ST79 Guest Editor’s Note

Dear Teachers and Researchers,

Success feels good. While many would agree, the relation between socially endorsed performance and positive emotion may not be as straightforward as it sounds. To what extent do success and happiness contribute to each other? Does happiness follow or precede success? Is it possible to be happy before success happens?

Doing well academically, getting admission to a certain school and securing a particular job are often considered as social measures of success. With one or more of these conditions fulfilled, one will become happy. Success precedes happiness. That said, the hedonic treadmill hypothesis (Brickman & Campbell, 1971) posits that success will make us happy only until we ask ourselves, “What’s next?” Happiness – based on the aforementioned markers – is thus a fleeting state of positive affect, because an expectation for achieving greater heights that follows a successful endeavour brings us back to our “baseline” emotion.

In contrast, Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) found ample evidence – based on their reviews of crosssectional, longitudinal and experimental studies – that happiness also breeds success. They found that happy people tend to be successful in various life domains (e.g., marriage, friendship, health, work performance, income). Their findings are in line with Barbara Fredrickson’s (2013) broaden-and-build theory which suggests that positive emotions broaden our perspectives on the self, others, and environment, as well as build our cognitive and behavioural resources to deal with a task at hand effectively. Together, it is sensible to assume that happy students and happy teachers are likely to be those who will perform well in school too. Insofar as this may be the case, there is reason to promote happiness in our students and teachers.

Beyond their causal relationships, success and happiness are sociocultural constructs (Gill, Trask- Kerr, & Vella-Brodrick, 2021; Joshanloo, 2019). The benchmark of success and happiness, and ways of their pursuit are largely dependent on the values prevailing in the society that the individuals reside in. What is considered as a key marker of success and happiness in one culture may receive less emphasis in others. Further, scholars have now agreed that experiencing positive emotions (a.k.a. “happiness”) is only one of the pillars of well-being. Psychological well-being is multidimensional and can also be derived from such experiences as enjoying warm and genuine social connections, and pursuing a “personal project” that allows us to use our strength and express our interest. Each of these “day-to-day” experiences appears to be practically attainable – more so than the markers of success – and is likely to give rise to a more long-lasting state of satisfaction that make us feel that life is worth living.

The current SingTeach issue, “Fostering Student and Teacher Well-Being”, features voices of teachers and researchers who agree that mental well-being and academic success are equally important and must not be “either/or”. Editing this issue has given me an insightful and pleasurable experience, especially through learning from the teachers who share how they promote the mental health of their students (and their “personal secrets” to work-life harmony), as well as from the NIE colleagues on their research efforts to foster students’ psychological well-being and academic motivation.

As much as success and happiness are sociocultural in nature, they are inherently personal and subjective too. So, it is possible for us to form our own meanings of success and happiness (or well-being at large). Signing off as Guest Editor, I will leave you with what Albert Einstein noted down a century ago, and invite you to consider revisiting (and perhaps redefining) your own conceptions of success, happiness, and their relationship. I wish you all well.

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”

References

Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H.Appley (Ed.), Adaptation level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–302). New York: Academic Press.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Positive emotions broaden and build. In E. Ashby Plant & P. G. Devine (Eds.), Advances on Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1-53. Burlington: Academic Press.

Gill, A., Trask-Kerr, K., & Vella-Brodrick, D. (2021). Systematic review of adolescent conceptions of success: Implications for wellbeing and positive education. Educational Psychology Review, 33(4), 1553–1582. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09605-w

Joshanloo, M. (2019). Lay conceptions of happiness: Associations with reported well-being, personality traits, and materialism. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02377

Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803–855. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.803