Should happiness be measured in terms of chemical responses in the brain?
Can it – yes. Should it – probably not. Everybody has a slightly different physiological profile so that if two events occur to which two different people are witnesses, the responses from both wotnesses will be different. Even within the same person, the same stimulus (e.g. hearing a joke) at different times will cause different reactions acording to the person’s mood, tiredness, illness, cranial perfusion and so on. Therefore, there can be no absolute benchmark against which a value can be referenced, so if you want to evaluate exactly how happy someone is at any one time, this is nigh on impossible using purely chemical markers. If however, you want to measure the effectivness of SSRI drugs compared to TCAs in treating depression, you can in theory measure changes in serotonin levels. This is probably somewhat hard to do in practical terms but leaving that aside, even if you showed that SSRI type A gave a 30% increase in serotonin level compared with use of a TCA antidepressant, thi
