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...

Happiness underlying factors are considerable from two dimensions: endogenic factors (biological, cognitive, personality and ethical sub-factors) and exogenic factors (behavioral, socialcultural, economical, geographical, life events and aesthetics sub-factors). Among all endogenic factors, biological sub-factors are the significant predictors of happiness. Existence of significant differences ...

Traffic has a profound effect on how humans perceive their own happiness. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the short term happiness losses associated with traffic lead to lower overall happiness for people living in areas with consistently high traffic. This paper looks at average traffic delays in major metropolitan cities in the United States and compares these delays to average h...

The aim of the present study was to examine the internal reliability, content validity, construct validity, and concurrent validity of the Persian translation/Farsi version of the Oxford Happiness Inventory. The Oxford Happiness Inventory and Fordyce Happiness Inventory were completed by a sample of 727 Iranian university students. Findings confirmed the internal reliability, construct, and con...

While abundant evidence is available about the relationship between income and happiness, relatively little is known about the effects of the level and composition of consumption on happiness. The present paper provides an introduction to this special issue devoted to Consumption and Happiness. We start by discussing different concepts and measures of happiness. We then briefly review the exist...

There are substantial differences in happiness in nations. Average happiness on scale 0-10 ranges in 2006 from 3.24 in Togo to 8.00 in Denmark and the inequality of happiness, as measured by the standard deviation, ranges from 0.85 in Laos to 3.02 in the Dominican Republic. Much of these differences are due to quality of governance and in particular to 'technical' quality. Once a minimum level ...

Culture shapes the emotions people feel and want to feel. In Western cultures, happiness is an emotion that many people want to feel. Although experiencing happiness is associated with increased well-being and psychological health, recent evidence suggests wanting to feel happy to an extreme degree, or, highly valuing happiness leads to decreased well-being. To examine whether these effects of ...

Happiness is a subjective experience that is an ultimate goal for humans. Psychological studies have shown that subjective happiness can be measured reliably and consists of emotional and cognitive components. However, the neural substrates of subjective happiness remain unclear. To investigate this issue, we used structural magnetic resonance imaging and questionnaires that assessed subjective...

Since the dawn of written history, happiness has attracted the attention of great philosophers, including Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Aristotle (McMahon, 2006; The Pursuit of Happiness). Happiness has been variously conceptualized and defined throughout history, influenced by the thinking of the times. Today it has come to be recognized as, “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive ...