UC Berkeley

All humans strive to be happy in some form. Yet the pursuit of happiness is sometimes successful and sometimes self-defeating. This review aims to resolve when and why pursuing happiness is successful or self-defeating by showing that its consequences depend on how people pursue happiness. Building on process models of goal pursuit, we consider five aspects of pursuing happiness: the happiness goals people have, affect regulation, monitoring of one's happiness, responses to one's happiness, and the broader context. Each of these aspects entails not only pitfalls but also promises, and we review recent empirical work on them. Taken together, this review offers a theoretically and empirically informed understanding of the pursuit of happiness. While there are pitfalls, attaining greater happiness is possible.