Happiness Level Definition

The term of happiness is a multi-disciplinary concept because it includes a variety of components such as health condition, mental status, emotional feelings, etc. Thus, the level of individual happiness is not easy to measure. Scholars have differently defined the concept of happiness. For example, Diener et al. (1985) call it as “all of the various types of evaluations, both positive and negative, that people make of their lives” (p.51), and Stiglitz et al. (2009) define it as “cognitive evaluations of one’s life, happiness, satisfaction, positive emotions such as joy and pride, and negative emotions such as pain and worry” (p.15). Some economists have argued that happiness depends on relative income, and thus its level increases relative to other people’s condition in the same location at the same time (Easterlin, 1974; Clark, et al., 2008). Recently, scholars have attempted to use self-reported survey data to measure individual happiness level (Easterlin, 2006; Frey and Stutzer, 2002; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004).

Following the way of previous studies, we also use the

However, individual happiness level increase again after 60s. This is because younger individuals have higher expectations than older adults and the elderly learn to adapt to their abilities and thus become more realistic. This U-shape pattern has been reported in many Western countries including UK and Germany (Clark and Oswald, 1994; Landeghem, 2012; Van Landeghem, 2012). On the other hand, there is an inverse U-shape relationship between happiness and age in the United States (Easterlin, 2006). Scholars have argued that happiness level slightly rises through midlife due to growing satisfaction with work and family life, but after that it decreases due to increasing health