Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness?
In "The Noticer," the author, Andy Andrews, writes of being down and out and living under a pier when he is visited by a sage who helps him to see that a life characterized by happiness and abundance begins with his owning up to bad choices and decisions and adopting a grateful perspective.
Its previously accepted definition as "a condition characterized by happiness, health, or prosperity" [18] has been criticized for focusing descriptions or dimensions of well-being instead of its definition [26].
Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a "good mood," happiness is characterized in this proposal as "psychic affirmation," or "psychic flourishing" in pronounced forms.
Straightforwardly hedonistic measures are less common, but see Kahneman, Fredrickson, et al. 1993 and Fredrickson and Kahneman 1993; note that these instruments are not characterized in terms of happiness.
But perhaps that sort of happiness is best characterized as ignorance is bliss. .
There is an increasing amount of hard science validating that happiness -- sometimes characterized as well-being -- makes you more likely to be successful in your work, in your personal relationships, as a parent, and in other critical life roles.
But I'm just emerging from four days of mental fog characterized by alternating episodes of dazed happiness and numb stupefaction.
Because hedonistic and emotional state theories have seldom been distinguished, some ostensibly "hedonistic" approaches to happiness might more accurately be characterized as emotional state views.
An equally powerful effect was to expose young Americans to knowledge, which an earlier Congress characterized as "necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind".
