Throughout history

Throughout history, there has been much debate on the concept of happiness. Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Zeno of Citium’s (C344-c202 BC) established the school of philosophy, called Stoicism and believed virtue was sufficient for happiness (Stoicism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) reasoned happiness can be nurtured through intellectual and moral virtues (Aquinas: Moral Philosophy – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) whereas, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1780-1860) counters happiness as a wish that is fulfilled, and the absence of fulfillment as suffering. (Arthur Schopenhauer, 1997). Similarly, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) recognised that a person with meaning in their life could achieve happiness. From a philosophically perspective happiness is the ethical aspiration of a person’s life and in most European languages happiness is associated with luck (Cassin et al.2014).
There have been several scales developed to measure happiness