Thesis Chapter 1-Part 3, Corey Keyes's Model of Well-Being

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Keyes’s Model of Well-Being

Psychologists in the field of positive psychology and the broader field of psychology have come up with a number of models through which people can understand happiness. Of these models, Corey Keyes’s is especially impressive in its thoroughness in exploring the life that yields happiness. Keyes, an internationally acclaimed scholar in sociology and psychology, is known for his interdisciplinary approach to the study of mental health and living well. His model outlines what a flourishing life consists of. Many scholars and policy makers dealing with mental health and well-being issues have adopted this model for use in studying well-being and creating and evaluating social policies respectively.[1] Providing a full “strengths and weaknesses” analysis of the model is beyond the scope of this thesis. So is exploring or comparing the many models of happiness and flourishing that are in use. For the purposes of my thesis, I will list and discuss the elements of well-being in Keyes’s model and later use them to build and discuss my main claims that shame is a major threat to happiness and that flourishing requires resilience to shame.

Corey Keyes traces his own ideas to two ancient patterns of thought about happiness. These are best represented in the Greek words “hedonia” and “eudaimonia”. “Hedonia” is the etymological root for the English word Hedonic that means pleasure. Eudaimonia is a term that was popularized in ancient Rome by Aristotle. It refers to the sense of pleasure that one gets from personal growth or living out one’s life, which for Aristotle meant growing in virtue. Eudaimonia is the pleasure one feels after doing something honorable as opposed to hedonia, the pleasure from physical sensations. Flourishing, for Keyes, is the combination of Hedonic Well-being and Eudaimonic Well-Being, that is, feeling good and functioning well respectively.

Keyes lists thirteen signs of Mental Well-Being or Flourishing. These can be divided into three main classes: feeling good, private well-being and public well-being. Feeling good constitutes what he calls “hedonia” while the other two make up Eudaimonia. Below is a list of the thirteen signs of Flourishing.

 1    Excitement or interest in life

 2    Satisfaction with one’s life

 3    Social Contribution

 4    Social Integration

 5    Social Growth and Potential

 6    Social Acceptance

 7    Social Coherence

 8    Self-acceptance

 9    Environmental Mastery

 10 Positive intimate relationships

 11 Personal growth

 12 Autonomy

 13 Purpose in life

Keyes and others who follow his model look for those thirteen signs to determine the level of Flourishing. In terms of the actual measurement, the researchers do not look for the amount of episodes or their quality. Rather they ask one to evaluate one’s own experience using the questions shown in the table. Each question represents a component from the list of thirteen we made. The measurements exist along a continuum but one needs “Almost every day” (Scale 5) or “Every day” (Scale 6) for at least half of these thirteen questions. Without delving too deep into the technicalities of the method of measuring and evaluating the measurements, one can notice that this model does offer a detailed and very extensive framework for thinking about happiness and living well. It is difficult to conceive a form of happiness that is not included in this model.

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[1]  Scottish Government's National Program for Improving Mental Health and Well-being 2008; Canadian Association of College and University Students Services 2012. Keyes has also participated in conferences and publications on Mental Health with the World Health Organization, U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Public Health Canada and the United Kingdom’s National Health Services.

Thesis Chapter 1 part 2. Happiness as/from the life well lived

Happiness as the life well lived

Based on my assumption that people want to be happy, I will now examine and defend the argument that the way to attain and maintain happiness is through living well. I will use the “flourishing” model of living well to show how happiness can be yielded from pursuit of optimum functioning. This, clearly, is no new argument. The idea that happiness is to be found through living in a certain way is present in all the leading religions of the world. The book of Psalms representing both Christian and Jewish thought opens thus;

Blessed (Happy, fortunate, prosperous, and enviable) is the man who walks and lives not in the counsel of the ungodly (following their advice, their plans and purposes)… But his delight and desire are in the law of the Lord…And he shall be like a tree firmly planted by the streams of water, ready to bring forth its fruit in its season…everything he does shall prosper (and come to maturity).[1]

By this account, the happy person is one who ignores the ways of the world and lives by the law of God. This excerpt is a good example of religion teaching that a life lived around a certain teaching guarantees one of happiness.

Religions are not the only ones that have taught that people can find happiness through living in a certain way. As discussed in my introduction, the philosophers of Ancient Rome believed and taught the same thing. Epicurus, for example, represents a whole school of thought built around the idea that there is a certain way of life by which people can attain happiness. In fact, the ethics and laws that govern human societies mainly exist to serve this purpose; to guide societies in preserving their collective happiness. “We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what is good for, and if we can examine all the main objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.”[2]

While religions and philosophies seem to agree that there is a way of life that leads to happiness, they do not always identify the same things as leading to happiness. Just as there were a number of competing philosophies in Ancient Rome spreading theories about the happy life, so are there competing religious teachings on how happiness is to be attained. Fortunately, happiness has recently become the subject of scientific inquiry. Positive psychology is a new academic field that seeks to investigate, scientifically, the nature of happiness, and what people can do to attain or increase their happiness. Here, I explore one model of happiness that represents not only positive psychology but actually a combination of positive psychology theory with fields like sociology, philosophy and public health.

Flourishing

The concept of “flourishing” is perhaps the most significant contributions of positive psychology to the ongoing discussions about happiness. Flourish is obviously an English word that predates positive psychology. It means “to grow well; to be healthy and happy, thrive.”[3] Flourish is synonymous with words such as bloom, develop, succeed, blossom and bear fruit. Theorists in positive psychology have built on this dictionary definition of the word flourish a construct that means “to live with an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth and resilience.”[4] This kind of life, I argue, is the way to happiness.

In his book Flourish, Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, traces his own transformation from thinking about happiness to thinking about well-being thus:

I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing.[5]

This thesis is not concerned with the metamorphosis of Seligman as a scholar or that of the field of positive psychology. The important idea that I develop from the above quote is that, just as positive psychology has transitioned from being concerned with happiness to being concerned with flourishing, anyone interested in the attainment and maintenance of happiness should also look at happiness from a broader perspective. That is, a perspective that looks beyond what happiness is to explore the broader life in which happiness can be regularly realized. Seligman changed his goal from happiness after realizing that, happiness (positive feelings of pleasure and contentment) results naturally from a live well lived. Below I explore one model of living well (flourishing) in detail.

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[1] Psalms 1:1-3 (Amplified Version).

[2]  Gilbert, Stumbling Upon Happiness, 69.

[3]  Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 594.

[4]   B. L Fredrickson and M.F. Losanda, “Positive Affect and Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing,” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 678.

[5]   Seligman, Flourish, Location 305-310.

Believe it or not, It's all about being happy.

Chapter 1

Happiness, the motivation of all behavior

Most dictionaries show happiness to be generally understood as pleasure or positive emotion. It has synonyms with words such as joy, bliss, delight and satisfaction. Some dictionaries distinguish between two broad categories of happiness.[1] On one hand is the more expressive happiness as would be captured in words like exhilaration, pleasure, delight, and interest. The other, more passive sense of happiness is one captured in words like satisfied, content and satiated. The former meaning is the more common one, and most often when people hear and use the word happiness, this is what they refer to. This meaning of happiness generally carries a somewhat negative connotation since people associate it with the pleasures from physical indulgences.

The general classification of happiness into pleasure and satisfaction is not a modern invention. Even ancient thinkers like Epicurus made similar distinctions, classifying pleasure into kinetic pleasure and static pleasure. While Epicurus and Epicureanism have come to be associated with sensuous pleasure, drink, food and festivities, these elements are far from the philosophy that Epicurus and his followers taught and lived by. In one of his letters, he wrote,

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul.[2]

Evidently, Epicurus was not one given to a life of unending indulgences. He sought, through rigorous thought, to lead people towards a rational and honorable path of living well enough to be able to enjoy living life and being satisfied with it.

Likewise, in this treatise, the assumption that all people want to be happy does not mean that all people want to live a life of physical indulgences. Indeed history abounds with people who have sacrificed indulgences and have claimed a sense of pleasure and satisfaction from doing so. Happiness in this treatise means a positive emotional state, a subjective internal state of pleasure that can be seen in external expressions, smiles, celebration or that may remain unseen to the observer. Such a notion would apply equally to the person who goes for a week of partying as one who denies himself food and other physical pleasures for the same period of time. Arguably, these two people are looking for the same thing, and that thing in this treatise I call happiness.

The Universal pursuit of happiness

Many great thinkers on human behavior have expressed the sentiment that all people want to be happy, or, that happiness is the ultimate end of all human endeavors. However, this idea still makes many people frown with doubt or outright disagreement. It was the great philosopher and Mathematician, Pascal who observed that,

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and others avoiding it, it is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.[3]

In light of the above, to call happiness the ultimate goal of all people is not an overstatement. Happiness is clearly the primary motivation of human behavior. Everyone acts to attain or maintain this state, even those who do not realize it. As Freud observed,

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.... We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.[4]

If Freud is right, and by all appearances he is, then, “Yes! Indeed, everyone wants to be happy”. Perhaps psychopaths and mentally disturbed people may be exceptions to this rule. Otherwise, it is reasonable and academically viable to assume that any normal person seeks to be happy, and organizes his or her own life towards attaining happiness or some form of gratification.

Daniel Gilbert reiterates the same position when he says,

If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction, and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them. The dictionary tells us that to prefer is “to choose or want one thing rather than another because it would be more pleasant,” which is to say that the pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire.[5]

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[1]  Cambridge Advanced Lerner’s Dictionary 2005.

[2]   Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus. http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html accessed on March 20, 2012.

[3]   Pascal quoted in, Gilbert, Stumbling Upon Happiness, 32.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. Electronic Version Buckinghamshire: Chrysoma Assocites, 1929. Quoted in Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 32.

[5] Gilbert, Stumbling Upon Happiness, 31.

Thesis 002 "Introduction" -Purpose and Methodology

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Purpose of Study 

As indicated above, the general purpose of this study was to address the apparent lack in qualities that seemed crucial for leading happy lives: genuineness and sincerity. I retain this same purpose and to it I add other purposes and more specific objectives. This thesis will explore the nature of happiness, with a special interest not in the abstract concept of happiness, but rather, in how people can live lives that yield happiness. I will adopt and defend the argument from ‘flourishing’ that sustainable happiness is found in living well (not in seeking happiness episodes or events), growing and developing into a functioning person in three main areas, psychologically, emotionally and socially. I will argue that shame is a pervasive emotion, and the major threat to leading the life that yields happiness. This argument naturally requires me to first extensively discuss the phenomenon of shame, which I will do in my second chapter. My main argument will be, leading a life that yields happiness, that is, flourishing, requires resilience to shame. In other words, the degree of flourishing in someone’s life and, consequently, the measure of happiness or positive emotion are conversely related to their shame levels. In order to build and defend this argument, this thesis is going to:

·      Provide an extensive discussion on the emotion shame.

·      Demonstrate that shame is pervasive and the most dominant human emotion.

·      Defend the argument that sustainable happiness comes from living well: ‘flourishing’. 

·      Discuss the relationship between shame and flourishing.

·      Give theological reflections on shame and happiness.

Methodology and Sources

This project is a library based or theoretical one. The primary data for my thesis therefore is published material accessed from printed matter and virtual libraries. My task is to analyze, break down and synthesize data from these sources. The primary methodology of this thesis will be compiling, comparing and analyzing the existing arguments or academic positions on my subject matter, that is, shame, happiness and related topics. From these discussions, I will propose my own original arguments and defend them logically. In some cases I will pick existing arguments belonging to scholars and defend them against opposing views.

As I mentioned above, my thesis, just like my major, spans across a number of academic disciplines. However, the larger part of the material discussed in this thesis comes from the social sciences, especially psychology. This is a rather curious position for someone whose major is theology. Because of the rather interdisciplinary nature of my liberal arts major, I had relative freedom to choose a subject from any one of a number of fields. The natural expectation perhaps would be that I address that particular subject from a theological standpoint. However, from the beginning of this project I found myself relying heavily on the social sciences, especially psychology. This was not so much a matter of preference as it was of utility. Internet searches for words like genuineness, happiness and shame yield mostly psychology articles. This is only natural, considering psychology, and its counterpart sociology are the two fields that have human behavior as their core concern. The social sciences, psychology in particular, became the prime source for my ideas because these fields offer not only the most content on my chosen subject matter, but also, the most extensive and consequently reliable material. Thus, the approach in this thesis is to use social sciences and philosophy to establish the nature of phenomena, and then to use theology to reflect on these phenomena.

 Many people from both Christian Theology and psychology consider these fields to be parallel. Some even go as far as regarding the two as conflicting fields of study that have very little common ground. Yet, there is a growing number of scholars that recognizing that psychology just like Christian Theology and arguably most religions share the same concerns, that is human behavior and well-being. This is the same thinking that motivates my quest to synthesize social science theories with theology in this treatise.

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Summary/Structural Outline

This thesis is built on the assumption that everyone wants to be happy. Based on this assumption, I will make a series of claims that build on each other. I begin the first chapter with a justification of my assumption about people and happiness. I will then describe the construct of “flourishing”, a term from positive psychology that denotes optimum functioning as conceived in the emerging field of positive psychology is a reliable, and propitious way of thinking about the nature of happiness and what people can do to attain it. Through exploring one model of flourishing, I will define components of happiness, as well as make clear the kind of life style that yields what all people desire, positive emotion.

In the second chapter, I will set the ground for a claim I will make in Chapter 3: shame is the major threat there is to flourishing. In order to make and sustain this claim, I will in Chapter 2 provide a thorough discussion on shame. I will start off by exploring definitions and conceptions of shame across various fields. From these conceptions I will analyze the roles played by shame in people’s emotional and social lives, discussing whether shame is of any value to people or just a destructive emotion. Through an examination of different aspects of shame, I hope to provide a comprehensive understanding of shame. Such an understanding will be crucial for reading my arguments on how shame interferes with human flourishing and happiness.

The third chapter of my thesis will be a synthesis of shame theories with the flourishing theory from the first chapter. I will use this synthesis to show in specific ways how shame not only threatens but also hinders human flourishing. I will also demonstrate that shame is a pervasive emotion, ever present in people’s experiences and yet rarely talked about. In the fourth chapter, I will discuss the implications of this study. The major implication stands as the main thesis claim: flourishing is realized only after acquiring some resiliency to shame. One important theme I will discuss under the implications is the important role that human relationships play in promoting or impeding flourishing and consequently happiness.

I will conclude this treatise with brief theological reflections on the themes and claims of my research. In this section, I will consider the relationship between my arguments with theological teachings on shame and happiness. I will pay particular attention to how shame, the fear of disconnection, relates to the theological view of sin as separation (disconnection) from God. I will also discuss the apparent convergence of Biblical theology with social sciences on the importance of relationships for human thriving.

Thesis post 001 "Introduction"

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Happiness Matters

Happiness is one of the most popular subjects of discussion in contemporary society. The average bookshop has a number of books on how to attain or maintain happiness in life. The mass media, Internet, television and radio are also abuzz with discussions on happiness. Even governments have taken up interest in the topic of happiness, with the kingdom of Bhutan leading other nations in measuring national progress in terms of ‘Gross National Happiness’ in place of the economics concept, ‘Gross Domestic Product’.[1] Across board, there is revived interest in understanding the nature of happiness, and how it, happiness, can be attained or maintained. This ever-growing interest in the subject of happiness clearly indicates that happiness really matters to all people. Likewise, in this thesis I take interest in this important subject, happiness. To this subject I add a far less talked about topic, shame, which I argue is the major threat to the happy life.

Background of Study

This treatise is written as part of my studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree at Tokyo Christian University. Because of this setting, my thesis assumes primarily a Christian readership. The general themes of my thesis, however, transcend religious affiliation and even academic orientation. Happiness is a topic that matters to all people irrespective of religious affiliation or field of study. Although I will write from a Christian theological standpoint, I will, in this thesis, explore the topics of happiness and shame with academic rigor and faithfulness so that, I expect, anyone who reads this work will find it stimulating and enlightening. A range of academic fields including psychology, philosophy, Christian Theology, Sociology and Anthropology, informs my discussion.

The initial purpose of this thesis was to address the relationship between qualities like genuineness, sincerity and vulnerability on one hand and human happiness and well-being on the other. Following a class discussion on serving people effectively in Christian communities, the general consensus seemed to be that Christian ministers are not always genuine when dealing with the difficulties that people face in life. And yet, these same qualities, being genuine and realistic, appeared to be effective for helping people through difficult situations to happier, contented lives. Assuming that people who are more genuine and realistic in dealing with difficult situations are happier, I began to ask why these qualities were not embraced or celebrated not only by Christian ministers but also by the people they lead. A number of possible leads emerged, but only two would remain. On one hand, the word happiness in my assumption led to a more thorough investigation into the nature, and attainment of happiness, a search that plunged me into the field of positive psychology. On the other hand, I chanced upon the argument that shame impedes qualities like genuineness and wholehearted living.[2] This argument ignited in me a passion to understand shame and how it hinders the very qualities I assumed were necessary for a happy, thriving life. This thesis resulted, and in it, I seek to synthesize a theory about happiness called ‘flourishing’ with a number of theories on shame.

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[1]  The Center for Bhutan Studies, www.grossnationalhappiness.com

[2] Brene Brown, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html