What do Happiness Studies Study Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events - Essay Example

? Critique on James Griffin’s What do Happiness Studies Study? Comparative Critique on James Griffin’s What do Happiness Studies Study? And Richard Lucas’ Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events? The studies by James Griffin and George Lucas both delved into the aspects of happiness and on how we cope with life events. Griffin attempted to define happiness beginning his arguement with the ancient Greek’s “eudaimonia” referring to “having a good guardian spirit” that is ‘‘the state of having an objectively valuable life’’ (2007:140). He also went furhter in dissecting the etymology of the word “happiness” by tracing to its root word “hap”, meaning chance and luck whether it is good and bad in his effort to find the true meaning of happiness. The other study of Lucas that our set point of well being or our normal selves is predominantly biologically determined and our response and how we adapt to happiness life changing events in life fluctuates around that levels but will ultimately settle back to this normal state of well being. Griffin in his study about happines begun by assigning a value at the beginning of his argument particularly when Griffin cited eudaimonia” referring to “having a good guardian spirit” because that defined the trajectory of his argument. He begun associating martyrdom with happiness and formulating imaginary mathematical equation that being “happy now” and “more happy instances” vis-a-vis lesser unhappy instances would net to a happy life that made the paper problematic. The analysis was quite simplistic particularly when Griffin added Hume’s standard of taste because it required putting standard to happiness that can be likened to the concept of right and wrong in being happy. Any modern student of philosophy can refute this argument because we already know that there is no universal formula or standard of happiness. What makes one elated with happiness may be a casual circumstance to another. The bottomline is, what makes one happy will not necessarily make another happy. This test can easily be applied to refute the paper’s argument by also using one of Griffin’s example which is the woman from India who is “badly oppressed and what from the outside looks like a miserable existence” (2007:141) and might be content with small improvement of which such contentment, Griffin argued, would not necessarily mean she has a “happy life”. The trouble with Griffin’s line of argument in this example is he already put a qualifier in the his hypothesis by framing it as “pathetically content with a small improvement in what from the outside looks like a miserable existence” (141). There was already a value judgment in the hypothesis which was supposed to be in the conditional because it is yet to be argued. Such, the conclusion is certain to arrive that she will not be happy because the line of reasoning did not provide room for refutation. It can be contended however that the woman, as opposed to the paper’s contention, is happy to the slightest improvement that will come in her life and not necessarily pathetic as what Griffin has framed. With how Griffin framed his words, it seem that he has not experienced poverty because it became an automatic reaction to him to say that a poor woman despite being content of having little will still be unhappy. It is like refuting his own argument because in his words, Griffin also mentioned that “one’s life is happy if one is content that life has brought one much of what one regards as important” (2007:140). Perhaps in his value system, slight improvement is not significant to be considered important but for those who were already exasperated with poverty, a moment of relief and the slightest of improvement is already bliss. Griffin is arguing from the point of view of a rich man who has not sufferred deprivation of his basic need such that, the provision of basic material things like decent food, clothing and shelter is a given to him that it cannot be considered significant for him to be happy. Unknown to him, that is the aspiration of many people not only among the poor women in India but also in many parts of the world. Lucas study entitled Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being spoke about people’s ability to adapt to any life events “and that happiness levels ?uctuate around a biologically determined set point that rarely changes” (2007:75). Lucas argument in a way is similar to Griffin in the aspect that certain factors deemed important to us can indeed reshape our perception of happiness according to Lucas’ adaptation theory. Lucas however differed because he expounded his theory of happiness that he included unhappy events in our lives such as divorce. His argument is centered on the idea of how we get back to our normal sense of self which he called the baseline levels of subjective well-being. To determine the validity of this hypothesis, Lucas embarked on the data of a 15 year period study of more than 24,000 individuals on how they react to the effects of marital transition such as divorce on their life satisfaction. His study shows that people significantly differ in coping to these situations but tend to go back to their baseline levels or their normal selves. In the study, individuals who reacted strongly to certain life changing situations take longer to get back to their normal selves or to their baseline well-being. This affects their capability with long-lasting satisfaction or happiness but still is destined to get back to their normal sense of selves albeit their coping mechanism may differ. Between the two studies, Lucas approach is more scientific and credible because the study was based on the data of 15 year longitudinal study compared to Griffin’s philosophy and opinion based study. Even if we would like to disagree with Lucas’ study, his arguments are difficult to refute because he has a very big population for his sample that extended for a period of 15 years making the study an authority on the subject matter. In addition, Lucas study was also supported by empirical evidences that are verifiable. On the other hand, Griffin’s study is deficient in scientific approach without any concrete data to fall back into or any empirical evidences but rather he based his interpretation of happiness based on old Greek’s concept of happiness and Hume’s definition of happiness. This renders Griffin’ study vulnerable because it is not grounded on scientific method. As a matter of suggestion to make Griffin’s paper more scientific, he should have approached it from a pure objective view of quantifying happiness that can be backed by hard and solid evidence such as Lucas’ study. Relying on subjective interpretation of philosophers of old such as Aristotle and Hume whose realities are different and not as complex as ours is like using a small ruler to measure a very huge and complex phenomena. Thus, it cannot approximate the subject being studied due to the utter shortcoming of the tool used to measure it. But at least to make it credible and more scientific, Griffin could have associated his arguments about happiness on the chemicals associated to it to make his argument about happiness quantifiable. There are constant variables to happiness. There is a chemical serotonin that scientists from University College, London, University of California, San Diego, Harvard Medical School and the University of Zurich associated it with happiness which is released everytime we feel happy, elated or just plainly feeling good (Breunin 2012). While its stimuli or motivation varies from one person to another, the same chemical is emitted everytime we feel happy. That is a viable option since he could not match the population of Lucas’s sample and length of observation. Had he associated that when he about happiness, his study would have a shade of science on it. Bibliography Dedyna, K. 2005, Serotonin is from Venus and Dopamine is from Mars:, St. Catharines, Ont., Canada, St. Catharines, Ont. Gracyk, Ted (2011). "Hume's Aesthetics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Happiness more than just genes and GDP 2011, , Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Vancouver, B.C. Loretta Graziano Breuning (2012). Meet Your Happy Chemicals: Dopamine, Endorphin, Oxytocin, Serotonin. createSpace Independent Publishing Platform Lucas, Richard (2007). Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events? Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(75):75-78 Read More