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...

Violence against people due to their sexual orientation is a phenomenon that exists within a framework of sexual stigma and sexual prejudice that can result in enacted stigma. The present study primarily aimed to validate the Stigma Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ) and the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS; for lesbian, gay, and bisexual [LGB] populations) in the Spanish context by using samples...

Recent Advances in the Economics of Individual Subjective Well-Being Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our revi...

It is well recognized that visual impairments (VI) worsen individuals' mental condition. However, little is known about the positive aspects including subjective happiness, positive emotions, and strengths. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the positive aspects of persons with VI including their subjective happiness, positive emotions, and strengths use. Positive aspects o...

We examined the Hurst exponent of heart rate time series and its relation with the subjective measures of valence and arousal in two groups of subjects. The electrocardiogram (ECG) and the subjective valence and arousal were measured during the administration of emotional film stimuli (happiness, sadness, anger and fear). The results showed that there is a difference in the Hurst exponent for t...

Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxy measure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-being and its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot of potential, but that it needs to be guided more by theory. We propose two ways to test theories of happiness, and illustrate them wit...

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 “Hedonistic Paradox” states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for himor herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being, as measured by responses...

subjective well-being, generally through survey methods. A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes happiness, whereas Western European and Scandinavian-style social democracies promote it. This paper argues that happiness research in fact poses no thre...

Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This pa...