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How do you operationalise happiness?

In discussions in class, people would answer this question by seeing how often they smile or laugh in response to stimuli, by measuring seratonin levels in the brain etc.

If asked in the exam (AQA AS Psychology), what is the one answer to this question that is guaranteed to be correct and worth a mark.

(I know that they probably won't ask this but I am just looking for what answer that most people can agree is correct).

I don't know if this made sense so.. yeah.
if you don't get an answer on here then maybe you should check getrevising.co.uk maybe someone has made some notes on it?
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Original post by Nisr123
In discussions in class, people would answer this question by seeing how often they smile or laugh in response to stimuli, by measuring seratonin levels in the brain etc.

If asked in the exam (AQA AS Psychology), what is the one answer to this question that is guaranteed to be correct and worth a mark.

(I know that they probably won't ask this but I am just looking for what answer that most people can agree is correct).

I don't know if this made sense so.. yeah.


Like the people in class had said.

I would say that a checklist would be made with categories such as smiling and laughing, where each time a person smiles, etc; an appropriate box would be ticked to produce a tally of observed behaviours. Each category would be differentiated so that that other investigators can reproduce the investigation and know what behaviour to look for (smiling can be described as anything from a smirk to teeth bearing :biggrin:, while laughter has to be audible), for example.
Original post by Nisr123
In discussions in class, people would answer this question by seeing how often they smile or laugh in response to stimuli, by measuring seratonin levels in the brain etc.

If asked in the exam (AQA AS Psychology), what is the one answer to this question that is guaranteed to be correct and worth a mark.

(I know that they probably won't ask this but I am just looking for what answer that most people can agree is correct).

I don't know if this made sense so.. yeah.


A common way is just using a likert scale and asking people "How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10". How would you measure serotonin in people's brains, is another question, I don't think you can cut open people's skulls for some experiment on happiness :P What you mentioned on observing happiness through smiling would work.

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