Quantifying happiness has often been seen as a futile task by psychologists given the elusive nature of the concept of ‘happiness’. Positive psychologists view happiness with two theoretical perspectives - hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic happiness is largely about pleasure and therefore is viewed as being subjective. The hedonic happiness theorists view that an increase in ‘positive’ events and lowering of ‘negative or painful’ events lead to happiness.
Eudaimonic happiness, on the other hand, is about overall growth and wellbeing of an individual and it often comes with a moral component. This entails one’s social contribution, a sense of freedom, social acceptance and level of interaction. In fact, the root word of Eudaimonic – ‘Eudaimonia’, a Greek term, is translated as good (eu) spirit (daimon). Being good by doing good is often seen as the key cause of this kind of happiness.
It goes without saying that measuring either of these two categories of happiness in an individual is not practical.
With quantifying individual happiness thus being a challenge as to how one would measure the happiness of a nation is also a pertinent question. As such the annual World Happiness Report of the United Nations, which attempts to measure the happiness of individual nations and has a slew of Nordic countries leading the ranking every year, is hardly seen a pragmatic approach. Sri Lanka was ranked 130 in the 2019 report while the 2018 report had us in the 116th slot.
However, this does not mean that one’s level of happiness cannot be identified. It has been agreed that at an elementary level of research, facial expressions can well be used as a barometer of happiness. A study released by the Ohio State University, the USA, in 2019, concluded that there are 35 clear, relatable facial expressions made by human beings across cultures and of them 17 are made to express happiness.
However, way before the results of the Ohio State University, a Sri Lankan University has been using facial expressions as a gauge to measure happiness in its projects. This fact came into light during two recent programmes televised by the Independent Television Network (ITN).
The only department to teach Health Promotion as a subject in entire South Asia, the Department of Health Promotion of the Rajarata University started using this yardstick in their projects in 2011. That was in a bid to determine a correlation between children’s malnutrition and parents’ temperament.
Introduced by the department head Dr Duminda Guruge, the method which has a daily marking of the day’s most visible facial expression of each family member – happy, neutral or negative, on an old calendar, offers an opportunity for the entire family to explore links between family happiness and health or any other factor. Along with the calendar a record was also maintained to note down the triggers behind negative temperament.
In the case of malnutrition, the parents themselves found that their state of mind, especially that of the mother of the family, plays a large role in the food habits of the children. Besides, the calendar shed light on the interdependence of the moods between mother and father and their collective impact on the overall wellbeing of the family. The continuous gauging of their own moods resulted in every family member, especially the parents, realizing the important role their temperament plays in family well-being and this realisation saw a gradual, yet steady improvement of the temperament, especially of the parents. The analysis of index results also opened a family forum to assess the factors that contributed to negative temperament among members and thereby helped exploring ways of facing such challenges in future. Happiness, for the first time, became the primary concern of the entire family.
Following its maiden launch in the villages in Anuradhapura, Dr Guruge’s method of gauging happiness level went on to become a roaring success across the country with little or no media attention. Such was its impact on the tens of thousands of families that benefitted from this method that the beneficiaries went on to dub the calendar as ‘the magic calendar’.
Though primarily promoted among rural community groups, covering over 350 villages, later the method was propagated in schools, hospitals and a slew of other government institutions. The students and the employees were encouraged to maintain happiness calendars in schools and workplaces and this opened their eyes to possible links between school/workplace temperaments and domestic happiness and also the parallels between temperament and the physical health of the individuals.
While any encouragement and appreciation of this index by the higher education authorities is forthcoming, they should also help the Department of Health Promotion of the Rajarata University to take this happiness index to a greater audience.
