Theories Of Happiness

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CHAPTER 1
The Problem and Its Background
Introduction
It is a common if not the ultimate goal for people to be happy, in any stage of human life. Happiness in fact is almost interchangeably referred to as well-being, is in the heart of positive psychology. The nascent literature on this provides insights to helping professionals like psychologists and counselors who work with families, schools, religious communities and corporations (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). The adolescents in schools are not exempted from wanting to be happy. They involve themselves in activities and leisure that are enjoyable and for some fulfilling. Albeit gratitude has been the favored topic in many disciplines like religion, sociology and economics for centuries, positive psychology focuses on it recently …show more content…

Happiness is about what benefits a person, is good for him and make him better, serves his interests and desirable for his sake. This concept is better known as hedonism which holds subjective raw feeling. Desire theory on the other hand holds that happiness is a matter of getting what people want or the fulfilment of their desires. Objective List Theory lodges that happiness outside of feeling and onto a list of truly valuable things in real world. These three are theories of happiness. (Happiness Scale Manual) Seligman’s (2002) authentic happiness theory as mentioned in the work of Schueller & Seligman, 2010, posits three distinct pathways to well-being: pleasure (Pleasant Life), engagement (Good Life) and meaning (Meaningful Life). This will encompass the three theories of hedonism, desire theory and objective list theory and this is the main theoretical framework of the Happiness Scale that will be used by the

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