Happiness Research : Past and Future

MEXT-Supported Program for the Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities (2014-2018)Forming a Social Well-being Research Consortium in AsiaScholarly interest in happiness peaked in ancient Greek philosophy and during the 18th century Enlightenment. Interest in the subject revived in the second half of the 20th century and still mounts today. In this paper, I describe these trends of interest in happiness and speculate about the drivers of this development. On this basis, I make an educated guess about interest in the future