Northwest Vista students share their findings on happiness versus contentment. Their presentation has won numerous accolades, including first place at the Psi Chi Southwestern Students of Psychology: Ideas, Data Exchange and Review (SW SPIDER), held in March at Texas Lutheran University.

Happiness:

We rarely feel it.
I would buy it,
beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of
dripping blood
For this one
transcendent good.

— Amy Lowell,

American poet

(1874-1925)

Maybe the problem with finding happiness is that we don’t know what it is.

According to a team of Northwest Vista College students, happiness and contentment are often confused.

The researchers won first place in their presentation “Mistaking Contentment for Happiness” at the Psi Chi Southwestern Students of Psychology: Ideas, Data Exchange and Review (SW SPIDER), held in March at Texas Lutheran University.

Dr. Don Lucas

Psi Chi is the National Honor Society in Psychology for four-year college students. Northwest Vista and its sister, Northeast Lakeview, were the only two community colleges present at the competition. Most of the students on the Northwest Vista team are not psychology majors.

For two years, the students pored over three studies on 630 subjects, concluding that man’s mistaking of the meaning of happiness leads him to exercise poor judgment when pursuing it.

Anna Evans, psychology major and leader of the project, said subjects were told to write down the first three words that came to mind when they heard the word pleasure, then the same prompt was given for happiness and contentment.

“Regardless of age and gender, we were getting very similar responses from everyone. This surprised me since I expected age to affect a person’s perception of happiness,” Evans said.

“But it reality, in our society, we all have the same basic ideas of positive emotions: smush them.”

Since the conference, some of the students have gone on to other venues to present their research findings including the Southwestern Psychological Association Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.

“The students were intrinsically motivated, doing something for the love of research,” said Lucas, was recognized in 2007 as a Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation, the oldest and most prestigious teaching award recognizing outstanding educators in Texas.

Fellow researcher Genita Zertuche suggests that she may hold the key to happiness when asked what her expectations were of the project in the beginning:

“I really didn’t expect anything, because that’s just who I am,” she said.

“The outcome went way beyond my expectations.”