Overview

Between questionnaires, brain scanners, animal experiments, happiness indices, and AI-supported emotion recognition, happiness seems more tangible today than ever before. In laboratories, positive affects in rats are being studied through play behavior and vocalizations, while politics, economics, and science increasingly treat happiness in humans as a measurable target variable. But what exactly is being measured here-and what are the limits of this approach? And does it help us become happier? This book takes modern happiness research at its word. Interdisciplinary, scientifically sound and at the same time accessible, it analyzes happiness as a multi-layered phenomenon composed of biological affective systems, psychological experience, social embedding and narrative self-interpretation. Animal research reveals the evolutionary foundations of positive experience - and at the same time why human happiness cannot be reduced to neurochemistry or behavior alone. Particular attention is paid to the limits of measurability: the distortions of self-reports, the misunderstandings of neuroscientific findings, the limited transferability of animal experimental results, the risks of political happiness control, and the ethical pitfalls of digital self-measurement. At the same time, the book shows the conditions under which happiness becomes more likely, without declaring it the norm or an obligation. A sober and illuminating work on what is perhaps the most human of all topics. For anyone who wants to understand what happiness is, what science can say about it-and why, in the end, the good life cannot be fully quantified. Bremen University Press has published over 5,500 specialist books in various languages since 2005. January 2026

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