In his book The Hypothesis of Happiness, Jonathan Hight argues that experiments that showed that genes play a big role in the subject of happiness were a severe blow to psychology that, since Freud, believed that man s childhood and his upbringing is what determines how his personality is formed and if he or she will be happy or not.
When Martin Selgman founded positive psychology in 1990, he and a number of psychologists worked to find what is called a formula or happiness equation, which tried to look at the opposite of what science experiments found. The equation was as follows: H = S + C + V. The letter H means Happiness, while S means biological Set point and C means conditions and V is voluntary actions.
Hight says that external influences can not be zero effect, and it must help in raising the happiness rate of those who were unlucky in terms of the subject of genes. The circumstances include, for example, the society in which man is born, the relationships that are imposed on him or her such as the family, the outward form, race, and perhaps sex and religion as well.
As for voluntary acts, we cannot deny the role of philosophies (such as Buddhism) and philosophy (Epictetus), for example, despite the difficulty of the road they have taken, but nevertheless seems effective with some and has positive results in the long run.
