Happiness cannot exist without unhappiness. There must be a standard from which the idea of happiness is derived. If a person felt happy their entire life, they would not know that they were "happy"; they would consider their emotional state to be simply "normal." If this same person, one day, felt a loss, and felt saddened, only then would they be able to discriminate between their new feeling, unhappiness, and the previous feeling, happiness. By this rationale, however, one might suggest that happiness is merely the absence of unpleasant feelings. This is true to a certain extent; when people are happy they rarely acknowledge their well-being, whereas those who are unhappy cannot think of anything but a way that they might remedy their state and become happy once more. This probably explains why so few studies have been done in psychology to define happiness. There is a more pressing need to cure those who are angry or depressed. However, without a clear cut definition of what happiness is, how can researchers determine what state they would like to return their depressed patients to, perhaps through use of drugs? More often than not, psychotropic medication disables its users to feel severe emotions, both negative and positive. The symptoms of depression are removed, but is the result happiness? .
Emotions are influenced by a person's subjective feelings about things, events, and people, and people behave a certain way based on these emotions. There is difficulty in objectively defining particular emotions, and scientists tend to identify how emotions are expressed than to say exactly what emotions are. The expression of emotions includes physiological changes, such as changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and hormone secretions (Kolb 432). One might hypothesize that humans have evolved in such a way that predisposes them to be happy at some times and sad at other times.
