What is happiness? Is it important?

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What is happiness?Is it important?
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What is well-being?

• Is it good health?
• Is it utility or welfare (e.g. access to economic
  resources, healthcare, family and community
  support)?
• Is it a feeling of happiness, satisfaction,
  contentment, and fulfillment?

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While we have a good of idea of what suffering
looks like
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but what about flourishing?
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Well-being

• The UKs Sustainable Development Strategy defines
  well-being as a positive physical, social and
  mental state requiring
• basic needs are met
• individuals have a sense of purpose
• they feel able to achieve important personal
  goals and participate in society

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A taxonomy of well-being?

• Different types of well-being include
• Basic needs (necessary prerequisites for human
  well-being e.g. health, income, education,
  freedom)
• Psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and
  relatedness)
• Flourishing (living the good life being able
  to reach your full potential)
• Hedonic (an optimal positive affect balance)
• Evaluative (a subjective appraisal of aspects of
  life and how it is going that is, judgment about
  feelings)

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Why should I care about flourishing?
Gallup reported that lost productivity due to
employee disengagement costs more than 300
billion . James Harter and his colleagues found
that business sales and profits are predicted by
employees feelings about the organization.
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Benefits of Happiness
Better Work Performance
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Learn about your happiness.

• BeyondThePurchase.Org helps people understand
  their own happiness. Your responses will also
  help researchers understand how happy people
  think and behave. 

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Discussion Questions

• Were your results on the Satisfaction with Life
  Scale what you expected? If not, why might that
  be the case?
• Which measure of well-being was your favorite?
  Which do you think is most accurate?
• What activities could you do to improve your
  well-being?