Hayatudeen Burke

10/19/2017
PSYCH 100, Section 002: Intro Psychology
Dr. Mark Casteel
Article Summary – “The Secret to Happiness: Feeling Good or Feeling Right?”

A study by Shige Oishi, Maya Tamir, Shalom Schwartz, and Min Kim (2014) examined the

controversy of what specific emotions were responsible behind the process of optimizing happiness.

This was a study hypothesizing whether Aristotle’s approach on the cause of happiness would be the

most accurate reason behind one’s happiness. The 4 authors of this study had up to 2,324 participants

for their research, divided from 8 different countries.

Aristotle believed that reason behind one’s happiness was the feeling of “right” emotions. His

definition of right, was not that right emotions had to revolve completely around positivity, but that it

could consist of negative emotions as well. Essentially, that “the absence of unpleasant emotions is not

an indicator of happiness.” Opposed to this approach, other psychologists such as (Kahneman, 1999),

believe that with negative emotions descending, and positive emotions ascending, happiness is

achieved. As this approach of “subjective well-being” (SWB) has overpowered Aristotle’s approach, this

is what urged the 4 authors to investigate deeper into his approach.

This study suggests that people are happier when feeling what it is they desire. Tamir, Schwartz,

Oishi, and Kim used the example of if a person known as a minority, has the feeling of anger due to

being mistreated; this would be considered a right feeling. As feeling angry for that person, may be what

is right for them. They then proceed to say that an emotion is determined right, “depending on the goals

and needs of each individual.” However, regarding this concept, it only pertains to certain individuals as

some people do indeed feel better after being angry, whereas, others dislike the feeling of being angry

completely.
 Evidently, since this is a broad study that doesn’t study just a specific group of people, but rather

humanity in its entirety. The variables would come back differently on which part of humanity around

the world you choose to study. Factors being culture, family upbringing, values, etc. They found in their

research that the average European American typically prefers to feel “high arousal and pleasant

emotions”, more so than the average East Asian according to the study (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006).

They found that opposed to how European American’s feel, people in other cultural groups preferred to

feel an overall balanced scale of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions.

From this, Tamir, Schwartz, Oishi, and Kim conclude, that “people’s values are one factor that

might determine which emotions they desire.” In their cultural studies, they found that those people

desired to feel emotions that were coherent with their core values. For example, people who valued

things such as self-transcendence, would be more likely to want to experience positive emotions (love,

kindness, trustfulness, etc.) Whereas opposed to that, people who valued self-enhancement, desired to

feel emotions leaning more towards the negative side, such as pride and anger. (Tamir, Schwartz, Oishi,

Kim, 2014).

They then examined the correlation between a person’s happiness and how much of the

emotion they desired to feel they got. It was found that “When individuals desire pleasant emotions, the

Aristotelian prediction is the same as the prediction of traditional SWB researchers: people are happier

if they experience as much of a pleasant emotion as they desire.” However, when it came to people and

their desire to feel unpleasant emotions, a controversy was stuck again.

Due to people