Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 55 of 91
Gilbert's three kinds of happiness
One researcher who has spent many years trying to get at the answer is a delightful elf of a psychologist named Daniel Gilbert, at Harvard. Other definitions of happiness exist, of course, but Gilbert proposes these three: • Emotional happiness. This is what most of the parents I ask probably mean. This type of happiness is, Gilbert wrote, “a feeling, an experience, a subjective state” untethered to something objective in the real world. Your child is delighted by the color blue, moved by a movie, thrilled by the Grand Canyon, satisfied by a glass of milk. • Moral happiness. Intertwined with virtue, moral happiness is more akin to a philosophical suite of attitudes than to a spontaneous subjective feeling. If your child leads a good and proper life, filled with moral meaning, he or she might feel deeply satisfied and content. Gilbert uses the Greek word eudaimonia to describe the idea, a word Aristotle translated as “doing and living well.” Eudaimonia literally means “having a good guardian spirit.” • Judgmental happiness. In this case, the word “happiness” is followed by words like “about” or “for” or “that.” Your child might be happy about going to the park. She might be happy for a friend who just got a dog. This involves making a judgment about the world, not in terms of some transient subjective feeling but as a source of potentially pleasurable feelings, past, present, or future.