The study of happiness was of interest to early economists and philosophers. Centuries later, it has gone from the fringes of economics to the mainstream. Economists are using happiness surveys to study a host of questions, ranging from the happiness effects of health, marriage, and various institutional arrangements, to the unhappiness effects of unemployment, divorce, and commuting time. Beca...

OBJECTIVE To assess the status of food security--i.e., access to food, food availability and food utilization--in South Africa. METHODS A systematic search of national surveys that used the Community Childhood Hunger Identification Project (CCHIP) index to measure food security in South Africa over a period of 10 years (1999-2008) was conducted. Anthropometric data for children aged 1-9 years...

Examined whether intrapersonal comparisons and social comparisons operate in similar ways to determine ratings of happiness. Events were varied to create positively and negatively skewed distributions. The events in each distribution were ascribed to either a single person or a group of people; Ss rated how happy they would feel if they experienced specific events within the distribution. Ratin...

happiness holds a central position in farabi and aquinas theory of  ethics and politics. both of these philosophers are considered aristotle-oriented and peripatetic. while both regard god’s countenance as real happiness, their methods to reach this goal are separated in a stage and a place. recognizing the insufficiency of intellect,aquinas affirms the necessity of faith and other theological ...

Increasing evidence suggests that multiple cognitive and motivational processes underlie individual differences in happiness (Lyubomirsky, 2001, 2008). One behavior that is associated with (un)happiness is self-reflection or dwelling. We hypothesized that unhappy individuals would be inclined to dwell about themselves, and that this behavior would have a variety of adverse consequences. Three s...

A growing empirical literature uniformly claims that prosocial (or moral) behavior increases happiness. Previous causal evidence, however, focuses on short-term effects and non-choice data. We test the link between prosocial behavior and happiness in a novel high-stakes paradigm that provides a comprehensive, dynamic perspective on the pattern of derived happiness. In our longitudinal study, ea...

This study was designed to assess whether the impact of a microswitch-based program on indices of happiness would be comparable with that of a stimulation program. Three persons with profound multiple disabilities participated. The microswitch-based program produced increases in indices of happiness which were fairly clear for the first two participants and quite modest for the third participan...

Why do we believe that more money will buy us more happiness (when in fact it does not)? In this paper, we propose a model to explain this puzzle. The model incorporates both adaptation and social comparison. A rational person who fully accounted for the dynamics of these factors would indeed buy more happiness with money. We argue that projection bias, the tendency to project our current refer...

Climate is an important input to many human activities. Climate affects heating and cooling requirements, determines clothing and nutritional needs and limits recreational activities. As such it is to be expected that individuals will have a preference for particular types of climate. These preferences have indeed been observed using a variety of approaches including regional analyses of wage r...