What are the happiest jobs? What are the unhappiest?
a Forbes: 1. Clergy: The least worldly are reported to be the happiest of all 2. Firefighters: Eighty percent of firefighters are “very satisfied” with their jobs, which involve helping people. 3. Physical therapists: Social interaction and helping people apparently make this job one of the happiest. 4. Authors: For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existent, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness. 5. Special education teachers: If…
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What drink might reduce depression in women?
ffee. Via Inforum: Among a large population of women tracked for as long as 18 years each, the women who routinely consumed the highest levels of caffeine were 20 percent less likely than those who drank little to none to become depressed when they were nearing or in their 60s. Coffee, which ounce-for-ounce delivers the strongest dose of caffeine, was most women's pick-me-up of choice. And generally, the more caffeine a woman drank, the more likely she was to be…
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Why are lawyers so unhappy? (And how can we use this to be happier?)
rtin Seligman, psychology professor at UPenn and author of Authentic Happiness, clues us in as to just how unhappy lawyers are: Researchers at John Hopkins University found statistically significant elevations of major depressive disorder in only 3 of 104 occupations surveyed. When adjusted for sociodemographics, lawyers topped the list, suffering from depression at a rate of 3.6 times higher than employed persons generally. Lawyers also suffer from alcoholism and illegal drug use at rates far higher than non-lawyers. The divorce…
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Does Facebook make us miserable?
Facebook we all show the best and not the worst, leading to portraits of unattainable lives that may very well make us feel bad by comparison: Via Slate: Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford's psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook:…
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Who is happier: lottery winners or paralyzed accident victims?
ttery winners... but not by nearly as much as you might guess. Some time after winning their money, lottery winners weren't all that much happier than people who hadn't won -- and accident victims weren't anywhere as unhappy as the researchers had assumed. Shouldn't lottery winners be ecstatic and paralyzed accident victims be miserable? No. What the authors of the study found was that: 1) Much of happiness exists outside of objective life circumstances. Attitude and perspective mean a lot…
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Is being selfless the smartest way to be selfish?
is study shows doing volunteer work increases happiness -- not just correlation; they demonstrated causation as well. So if you're being self-centered and thinking only of how you can increase your own happiness, well, you may want to go help others for nothing in return: Here, we directly address the issue of causality and take advantage of a natural experiment: the collapse of East Germany. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first…
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What notably reduces pain? (Hint: you might already do it.)
earing. Via Time Magazine: In a previous study, psychologist Richard Stephens at Keele University in the U.K. and colleagues found that people who were asked to dunk their hand in ice-cold water were better able to tolerate the pain — and they left their hands in the buckets for a full 40 seconds longer — if they were allowed to swear, compared with people who were asked to utter a non-curse word. In the new study, Stephens repeated the previous…
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How you can deal with angry people without losing your cool:
ll yourself they are having a bad day and that it's not about you. Via US News: Telling yourself that an angry person is just having a bad day and that it's not about you can help take the sting out of their ire, a new study suggests. This strategy of finding another way to regard an angry person is an approach commonly suggested in cognitive behavioral therapy. For example, you can tell yourself that the angry person has just…
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