This essay explores how happiness is maintained as a memory of the first relationship and when that memory is disturbed, envy can set in. Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. The thought of Melanie Klein and her 1957 work, Envy and Gratitude, guides the inquiry. Happiness in one person ca...

Participants completed measures of trait emotional intelligence (trait EI), happiness, personality, and cognitive ability. Neuroticism was negatively related to happiness, whereas Extraversion and Openness to Experience were positively related to it. Cognitive ability was not related either to happiness or to trait EI. A three-step hierarchical regression showed that trait EI explained over 50%...

The theory that happiness is relative is based on three postulates: (1) happiness results from comparison. (2) standards of comparison adjust, (3) standards of comparison are arbitrary constructs. On the basis of these postulates the theory predicts: (a) happiness does not depend on real quality of life, (b) changes in living-conditions to the good or the bad have only a short-lived effect on h...

The paper uses paradata on response time, cognitive effort and questionnaire order from a large Dutch internet panel survey to study the association between reporting process and reported happiness. We find that slower responses and higher self-stated cognitive effort are associated with lower reported happiness, potentially, because they proxy for momentary mood. Moreover, in multivariate happ...

The aim of this essay has been the evaluation of three orientations towards happiness: pleasure, meaning and engagement, as well as their relation to life satisfaction and the perception of happiness in a sample of 320 university students. The results show that the most used kind of orientation towards happiness is pleasure, followed by meaning, and finally engagement. It has also been found th...

Happiness research has dealt with a great number of determinants of well-being but has neglected the effect of war. Wars drastically reduce people’s happiness. The large psychic costs of soldiers, the suffering of civilians, and the material destruction are well documented. An important issue for happiness research is how to calculate the forgone well-being of the people killed in war. Wars may...

Happiness underlying factors are considerable from two dimensions: endogenic factors (biological, cognitive, personality and ethical sub-factors) and exogenic factors (behavioral, socialcultural, economical, geographical, life events and aesthetics sub-factors). Among all endogenic factors, biological sub-factors are the significant predictors of happiness. Existence of significant differences ...

Traffic has a profound effect on how humans perceive their own happiness. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the short term happiness losses associated with traffic lead to lower overall happiness for people living in areas with consistently high traffic. This paper looks at average traffic delays in major metropolitan cities in the United States and compares these delays to average h...

The aim of the present study was to examine the internal reliability, content validity, construct validity, and concurrent validity of the Persian translation/Farsi version of the Oxford Happiness Inventory. The Oxford Happiness Inventory and Fordyce Happiness Inventory were completed by a sample of 727 Iranian university students. Findings confirmed the internal reliability, construct, and con...

While abundant evidence is available about the relationship between income and happiness, relatively little is known about the effects of the level and composition of consumption on happiness. The present paper provides an introduction to this special issue devoted to Consumption and Happiness. We start by discussing different concepts and measures of happiness. We then briefly review the exist...