Factor of happines

Positive psychology
Since 2000 the field of positive psychology has expanded drastically in terms of scientific publications, and has produced many different views on causes of happiness, and on factors that correlate with happiness.^[88] Numerous short-term self-help interventions have been developed and demonstrated to improve happiness.^[89][90]
Indirect approaches
Various writers, including Camus and Tolle, have written that the act of searching or seeking for happiness is incompatible with being happy.^{[91][92][93][94]}
John Stuart Mill believed that for the great majority of people happiness is best achieved en passant, rather than striving for it directly. This meant no self-consciousness, scrutiny, self-interrogation, dwelling on, thinking about, imagining or questioning on one's happiness. Then, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, one would "inhale happiness with the air you breathe."^[95]
Natural occurrence
William Inge observed that "on the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so."^[96] Orison Swett Marden said that "some people are born happy."
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a popular therapeutic method used to change habits by merely changing thoughts. It focuses on emotional regulation and utilizes a lot of positive psychology practices. It is often used for people with depression or anxiety, and works towards how to lead a happier life.
Negative effects
June Gruber argued that happiness may have negative effects. It may trigger a person to be more sensitive, more gullible, less successful, and more likely to undertake high risk behaviours.^[99] She also conducted studies suggesting that seeking happiness can have negative effects, such as failure to meet over-high expectations.^{[100][101][102]} Iris Mauss has shown that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they will set up too high of standards and feel disappointed.^[103][104]
Limits
The idea of motivational hedonism is the theory that pleasure is the aim for human life.^[105] However, according to impact bias, people are poor predictors of their future emotions.^[106] Therefore, can happiness be sought after and pain be avoided, if it is considered to be unpredictable and unsustainable? Sigmund Freud said that all humans strive after happiness, but that the possibilities of achieving it are restricted because we "are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from the state of things.

Pursuit
Not all cultures seek to maximise happiness. It has been found in Western cultures that individual happiness is the most important. However, other cultures have opposite views and tend to be aversive to the idea of individual happiness. For example, people living in Eastern Asian cultures focus more on the need for happiness within relationships with others and even find personal happiness to be harmful to fulfilling happy social relationships.^{[62][61][108][nb 2][nb 3]}
A 2012 study found that psychological well-being was higher for people who experienced both positive and negative emotions.^{[109][110][111]}
Examination
Happiness can be examined in experiential and evaluative contexts. Experiential well-being, or "objective happiness", is happiness measured in the moment via questions such as "How good or bad is your experience now?". In contrast, evaluative well-being asks questions such as "How good was your vacation?" and measures one's subjective thoughts and feelings about happiness in the past. Experiential well-being is less prone to errors in reconstructive memory, but the majority of literature on happiness refers to evaluative well-being. The two measures of happiness can be related by heuristics such as the peak–end rule.^[112]
Some commentators focus on the difference between the hedonistic tradition of seeking pleasant and avoiding unpleasant experiences, and the eudaimonic tradition of living life in a full and deeply satisfying way.^[113]
Measurement
People have been trying to measure happiness for centuries. In 1780, the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed that as happiness was the primary goal of humans it should be measured as a way of determining how well the government was performing.^[114]
Several scales have been developed to measure happiness:

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  The Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) is a four-item scale, measuring global subjective happiness from 1999. The scale requires participants to use absolute ratings to characterize themselves as happy or unhappy individuals, as well as it asks to what extent they identify themselves with descriptions of happy and unhappy individuals.^[115][116]
  
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  The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) from 1988 is a 20-item questionnaire, using a five-point Likert scale (1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely) to assess the relation between personality traits and positive or negative affects at "this moment, today, the past few days, the past week, the past few weeks, the past year, and in general".^[117] A longer version with additional affect scales was published 1994.^[118]
  
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  The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) is a global cognitive assessment of life satisfaction developed by Ed Diener. A seven-point Likert scale is used to agree or disagree with five statements about one's life.^[119][120]
  
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  The Cantril ladder method^[121] has been used in the World Happiness Report. Respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.^[122][121]
  
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  Positive Experience; the survey by Gallup asks if, the day before, people experienced enjoyment, laughing or smiling a lot, feeling well-rested, being treated with respect, learning or doing something interesting. 9 of the top 10 countries in 2018 were South American, led by Paraguay and Panama. Country scores range from 85 to 43.^[123]
  

Since 2012, a World Happiness Report has been published. Happiness is evaluated, as in "How happy are you with your life as a whole?", and in emotional reports, as in "How happy are you now?," and people seem able to use happiness as appropriate in these verbal contexts. Using these measures, the report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness. In subjective well-being measures, the primary distinction is between cognitive life evaluations and emotional reports.^{[124][citation needed]}
The UK began to measure national well-being in 2012,^[125] following Bhutan, which had already been measuring gross national happiness.^[126][127]
Happiness has been found to be quite stable over time.^[128][129]
Relationship to physical characteristics and heritability
As of 2016, no evidence of happiness causing improved physical health has been found; the topic is being researched at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.^[130] A positive relationship has been suggested between the volume of the brain's gray matter in the right precuneus area and one's subjective happiness score.^[131]
Sonja Lyubomirsky has estimated that 50 percent of a given human's happiness level could be genetically determined, 10 percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining 40 percent of happiness is subject to self-control.^[132][133]
When discussing genetics and their effects on individuals it is important to first understand that genetics do not predict behavior. It is possible for genes to increase the likelihood of individuals being happier compared to others, but they do not 100 percent predict behavior.
At this point in scientific research, it has been hard to find a lot of evidence to support this idea that happiness is affected in some way by genetics. In a 2016 study, Michael Minkov and Michael Harris Bond found that a gene by the name of SLC6A4 was not a good predictor of happiness level in humans.^[134]
On the other hand, there have been many studies that have found genetics to be a key part in predicting and understanding happiness in humans.^[135] In a review article discussing many studies on genetics and happiness, they discussed the common findings.^[136] The author found an important factor that has affected scientist findings this being how happiness is measured. For example, in certain studies when subjective wellbeing is measured as a trait heredity is found to be higher, about 70 to 90 percent. In another study, 11,500 unrelated genotypes were studied, and the conclusion was the heritability was only 12 to 18 percent. Overall, this article found the common percent of heredity was about 20 to 50 percent.^[137]
Economic and political views
Newly commissioned officers celebrate their new positions by throwing their midshipmen covers into the air as part of the U.S. Naval Academy class of 2011 graduation and commissioning ceremony.