Is happiness a Selection/Selective Trait?

[Rosiv]

TLDR: Is happiness a Selection/Selective Trait?, I am a novice and do not understand genetics well.

I was speaking to a biology friend of mine, and he told me that "Happiness is a selective trait" once. I discarded it as just a popular phrase, but it recently popped back into my head for some reason. So do you think its possible that happiness is a trait that individuals select upon to reproduce. I'm not too academically gifted nor have good reading comprehension, so any research I tried to do on the topic didn't really help me or wasn't properly done.

But from Wikipedia I read about selection "certain traits or alleles of genes segregating within a population ". So if that is the case, then would not happiness have to be determined to be genetic in origin or influenced by genes to then be selectable? You cant add a genotype to a population if there are no genes involved? Am i misunderstanding this or no?

 

[JoJo]

Your second paragraph is entirely correct, if happiness is a selective trait then it would have to be heritable to a point, otherwise there would be nothing to be selected. Personality traits including happiness are a mixture of inborn (most likely some genetic) origins and reactions to our environment. E.g. you can be born a psychopath but it generally takes an abusive or otherwise shitty upbringing to turn you into a violent criminal psychopath. There are always exceptions of course.

Selective trait? Probably, people generally prefer to be around upbeat people though on the other hand as they say, misery likes company.