Members in the Media
From: Scientific American

Not Everyone Wants to Be Happy

Scientific American:

Everyone wants to be happy. It’s a fundamental human right. It’s associated with all sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right?

Well, maybe not.

A new research paper by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers from Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the desire for personal happiness, though knitted into the fabric of American history and culture, is held in less esteem by other cultures.  There are many parts of the world that are more suspicious of personal happiness, defined in the paper as experiencing pleasure, positive emotion, or success, and now empirical research is catching up with these cultural beliefs.

Read the whole story: Scientific American

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