Excerpting from an article by Reichhardt (Nature 444, 418-419;
23 November 2006) and an editorial (pp 401-402) in the same
issue of nature: Is happiness a single emotion or a personality
trait? A physical state, with characteristic brain-wave patterns
and biomarkers? Is it simply the absence of unhappiness, or
something else? ... This new science has yet to provide a
compelling account of how happiness is created. Instead, for
obvious methodological reasons, it concentrates on what it
correlates with. But it is not clear that changing those
correlates by dictat would necessarily produce the desired
effect. People may be happy spending time with their children,
but forcing parents to spend more time this way would not
necessarily overjoy everyone involved. Expressing gratitude
makes people happier; a politeness police, probably, would not.
There is further debate as to whether trying to do something
about people's happiness is feasible in principle. Some
researchers favour the idea that people have a 'hedonic