Happiness: An Analysis Of The Definition Of Happiness

Definition of Happiness The word happiness is a construct that is believed to be contemplated since ancient times and has experienced booming scientific interest over the past 50 years (Coles et.al, 2015). Considering its growing significance, the interest of studying happiness is indeed increasing, because almost everyone wants happiness and because happiness is important (Lyubomirsky & Sheldon, 2005 as cited by Primasari & Yuniarti, 2012). Happiness is used in various ways and that overall happiness is the evaluation of a person to his/her personal life (Veenhoven. 2015) and it also serves an indicator for the quality of life (Haller & Hadler, 2006 as cited by Abecia et. al, 2014). In support with Veenhoven‟s definition of happiness,

al. (2005) defined happiness as a multidimensional component of cognitive, motivational and unconscious processes that are unique to how life is perceived by individuals (as cited by King et.al, 2014).
Furthermore, the latter definition pointed out by Sen has similarities with Ed Diener’s definition of happiness. As opposed to the term “happiness” that has been used in many studies, Diener advocated the use of Subjective Well Being or SWB (Oishi, et. al., n.d). SWB is an assessment of a person’s life taking in to consideration cognitive and affective aspect of his/her life (Diener, Lucas & Oishi, 2002).
In a study conducted by Coles et.al, 2015 stating that the term Subjective Well-Being (SWB) has emerged as a modern reconceptualization of the construct “happiness,” and this conceptualization according to (Diener, 2000) includes three major components- life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect, and allows for the idea that a large component of personal happiness is subjective (Coles et.al, 2015). Furthermore, Sillick et. al. (2016) explained that “happiness was defined as the absence of negative feelings, the degree and frequency of satisfaction and joy over a given period of

But, in the study that will be undertaken, the word happiness is operationally used as the subjective well-being of a person, as suggested by Diener (2002), SWB is “the aspect of happiness that can be empirically measured”
Also, happiness is part of psychology and commonly referred as Positive Psychology. It is considered as an important construct within positive psychology (Robbins et. al, 2011).
The reason behind this is because psychology has traditionally focuses on dysfunction- problems of people like mental illness. Positive Psychology in contrast to what has been psychology focused with is the relatively new field which tries to examine ordinary people which can be happier and fulfilled (Psychology Today, 2015).
Positive psychology has gained the attention of many psychologists and health researchers and one of the issues raised in positive psychology is happiness, which is considered an important part of quality of life and is above all the wealth (Lesani et. al,