Humanistic Perspectives in Happiness Research

This volume provides innovative perspectives on the scholarly connection between the humanities and happiness, and considers the narrative expressions of happiness and recent investigations about happiness, its metrics, and objective insights about human wellbeing. This volume relates intemporal humanistic values to views across social and behavioural sciences, and thereby covers a broad interdisciplinary frame, from philosophy, psychology, literary studies, to the communication sciences. The philosophers in this volume discuss the achievement of happiness through the cultivation of virtue, as well as the logic of the gift as an experience of personal fulfilment and the fact that happiness is inextricably linked to hope. Their chapters take on the approach of the permanent human struggle to generate global horizons of happiness and thus attain eternal bliss. Scholars from other fields of the humanities and communication sciences consider the positive messages of environmental happiness in virtual platforms, where the Homo digitalis finds happiness at the click of a button, often under the endorsement of celebrities, or under the visual fruition of playful objects. They also present the intertextual memory of happiness as a condition for humanistic research. Finally, this volume considers the sphere of education as the best place in which to apply the results of sustainable happiness measurement and research, and to realize this complementary, humanistic perspective on happiness research.

Part I Philosophy and spirituality in happiness research.- Contemporary philosophical perspectives on the dialogue between Seneca and Ortega y Gasset regarding human mortality and happiness.- Virtues as a resilience factor in the human pursuit for happiness.- Spirituality as a Factor of Resilience in the Witness of Adult Survivors of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse.- The critical limits of human condition, between hubris and aristeia.- Phenomenological approach to somatic evidence of depression, happiness, and radical hope.- Rediscovering the dynamic of happiness though feelings of self-gift and reciprocity.- Religion as the global horizon of human happiness.- Hope is happiness.- Part II Narratives of happiness in communication and media research.- Between utopia and dystopia: homo digitalis and happiness at a click.- The spectacle of happiness within the photographic idyll.- The communicative role of TV toy advertising in fostering children's happiness through play interaction.- Different representations of happiness in contemporary literary narratives: between the dramatic and the humorous.- The collective selfie: the dubious rhetoric of planetary happiness in celebrity environmental activism.- Part III Investigating happiness in individual and community contexts.- The sustainable happiness semester: a 100-day journal for students.- Education as protective factor in times of transformation and pandemic crisis.- Methodological complexity in the measurement(s) of happiness as a positive experience.- Happiness, wellbeing, and human development in unsettled times: what matters and why?.- Conclusion. 

Maria José Ferreira Lopes is Assistant Professor and Researcher in Humanities at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and is particularly interested in the classical heritage and its influence on Portuguese authors.

Bruno Nobre is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. His main research interests are philosophy of physics, virtue ethics, and philosophy of religion.

João Carlos Onofre Pinto is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. His main research interests are phenomenology, noology, Spanish contemporary philosophy, and philosophy of religion.