It is indeed a pleasure to be at this World Food Prize celebration here in Des Moines to participate in honoring this year’s co-laureates, Dr. Monty Jones and Prof. Yuan Longping, two giants in rice research. How appropriate it is that we honor them this year—2004, the International Year of Rice. In Africa and Asia, respectively, they have both made remarkable contributions toward the eradicati...

The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to examine the associations of both objectively assessed and perceived physical and social neighborhood characteristics with happiness in European adults. In addition, we aimed to study how these associations differed among subgroups. METHODS Participants (N = 6037) of the cross-sectional SPOTLIGHT survey reported on their level of happiness using a 5-point Likert scale, a...

We studied the predictive impact of proxy ‘‘outsider’’ reports, injury type, and functional independence on trajectories of happiness over the first 5 years following medical treatment for a traumatic spinal cord injury, brain injury, severe burns or interarticular fractures (total N = 1,271). It was anticipated that lower functional independence and outsider status would predict lower happines...