Joy

Poets, priests, prophets, sages, and saints in every culture and religion in human history have regarded joy as essential to human life and well-being. Yet until recently joy was virtually absent in contemporary culture, replaced in the academic lexicon and in common vernacular by the more general concept of happiness. The “happiness industry” of recent decades has produced important scientific insights that have reached a wide popular audience. Conversely, with a few minor exceptions, the serious study of joy has been ignored.

Happiness and joy are not the same. Joy is an emotion—positive, intense, and transient. Happiness is a longer-term evaluation that the conditions of one’s life are desirable. Joy offers a fuller and richer portrait of a person’s capacity to live a life of purpose, meaning, and value, or an experience of “elation of right relation” between ourselves and the world. Robert Lewis Stevenson may have exaggerated a bit, but was on to something when he said, “to miss joy is to miss all.”¹

Fortunately, the picture is beginning to change. Scientists are slowly following the poets’ quest, to find where joy resides and to explore ways in which, through the idioms of science, they can give it a voice. Recent years have seen a developing science of joy, the goal of which is to bring joy back to the center of serious academic inquiry and popular interest. Joy—how much and how well a person is joyful and the extent to which joy bears on action and behavior—is being recognized as a vital positive emotion and a basic explanatory variable in social science, theology, and ethics. Positive psychology, the field at the nexus between affective science, virtue ethics, the psychology of religion and spirituality, and human flourishing has begun to nurture the incipient science of joy to ensure that gains in the psychological and neuroscientific understanding of joy are integrated with insights from humanistic research and applied in ways that improve individuals and society. In this incursion, joy and the flourishing life have been studied in a way that recognizes the integral relationship between them: Joy is an essential element of flourishing, and the flourishing life is essentially marked by genuine joy.

Toward that end, I edited a special issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology on joy.² The issue contained articles from scholars and researchers from the academic fields of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, affective science, religious studies, theology, public health, and human development. The goal of the issue was to aid in the return of joy, understood not as a synonym for happiness, but as the summit of integral well-being, or human flourishing. Since that issue appeared, a handful of additional articles have contributed vital, novel understandings of the nature and functions of joy.³ Despite varying definitions and conceptualizations of joy, consensus is emerging that to grasp human flourishing and thriving, and quite possibly flourishing in other species as well, we must understand joy. In terms of the latter, comparative studies can help us understand the evolutionary, developmental, and genetic origins of joy. Collin Allen contends that joy is an aspect of intelligence in four non-human animals: chimpanzees, bonobos, the New Zealand native kea parrot, and the bottlenose dolphin.⁴

What is Joy and Why Does it Matter?

Emerging perspectives from the aforementioned disciplines generally agree that joy is an emotion, understood as a concern-based construal—that is, a judgment about something one cares about. As an emotion in this sense, joy has an intentional object that it construes as good. Yet, a purely cognitivist description of joy is insufficient; joy has an inalienable affective and relational dimension. Psychologist Edward Hoffman and his colleagues asked respondents to describe a recent joyful experience.⁵ Expe­riences of interpersonal joy were reported by far the most frequently, outnumbering all other categories combined. Some of the joy-producing experiences frequently reported were the birth of a child or grandchild, family togetherness, recovery of a family member from illness or accident, romantic bliss, the wedding of an adult child, caregiving to a nonfamily member such as mentoring or volunteer work, and vicarious achievement (i.e., parental pride in a child or grandchild’s accomplishment). Joy is an emotion, then, that involves both a perception of the world (or some small part of it) as being as it should be, and an attendant positive feeling triggered in circumstances involving connection, attachment, and reunion.

As it connects us outward and upward, joy is also spiritual. Devotional writers have long located the emotion of joy within the human spirit. The Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, among other spiritual giants, prefer the term joy over happiness. This is because joy is part of the very essence of human nature, intrinsic to what it means to be human. For scientist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, joy was the most infallible sign of the presence of God. When C.S. Lewis wrote of his childhood in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, he noted that joy involves both memory and longing. “All joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In this sense, joy indicates something deeper, more embodied, more acute—it is akin to aliveness, or animating force. According to C.S. Lewis, “it must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”⁶ Joy also signifies a broader and more transcendent sense of goodness, one that links not just to personal well-being, but also to the larger reality, and to a vision of broader human flourishing. It is right at the heart of what it means to be fully alive.

Joy is importantly different from both happiness and other pleasant feelings because joy is typically intense and takes place over shorter durations of time. Joy often contains a sensation of being light, airy, uplifted, and typically energizes and motivates the agent for immediate and long-term action. Joy makes the agent more open to engagement with new experiences and often propels the agent into action. Chris Meadows identifies four phenomenological features of joy. Joy includes a dimension of being in harmony, unity, or equilibrium with oneself and other agents. Joy includes a sense of vitality, aliveness, and potency. Joy includes an experience of transcending beyond ordinary life or ordinary experiences. Joy is characterized by a strong experience of freedom and agency.⁷ Emerging conceptualizations of joy share the following consensual assumptions and hypotheses:

• Humans are evolutionarily adapted for joy. Joy drives the attachment system by reinforcing return to the attachment figure.
• Joy can be studied as both a transient state and as an enduring state.
• Joy is not a synonym for happiness. They operate on a different temporal scale and emotional register and have different levels of cognitive evaluation and specificity.
• Joy maps onto both central and peripheral physiological processes and thus is a key driver of health-related outcomes.
• Joy is malleable and modifiable. Individual and communal practices can foster joy, and joy drives both personal well-being and prosocial actions aimed at benefitting others.

Joy as Virtue

It has been argued that joy—more than any other state—is a linchpin between emotion and ethics.⁸ According to some teleological accounts, experiencing joy is tied to performing actions that align with what we narratively consider most important in a human life. Joy is an experience that accompanies virtuous action. When an agent finds themselves doing actions directly tied to that which they find to be most important in life, they feel joy. Thus, joy is tied to each agent’s self-understanding and narrative about what is most important in a human life. Research shows that when we believe our actions are tied to something that is ‘transcendentally’ important, we tend to experience joy. Pamela King argues that “joy is the virtue that involves thinking, feeling, and doing what matters most.”⁹ That is, joy is produced by doing activities that aid in bringing about the highest human goods (our self-perceived telos, or purpose). For example, many people are raised on the moral and (often religious) belief that volunteering to help those in need is one of the most noble and virtuous actions. Such people often report feeling great joy when volunteering, even in the most difficult of contexts. For example, volunteers engaging in disaster relief often report feeling joy despite the devastation and suffering around them. This is because these volunteers understand themselves to be doing something that is tied to what is most important at an existential level.

This conception of joy makes it enactive. Joy cannot be experienced passively. On this account, joy is tied to action and must be performed. Since joy is tied to atelos, there are better and worse ways to perform joyful actions. In connection with this skillful aspect of joy, one can likewise improve or decline in one’s capacity to experience it; agents can cultivate greater joy through intentional practice. Yet becoming more skillful at joy requires consciously examining, reevaluating, and reminding ourselves of what truly matters and how our actions align with those values. Collective joy, related to yet distinct from individual joy, is a highly desired shared experience of doing something considered meaningfully important in relation to others and experienced from a communal perspective. Festivals, celebrations, holidays, sporting events, concerts, and worship services are just a few examples of settings that induce collective joy.

Promoting Prosocial Actions via Joy: The “BIG JOY” Project

If the above analysis of joy’s role in the economy of human behavior is correct, it would not be surprising to find that joy can motivate and inspire acts of kindness, generosity, and other forms of pro-social behavior. The results of a recent ground-breaking large scale intervention study suggests indeed that felt joy motivates individuals to make the world a better place.¹⁰

A landmark global-scale well-being intervention deployment study, BIG JOY, recruited 18,000 participants from 172 countries and regions (mean age = 52) to examine the impact of joy-augmenting activities on prosocial behaviors. The week-long BIG JOY intervention consisted of seven daily micro-acts (i.e., brief actions that require minimal effort), each adapted from validated positive psychology interventions. Participants engaged in one micro-act each day for seven days, delivered through digital devices. These micro-acts included gratitude listing, doing something kind for others, celebrating another’s joy, a lovingkindness meditation, and dwelling in experiences of awe. Upon completion of the seven-day intervention, participants responded to questions assessing the degree to which they had engaged in prosocial behaviors such as helping or supporting others or engaged in activities to protect the environment.

Of the seven micro-acts, three were especially effective in improving prosociality across all age groups: making a gratitude list, celebrating another’s joy, and dwelling in awe. This is significant because these three activities show a generalizability across a wide range of ethnic and cultural groups. Celebrating another’s joy was the most impactful micro-act for the older (55 and over) persons in the study, whereas doing something kind was the only micro-act to enhance prosociality in the youngest participants (34 and younger). The results of projects like BIG JOY that examine the prosocial contours of joy suggest that large scale initiatives designed to create global interventions across a variety of sectors and stakeholders can foster a more compassionate and connected world, a noble and humane purpose worth envisioning and striving for.

Conclusion

Joy is a quintessential human experience that has, for too long, been hiding in plain sight. Until recently it was the last major unexplored positive emotion in psychology and a neglected subject in the humanities and sciences. The nascent science of joy has ratified what has been anecdotally understood throughout history, namely that joy is fundamental to human existence and well-being. “We cannot understand human beings unless we understand joy and how joy comes to be” wrote George Vaillant.¹¹ By giving expression to our ecstatic nature, joy points beyond itself to something deeply true about human nature and purpose. Whether experienced in isolation or as part of a collective, joy elevates, energizes, inspires, and transforms. People are moved, opened, and humbled through experiences and expressions of joy. Without joy, life can be lonely, depressing, impoverished. To the extent that joy both opens us up to the benevolence of others and motivates us to behave prosocially in turn, joy may be thought of as a social resource that is deserving of further study, reflection, and cultivation for the development of a global society built on goodwill.