Benessere, gioia, dolori e felicità, Psicologia della salute

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the concepts of happiness and well-being, which are two important issues in the field of the emergent Positive Psychology as well as in the contemporary Health Psychology. Referring to a theoretical model of positive affective states presented in a previous paper (Galati e Sotgiu, 2004), the authors propose to consider happiness as the progressive realization of a life project, which is formulated by the person taking into account the resources that are available and acquirable in the social and cultural context where he or she lives. The concept of happiness differs from that one of well-being, which is placed in a subordinated position regarding the first one. A distinction between two categories of well-being is proposed: the objective well-being, i.e. wealth and availability of economic goods and material resources, and the subjective well-being, i.e. ognitive and emotional evaluation of the degree of satisfaction with personal life. After discussing the complex relation between well-being and happiness, the authors analyze the role played by positive emotions in the realization of a happy life and their relation with the simpler experience states of pleasure and displeasure. Then, they discuss individual and social risks related to the unrestrained consumerism and to the obsessive pursuit of pleasure which seem to characterize the everyday life of people who live in highly industrialized societies.