Very happy people

A sample of 222 undergraduates was screened for high happiness using multiple confirming assessment filters. We compared the upper 10% of consistently very happy people with average and very unhappy people. The very happy people were highly social, and had stronger romantic and other social relationships than less happy groups. They were more extraverted, more agreeable, and less neurotic, and scored lower on several psychopathology scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Compared with the less happy groups, the happiest respondents did not exercise significantly more, participate in religious activities significantly more, or experience more objectively defined good events. No variable was sufficient for happiness, but good social relations were necessary. Members of the happiest group experienced positive, but not ecstatic, feelings most of the time, and they reported occasional negative moods. This suggests that very happy people do have a functioning emotion system that can react appropriately to life events.     

The funds, friends, and faith of happy people

New studies are revealing predictors of subjective well-being, often assessed as self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. Worldwide, most people report being at least moderately happy, regardless of age and gender. As part of their scientific pursuit of happiness, researchers have examined possible associations between happiness and (a) economic growth and personal income, (b) close relationships, and (c) religious faith.     

Sad people are more accurate at face recognition than happy people

Mood has varied effects on cognitive performance including the accuracy of face recognition (Lundh & Ost, 1996). Three experiments are presented here that explored face recognition abilities in mood-induced participants. Experiment 1 demonstrated that happy-induced participants are less accurate and have a more conservative response bias than sad-induced participants in a face recognition task. Using a remember/know/guess procedure, Experiment 2 showed that sad-induced participants had more conscious recollections of faces than happy-induced participants. Additionally, sad-induced participants could recognise all faces accurately, whereas, happy- and neutral-induced participants recognised happy faces more accurately than sad faces. In Experiment 3, these effects were not observed when participants intentionally learnt the faces, rather than incidentally learnt the faces. It is suggested that happy-induced participants do not process faces as elaborately as sad-induced participants.     

Not all happy people are lazy or stupid: Evidence of systematic processing in happy moods

Two experiments investigated the effects of mood on the use of global trait information in impression formation tasks. Participants in both experiments formed an impression of a target based on traits and a series of behaviors that were both consistent and inconsistent with the traits. In Experiment 1, participants in happy moods, relative to those in unhappy moods, made impression judgments that reflected the evaluative implications of the trait information to a greater extent than the behaviors, regardless of the order in which they received the information. In Experiment 2, both happy and sad participants engaged in systematic processing, as reflected by the recall data, but only happy participants’ recall of target information was significantly biased by the global trait information they received. These findings are consistent with the affect-as-information model in which affective cues influence the extent to which individuals rely on general knowledge and, importantly, are inconsistent with models that posit that happiness results in reduced motivation or ability to process information carefully.     

Diminishing marginal value as delay discounting.

The fundamental law underlying economic demand and exchange is the tendency for value of marginal units to diminish with increasing amounts of a commodity. The present paper demonstrates that this law follows from three still-more-basic psychological assumptions: (a) limited consumption rate, (b) delay discounting, and (c) choice of highest valued alternative. Cases of diminishing marginal value apparently due to pure intensity of reward may plausibly be attributed to the above three factors. The further assumption that maximum consumption rate may vary within and across individuals implies that some substances may be unusually addictive and that some individual animals may be unusually susceptible to addiction.     

Interpreting the good life: growth memories in the lives of mature, happy people

In 2 studies, the authors examined autobiographical memories for the presence of 2 growth orientations that were expected to correspond differentially to maturity and well-being, which are considered to be key facets of "the good life" by L. A. King (2001). Mature participants emphasized integrative memories (conceptual integration and learning), whereas happy participants emphasized intrinsic memories (humanistic concerns). Both kinds of growth memories correlated more strongly with eudaimonic than with hedonic measures of well-being. Growth memories were largely independent of Big Five traits in relation to maturity and well-being. Finally, older participants were more likely than younger participants to have greater maturity (marginally) and well-being, but this was in part explained by older participants' greater tendency to have growth memories. The discussion considers the role of growth memories in the intentional cultivation of the good life.     

Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.     

The confounded nature of angry men and happy women

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception.     

聚焦“缺失”对当下幸福体验的影响

人们的幸福体验与其关注的焦点密切相关。研究1采用图形聚焦范式,结果发现个体在情绪体验中出现聚焦缺失的聚焦错觉现象,聚焦缺失组个体的总体幸福体验低于非聚焦缺失组;研究2通过启动范式操纵被试的聚焦缺失程度,结果发现,高聚焦缺失个体的情绪幸福比低聚焦缺失的个体更低。2个研究结果发现:聚焦缺失是导致人们低幸福体验的根源,聚焦缺失使人们高估缺失所占整个生活比例,出现"缺失放大"现象。研究将聚焦错觉从"情感预测偏差"领域拓展至"当下幸福体验"领域,同时从聚焦"实物类匮乏"跨越到聚焦"抽象性缺失感",并初步揭示出"缺失放大"机制,未来或可进一步探讨聚焦缺失影响幸福体验的"缺失放大"机制。     

Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value

The authors explored three properties of basic, unconsciously triggered affective reactions: They can influence consequential behavior, they work without eliciting conscious feelings, and they interact with motivation. The authors investigated these properties by testing the influence of subliminally presented happy versus angry faces on pouring and consumption of beverage (Study 1), perception of beverage value (Study 2), and reports of conscious feelings (both studies). Consistent with incentive motivation theory, the impact of affective primes on beverage value and consumption was strongest for thirsty participants. Subliminal smiles caused thirsty participants to pour and consume more beverage (Study 1) and increased their willingness to pay and their wanting more beverage (Study 2). Subliminal frowns had the opposite effect. No feeling changes were observed, even in thirsty participants. The results suggest that basic affective reactions can be unconscious and interact with incentive motivation to influence assessment of value and behavior toward valenced objects.     

Most people with mental disorders are happy: A 3-year follow-up in the Dutch general population

The nature of the associations between life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression remains elusive. Using questionnaire data from a large population-based sample (N = 6326) of young adult Norwegian twins (aged 18–31 years) we explored the extent to which latent genetic and environmental factors are (1) common or distinct, and (2) sex-specific. Phenotypic correlations ranged between 0.44 and 0.70 in females, and between 0.41 and 0.69 in males. Environmental influences accounted for 75% of these correlations in females, and less than 50% in males. Genetic and environmental sources of life satisfaction, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of depression were shared mostly, but the magnitude of the effects was different in males and females. In both sexes, however, aetiological factors enhancing life satisfaction were simultaneously protecting against feelings of sadness and displeasure, but contributed less to countervailing anxiety and tension.     

Alone and happy: Personality moderates the effect of happy mood on social approach

Happy moods are believed to evoke an approach orientation and to broaden one’s potential courses of action. Although positivity is strongly associated with approach, social approach is a more complex behavior because interacting with other individuals can offer either positive or negative consequences. We provide novel experimental evidence that happiness actually reduces social approach among individuals whose happiness might be threatened by social interaction. Specifically, experimentally induced mood interacted with participants’ personality, such that participants who were high in social inhibition (e.g., shyness, rejection sensitivity) sat further away from another individual when in a happy mood. We suggest that happiness may produce a general orientation to approach other individuals except when such approach threatens mood.     

A happy medium: The sociology of Charles Horton Cooley

The career, teaching, and writing of Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), sociologist at the University of Michigan, show that a middle ground between broadly integrative, general knowledge and specialized knowledge prevailed well into the early twentieth century, both at the level of professional social science and within the modern university curriculum. Cooley's social science rested upon introspection and the study of art and literature, and he eschewed the drift of social science toward behaviorism and quantification. As a university professor, he conceived of specialized knowledge within the context of general culture, not in opposition to it.     

The happy personality: Mediational role of trait emotional intelligence

This study examined the relationship between the Big Five personality traits (Gosling et al., 2003), trait emotional intelligence (EI) (Petrides & Furnham, 2001) and happiness (Argyle et al., 1989) in a sample of 112 (61 female) student and non-student participants. Strong dispositional determinants of happiness were identified. In line with previous findings, four of the Big Five, namely stability, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, were positively correlated with both happiness and trait EI, which explained 18% of unique variance (over and above age and the Big Five) in happiness. Furthermore, a significant amount of shared variance between happiness and the Big Five was explained by trait EI, which partly mediated the paths from stability and conscientiousness to happiness, and fully mediated the link between agreeableness and happiness. Limitations and implications are discussed.