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Does money reduce your ability to enjoy life?
is study provides the first evidence that money impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as…
1 min read
When you’re unemployed is it better to have friends with jobs or friends who are out of work?
u'll be happier if you have unemployed friends. You'll also be likely to remain unemployed longer: This paper uses 16 waves of panel data from the British Household Panel Survey to evaluate the role of subjective well-being in determining labor market transitions. It confirms a previous finding in the literature: individuals report a fall in their happiness when they lose a job, but they report a smaller fall when they are surrounded by unemployed peers, an effect called the"social norm".…
1 min read
You just committed murder. What should you do now?
u may want to know how long it takes to dissolve a body. Some insight on how to reduce that aggression level of yours could be useful and along those lines, guys, you should definitely stay away from guns -- unless you use them a lot, that is. (Honestly, there may not be much you can do; you and your family may all have serious brain problems. I'm guessing you were probably a pretty fearless kid.) Now there are some…
4 minutes
Why does (nearly) everyone want to be taller?
cording to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings…
2 minutes
How to quickly and easily improve your marriage:
ose relationships are central to health and happiness. Most research has focused on eliminating problems such as conflict and tension, issues that counselors are likely to encounter. However, some cross-sectional surveys of the general public suggest that another problem faced in long-term marriages may be simple boredom, the lack of excitement; laboratory and shortterm field experiments suggest a causal effect of reducing boredom (by shared participation in exciting activities) on relationship quality (e.g., Aron et al., 2000). The experimental and…
1 min read
Are happier people better citizens?
is paper presents evidence on causal influence of happiness on social capital and trust using German Socio-Economic Panel. Exploiting the unexplained cross-sectional variation in individual happiness (residuals) in 1984 to eliminate the endogeneity problem, the paper finds that happier people trust others more, and importantly, help create more social capital. Specifically, they have a higher desire to vote, perform more volunteer work, and more frequently participate in public activities. They also have a higher respect for law and order, hold…
1 min read
Do happy people love their jobs or do good jobs make people happy?
ppiness leads to job satisfaction: The current meta-analysis examined the relationship between job satisfaction and subjective well-being (SWB). Consistent with the spillover hypothesis, we found positive relationships between job satisfaction and life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and the absence of negative affect. In addition, an examination of longitudinal studies suggested that the causal relationship from SWB to job satisfaction was stronger than the causal relationship from job satisfaction to SWB. Source: "A meta-analytic examination of the relationship between job satisfaction…
1 min read
Does the weather affect how you invest?
ather variables, and sunshine in particular, are found to be strongly correlated with financial variables. I consider self-reported happiness as a channel through which sunshine affects financial variables. I examine the influence of happiness on risk-taking behavior by instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, and I find that happy people appear to be more risk-averse in financial decisions, and accordingly choose safer investments. Happy people take more time for making decisions and have more self-control. Happy people also expect to…
1 min read
