  Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and
happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and
desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self Determination
theory posits that the basis for well-being rests on our assessment of our
competence, autonomy, and social connection. And surveys that measure happiness
empirically note that people require their basic needs to be met for food and
shelter, but beyond that tend to be happiest when socializing, eating or having
sex. We analyze a corpus of private microblogs from a well-being application
called ECHO, where users label each written post about daily events with a
happiness score between 1 and 9. Our goal is to ground the linguistic
descriptions of events that users experience in theories of well-being and
happiness, and then examine the extent to which different theoretical accounts
can explain the variance in the happiness scores. We show that recurrent event
types, such as OBLIGATION and INCOMPETENCE, which affect people's feelings of
well-being are not captured in current lexical or semantic resources.
