Materialism, happiness and spiritualism seem inseparable and represent areas that have continued to dominate human life and yet have attracted limited research interests, especially in Nigeria. The present study employed the multi-stage sampling technique to investigate the relationship between materialism, happiness and daily spiritual experience among 142 participants drawn from across 3 reli...

Happiness in this context is defined as `the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life-as-a-whole positively', or in short: how well one likes the life one lives. In this way, happiness belongs to a wider class of subjective appraisals of life, which is usually referred to as ‘subjective well-being’ (SWB) or ‘life satisfaction’. (cf. Chapter 2). We will confine this d...

822 www.thelancet.com Vol 387 February 27, 2016 What defi nes a good life? If in answering this question you included happiness in your list, you are not alone. Indeed, the pursuit and enjoyment of happiness is a common goal and desire in life for most people. Adults of all ages, including those in old age, frequently report the experience of happiness as a determinant of a good life. Since bot...

Client-agent interactions are prevalent in our daily lives. In this research, we study one such interaction through an economic game that captures the essence of clients’ and agents’ dealings with one another: the fact that agents, whose pay is frequently determined by client happiness, have the incentive to maximize client happiness by giving distorted feedback. In this game, a client undertak...

HAPPINESS IS A CENTRAL criterion of mental health (Keyes, 2005; Taylor & Brown, 1988) and has been found to be associated with numerous tangible bene!ts, such as enhanced physical health, reduced psychopathology, greater productivity, more ful!lling relationships, and even longer life (see Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005, for a review). Thus, an important goal for psychology is advancing know...

BACKGROUND Mental health disorders are major contributors to the global burden of disease and their inverse relationship with physical activity is widely accepted. However, research on the association between physical activity and positive mental health outcomes is limited. Happiness is an example of a positive construct of mental health that may be promoted by physical activity and could incre...

Large-scale social surveys typically elicit levels of happiness and/or life satisfaction. This paper studies how such reports of happiness and life satisfaction are related to measures of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). Major findings are the following: (1) PA and NA levels jointly predict happiness better than they predict life satisfaction. (2) PA levels predict happiness bette...

Psychologists, quality of life and well-being researchers have grown increasingly interested in understanding the factors that are associated with human happiness. Although twin studies estimate that genetic factors account for 35-50% of the variance in human happiness, knowledge of specific genes is limited. However, recent advances in molecular genetics can now provide a window into neurobiol...

The pursuit of happiness is viewed as an inalienable right by most Americans, but the government of the United States does not ensure that the right is equally enjoyed by all its citizens. There is significant difference in the distribution of happiness among different aggregates of American people. Using General Social Survey (GSS) 1998 data, this paper analyzes which aggregates of American pe...

Past studies have shown that personal subjective happiness is associated with various macro- and micro-level background factors, including environmental conditions, such as weather and the economic situation, and personal health behaviors, such as smoking and exercise. We contribute to this literature of happiness studies by using a geospatial approach to examine both macro and micro links to p...