有多少人听过《你不是真正的快乐》这首歌？刚开始的时候，我觉得这首歌听起来还不错的，但是后来慢慢地就开始不喜欢了……因为感觉它一直给人洗脑说你不快乐 (如果你喜欢五月天，请不要打我)。
生而为人奋斗一生，终其目标应该都是获得幸福吧？而幸福和快乐又是紧密联系的。可是，又有多少人因为走得太远而忘了为什么出发呢？
我最近在Coursera上一门叫《幸福美满的一生》(A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment) 的课。因为觉得讲得还挺好的，所以前几天问了这门课的教授能不能分享。助教回复说他个人认为是可以的，不过最好还是等教授本人确认，所以我就先稍微简单介绍一下，可以的话日后再详细分享。如果你们感兴趣的话也可以直接去Coursera找这门课哦(详情点击文末“阅读原文”)！
以下是我认为比较有意思的知识点：
1. (Professor Ed Diener 认为) 也许直接去询问人们 (他们有多幸福)，是最好的方法。因为其他的方法，那些所谓的客观方法，都有其局限性。
(According to Professor Ed Diener) probably if you ask people (how happy they are), that's the best single measure because each of the other measures, the so-called objective measures, each has its own problems.
2. 我们可以通过人们的家人和朋友对他们幸福的评价来了解他们是否快乐。我们可以在电脑上对他们进行反应时间实验。这项实验使得人们对他们生活中好的事件和坏的事件进行反应。幸福的人会记起更多的好事而不是坏事。当我们做这些的时候，我们发现所有的测量结果在某种程度上都是吻合的。他们并非100%吻合，但是结果都是一样的。当我们发现了一个有很大差异的特例时，比如说家人和朋友觉得他非常幸福，但是他却说自己不幸福，或者相反的，家人和朋友觉得他很不幸福，但是他却说自己很幸福。那么我们会发现这样的人将会有一些问题，将会有一些“奇怪”的事情发生。但是大多数情况下当他说自己不幸福的时候，他的家人和朋友也会这样觉得。
We can look at what their family and friends say about their happiness. We can give them reaction time experiments on the computer where they're having to react to good things in their life or bad things. Happy people are able to remember more good things than bad things and when we do that, we find that all the measures, to some degree, converge. They don't converge 100%, but they all tell us the same answer. And when we find an individual where there's big differences, for example, family and friends say he's very happy, but he says he's unhappy, or vice versa, family and friends say he's very unhappy, or very happy, but he says he's unhappy, whichever. Then we see usually that person is going to have some problems, there's something strange going on. But in the majority of cases when people say they're unhappy their family and friends do too.
3. 另外一个我们知道的关于测量有效性的事实是你可以预测他人未来的行为。所以比如说如果你问一个人他们在18或20岁时对生活有多满意，我们发现那些在年轻的时候，更快乐生活、更满意的人，将来都有某些方面的成功，比如在38岁的时候，他们有更高的收入(如果消除他们父母的收入、他们的职业等等因素的影响的话)。所以有趣的是，幸福的人能赚更多钱。我们也将看到，幸福的人更可能活的更久、更健康。我们发现他们更可能结婚并且婚姻稳固不会离婚。你可能会说他们的婚姻并不幸福，但并不是这样的。我们在他们结婚之前的5年或者10年得到了幸福感报告，并且之后我们发现那些在18或20岁时幸福感较低的人，有非常大的几率会离婚或者婚姻不幸福。因此这表明这些东西并不只受那个时刻，或那时情绪影响，这里有某种持久的重要的因素，被这些测量所捕捉到。
Another thing that sort of tell us about the validity of the measures is that you can predict their future behavior. So, for example, if you ask people how satisfied are they with their life at age 18 or 20, we see that the people who are more cheerful, more satisfied early in life later succeed in certain ways. For example, in age 38 they have higher incomes, controlling for other things like their parental income, their occupation, and so forth. So that's interesting, happy people making more money. We also see that happy people later, are more likely to live longer, have better health. We see that they are more likely to get married and stay married and not get divorced. You say well maybe their marriage was unhappy no, this is five, ten years before they ever got married when we took the happiness report and later we see that the people who are low on happiness way back then when they were 18 and 20, are fair amount more likely to get divorced or have any unhappy marriage. So this points to the fact that these aren't just made up at the moment, current mood. That there's something enduring and important that these measures are capturing.
4. 直接问人们有多幸福是最简单的一种测量幸福的方法。并且事实证明，这也是一种测量幸福的可靠的方法。
Asking people how happy they are is the easiest way to measure happiness. And it turns out that this is a reliable measure of happiness as well.
那么问题来了，你幸福吗？
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