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Does plastic surgery increase or decrease happiness?
average, people who undergo plastic surgery report increased happiness and decreased psychiatric symptoms. The biggest gains came from breast surgery. Via Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom: Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness. People who undergo plastic surgery report (on average) high levels of satisfaction with the process, and they even report…
1 min read
Do all these little happiness-improving tricks really work?
ve posted about these happiness-increasing tricks like showing gratitude, counting your blessings and spending money the right way. How powerful are they? Promising results have been seen not just with average people but also with those who have been diagnosed with clinical depression: Despite the availability of many treatment options, depressive disorders remain a global public health problem. Even in affluent nations, 70% of reported cases either do not receive the recommended level of treatment or do not get treated…
2 minutes
8 ways that money can buy happiness:
other paper from Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert (author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness) spells out 8 ways we can spend our money to increase happiness: 1) "Buy more experiences and fewer material goods." This means more amusement parks and vacations. Fewer cars and new TV's: Asked which of the two purchases made them happier, fully 57% of respondents reported that they had derived greater happiness from their experiential purchase, while only 34% reported greater happiness from their material purchase.…
6 minutes
How much of happiness is under our control? How can we make the most of it?
ppiness doesn't just make us feel good; it can also objectively improve our lives: A recent and comprehensive meta-analysis revealed a wide variety of benefits that accrue from positive emotion and well-being, including greater career success, better relationship functioning, increased creativity, enhanced physical health, and even longer life expectancy (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Source: "Is It Possible to Become Happier? (And If So, How?)" from Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1/1 (2007): 129–145 Are the rich happier? Yes, but…
3 minutes
What can Dilbert teach us about happiness?
lbert creator Scott Adams listed his tips for happiness and I was surprised how much they lined up with the research. Links included below to show the connections. Via Dilbert blog: Food - "...I suspect that anger is evolution's way of telling you to go kill something so you can eat. Exercise - "...If you think of exercise in its usual way, as one component of health, or as a way to lose weight, it's easy to skip your hour…
2 minutes
Is uncertainty one of the keys to happiness?
s. Positive moods lasted longer when people weren't clear on why good things happened. This is why you should explain the bad things in life and not explain the good things: The authors hypothesized that uncertainty following a positive event prolongs the pleasure it causes and that people are generally unaware of this effect of uncertainty. In 3 experimental settings, people experienced a positive event (e.g., received an unexpected gift of a dollar coin attached to an index card) under…
1 min read
What leads to life satisfaction and feelings of happiness?
bsp; First, let's be clear that those are two different things (I've posted about this distinction before here and here.) Life Satisfaction: Looking back and feeling good about your life holistically. Happy Feelings: Feeling good in the moment. Money and luxuries increase life satisfaction but don't do much for happy feelings. Happy feelings are associated with "the fulfillment of psychological needs: learning, autonomy, using one's skills, respect, and the ability to count on others in an emergency." The Gallup World…
2 minutes
Is there an easy way to increase happiness, meaning in life and social support?
searchers are seeing success with a type of meditation focused on expanding one's positive feelings toward others: B. L. Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions asserts that people’s daily experiences of positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources. The authors tested this build hypothesis in a field experiment with working adults (n = 139), half of whom were randomly-assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation. Results showed that this meditation practice…
2 minutes
