Happiness

My thoughts for the post about being thankful continued to rattle around my brain for a few days after I’d written it, and found myself beginning to think about the connection between thankfulness and happiness. The obvious link is that if we can find it in ourselves to be thankful for even small everyday things, our mood improves and we feel happy. My question then was how do I know whether this is happiness is real, since I’ve essentially set myself up to feel it.

I immediately Googled “happiness test” to see if there was a scientific way of answering my question. The first option was an amazing motherlode of information and quizzes – and the location is right in my back yard…well, nearly! It turns out that Penn has a department of positive psychology, and their website has a battery of quizzes you can take to find out how happy-or depressed-you are. As a longtime answerer of quizzes and questionnaires, I immediately signed up (the results become part of the research so your consent to participate is required) and got going.

It seems that regardless of my list, I am for the most part an authentically happy person, scoring 3.63 on a scale from 0-5. As someone whose radar for inauthentic emotions is finely-tuned, am glad to learn that my happiness is more than 50% real! Now if you’ll excuse me, its time to go and take the optimism test. What do you think your authentic happiness score is?