V. UNDERSTANDING MAJOR EMOTIONS
We shall now try to understand some of the emotions that have significant impact on our growth as integrated persons. Among these are happiness, sadness and grief, anger, fear, anxiety, guilt and shame.
HAPPINESS
Happiness involves our deepest strivings and concerns. Though happiness can be seen as a pleasant feeling like joy, it also entails evaluation of our situation and things around us as basically right and good. Happiness is not the same as joy, although the two are closely linked. Evans (2001) distinguished between joy and happiness; joy is a basic emotion, and, like the other basic emotions, a single episode of joy lasts only a few seconds or minutes, whereas, happiness is a mood that lasts from several minutes to several hours. Moods are background states that raise or lower our susceptibility to emotional stimuli. In a happy mood, for example, we will be more likely to react joyfully to good news, while in not so happy mood we might not react to it so intensely.