Impact of authentic happiness on emotional intelligence among Indians in late adolescence

In today's ever-changing world, there is a magnanimous shift in our philosophies, cognition and our social structure. With acculturation making a strong impact on Indian society, the current Indian society is a metamorphosed version of amalgamation of its authentic attributes and its Western counterparts' attributes. The shift in societal structure along with advancement in technology has a great influence on our life, our holistic well-being and happiness and our emotional intelligence (Baker, 2018). The study aims at establishing the correlation between authentic happiness and emotional intelligence.

There are multitude of emotions but according to certain emotional theories, there are either six basic emotion, namely anger, disgust, happiness, fear, surprise and fear (Ekman, 1992); or eight basic emotions, grouped into four opposite pair of emotions (Plutchik, 1980). There polar contrasting pairs were trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation, joy-sadness, anger-fear. These emotions have a discernible influence on various facets of life, out of which emotional intelligence is an area. This research aims at finding the impact of authentic happiness, one of the basic emotions, on emotional intelligence.

Authentic Happiness
In psychology, happiness has two denotation (Kaczmarek, 2017). The first reference of happiness deals with the concept of well-being and the second denotation refers to happiness as a basic emotion. Happiness is a pluralistic term, having various meaning and various theories pertaining to it. Broadly, there are seven notable theories of happiness, namely: objective happiness (Kahneman, 1999), psychological well-being (Ryff, 2013), the onion theory of happiness (Czapinski and Peeters, 1991), social-psychological prosperity/ flourishing (Diener et al., 2010), subjective well-being (Diener, 2000), eudaimonic wellbeing (Waterman et al., 2010) and authentic happiness (Seligman et al., 2005). The objective happiness theory states that broad, holistic perspective of the well-being concept analysis is prejudiced and the assessment of the immediate moment or experience is a valid scale of well-being (Kahneman, 1999). The psychological well-being model states that a person's happiness is a combination of various positive psychological parameters, like personal growth, autonomy and environmental mastery (Ryff, 2013). The onion theory of happiness describes happiness as a three-layered onion, where the will to live or positive attractor forms the core, the general subjective well-being becomes the middle layer and the current effective experience and satisfaction, comprising of everyday or hedonistic happiness forms the outer layer (Czapinski and Peeters, 1991). Being engaged in daily activities, manifesting empathy and helping others and having fulfilling relationships constitute a person's happiness as per the social psychological prosperity theory, which draws an analogy between a person's social behaviour to the person's happiness (Diener et al., 2010). The argument of the subjective well-being theory is that a happy person experiences more of positive feelings and less of negative feelings, a procedure that balances the experiences and makes the life considerable as satisfactory (Diener et al., 2010, Kim-Prieto et al., 2005. The eudaimonic theory of happiness states that a person can experience happiness by indulging in self-discovery, selfexpression and having a positive outlook while developing or utilizing their potential to the best (Waterman et al., 2010). The authentic happiness theory states that happiness is comprised of three elements-positive emotion, engagement and meaning. (Seligman, 2002). The first two elements are subjective whereas the third is objective in nature. Positive emotions include emotions like excitement, pleasure, comfort, ecstasy, etc. Engagement refers to the process of involvement in a task where in a person loses awareness about his own identity and experiences pleasure. The last factor refers to meaning, which is synonymous to finding meaning in life. Authentic Happiness is one of the variables used in the research.

Emotional Intelligence
We every day encounter mammoth of emotions be it fury, rage, envy, ecstasy or loathe. Emotions are defining as feeling states that involves physiological, cognitive and behavioural reactions to instances (Passer & Smith, 2011). The term emotional intelligence was coined by Mayer in 1990 (Salovey &Mayer, 1990;Mayer & Salovey, 1993, 1995. Salovey and Mayer (1990) defined emotional intelligence as a version of social intelligence that inculcates the capability to access one's own and others' emotions, to differentiate among these emotions and to utilize these judgments to influence one's actions and thoughts. A study conducted by Guerra- Bustamante et al. (2019) aimed to analyze the link between various dimensions of emotional intelligence-attention, clarity and repair; and different level of perceived happiness in adolescents. The tools used comprised of the Spanish version of Trait Meta Mood Scale-24 Questionnaire, for EI and the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire for various levels of perceived happiness-low, medium and high. The results show that as adolescents' capacities of emotion regulation and comprehension is proportional to their subjective happiness.
As the paper deals in formulating a link between happiness and emotional intelligence in Indians falling in the late adolescence category, it is essential to get insight into Indian view of emotional intelligence. It is an interesting observation, that the concept of emotional intelligence finds its roots in ancient Indian texts like Bhagwad Gita, Upanishads and Vedas. Concepts like 'Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam'-treating everyone like a family, surpassing biases and prejudices; and 'Atma bodha', i.e. aligning oneself with the universe in order to partake social outcomes rather than materialistic goals, are reiterated by Indian ancient texts, instilling in Indians the concept of Emotional Intelligence and making them aware about the social values (Gopraj & Sharma, 2011). Emotional Intelligence when viewed from Indian perspective includes traits like respecting elders, empathy for others, fulfilling one's duties along with morals of benevolence, kindness and Ahimsa (non-violence), which provide a framework for emotional responsibility and expression along with dealing with socio-cultural and emotional scenarios (Anand, 2017). The cultural practices in India induces the concept of emotional intelligence in Indians (Sibia, Srivastva and Mishra, 2005).
Late adolescence is an age where the individuals have a great potential and they have a sense of self-esteem. It has been found that for life success, 80% contribution is by emotional intelligence and the rest 20% is contributed by intelligence (Goleman, 1995). As research states the importance of EI, so the findings of the research may help in influencing or developing a methodology to train adolescents with hefty emotional intelligence.

Sample
The subjects of this research are Indians in the late adolescence. State Adolescent Health Resource Center defines late adolescence or young adulthood as the period of frequent change and discovering various aspects ranging from home, family, school, resources, work and life. The age bracket is from 18 years to 24 years (Teipel). The sample size (n) is 50. These 50 subjects are Indians from the age group 18-24 years and gender is not a parameter.

Hypothesis
There is a positive correlation between authentic happiness and emotional intelligence among Indians in late adolescence.

Instruments
Two tools were used in this study,

Authentic Happiness Inventory:
The tools used to evaluate authentic happiness is Authentic Happiness Inventory (AHI), invented by Christopher Peterson (2005). The inventory makes use of 5-point Likert scale. The score ranges from 24-120. The tool is a subjective assessment of happiness and has an important role in the field of positive psychology. The AHI has Cronbach's alpha equal to 0.86.

Procedure
The present research was conducted to find the impact of authentic happiness on emotional intelligence among Indians in late adolescence. So the targeted age group was between 18 to 24 years having Indian nationality. First, a consent form was signed by the participants where after the participants were given two questionnaires to fill. The first was a questionnaire on evaluating authentic happiness and the second questionnaire is an Indian scale for measuring emotional intelligence.

Data Analysis
Once the data was collected, the correlation was evaluated using IBM SPSS Statistics v23x64. It was used to evaluate the effect of independent variable (authentic happiness) on dependent variable (emotional intelligence). Based on the above data, it can be seen that there is a high correlation between authentic happiness and emotional intelligence of 0.616 (R). The R square tells the dependency of dependent variable on independent variable, which can be converted into a percentage. It states that the influence of authentic happiness on emotional intelligence is 0.380%, and the rest percentage is influenced by other factors, not included in the study.

DISCUSSION
The empirical data states that there is a positive high correlation between authentic happiness (independent variable) and emotional intelligence (dependent variable). A study titled 'Does Happiness Promote Emotional Intelligence', by Khosla and Dokania (2010) was conducted on 208 Delhi University graduate, between the age range of 18-24 years. The objective was to study the affective processes among unhappy and happy participants. The tool used for the study was Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and to establish the effect of gender and group on affect, emotional intelligence and emotion regulation. The results stated that there was a significant gender difference in males and females with respect to EI and also happy individuals had more EI as compared to unhappy EI. Happy men reported to have low EI and happy women reported to have higher EI.
A study titled "The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and happiness in Medical students" concluded that in medical students, happiness was determined by emotional intelligence. It was found that students with higher EI felt healthier and happiness in extroverted students were more as compared to introverted students (Ghahramani, Jahromi, Sepehrpoor et al., 2019). The tools used for the study were Oxford Happiness and Shering's Emotional Intelligence Questionnaires.
A study aimed at establishing a positive relation between flourishing and happiness with emotional intelligence was conducted in the study titled "Are More Intelligent People Happier? Emotional Intelligence as Mediator Between Need for Relatedness, Happiness and Flourishing" (2019). The study showed that people with higher emotional intelligence had greater levels of happiness and flourishing.
Along with happiness, there are various other factors influencing emotional intelligence. A study titled "Factors Affecting Emotional Intelligence: An Empirical Study for Students of Secondary School and Professional Colleges" (Malekar, Mohanty, 2007) found various factors affecting EQ. They suggested that interpersonal ability, intrapersonal ability and adaptability have an influence on EQ. The interpersonal ability had a strong correlation with emotional quotient of 0.660. Similarly, intrapersonal activity has moderate correlation with EQ of value 0.593. the last factor, adaptability was found to have a very high correlation with