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Oxford Happiness Questionnaire

Friday, October 17th, 2008

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire was developed by psychologists Michael Argyle and Peter Hills at Oxford University. Take a few moments to take the survey. This is a good way to get a snapshot of your current level of happiness. You can even use your score to compare to your happiness level at some point in the future by taking the survey again. If you are using some of the interventions presented on this site to raise your happiness level, you can see whether your score on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire goes up as a result.

Instructions

Below are a number of statements about happiness. Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with each by entering a number in the blank after each statement, according to the following scale:

1 = strongly disagree
2 = moderately disagree
3 = slightly disagree
4 = slightly agree
5 = moderately agree
6 = strongly agree

Please read the statements carefully, because some are phrased positively and others negatively. Don’t take too long over individual questions; there are no “right” or “wrong” answers (and no trick questions). The first answer that comes into your head is probably the right one for you. If you find some of the questions difficult, please give the answer that is true for you in general or for most of the time.

The Questionnaire

1. I don’t feel particularly pleased with the way I am. (R) _____

2. I am intensely interested in other people. _____

3. I feel that life is very rewarding. _____

4. I have very warm feelings towards almost everyone. _____

5. I rarely wake up feeling rested. (R) _____

6. I am not particularly optimistic about the future. (R) _____

7. I find most things amusing. _____

8. I am always committed and involved. _____

9. Life is good. _____

10. I do not think that the world is a good place. (R) _____

11. I laugh a lot. _____

12. I am well satisfied about everything in my life. _____

13. I don’t think I look attractive. (R) _____

14. There is a gap between what I would like to do and what I have done. (R) _____

15. I am very happy. _____

16. I find beauty in some things. _____

17. I always have a cheerful effect on others. _____

18. I can fit in (find time for) everything I want to. _____

19. I feel that I am not especially in control of my life. (R) _____

20. I feel able to take anything on. _____

21. I feel fully mentally alert. _____

22. I often experience joy and elation. _____

23. I don’t find it easy to make decisions. (R) _____

24. I don’t have a particular sense of meaning and purpose in my life. (R) _____

25. I feel I have a great deal of energy. _____

26. I usually have a good influence on events. _____

27. I don’t have fun with other people. (R) _____

28. I don’t feel particularly healthy. (R) _____

29. I don’t have particularly happy memories of the past. (R) _____

Calculate your score

Step 1. Items marked (R) should be scored in reverse:

If you gave yourself a “1,” cross it out and change it to a “6.”
Change “2” to a “5”
Change “3” to a “4”
Change “4” to a “3”
Change “5” to a “2”
Change “6” to a “1”

Step 2. Add the numbers for all 29 questions. (Use the converted numbers for the 12 items that are reverse scored.)

Step 3. Divide by 29. So your happiness score = the total (from step 2) divided by 29.

I recommend you record your score and the date. Then you’ll have the option to compare your score now with your score at a later date. This can be especially helpful if you are trying some of the exercises, and actively working on increasing your happiness.

UPDATE: A lot of people have been asking for some kind of interpretation of the raw number “happiness score” you get in step 3 above. What follows is just off the top of my head, but it’s based in part on the fact that the average person gets a score of about 4.

INTERPRETATION OF SCORE

I suggest you read all the entries below regardless of what score you got, because I think there’s valuable information here for everyone.

1-2 : Not happy. If you answered honestly and got a very low score, you’re probably seeing yourself and your situation as worse than it really is. I recommend taking the Depression Symptoms test (CES-D Questionnaire) at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Authentic Happiness” Testing Center. You’ll have to register, but this is beneficial because there are a lot of good tests there and you can re-take them later and compare your scores.

2-3 : Somewhat unhappy. Try some of the exercises on this site like the Gratitude Journal & Gratitude Lists, or the Gratitude Visit; or take a look at the “Authentic Happiness” site mentioned immediately above.

3-4 : Not particularly happy or unhappy. A score of 3.5 would be an exact numerical average of happy and unhappy responses. Some of the exercises mentioned just above have been tested in scientific studies and have been shown to make people lastingly happier.

4 : Somewhat happy or moderately happy. Satisfied. This is what the average person scores.

4-5 : Rather happy; pretty happy. Check other score ranges for some of my suggestions.

5-6 : Very happy. Being happy has more benefits than just feeling good. It’s correlated with benefits like health, better marriages, and attaining your goals. Check back – I’ll be writing a post about this topic soon.

6 : Too happy. Yes, you read that right. Recent research seems to show that there’s an optimal level of happiness for things like doing well at work or school, or for being healthy, and that being “too happy” may be associated with lower levels of such things.

Reference

Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: a compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 1073–1082.

I’ve used “don’t” rather than the more staid and formal “do not” in the phrasing of the questions above; I decided to give preference to my own sense of what is more natural and conversational in American English. (Remember that the questionnaire was developed in England.) I’ve also added the phrase “(find time for),” which psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky uses for clarification in question 18.

Note: Michael Argyle died in 2002. If you would like to contact Peter Hills, you can email him at p_r_hills “AT” hotmail “DOT” com (seems to be outdated) or contact him by telephone/fax in the UK: Tel.: +44-1235-521-077; fax: +44-1235-520-067.

There is a problem with the comments below. None of the early comments are showing up since an upgrade a few days ago. Here’s one example, a comment from me:

Dr. Steve Wright says:

The highest score you can get on an item is a 6, and the lowest a 1. If you add up all your scores and divide by the number of questions (29 questions), you’d get an average score for all the questions. The highest possible average would be 6, the lowest possible would be 1. Right in the middle would be 3.5, so you might think that’s what the average person would get, but this is just a raw score. In fact, other studies show that people are generally somewhat happy on average. So it may not be surprising to hear that the average score on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire is right around a 4, which is essentially what you got (since you got 3.9 out of 6).

Rather than compare yourself to other people, it’s probably more meaningful to compare your score now to your score later, and see if there’s a change. Some of the exercises on this site have been shown in scientific studies to make a lasting, positive impact on happiness. You might want to try some of them (I’ll be adding more), and see if they work for you. A few gratitude exercises are already on the site:

*Gratitude Journal & Gratitude Lists

*Gratitude Visit

Sonja Lyubomirsky and the How of Happiness

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

“Dr. Happiness” Ed Diener and Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky are two of the leading researchers on happiness. A funny thing happened the day after I wrote my last post, where I introduced Dr. Diener and talked about his Life Satisfaction Scale. I got an email from Dr. Ben Dean (who I’ll talk about in a minute) saying Dr. Diener “is considered to be the world’s leading authority on research on happiness” and inviting me to a conference-call interview of Dr. Diener and Dr. Lyubomirsky that night.

Both Ed Diener and Sonja Lyubomirsky have written popular books about happiness. Sonja’s book has been out for awhile now. I just did a search for “happiness” in the “books” section of Amazon.com, and it came up second. It’s called: The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. It’s a how-to book. In the Foreword, she says “To my knowledge, this is the first how-to-become-happier book authored by someone who has actually conducted research revealing how people can achieve a greater sense of happiness in their lives.

She’s certainly qualified to talk about happiness: she was awarded a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize in 2002, she’s an associate editor of the Journal of Positive Psychology, and she and Ken Sheldon have a 5-year million-dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness.

Just looking at the table of contents gives you an idea how much she has to offer:

Part One: How to Attain Real and Lasting Happiness

1. Is It Possible to Become Happier?

2. How Happy Are You and Why?

3. How to Find Happiness Activities That Fit Your Interests, Your Values, and Your Needs

Part Two: Happiness Activities

Foreword to Part Two: Before You Begin

4. Practicing Gratitude and Positive Thinking

5. Investing in Social Connections

6. Managing Stress, Hardship, and Trauma

7. Living in the Present

8. Happiness Activity No.10: Committing to Your Goals

9. Taking Care of Your Body and Your Soul

Part Three: Secrets to Abiding Happiness

10. The Five Hows Behind Sustainable Happiness

The Promise of Abiding Happiness: An Afterword

Postscript: If You Are Depressed

Appendix: Additional Happiness Activities That May Fit

Dr. Lyubomirsky has found that happy people tend to perceive and interpret the world in ways that reinforce their happiness, and unhappy people do the reverse. Happy people respond in a more positive and adaptive way, while unhappy people tend to dwell or “ruminate” on negative or ambiguous events, draining cognitive resources and creating negative consequences.

She and her colleagues are investigating ways that happiness can be reliably and durably increased. They believe it can be done through intentional activities, but that these require “daily and concerted effort and commitment.” They are testing the effectiveness of gratitude exercises, “self-regulatory” and positive thinking about oneself (such as reflecting, writing, and talking about one’s happiest and unhappiest life events, or about one’s goals for the future), and practicing acts of kindness and altruism.

Popular how-to book on happiness by leading researcher

She talked about some of these things in the interview, and deals with how to apply some of them in practical ways in her book.

I want to talk about Ed Diener’s new book too, a bit more about the interview, and about Ben Dean’s work. But I think I’m going to have to break this up into several posts. In the meantime, take a look at Sonja’s book, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

First step: What do you really want?

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

…then goals and commitment.

Since this is my first post, I thought I would talk about the topic of taking a first step. Some ideas that came to mind were about goals and commitment.

Concrete goals help you focus. They take a vague idea and make it more specific. They clarify what you need to do, and they actually help you get it done. People who make clear goals, with a time frame for getting them done and a way to gauge performance, are more successful.

According to psychological research,* goals help you in at least four ways:

1. Goals help you pay attention to, and learn, what you need to know to accomplish them.

2. People with goals make more effort, both physically and mentally.

3. Goals help you stick with a task, giving you more persistence in pursuing the accomplishment.

4. Goals help you use relevant knowledge and strategies.

Goals also help you commit. If you say you’re going to do something, you’re more likely to do it. If you make a decision to accomplish your goal (or each specific step needed for a more complex goal) by a certain date, there will be psychological forces helping you to do it.

Obviously, the reverse is true: commitment helps accomplish goals, especially challenging ones.

Sometimes you have to take a risk and make the commitment even if there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to accomplish exactly what you’re setting out to do. Olympic divers need to put themselves in the right frame of mind the moment they jump, but if they wait too long on the board over-thinking it, they’re more likely to have a poor dive. The preparation they needed happened before they even climbed up the diving board, during the many hours of training leading up to the execution of the dive. When it’s time to dive, take the leap.

But before goals and commitment you have to decide something: What do you really want?

This may not be as easy as you think. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out that we’re actually pretty bad predictors of what’s going to make us happy. He wrote a best-selling book about it called Stumbling on Happiness. More on that later.

Sometimes you know exactly what you want and you can just pursue it, with whatever goals and commitment are appropriate. Other times, especially when it comes to big things, it’s not always completely clear. When the question “What do you really want?” is expanded in scope to mean “What do you really want in your work or career?” or “What do you really want in life?” – then a lot of people aren’t completely sure. Often they haven’t really thought it through very carefully. Sometimes they were just going after things they thought they wanted. In many cases they’re not very happy with some aspect of their work or life.

When it comes to their work, some people say “Just give me a paycheck.” Those people are not as happy in their work life as people who find some inherent value or meaning in what they do. Even people who have what many would consider a mundane and boring job, like an assembly line worker, can be satisfied with their work if they feel it has intrinsic value. In one study I ran across, some assembly line workers reported that they took pride in their role as creators of a quality product, they said they liked their jobs, and their scores on standard measures agreed.

One thing that contributes a lot to life satisfaction is engaging in activities that make use of your personal strengths. One prominent psychologist spent three years studying this, and working with a colleague (an even more well-known researcher and past president of the APA), wrote an important book which features a list of personal strengths. Take a look at that list and ask yourself how much you’re using your strengths in your life, in your work, and in your leisure activities. Are there changes you could make to spend more time doing the things you find rewarding and valuable?

I’ll be writing a lot more on these and related topics. Please subscribe and check back with me.

I asked myself the question: “What do I really want…out of this web site?” My answer was that I wanted to create as much value as possible for my readers. I want to share what I think and what other psychologists think about how to increase your happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning in life. Some of it will be straight out of research studies, and other ideas will be informed and influenced by them. Either way there will be some science behind the advice. Think of it as “Dear Abby 2.0.”

*If you want to take a look at a review of the academic literature on goals, there is a good one entitled “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation” (pdf format) that was published in American Psychologist in 2002. It’s not light reading, but a lot of scientific findings are presented on this topic. A side benefit is that even in the first couple pages you can see how far psychology theory has come in the last 50 years since the dark days of psychologists’ thinking being almost universally conditioned by the ubiquitous conceptual assumptions of behaviorism, even on questions where it didn’t make much sense.

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