so, Dr Drew and Dr Phil are Scientists now?
psychology isn't a science because there is no clearly defined terminology, no quantifiability, hardly any highly controlled experimental conditions, very little reproducibility and, finally, only mild predictability and testability.
Just try to define happiness.
Well, being wrong doesn't hurt. Could you imagine being right all the time? Boring. Happened to me, once. But, finally, the streak broke. I thought I was wrong about something, but I was mistaken about that.
clearly defined terminology, not quantifiable, hardly any highly controlled experimental conditions, very little reproducibility and, finally, only mild predictability and testability.
Untrue on the face of it. It has, all that, you say it does not. The problem is not that science cannot define the word, people in this world cannot define it except for themselves and badly, as I will show.
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The 2012 World Happiness Report[SUP]
[3][/SUP] stated that in subjective well-being measures, the primary distinction is between cognitive life evaluations and emotional reports. (Emotional reports can be distinguished as of positive or negative affect. Many but not all commentators regard positive and negative affect as carrying different information, and needing to be separately measured and analyzed). Happiness is used in both life evaluation, 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.
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I happen to know, for myself, that happiness is not an externally caused emotion. In fact, I do not see it as an emotion, but more of a baseline of Being. We are born ready to be happy, and it does not take much and a new born remains in a happy state, big grin, etc. They can just as easily be upset, not by words, but by the local lack of food, shelter, and clean pants.
Here is where it goes wrong, where we all get mixed up before we can do anything about it. And it is hell to figure it out later. That is what I call hell. Not having figured out this simple riddle of happiness.
We get it all wrong from the beginning, because the base physical situation can make us very un-happy... cutting teeth, ear ache, got milk???, poopy pants, etc. No matter what, we learn very early, in few days, the wrong message.
We learn, (in our baby brain, before we have thought) that the physical can disrupt our baseline, happiness. So we use that mammal survival instinct to learn, wrongly, at about 3 days old, happiness also
comes "from" the physical environment. And then, as kids, we get the heads up, that we are to peruse happiness. (but, we don't get the heads up, we can never catch it that way, by pursuit.) "Maya, the Illusion, runs away, as we chase it." That is the way it is said in ancient language of Sanskrit.
Happiness is not a, come and go thing. Really it is the pure joy of existence, inside, that gets attributed to outside causes, and seems fade in and out.
It does not. We fade in and out, of our appreciation, of Joy.
Happiness runs in a circular motion with the breath.
Oh, and don' cha worry, now, BE happy.
