2. Happiness Can Be Measured

Most empirical research uses subjective and self-reported life satisfaction to capture happiness. The answers correspond well to everyday observations about what well-being means. Subjective life satisfaction data are presented here for several countries. People living in the Nordic countries, above all Denmark and Switzerland, are the happiest. The nations in which the average life satisfaction of its inhabitants is lowest are, with the exception of Syria, all situated in Africa. Happiness can also be measured by other methods such as the U-index, which captures the periods of a day in which individuals surveyed felt that they were in an “unpleasant state”; experience sampling, which is an electronic diary capturing immediate, affective experiences; day reconstruction, which retrospectively reconstructs subjective feelings through the various phases of a day; and brain imaging, which employs functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture the brain activity of human beings with respect to positive and negative affect.