A Few Simple Questions
At the annual conference of the American Psychological Association last summer, Erik Angner, Ph.D., presented his findings on the pre-history of happiness research in the early 20th century. For those who’re intoxicated with the field’s status on the cutting edge, Angner’s paper offered some sobering insights into the value of learning from those who have gone before.
Angner is especially interested in the work of Goodman Watson. “He was a professor of educational psychology at Columbia University who wrote a prominent article in 1930 that outlined his determination to explore whether it was possible to measure happiness,” Angner explains.
“He gave subjects question after question about their happiness to see whether their answers suggested something useful. In one such test, he gave subjects a line with clearly marked endpoints. One end said ‘Most Miserable of All’ and the other said ‘Happiest of All,’ and the subjects were expected to draw a little mark where they felt their happiness lay as compared to others. Then they were asked to draw a circle around the point where they thought their friends would rate them. And then they were given a series of short sentences, from ‘Cheerful, gay spirits most of the time’ to, ‘Occasionally bothered by something, but can usually laugh it off,’ to, I forget the exact wording here, but it was something like, ‘Nothing matters much, there has been so much hurt that laughter would be empty mockery.’ And subjects were expected to check the ones that applied.”
Since Watson, many researchers in several fields have continued in the search for the best methods to divine a person’s true level of happiness, Angner says. “Some of these measures fell by the wayside, but it turned out that many of them worked pretty well, and if you asked teachers or spouses or friends how happy a person was, their ratings would corresponded quite well to the individual’s own data. So over time these early researchers came to the conclusion that the easiest way to measure happiness might also be one of the best: Just ask people, on a scale from 0 to 10, how happy they are. Sometimes these numbers can be expected to be too high, sometimes too low, but all in all they might be quite accurate.”
One of the standard tests involves giving subjects a series of four questions using a 0-7 scale, then averaging their answers to arrive at a “happiness score.” The method is still being used today—among others, in Angner’s own research.
“I’ve teamed up with some of the people in our medical school to administer these questions to large populations around Alabama,” he says. “We’ll be looking at the connection between their happiness ratings and their health status, among other things. Is it the case that good health leads to happiness or does happiness lead to good health? Both might be true. We also want to know which disorders or diseases tend to be more strongly correlated with happiness and unhappiness. And then there are all sorts of other factors to study: ethnicity, living conditions, income, social structure, support networks, church membership. There’s a long series of things that could influence peoples’ happiness, and we’re trying to disentangle and define those relationships.”