Happiness and how it is achieved is a popular area of study for psychologists. This ABC news article addresses how genetic inheritance influences happiness. As you read, take notes on what contributes to a person's happiness.↵
Is there a set point that determines your level of happiness, regardless of your status in life? Is it something you have little power to change? For several decades psychologists have wrestled with that question, and in recent years many, if not most, have embraced the idea that we are born with a tendency to be happy, or sour, and it doesn't have much to do with our surroundings or lifestyle. One researcher compared it to height. Try as you may, you probably aren't going to get any taller.↵
But a new study contends that happiness is very different from height or other genetically-determined characteristics. The study concludes that the set point is really a range, and we can move up and down on the happiness scale within that range. All we have to do is keep our lives interesting, and be satisfied with what we already have.↵
Sounds easy, and psychologist Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri, Columbia, argues that it is — although most of us may not succeed. We all have good things happen to us, and they lift us for a while and then we kind of fall back where we started, Sheldon, lead author of a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, said in a telephone interview. We're trying to figure out how people can get more out of the good things that happen to them."↵
Sheldon and his coauthor, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have collaborated on several research projects over the last couple of decades. They have come up with a program that they think could help us inch our way up the happiness scale, and stay there longer, although there will always be a tendency to drop back to our personal set points."