All of us have experienced a happy mood. Thus, we all ought to be expert on how it feels to be happy.

How well could you describe your happy moods? How well could you describe the feelings, the thoughts, the ways you behaved? According to the research, you'd probably not do well at all

Most people find it difficult to describe what it's like to feel happy. It's like many of the most important aspects of being human: often we find it hardest to explain and understand the things that are the closest and most important to us. Things like love, consciousness, or grief are almost impossible to understand ourselves, much less describe to others. And of all these intimate experiences, happiness appears to be the most difficult of all.

The main problem facing psychologists studying the happy mood has been how to "capture" a happy mood in order to study it. In much the same way that a biologist goes to the field to gather specimens for intensive study back at the laboratory, the happiness researchers have had to develop ingenious techniques to help them stalk the happy mood.

The most basic method has simply been to ask people to describe happy moods they can recall. Taken either verbally (in face-to-face interviews), or in written form, these descriptions of happy moods have undergone extensive scientific and computer analysis. From this preliminary work, a basic understanding of the common elements of a happy mood has been developed (e.g., 81, 201). Still, many psychologists have wanted to get even closer to happy moods as they actually happen, not as they are recalled later. One strategy in this direction has been to study people on a daily basis over long periods of time (often many months) observing their mood changes, and especially focusing on their happy moods (e.g. 132, 201). All kinds of observations have been made of people while they're in happy moods. Psychologists have observed happy individuals directly (60, 67, 68). They have been studied using video-tape ( ). They have been observed in the intimate light of counseling by clinical psychologists (50, 132 ), and they have been extensively studied by psychological tests and measurements taken in happy moods.

Today, happy moods are even being produced in the laboratory. Unlike the above methods, which involved waiting long periods for happy moods to naturally occur, several techniques are being used to induce a happy mood on the spot. With such techniques, researchers need not wait, they simply make a happy mood happen whenever they want to study it.

Films and videos (with pleasant, happy themes), are one way that is being used to produce happy moods (98, 146, 148, 149, 501). Other researchers employing positively worded tape-recorded to produce the same affect (151). Happy moods are also commonly induced by hypnotic suggestion ( ), and, of course, through the use of a wide variety of mood elevating drugs.

Finally, in the most dramatic of all techniques, happy moods are now being generated through electrical stimulation at their very source -- deep within the brain itself (19, 35, ).In what seems more like a current science fiction movie than real life, brain surgeons have discovered parts of the human brain that account for emotional sensations. In other words, recent discoveries reveal that there are specifically locatable centers of the brain that produce happiness. Technically speaking, these brain areas appear to be located in and around the limbic system and (to a lesser extent) the frontal lobes. When electrically stimulated, brain scientists find that happy feelings can be produced in there most naturally occurring and pure form! And because of their importance, we'll speak more about the brain's emotion centers in later chapters of this book.

For our present discussion, however, the most interesting finding regarding happy-mood research is: no matter what technique has been used to generate a happy mood, the results are practically identical! Whether induced through pleasant environmental manipulation, triggered by brain-stimulation, created under hypnosis, observed as they naturally occur, or analyzed from individual recollections the basic characteristics of this mental state appear the same. No matter what the technique used to create it, a happy mood is a happy mood.