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Why Happiness Isn’t Always Good: Asians vs. Americans
TIME: Among journalists — and less so among psychologists — the subset of mental-health research called “positive psychology” has become powerfully influential. Positive psychology, which was more or less founded by a University of Pennsylvania
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The Joy of Researching the Health Benefits of Sex
The Wall Street Journal: Is sex good for your health—or is that just a fantasy? A flurry of small studies suggest that sex is as good for your health as vitamin D and broccoli. It
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How Happy Are You? A Census Wants to Know
The New York Times: When they filled out the city’s census forms this spring, the people of Somerville got a new question. On a scale of 1 to 10, they were asked, “How happy do
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The Perils of Comparative Thinking
“I wept because I had no Porsche, and then I saw a man who had no BMW.” That’s an ancient proverb, slightly doctored for modern American sensibilities. The point is that, regardless of our life
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Why the Happiest States Have the Highest Suicide Rates
TIME: Worldwide surveys have consistently ranked the Scandinavian countries — with their generous family-leave policies, low crime, free health care, rich economies and, yes, high income taxes — as the happiest places on earth. But
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Misery may really love company, study suggests
MSNBC: Does misery really love company? An intriguing new study suggests that may be the case. Researchers who study how people’s sense of well-being varies from place to place decided to compare their findings with
