Unlike happiness, delight, awe, and other positive emotions, joy requires us to define a set of morals and values that orient us toward respect and responsibility to others. Find the tools for meaning-making to increase joy in your life in this week’s blog!

For many of us, this is a special time of the year. So much so that we think of it as a season of joy because joy involves changing how we engage in the world. Find out how this feeling of joy is related to Maslow’s 1964 concept of peak experiences in this week’s blog.

In an overview of studies on happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky found that we control at least 40% of our happiness through our focus and choices (Lyubomirsky, 2013). We now know we can raise our happiness by cultivating positive emotions such as love, kindness, compassion, gratitude, hope, and inspiration. Here are some science-based ways to boost your happiness and well-being.

Happiness is an emotional state—feeling happy about something means feeling satisfied—or maybe it’s an assessment of our life or someone else’s. Joy is an episodic emotion and is felt concurrent with the situation prompting this emotion and arises during activities. The following factors can explain the main differences between joy and happiness…