The Subjective Happiness Scale: what four questions can tell you about your happiness

"Are you happy?" sounds like a question with no good answer. Happy today, this year, compared with whom? In 1999 the psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky and Heidi Lepper published a short answer to that problem: four questions that ask how happy you are in general, as a person, not how you feel this afternoon.

Their Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) became one of the most used happiness measures in research, mostly because it is short and holds up well. Our Subjective Happiness Scale test is based on it.

What the four questions ask

Two items ask you to rate yourself directly: in general, do you consider yourself a happy person, and are you happier than most of your peers? The other two describe a type of person and ask how well the description fits you. One describes people who enjoy life whatever is going on. The other describes people who are not depressed but never seem as happy as they could be. That last item is scored in reverse.

Your score is the average of the four answers, from 1 to 7. In the original scale each question has its own answer labels. We use one agree to disagree scale for all four, an adaptation that keeps the content but changes the format, so your number may not match published norms exactly.

Subjective means your own judgement

The SHS does not count good events, income or health. It asks for your overall view of your own happiness. Two people with very similar lives can score far apart, because the scale measures how you experience your life, not how it looks from outside.

It is also not the same as life satisfaction. Satisfaction is a judgement of how your life matches your standards, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale measures that. You can be satisfied with your circumstances and still not feel like a happy person, or the other way round.

Can you become happier?

Happiness is partly stable. Twin studies show that a sizeable part of the differences between people in wellbeing is linked to genes, and many people return to roughly their usual level some time after both good and bad events.

A popular diagram says that 50% of happiness comes from genes, 10% from circumstances and 40% from what you do. It comes from a 2005 paper by Lyubomirsky and colleagues. In a 2020 paper Nicholas Brown and Julia Rohrer showed that the data cannot support those exact percentages, and the authors have since moved away from them. What remains supported is more modest: deliberate habits, such as regular contact with people you like or noticing what went well, can raise wellbeing for some people, but the effects are usually small and depend on the person.

When a low score is a signal

A low SHS score does not mean depression. The scale was built for the general population and says nothing about clinical symptoms. But if a low score comes with weeks of low mood, loss of interest or trouble sleeping, take a screening test such as the PHQ-9 depression test, and consider talking to a doctor or psychologist.

For a broader picture of how you have felt over the last two weeks, read the WHO-5 wellbeing index, and if the question behind your score is more about meaning than mood, try the purpose in life test.