Search (1068)
Is there an upside to your kid being miserable?
e type of thinking promoted by happiness can impair attention to detail: Happiness is generally considered an emotion with only beneficial effects, particularly in childhood. However, there are some situations where the style of information processing triggered by happiness could be a liability. In particular, happiness seems to motivate a top-down processing style, which could impair performance when attention to detail is required. Indeed, in Experiment 1, 10- to 11-year-old children (N= 30) induced to feel a happy mood were…
1 min read
Everybody hates commuting. Why do we do it?
nny, I'd been planning to do a bit on commuting for a while. Yesterday I saw Jonah Lehrer's excellent post on the subject and figured now might be a good time. As he and David Brooks both note, commuting dramatically and negatively affects happiness. I agree. Everyone hates commuting. Even sex offenders hate commuting. Married women have a pretty dramatic relationship with commuting -- it stops them from working: These points were confirmed when Black and his coauthors examined Census data…
3 minutes
Digest of Digests:
is will be the digest of digests (how meta can we get?) Might want to bookmark this one. I'll keep updating this post as I add more digests. So far we have: Things you didn't know about happiness Things you didn't know about sex How to quickly and easily improve your life Things you didn't know about sports Things you didn't know about lies, liars and detecting lies Things you didn't know about negotiation, persuasion and influence Things you didn't…
1 min read
Does it matter if your employees are happy?
s. Happiness significantly boosts productivity: The paper provides evidence that happiness raises productivity. In Experiment 1, a randomized trial is designed. Some subjects have their happiness levels increased, while those in a control group do not. Treated subjects have 12% greater productivity in a paid piece-rate Niederle-Vesterlund task. They alter output but not the per-piece quality of their work. To check the robustness and lasting nature of this kind of effect, a complementary Experiment 2 is designed. In this, major…
1 min read
Are fat people jolly? – Part 2:
friend Ben Casnocha recently gave me some great advice: he said it would be lot more interesting if I started questioning these studies a little more. Well, as he frequently is, Ben's right. I previously posted on whether fat people are jolly. Looks like the verdict may not be in. Because while the (admittedly limited) previous study said yes, here's one that links obesity and unhappiness: This paper provides insight on the relationship between obesity and happiness. Using the…
1 min read
The secret to getting a job:
u have to network. Yeah, you've heard that a million times already. I can show you what it really does and why it's one of the most important things to focus on: We assess the information spillovers generated by the exchange of job-related information within networks of fellow workers exploiting administrative records covering all employment relationships established in a specific local labor market over 20 years. We recover individual-specific networks of former colleagues for a sample of workers exogenously displaced…
4 minutes
Should a man be happier than his wife?:
t if he wants to stay married: This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to…
2 minutes
Does living in a fast paced country make you happier?:
ce of life was fastest in Japan, Europe and cold, rich, individualistic countries -- and they did have greater subjective well-being. They also smoked more and had more heart attacks. Can't have it all, I guess: This study compared the pace of life in large cities from 31countries around the world. Three indicators of pace of lifewere observed: average walking speed in downtown locations,the speed with which postal clerks completed a simple request(work speed), and the accuracy of public clocks.…
1 min read
