This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization— of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to...

It’s of great importance to measure happiness of social network users, but the existing method based on questionnaires suffers from high costs and low efficiency. This paper aims at identifying social network users’ happiness level based on their Web behav ior. We recruited 548 participants to fill in the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI) and divided them into two groups with high/low OHI score....

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding happiness and unhappiness in all its components – positive and negative emotions and moods – is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that understanding happines...

BACKGROUND This study explores the relationships between social capital, self-rated health, and happiness and suggests ways to improve the happiness level of a community. METHODS The survey was conducted with 445 people using stratified random sampling in a medium-sized city in Korea. Collected information included socio-demographic characteristics, social capital, self-rated health, and happ...

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...

The present study aims at investigating the conceptions of happiness and unhappiness in a sample of Italian psychology undergraduates. Participants completed a questionnaire asking them to report the most important things that made them feel happy (happiness components) and those ones that made them feel unhappy (unhappiness components). Different measures of overall happiness and overall unhap...

The biological correlates of negative affect (e.g. depression and neuroticism) have been well studied, but very little research has focused on the biological correlates of positive affect (e.g. happiness and well-being). Cortisol has been shown to be a consistent marker for depression, but has yet to be studied with relation to happiness. High levels of morning cortisol have been linked to depr...

Understanding how having children influences parents' subjective well-being ("happiness") has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modi...

OBJECTIVE The present study explored the role of the emotional experience of God (i.e., positive and negative God images) in the happiness of chronic pain (CP) patients. Framed in the transactional model of stress, we tested a model in which God images would influence happiness partially through its influence on disease interpretation as a mediating mechanism. We expected God images to have bot...

This paper deals with the concept of happiness in economics. Of late there has come into life a branch of happiness economics and it is this field that will be our concern. Actually, not only economists are interested in quantifications of happiness but also researchers in other disciplines. Notably there are several psychologists who investigate happiness as well. We mention Schimmack et al. (...