There is a burgeoning amount of research into happiness and greatly increased popular attention, so it seems logical to add a course on happiness to the university curriculum. We encountered, in developing and running such a course, a number of dilemmas that the topic of happiness makes especially acute. Should the teacher remain separate from the class, as an authority, or participate in group...

Abstract This paper examines factors affecting happiness using panel data concerning 58 countries during 2003-2011. Happiness data come in the form of answers to questions such as "How happy are you as a whole in your life?" and the answers range from 1 to 5transformed to obtain a 1-10 scale. Macroeconomics data are from MIT and World Bank 2012 tables. Including 215 total pool observations indi...

Assessing national levels of happiness has become an important research and policy issue in recent years. We examined happiness and satisfaction in Ireland using phone text messaging to collect large-scale longitudinal data from 3,093 members of the general Irish population. For six consecutive weeks, participants' happiness and satisfaction levels were assessed. For four consecutive weeks (wee...

The assumption that everyone wants to be happy is prevalent among psychologists and laypeople alike. The present investigation suggests that motives for happiness are not consistent across individuals or contexts. Three studies demonstrate that preferences for happiness vary as a function of trait extraversion and situational demands. When anticipating an effortful task that requires increased ...

We offer and test a simple operationalization of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being ("happiness") as mediating variables that link outcomes to motivation. In six evolutionary agent-based simulation experiments, we compared the relative performance of agents endowed with different combinations of happiness-related traits (parameter values), under four types of environmental conditions. We found (...

OBJECTIVES The main aim of this study was to examine the roles of physical passivity and extraversion in the relationship between daily engagement in activities and daily happiness among older adults. METHOD A day reconstruction method was used to accurately examine day-to-day activities and happiness. In total, 438 participants completed a monthly electronic diary survey over a 2-year period...

Most are to be found in the chronology; where, p. 316, Diocles is credited with the first Green Herbal (read "Greek anatomy"); plague in Britain ends in 1392; and syphilis breaks out in 1490. The decision to insert all entries referring to a century at the head of entries for that century, and to place individuals by their date of birth results in some curious juxtapositions. Misprints are comm...