, why haven't people succeeded in solving these problems, or at least some efforts been made to remove such social diseases from society?
People have encountered these problems in all ages, yet each time they have failed to find any solutions because the methods they employed were inappropriate. They sought various solutions, tried different political systems, laid down impracticable and totalitarian rules, stirred up revolutions or subscribed to perverted ideologies, while many others preferred to adopt an indifferent attitude and merely accepted the status quo.
In our day, people are almost numbed by this way of living. They readily believe these problems to be "facts of life." They picture a society immune to these problems as being nothing short of impossible-a dream utopia. They persistently and openly express their distaste for such a way of living, yet easily embrace it, since they think they have no other alternative.
The resolution of all these problematic issues is possible only by living by the principles of the "true religion." Only when the values of true religion prevail can a pleasant and tranquil scene replace this gloomy and unfavourable picture, which is doomed to continue so long as God's limits are ignored. To put it another way, people are enslaved by these complications as long as they avoid the values of the Qur'an. Put simply, this is the "nightmare of disbeliefe" and the link below for this wonderful book:

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you will find how the regulation of life by the "norms of morality" introduced by the Qur'an revealed to mankind by God will banish the "nightmare of disbeliefe," how pessimism, corruption and social restlessness can be eliminated from society, how the individual can surround himself with an ideal environment, what spiritual and material benefits he is likely to attain by adherence to these norms of morality are gone into in detail, and finally, that the unique alternative to all these problems is the morality of the Qur'an.
So far, many books have attempted to deal with the social and psychological problems societies face. Yet, what distinguishes this book from others is its stress on the most realistic solution. It also sincerely warns people against the troublesome future they are likely to face if they fail to resort to this solution.
We expect that every reader of conscience will grasp that peace, mutual trust and an ideal social life is attainable only by embracing the values of the Qur'an and will turn to the true religion, which is Islam.
They will then happily join the ranks of those who never suffer, mentally or physically, from any of the above-mentioned complications. Around them, there will always be an abundance of favours, comfort, love, respect, peace and confidence, and moral virtues will prevail. They will know how to earn God's approval, by observing His limits and the commandments of the Qur'an. They will thus, by having faith in God, attain His mercy and at last enter Paradise.

Real happiness and peace can be ONLY found in submitting to the commands of the Creator and the Sustainer of this world. God has said in the Qur’an: (Truly, in remembering God do hearts find rest.)
(Qur’an, 13:28)

On the other hand, the one who turns away from the Qur’an will have a life of hardship in this world. God has said:
(But whoever turns away from the Qur’an, he will have a hard life, and We will raise him up blind on the Day of Judgment.) (Qur’an, 20:124)
This may explain why some people commit suicide while they enjoy the material comfort money can buy. For example, look at Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam), formerly a famous pop singer who used to earn sometimes more than $150,000 a night. After he converted to Islam, he found true happiness and peace, which he had not found in material success.
To read the stories of people who have converted to Islam, please visit

http://www.islam-guide.com/stories

At this web page, you can read the thoughts and feelings of these people, who are from different countries and have different backgrounds and levels of education.


Useful link:

(A BRIEF ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING ISLAM)

http://www.islam-guide.com/islam-guide.pdf

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THE SECRET OF THE TEST
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THE MIRACLE OF MAN'S CREATION :
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PERISHED NATIONS -1:
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Answer 8

feeling good

Answer 9

think what is important to you !!!!!!!!!!!!well i suggest feeling.

Answer 10

... ...beer.