Researchers looked at data spanning several decades, and concluded that after the age of 48, men are generally happier than women.

Men are most miserable in their 20s, but grow more satisfied as they get older, marry and earn more money, they found.

Women on the other hand are happier than men in early adulthood, but the glow wears off with time.

Anke Plagnol, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Richard Easterlin, Professor of Economics at University of Southern California looked specifically at the role of unfulfilled desires in a person’s sense of well-being.

They found that overall happiness is most heavily linked to the stability of a person’s family and finances.

To read more about this UK happiness research - click here

The idea of Gross National Happiness has great visionary and symbolic power, writes Maureen Gaffney

IN 1972, the little Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan did a very radical and wise thing. The king established a Gross National Happiness programme, intended to be a more accurate measure of national wellbeing than GDP, or indeed GNP, the primary indicators of social wellbeing in western nations.

Ireland, currently in the grip of a post-Celtic Tiger hangover, may seem a little way off achieving such wisdom, but not as much as we might fear. The publication by the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) of an important discussion paper on wellbeing and competitiveness is another important step in the acknowledgement by Government and senior policymakers that the definition of national success must be amplified well beyond the traditional measures of economic wellbeing.

The discussion paper is thoughtful and, with some caveats, a well-researched exploration of what constitutes wellbeing, the drivers of wellbeing, and the limitations of current measures in assessing wellbeing.

To read more on this idea that there’s more to a nation’s wellbeing than economic success (i.e. happiness) - click here

By Marie-Josée Salvas

How often have you heard someone boast that they had worked 70 hours last week? Were you impressed and envious or did you think the speaker was either exaggerating or inefficient? Why do some take pride in proving that their work is more effortful, difficult, or even painful than that of others? In too many cases, this need to feel indispensable comes at the expense of one’s health and happiness.

This lifestyle choice is not only unfortunate, but worse, it is counter-productive. Exchanging happiness for difficulty could damage your life in the following areas. Read on so that next time someone tries to show off how demanding their schedule is, you have solid arguments to explain why their sacrifices may be unwise.

To read more about the benefits of happiness - click here

From: Psych Central

Reflecting On Values Transcends Self
By: Rick Nauert, Ph.D.
Senior News Editor

Reviewed by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
on July 23, 2008

Wednesday, Jul 23 (Psych Central) — Criticism is difficult for most as no one enjoys being told that their behavior is harmful to themselves or others. A common response is to become defensive when confronted with evidence that behavior is irrational, irresponsible, or unhealthy.

Fortunately, research has shown that just a few minutes of writing about an important value can reduce defensiveness.

Previous research by David Sherman at the University of California at Santa Barbara and his collaborators have shown that coffee drinkers are more willing to accept information that drinking coffee harms their health if they first write a few sentences about their most important value.

Although researchers have known for decades that reflecting on important values reduces defensiveness, they have not identified why this simple practice opens people to unpleasant facts they would rather avoid.

For decades, scientists assumed that writing about important values boosts self-esteem, or makes people feel good about themselves, and this makes them less defensive.

Yet, many studies failed to support the idea that boosts to self-esteem or positive mood explains why writing about important values reduces defensiveness.

In a new experiment, Jennifer Crocker and Yu Niiya from the University of Michigan and Dominik Mischkowski from the University of Konstanz, suggest that previous researchers have it wrong; writing about important values doesn’t reduce defensiveness by boosting the self; instead, it enables people to transcend the self by focusing on people or things they care about beyond themselves.

In two experiments, they found that writing about important values makes people feel loving and connected, and that these other-directed feelings account for reduced defensiveness.

In the first study, the researchers asked participants to rank six values — social life, religion/morality, science, business, arts, and government. One group later wrote for 10 minutes about why their most important value was important to them, while the control group wrote for 10 minutes about how their least important value might be important to others. Afterwards, they rated how much writing the essay made them feel love, empathy or other emotions.

In the second study, participants were smokers and nonsmokers. Like the first study, participants wrote about an important or unimportant value.
This time, however, they next read a fake article claiming that smoking increases the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysms, a bulge in the main artery of the heart, and the quality of the research described in the article.

The results for both studies were very strong. In both studies, those who wrote about an important value felt more loving and connected after writing the essays than those who wrote about an unimportant value.

And specifically in the second study, writing about an important value made smokers less defensive — they were more accepting of the article’s claim that smoking harms health if they wrote about an important value instead of an unimportant value.

“These studies raise the prospect that reminding people what they love or care about may enable them to transcend the self and may foster learning under difficult circumstances,” the authors explain in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The researchers speculate that the love and connection people feel after writing about important values could affect hormones related to care giving, such as oxytocin.

Because oxytocin increases trust, it might account for reduced defensiveness in people who take a few minutes to reflect on their important values.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Morale, Change, and Positive Organizations

By Dave Shearon
Positive Psychology News Daily
July 17, 2008

Dave Shearon, MAPP, applies positive psychology to both law and education. Dave writes articles about applications of Positive Psychology to law and education at his site.

This article is about morale and organizations helping us change for the better. Have you got any stories about great morale in an organization and its effect on the members? Maybe how a terrific leader or group response to a challenge improved morale? Let’s hear your story!

Christopher Peterson, a faculty member for the MAPP program, his research partner Nansook Park, and Patrick Sweeney of the United States Military Academy have published “Group Well-Being: Morale from a Positive Psychology Perspective” in Applied Psychology: An International Review. They note that the study of institutions that enable those things that make life worth living is “the acknowledged weak link of positive psychology” and suggest that research on “morale” as a group level construct can move the field forward in this area. Since I am working now on a 90-minute presentation I will give at the 1L orientations of two law schools in Tennessee in August, this article connects my thoughts both on organizations and on initiating and facilitating individual change and growth.

The authors suggest that morale is both an individual and a group construct and should be studied at both levels with methodologically independent measures. Peterson et al. note that positive psychology has made progress in studying other ordinary language concepts by articulating their dimensions and devising separate measures for them, e.g., happiness includes dimensions of pleasure, engagement, and meaning. The components they suggest for morale are:

Confidence
Enthusiasm
Optimism (both future expectations and explanatory style)
Belief in capabilities
Resilience
Leadership
Mutual trust and respect
Loyalty
Social Cohesion — friends at work
Common purpose
Devotion
Sacrifice
Compelling group history
Honor
Sense of moral rightness

To read the full happiness at work article - click here

Unhappiness is Part of Life

By Angus Skinner
Positive Psychology News Daily
July 22, 2008, 9:58 pm

Angus Skinner, MAPP, works in his beloved and beautiful Scotland principally as Associate Consultant with the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being. Angus is also a visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde.

You can be unhappy any time, any place. Moreover, life without unhappiness would probably be unbearable for it would have no light and so shadow, no day and so night, no loss and so no real gain, no sorrow and so no real joy. It would be devoid of meaning. Discontent is the source of creativity, perhaps of creation. From where do our goals come if not from discontent? (Of course I hope for a positive answer; but I don’t pray for one.)

Part of Martin Seligman’s argument (and others) about the damage done by much of the self-esteem movement over recent decades pivots on the fact that it undermines children’s (and adults’) tolerance of being unhappy.

There is nothing wrong with being unhappy. Seligman, a self-confessed grouch, made clear that philosophically unhappiness is a normal state while at the same time stating that in his case, good fortune probably did not stem from those times of unhappiness. In Authentic Happiness, Seligman writes:

Seligman famously wrote…In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring the mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to feeling grumpy, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change.

Happiness is life; life is other people. Let’s wallow awhile in this discontent. Depression is a feeling that “All is impossible, simple things can not be accomplished; problems overwhelm.” Few if any of us have never felt such feelings even if often our response has been to deny them. Whatever we do, to a degree we accept that we will die; more somberly, we accept that whatever we do, others will die. We cry for our children, for others. Our efforts fail, we fall to melancholia. We conquer countries, we comfort, we lead, we fail, we fall to melancholia.

Surprisingly our brains, no doubt the most fantastic organ in the known universe, are deeply flawed. As our best friend, the brain is also our irresponsible enemy - garnering information from our senses and body that it thinks it can use to understand the world, and then trying to control it.

Positive psychology is also about understanding being unhappy. Being unhappy is OK.

How best shall I be unhappy today? Of course I need to manage my unhappiness so as not to damage others. I need exercise, sun, and engagement. I also sometimes need to be unhappy alone. So do those I love.

I will laugh. And when we laugh together, then love abounds. Unhappy is fine for the moment.

It seems to have been on probation or parole for a while but perhaps it is time we accept unhappy back into the community of positive human emotions. No need to take it on hesitatingly. It’s here for keeps, even if sometimes it needs shaking out.

Martin Seligman is one of the leaders in the exciting new science of happiness, more formally known as positive psychology…in which research into what makes people happy is leading to powerful new coaching interventions to enhance happiness in more people. This is what we do here at The Happiness Institute and this is why we’re pleased to direct you to a new-ish video clip in which Marty talks about the good in psychology.

Click here to view the video

Although I now practice mostly as a positive psychology coach and consultant I still remember much of my days as a clinical psychologist and I still find most of what I learned while studying clinical psychology to be useful in my current roles.

Among many other things, I remember learning about a fascinating body of research on a topic that was most often referred to as “Preparedness Theory”. Notably, preparedness theory challenged those of us who believed in the most dominant paradigm of the day which was learning theory.

In short, while not denying the role of genetic make-up and even personality, learning theory proposed that our behaviour was largely determined by our past experiences. So, for example, referring to the area in which this was mostly applied, an individual might develop anxiety or even a phobia for cars if when young, he or she was involved in an unpleasant or traumatic experience while in a car.

Preparedness theory, however, threw quite a large spanner in the works by noting that many of the most common phobias (such as those associated with spiders and insects, heights and enclosed spaces) frequently occurred in the absence of any obvious incident in the person’s past. Despite many sophisticated attempts to identify past traumas and negative events often nothing of significance could be found.

Accordingly, in an attempt to explain and understand these somewhat surprising results, preparedness theory was developed and without going in to too much detail, it can be summed up as follows – we (humans) are born with an in-built system that prepares us to avoid certain situations so that we don’t need to learn from our mistakes.

If you think about it this makes perfect sense because if you had to fall off a cliff, or experience the bite of a venomous spider before developing a fear then it might well be too late to learn any lessons! Preparedness theory, supposedly developed over thousands of years of evolution, saves us the pain of learning by building the lessons of our predecessors into our brains.

Now I’ve been wondering what it would be like if we could build in preparedness for happiness! Given that we know, based on the last few decades of research in positive psychology, what will make us happy and given that we’ve developed a range of effective coaching strategies proven to enhance happiness and wellbeing, what would it be like if we could integrate these into our lives so that no matter what was going on we’d always (or almost always) respond in helpful and constructive ways more likely to enhance our positive feelings and minimise negative feelings, as opposed to slipping into old traps and bad habits?

In short, this would surely be great!

And do you know what? It’s distinctly possible. How do I know this? Because we achieve this on a regular basis through our coaching and group programs at The Happiness Institute. We know that achieving happiness requires nothing more than practising a few simple disciplines every day and we help people create a way of living their lives built around positive disciplines.

How can you do this?

Start by identifying when you’re at your happiest – what are you doing during these times; who are you with; what thoughts go through your mind; and what inner strengths are you utilising? Then give some thought to how you can apply these lessons in other parts of your life. Practice and persevere to ensure you master what could potentially be life changing strategies. Use reminders and create positive routines to ensure you don’t forget to do what will help you live a better life; and consider finding a “buddy” with whom to practice being happy.

Get the Most From Your Employees

How to get the best from employees? Instead of trying to change them, identify their unique strengths, then help them use those strengths to excel in their own way. To identify employees’ strengths, ask, “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” Listen for activities people find intrinsically satisfying. Then activate those strengths with recognition tailored to each person’s preferences. For example, if an employee values recognition from peers, publicly celebrate his achievements in front of coworkers. If he appreciates recognition from customers, post a photo of him and his best customer in the office.

Today’s Management Tip of the Day was adapted from the HBR article, “What Great Managers Do,” by Marcus Buckingham.

According to a BusinessWeek story on happiness at work and positive leaders we should all:

- get sleep
- get off our behinds and
- get positive

If you want more happiness at work consider our coaching and consulting programs (email info@thehappinessinstitute.com for more on our “Happiness at work” programs).

If you want to read this interesting article - click here