Efforts to determine emotions by thinking brain measurements seldom reveal what people actually feel. What’s measured is a construct of people’s thinking brains – a proxy for their emotions – that may not have anything to do with what people actually feel at the time.

It may be more appropriate to characterize the subjects’ self-reports of happiness in terms such as “this is what I think I should tell the researchers about what I think I should feel.”

What we think we should feel may not be what we actually feel. Feeling brain measurements need to be taken and considered when subjects in an experiment self-report degrees of happiness if the researchers intend to draw conclusions about feelings of happiness.

“..we show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is explained not by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations.”

It’s a thinking brain exercise of expectations and prediction errors to find that “..moment-to-moment happiness reflects not just how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected..”

http://surfaceyourrealself.com/2015/02/15/problematic-research-on-human-happiness-surfaceyourrealself/