Top Research Papers on Happiness

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been done in this arena tends to focus on physiological dynamics, which are certainly part of the puzzle. But they are not the whole picture, with psychological, phenomenological, and socio cultural processes also playing their part. As a result, this paper ...

VodafoneZiggo, a telecommunications organisation based in the Netherlands, has applied service design for many years in order to review and improve service delivery to its customers. In particular, customer journeys and personas have been embraced as useful methods. While these projects initially focused on customer experience, the service design approach is now also being applied to employee experience projects.

ABSTRACT Many organisations believe that workplaces ought to be happy spaces. However, actions to promote happiness often overlook the variety of impacts emotions may have. While the current literature on emotional labour focuses on feeling rules, emotional displays and normative control, this article links happiness to materiality by exploring affects and the power relations produced. After reviewing the literature on happiness and emotional labour, this article investigates the circulation of emotions, or how emotions become ‘sticky’ to objects and bodies while having different flows of inte...

This Element explores the connection between God and happiness, with happiness understood as a life of well-being or flourishing that goes well for the one living it. It provides a historical and contemporary survey of philosophical questions, theories, and debates about happiness, and it asks how they should be answered and evaluated from a theistic perspective. The central topics it covers are the nature of happiness (what is it?), the content of happiness (what are the constituents of a happy life?), the structure of happiness (is there a hierarchy of goods?), and the possibility of happine...

Surveys measuring happiness or preferences generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are used to analyze such data, suffer from an identification problem. Their conclusions depend on distributional assumptions about a latent variable. We propose using response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable through a chronometric effect. Using an online survey experiment, we verify the chronometric effect. We then provide theoretical conditions for testing conventional distributional assumptions. These assumptio...

Abstract This study aims to analyze the effect of loyalty on customer happiness. Therefore, the role of psychological variables such as copying, and attachment styles were studied. The sample was comprised of 524 cases corresponding tdo Peruvian customers. A multiple linear regression model was performed to evaluate our hypotheses. The stepwise method was used to select variables using AIC. An important finding of this study was that concrete and abstract loyalties can predict happiness among Peruvian customers. In terms of originality, the article evaluates the effect of loyalty on happiness ...

This research found out that the Indonesian version of Happiness at Work measurement is reliable and valid and may contribute to the happiness at work literature of non-western context.

Al-Ghazali's book entitled The Alchemy of Happiness describes happiness. It often becomes a reference of behavior of mysticism and psychology, especially Islamic psychology. However, there are no studies that specifically examine this book. This study analyzes al-Ghazali's concept of happiness in The Alchemy of Happiness. The research data sources consist of literature having The Alchemy of Happiness as their main references. The researcher uses the content analysis method to analyze the data. The research results show that (1) Al-Ghazali's concept of happiness refers to the Qur'an, Hadīths, I...

We examine the impacts of parental marital happiness on child outcomes. We also examine the potential mediating role of parenting styles in the relationship between marital happiness and children's behavioral outcomes.Parents' marital happiness lays a crucial foundation for successful parenthood, which contributes to children's positive development. However, scant research has examined the relationship between parental marital happiness and child outcomes in Chinese populations.Data from a subsample of 3,258 parents of third‐grade children in Shanghai and Greater Taipei were analyzed (n = 1,28...

This study aims at evaluating the psychometric properties of a new scale to measure experienced happiness—the Measure of Happiness (MH)—in a nonclinical sample composed of Italian adults from the general population. The MH was developed not only to provide a global measure of happiness, but also and more importantly to identify the specific areas of the individual’s life that are related to the experienced happiness. A total of 787 adults filled the MH and other self-report questionnaires, in order to assess the factor structure, reliability and external validity of the measure. The factorial ...

Many psychological theories emphasize the significance of early childhood events. A review of the literature reveals that studies concentrate on the consequences of adverse childhood experiences on the physical and mental health of individuals. A few studies have so far examined the effects of positive childhood experiences on mental health. This research aims to investigate the relationship between positive childhood experiences and happiness. 695 adults (488 female and 207 male) participated in the study. Positive Childhood Experiences Scale served to gather the data regarding the childhood ...

PurposeThis study analyses the concept of happiness management based on the empirical validation of the interactions between emotional wage, organisational justice and happiness at work. It complements a holistic view of the management models used in recent corporate governance. This perspective explores the dimension’s emotional wage mediating role and influences on organisational justice and happiness at work. The effect of organisational justice on happiness at work is also analysed.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive and correlational study is proposed. ...

Summary In this article the author reflects on her upbringing, in which she was admonished to be cheerful and happy and not acknowledge unpleasantness. Consequently, as a young adult and a new psychotherapist she found herself detached from her own feelings as well as those of her clients. She recalls the evening that she became a more whole, more sensitive human being, and credits her therapy practice and her clients for keeping her that way.

Abstract There are multiple indices based on positive psychology and the economics of happiness for measuring, evaluating and developing social policies. Based on univariable scales, they reflect a more hedonic view rather than a complex perspective on social reality and human behavior, which renders them unfit for purpose in the field of sociology. This paper proposes a multidimensional model that includes social relationships and human happiness, focusing more on eudaimonic than hedonic happiness. It contains an affective dimension, an ethical dimension, and a welfare system’s evaluation dim...

This article explores how the language teachers in our study associated particular teaching experiences with feeling happy in qualitative interview accounts. Adopting a critical poststructural orientation, it uses the concept of sticky objects (Ahmed 2010; Benesch 2017) to explore how contexts, social discourses, relationships and emotional norms are entangled in and shape emotions such as happiness. More particularly, it adopts Ahmed’s (2010) notion of “happy objects” in exploring language teachers’ associations of “teacher caring” with feeling happy. Rather than exploring what happiness is...

Using data across countries and over time, we show that women have worse mental health than men in negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used — anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger — and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives, such as democracy, the economy, the state of education, and health services. They are also less satisfied in the moment in terms of peace and calm, cheerfulness, feeling active, vigorous, fresh, and rested. However, prior evidence on gender...

I feel grateful to have been able to take part in discussions of the new approaches to the study of happiness and human thriving in psychology, economics, health care, and the brain sciences, both in a study group sponsored by Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Initiative and in a seminar series at the Center for Population and Development Studies. And I feel grateful, more generally, for having had a chance to learn from so many here at Harvard and in the larger Boston community in what I do think of as a precious opportunity for “continuing education.”

+ Encouraged by the writings in this issue I’m sharing a view of happiness; as an everyday aspiration and accomplishment rather than an enormous concept with voracious goals that is out of reach. Whether that be a postdoctoral researcher’s contentment upon completion of a draft of their new article, or the sense of achievement a young doctoral student gifts themselves after reading a book chapter about research methodology without having to perpetually refer to a dictionary to find the meaning of each new word (which sadistically appears to be in every other sentence) or, the deep pride a supe...

Research on lay conceptions of happiness is essential to determine what is investigated in happiness studies. Whereas psychological investigation has traditionally emphasized the importance of studying people’s everyday conceptions and their relation to cultural and social factors to advance psychological theory, this line of research is still largely overlooked in the field. The Spanish context has also received very limited attention in the area. To fill these gaps, this paper examined 547 lay definitions of happiness in a sample of Spanish participants. The aims of the study were threefold....

Idioms illustrate special linguistic units since they reflect human wisdom in the perception of the world (Giang, 2023b). They have intertwined and transformed into archives of a community's culture in the past. Idioms also play a significant role in the linguistic ontologization of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, etc. Semantically, idioms in Vietnamese are all perceptively associated with typical images (Hanh, 2008), and idioms of happiness have their own happy images. The paper aims to investigate the happy images Vietnamese people perceive through idioms of happiness from a cult...

Research has established that altruistic behavior increases happiness. We examined this phenomenon across cultures, differentiating between individualistic and collectivist cultures. We propose that cultural variations in the notion of altruism lead to different effects of helping on the helper’s happiness. For individualists, altruism is linked to self-interest (“impure” altruism), and helping others results in increased happiness for the helper. For collectivists, altruism is focused on the recipient (“pure” altruism), and helping others is less likely to enhance the helper’s happiness. Four...

ABSTRACT Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of future situations involving positivity. Although some self-report measures can capture emotions of happiness-averse individuals, they are not always capable of capturing automatic processing. Thus, we examined the association between implicitly-assessed happiness and explicit (i.e. self-reported) fear of happiness in three studies. In Study 1, participants completed the Fear of Happiness Scale ...

The regression model revealed that happiness increases with headache days, and subsequent analysis showed a U-shaped relationship between headache frequency and happiness, implying that headache calendars do not necessarily correctly reflect patients' difficulty to feel well despite the disorder.

It is argued that policymaking should shift from the traditional economic development approach to socio-technical wellbeing, and how human progress and economic development positively impact happiness should be investigated.

ABSTRACT Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic across academia, with a burgeoning array of research into its different aspects. Among the most dynamic and interdisciplinary work in this arena are studies exploring the myriad factors that influence it. These span multiple topics and fields of enquiry, from physiology and identity to politics and economics, covering analyses at both individual and national levels. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of such work, identifying seven overarching ‘conditions’ (in themselves multifaceted) that contribute towards the complex creation of ...

This Element provides an opinionated introduction to the debate in moral philosophy over identifying the basic elements of well-being and to the related debate over the nature of happiness. The question of the nature of happiness is simply the question of what happiness is (as opposed to what causes it or how to get it), and the central philosophical question about well-being is the question of what things are in themselves of ultimate benefit or harm to a person, or directly make them better or worse off.

This paper presents cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the digital divide and individual happiness in China, and is the first study to examine the impact and its variations among different groups of the three-level digital divide, as well as its mechanisms.

William H. “Dink” NeSmith, Jr., a member of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, will be the featured speaker at the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College fall commencement ceremony Friday at 6 p.m. in Gressette Gym. A 1970 graduate of the University of Georgia (UGA), NeSmith is chairman of the University’s Fanning Institute for Leadership, which promotes public service and outreach. He recently coauthored a biography of the institute’s founder, Dr. J.W. Fanning. NeSmith is past president of UGA’s National Alumni Association and a director of the Richard B. Russell Foundati...

Optimal ExperienceFinding FlowCreativityThe small BIGThe how of HappinessThe Happiness HypothesisHappy: The JournalThe Evolving SelfOxford Handbook of HappinessPsychology 2eThe Rise of SupermanFlow and the Foundations of Positive PsychologyRunning FlowThe Inner SelfFind Your FlowThe Systems Model of CreativityPositive Psychology In A Nutshell: The Science Of HappinessThe Happiness AdvantageSex and the PsycheThe Psychology of HappinessA Life Worth LivingApplications of Flow in Human Development and EducationGood BusinessPositive PsychologyBarking Up the Wrong TreeFlowA Rose for EmilyThe Psychol...

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across numerous academic fields. However, the literature can sometimes imply it is predominantly a modern concern. Relatedly, critics have argued that contemporary scholarship on happiness is Western-centric, yet in so doing can appear to suggest that happiness is mainly a Western preoccupation. However, taking an expansive view of happiness – defining it broadly as a desirable mental experience – one can appreciate that versions of this phenomenon have been of interest to humans across cultures and throughout history. To articulate this...

Abstract Contact with nature has been increasingly recognized as enhancing human well-being and health. Less is known about how people perceive and define the effects of nature in their everyday lives. This study examines conceptions of the relation between nature and happiness offered by 15- to 16-year-olds in Finland, which has been reported to be “the happiest country in the world.” The data consist of thematic writings (N = 184). The results show that most of the participants agreed that nature makes them happy or associated only positive characteristics with nature. One fourth of the part...

. It is now recognized that the personal well-being of an individual can be evaluated numerically. The related utility (“happiness”) profile would give at each instant t the degree u ( t ) of happiness. The moment-based approach to the evaluation of happiness introduced by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman establishes that the experienced utility of an episode can be derived from real-time measures of the pleasure and pain that the subject experienced during that episode. Since these evaluations consist of two types of utility concepts: instant utility and remembered utility, a dynamic model o...

Aim. The aim of the article is to look for an answer to the question of whether it is worthwhile to deal only with happiness and to leave the exploration of quality of life as something which is not viable, or if it makes sense to deal with both phenomena. If so, what is the relationship between them? At the same time, we ask ourselves whether happiness and quality of life are perceived equally by people and are therefore interchangeable. Results. The answer is also confirmed by measuring the number of published articles monitored in the Web of Science. The quantification of happiness and qual...

This paper provides a spiritual perspective on happiness referred to as the G-donic approach to happiness which is fundamentally different from the hedonic and eudemonic approaches. The G-donic approach identifies the importance of the spiritual self and argues that it embodies the technology that converts physical resources into happiness. We argue that with G-donic preferences, it is possible to achieve a higher level of happiness with moderate consumption. The G-donic approach encourages living a virtuous life by fulfilling the biological, social, emotional, intellectual, moral, and spiritu...

每天都是热夏,温柔的旋律伴着波光跳跃的水珠,游过夏天的5米深水池,呼吸着池底的空气,清醒却沉迷。我是一个睡神,懒于伸手敲打键盘。起床了就选择用相机记录一段段惊喜而平和的日子,只想某一天能忽然发现自己与你们偶然交错的轨迹。没有寂寞没有彷徨,却不安分、不守纪、不听话,也不讲道理,μ2是双机器眼,反正你们的窘迫和伤情被我逮住就永远逃脱不了。

A large interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between age and subjective well-being (happiness) has produced very mixed evidence. In this paper we argue that this is due to potential sources of bias that may distort the assessment of the age-happiness relationship. Most biases tend to produce a spuriously U-shaped age trajectory. In contrast, applying our suggested specification to German panel data we find a (nearly monotonic) declining age happiness trajectory.

ABSTRACT Happiness is valued as one of the most important goals in raising children, but what factors make children happy? Inspired by philosophical conceptions of ‘eudaimonia’ in life, we investigated how children’s social and academic functioning, including prosocial behaviors, peer preference, and academic achievement, may be related to happiness, over and above desire satisfaction. Participants included 2,144 children (initial ages of 9 and 10 years) in China. Two waves of longitudinal data were collected from multiple sources including self-reports, peer evaluations, and school records. C...

This study was conducted to determine the level of the happiness of educators, the level of happiness portrayal of educators, and the significant relationship between the happiness and happiness portrayal of educators. This study employed a quantitative correlational research design. Furthermore, this study administered two types of standardized tests to gather the data needed. The results implied that the educators’ level of happiness is high. On the other hand, the level of happiness portrayal of educators is also high. In addition, the reflected standard deviation for each of the variables,...

Happiness at Work is considered the Holy Grail of organizational sciences. The belief that happier workers are more productive leads to a win-win situation for both individuals and organizations. Nevertheless, years of research have not brought a convergent conclusion about the topic, mainly due to the lack of a widely accepted measure. Usually, questionnaires and self-report surveys are used; however, these methods embed shortcomings that allow studies’ results to be questioned. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the present study proposes a different approach to measure Happiness at Wo...

Abstract This article is a response to a piece in this journal, by David Bartram, which questions the validity of a vast literature establishing consistently a U-shaped relationship between age and happiness. There are 618 published studies that find U-shapes in that relationship in 145 countries, and only a handful that do not. Of the 30 countries that Bartram (2023, National Institute Economic Review, 1–15) examines, he finds U-shapes in 18. We show compelling evidence of U-shapes in the remaining dozen countries. Supporting evidence of a U-shape is found in objective measures including deat...

Human development is essential for social sustainability. The inclusive development of any nation depends upon the level of human development, which is affected by economic and social progress. In the present era, it is being observed that mere economic development does not lead to human progress. Rather such development resulted into the vicious impacts on the mental and social development of the majority of population. The lack of happiness is the key factor for rising cases of mental disorders all over the world. It is well recognized fact that human development is not possible without happ...

Subject Code Description Nr of Studies on this Subject H3 HAPPINESS: VIEWS ON HAPPINESS 0 H3.1 Happiness-attitude career 0 H3.1.1 Earlier happiness-attitudes 0 H3.1.2 Change in happiness-attitudes 0 H3.1.4 Later happiness-attitudes 0 H3.2 Current happiness-attitudes 1 H3.2.1 Concept of happiness 2 H3.2.2 Perceived sources of happiness 0 H3.2.2.1 . perceived sources of one's own happiness 13 H3.2.2.2 . perceived sources of every-bodies happiness 2 H3.2.3 Perceived happiness of others 1 H3.2.3.1 . perceived level of happiness of compatriots 3

: The present study aimed to contribute to the cultural and linguistic adaptation of the Fear of Happiness Scale for Portugal. It was studied a convenience sample of 262 Portuguese adults, 87.4% female, aged between 18 and 82 ( M = 33.50; SD = 13.37), with an education level that varied between secondary education and the 3rd cycle of higher education; 79% resident in urban areas and 21% in rural areas. Participants answered to an assessment battery, which included the Fear of Happiness Scale (FHS) consensus translation, previously subjected to a cognitive analysis. The Portuguese version of t...

There are four hormones which determine a human's happiness, and these hormones are Endorphins, Dopamine, serotonin, Serotonin and Oxytocin.

ABSTRACT There has been a growing tendency to use humanistic and utopian goals in the naming and framing of education policies. The case of the Happiness Education Policy (HEP) in South Korea is illustrative and demonstrates the potential of such framing, combined with references to external authorities, to neutralise domestic opposition and generate support from diverse national stakeholders. The HEP focuses on nurturing ‘happy human capital’ for the future through education initiatives such as the Free Semester/Year Initiative, character education, STEAM-based curriculum, and software educat...

Abstract Has the income–happiness correlation changed over time? If so, what predicts such changes? We tested these questions in diverse economic, political, and cultural contexts. Drawing on nationally representative data, we found that the income–happiness correlation has increased in the USA since 1972, as GDP per capita and income inequality increased (Study 1). Study 2 examined an income–life satisfaction correlation in nationally representative surveys between 1978 and 2011 in Japan. Unlike in the USA, there was no clear increase in the income–life satisfaction correlation over time. We ...

Analysis of a large social survey dataset sampled from 408 communities in Japan revealed that the psychological interconnection of happiness was moderated by community-level social capital above and beyond individual- level social capital, while individual-levelsocial capital did not have a significant moderation effect.

Abstract The Declaration of Independence lists the “pursuit of Happiness” as one of the rights that government is duty-bound to protect. Yet in the United States, decades of conservative and neoliberal policies have made that right illusory for far too many. By several metrics-economic inequality, life expectancy, and the alarming growth in so-called deaths of despair-it has become clear that the government has failed to provide most Americans with a basic level of security, much less with the chance to pursue lives of meaning and connectedness. A major reason for this failure is the distortio...

Abstract Many consider Hobbes the father of political individualism, claiming that his new conception of happiness involved abandoning its metaphysical dimension, which had been central in ancient times and in the Middle Ages. Highlighting previous commentators’ inattention to the link between scientific knowledge and happiness in Hobbes’s thought, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of considering him the founder of a new ideal of happiness grounded in individual experience. Hobbes adopts the ancient principle that man’s happiness is necessarily conditional upon his submission to a normative system ...

A prototype robot lawnmower that can recognize hedgehogs, interrupt its work for them and thus protect them is developed, and the results could be relevant for an industry that wants to market their products as animal-friendly machines.