BACKGROUND In recent years there have been numerous attempts to define and measure happiness in various contexts and pertaining to a wide range of disciplines, ranging from neuroscience and psychology to philosophy, economics and social policy. This article builds on recent work by economists who attempt to estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals in order to cal...

Modern diagnostic methods enable clinicians to look beyond a diagnosis of chronic Q fever and discern whether patients instead have persistent focalized Coxiella burnetii infection(s). Use of these methods and development of criteria to define and treat such infections, especially cardiovascular infections, will improve the prognosis for patients previously thought to have chronic Q fever.

Given that the core issues of attention research have been recognized for millenia, we do not know as much about attention as we should. I argue that the reasons for this failure are (1) we create spurious dichotomies, (2) we reify attention, treating it as a cause, when it is an effect, and (3) we equate a collection of facts with a theory. In order to correct these errors, we need a new techn...

Is the Introspection Thesis true? It certainly isn’t obvious. Introspection is the faculty by which each of us has access to his or her own mental states. Even if we were to suppose that mental states are identical to brain states, it doesn’t follow immediately from this supposition that we can introspect our mental states as brain states. This point is analogous to the following. It doesn’t fo...

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...

The subjective well-being or happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies. Although happiness is influenced by life circumstances and population demographics such as wealth, we know little about how the cumulative influence of daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. Using computational modeling, we show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happi...

The economic evaluation of health care technologies employs a standard economic approach based on preferences to provide utility information. Previous studies have used happiness rather than preferences to weight health states using general population data. However, these data may not reflect the full range and scope of health and happiness experienced by patients. This paper applies a similar ...