Question: How are you testing how happy someone is?

Steven Brown answered on 14 Jun 2017:

Great question! Psychologists are not gifted with things like weight, time, etc. as with physics etc so we need to be creative to measure things like happiness, self-esteem, beliefs, etc. Happiness can be measured using various questionnaires which have been tested using maths to be shown to actually measure what they claim to measure.

What you can then do is get someone to complete one of these questionnaires before or after they engage in some kind of intervention or experiment – say playing with dogs, going for a walk, listening to music – and you can compute if there are different scores or levels of happiness and that it was as a result of the intervention or experiment.

There are also biological measures to show stress reduction, using saliva samples, etc.

Importantly, there is no one agreed on definition of happiness – so there is no agreed on measure.