The changing meaning of happiness: a review of the concepts of happiness in foreign and domestic psychological research

The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that happiness is one of the main goals, considered extremely valuable in the sociocultural understanding of modern societies. Moreover, the attitude towards happiness changes periodically. In this article, the author makes a theoretical review of foreign and domestic research on happiness. Attention is focused on the fact that in academic literature it is generally accepted that this is a construct that changes both diachronically - that is, throughout history, and synchronously - along cultural and political axes. If we look at its definition in other cultures, past and present, but characterized by their distance from our own cultural coordinates, we find that happiness is associated with values focused on individual or collective well-being. The work emphasizes that all these examples show that the definition of happiness varies and multiplies depending on temporal, local, social, religious and political coordinates. It is emphasized that studying the nature of such changes not only sheds light on our own context of happiness, but also allows us to evaluate its advantages and disadvantages.