Stuff v. Happiness in the NYT:
A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people. Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.” So one day she stepped off…
YANSS looks at the confusing route to happiness.
Imagine you are preparing to go on a two-week vacation. At the end of this vacation, you will drink a potion which will delete all the memories from those two-weeks. How will this affect your decision? Knowing you won’t remember any of it, what will you spend your time doing during those two weeks?
ScienceDaily: What You Say About Others Says a Lot About You, Research Shows
This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing.
A study at PhysOrg.com–feelings catchable.
[R]esearchers [have] found a correlation between an individual’s emotional state and those of the person’s contacts. In other words, it appears that you can catch happiness. Or sadness.
(Via GoodTherapy.org)
New York looks at parents who hate parenting in All Joy and No Fun.
From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think…
A TED talk from Dan Gilbert.
The Boston Globe looks at the science of taking a good vacation.
For psychologists and behavioral economists, vacations are a window into the still only dimly understood mystery of human pleasure, a field known as hedonic psychology. Their research, along with other work on prototypically pleasant (and unpleasant) experiences, has begun to yield a portrait of your mind on vacation. And if the findings tell us anything, it’s that we might actually need some help. When we guess the best way to spend our free time, it seems that we often guess wrong.
For a summary, discussion, and objecting-to of the article, try the Slate Culture Gabfest.
Another in the Google lecture series, this one from scientist-turned-Buddhist monk, Matthieu Richard, author of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.
A survey reported on the Well blog shows fidelity as criteria #1 for a happy marriage.
But what about children? As an ingredient to a happy marriage, kids were far from essential, ranking eighth behind good sex, sharing chores, adequate income and a nice house, among other things. Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990.
PsychCentral: Money Impedes Our Ability to Enjoy the Little Pleasures in Life, says study.
Simply seeing a picture of money — which appears to prime our brains, increasing the concept of money at a level below awareness — seems to impede our ability to enjoy life’s little pleasures.
