Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063-1070. While there are many neurotransmitters that affect our happiness, there are a few key ones worth focusing on: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Ryff, C. D. (1989a). Beyond Ponce de Leon and life satisfaction: New directions in quest of successful ageing. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 12(1), 35-55. As a practitioner looking to assess your clients’ happiness, you should use the information above as a guide to ensure the content validity of your chosen measure. That is, take care to select a scale that has been shown to effectively assess the conceptualization of happiness (e.g., hedonic, eudaimonic) that you apply in your practice. Neurological measures of happiness A next important step in the search for happiness is to work toward securing the basic necessities for wellbeing and development, or what Aristotle called real goods.

The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” Find Your Happy is a beautiful children’s book all about showing children what to do when they are angry, sad, worried, etc so that they can find their ‘happy’ again. The second body of thinking lies in empirical findings from the psychology of expectancies and goal-pursuit. This book is a lovely adult-led addition to any EYFS and KS1 classroom, however, I was left with a slight feeling of dissatisfaction and unease when I finished reading. I took some time to reflect and further discuss this text with a friend, and experienced EYFS practitioner, to work out why I was unhappy about this being an independent read.When you give yourself time in your happy place, as a consequence, you show up in all areas of your life as a happier and more positive person. And let’s be honest, we all want to be around happy and positive people. Be open to change. Even if it doesn’t feel good, change is the one thing you can count on. Change will happen, so make contingency plans and emotionally shore yourself up for the experience. To recapture this happy place, I have initiated the process of helping out at a local stable. Yes, 3 decades have passed, and I still crave that sense of joy horses brought me in my childhood. I can’t wait to recapture my old feelings and sense of belonging. 4. Step away from the crowd Transform your outlook to create an extraordinary life, full of adventure, happiness, and inner peace. Shannon Kaiser gives us much to think about. I love the idea of the "Magic List" and started writing mine out. (I'm having so much fun with this.) This study from 2005 set to establish if there was a link between happiness and blood pressure and heart rate. The study required participants to rate their happiness levels throughout the day and was repeated with the same participants 3 years later.

What it doesn’t do as well is provide tools to do that - it just sort of suggests you should think of it a different way. As we all know, we wish it were so easy. So I think the simplification is understandable for a children’s book, but I think it may also underestimate those little readers who want to know the how’s and why’s, not just that they should have a rethink.Ballas D, Dorling D. Measuring the impact of major life events upon happiness. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2007;36(6):1244-1252. doi:10.1093/ije/dym182