- Joined
- Apr 18, 2010
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- 27,208
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
I suspect extraverts overall display their happiness more, almost by definition. This doesn't mean introverts feel any less happy inside.That's true, but it makes sense to me that extroverts overall experience positive emotions more often than other types. The extroverts I know are generally less depressive than the introverts I know.
I'm sure these researchers are seeing something in the brain that is reproducible, but what correlation are they really making? Does it actually correlate with happiness, or contentment, or inner peace, or simply the absence of any sort of clinical depression or anxiety? Did they measure each subject many times, to correct for daily highs and lows in a person's emotional state prompted by ongoing events?So I read this curious book called The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World.
It wasn't much of a self-help book, per se, but you could glean some. It was mostly about the author's (unhappy author's) search around the globe studying different cultures and how they see happiness. It varies indeed.
But the interesting thing was this think tank/happiness laboratory in Holland called the World Database of Happiness. No joke.
And the researchers there discovered a method of determining a person's happiness that was surprisingly accurate. Certain brain centers are more active in happy people, plus other scientific indicators to compare.
But the main method was this: They simply asked if the person was happy or not.
I thought about it and it made total sense to me. I'm about to pass out, so that's all I got for now. I haven't done any research on extroverts vs. introverts and possible correlating happiness levels, so I can't speak to that at the moment, but I thought that their method for determining one's happiness was interesting.
I find it hard to believe that an emotional state as individual and subjective as happiness can be predicted or measured in any statistically significant or scientifically reproducible way.