Money helps, but — when it comes to happiness — our relationships, generosity and gratitude buy a lot more.

Robert Emmons, UC Davis

Is happiness everything it’s cracked up to be?

It depends. Throughout the ages, our greatest thinkers found happiness an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Ancient Greek philosophers racked their brains in search of the cleverest answer to this question, and the brightest Enlightenment sages deeply pondered one of humanity’s most perplexing and popular subjects.

Times change, and today we live in a huge-bandwidth world with learning and growing opportunities unimagined by our ancestors. Still, these two existential questions remain for us as they did for Aristotle: What is happiness, and how do we achieve it?

There is progress to report. Faculty members at UC Davis are leaders in the study of the “science of happiness.” And while happiness research is in its infancy, three major points are emerging:

• the positive trumps the negative
• social participation trumps materialism
• generosity trumps selfishness

Sounds like common sense, right? But it’s all in how you define those concepts, and personalities and preferences count a lot. What makes an extrovert happy might not be the same thing that makes an introvert gleeful. Everybody is different, of course, but some things appear to prod even the biggest grumps to crack a smile.

No matter your personality type, thinking about happiness is a grand tradition in philosophical circles dating back to the dawn of civilization. In ancient Greece, Aristotle wrote extensively on the relation between pleasure and happiness in his Nichomacean Ethics.

“Aristotle’s own view was that the good life, the happy life, is a life of virtue or excellence,” UC Davis philosophy instructor G.J. Mattey said. “The more valuable a person’s powers are, and the more perfectly those powers are exercised, the happier the person’s life.”

Philosopher’s ideas about happiness have changed over time. Today, Mattey is skeptical whether there is any single meaning for terms like “happiness,” “goodness,” and “knowledge,” all of which have changed over time. With social science now grappling with the issue, other conclusions are arising.

One key component in any concept of happiness is “gratitude,” said UC Davis psychologist Bob Emmons, who has written numerous scholarly articles and several books on the subject — including  “Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.”

A 2003 research project conducted by Emmons and a colleague from the University of Miami found that people who expressed gratitude regularly by means of a “gratitude journal” — basically a list of things, no matter how small or ordinary, for which they were thankful — were more satisfied with their lives, more optimistic and in better physical health, among other things, than those who did not.

Happiness, he believes, is possible for everyone, though genetics and environmental factors, of course, play a role.

“Recent studies show that 25–50 percent of people change significantly from their baseline levels of happiness over time,” Emmons said.

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