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I found this surprising. Well, maybe not.  But maybe not.  According to a new study, parents are raising their kids to achieve or be happy, the Washington Post relates. What's wrong with that?  They're not valuing caring for others. About 80 percent of the youth in the study said their parents were more concerned with their achievement or happiness than whether they cared for others. The interviewees were also three times more likely to agree that “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.” Why is this important? Because if we want our children to be moral people, we have to, well, raise them that way, right?  We've certainly seen enough of the kids who make fun of others for being different, or because they don't wear the right sneakers, or live in the right neighborhood.  And isn't this, at the head of it all, where bullying comes from? I guess you can't teach moralit...

Well, not for me.  Years ago, when we were first dating, a woman I know told me never to marry someone who hated what he did. Unfortunately, I did, because I loved him, but over 30 years with a man who violently hates what he does (he's a dentist) has made my life, well, if not unhealthy, then extremely hellish! A new study has found that if your spouse is happy, you will be healthy.   Newswise.com reports that having a happy spouse could be good for your health, at least among middle-aged and older adults, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. In a nationally representative study of 1,981 middle-age heterosexual couples, researchers found that people with happy spouses were much more likely to report better health over time. This occurred above and beyond the person’s own happiness, according to the study. “This finding significantly broadens assumptions about the relationship between happiness and health, suggesting a uni...

Who doesn't remember the Stanford swimmer who got off very lightly after raping an unconscious co-ed?  Or, if you're old enough, the preppy killer, Robert Chambers, who strangled his girlfriend and used "rough sex" as his defense.  He's now in jail for 19 years on a drug charge. So what's up with all these people who feel so entitled ?  (And the people who grant it to them, like judge Aaron Persky, who faced recall after his decision.) Says Joshua Grubbs, the primary author of a new paper on entitlement and a recent PhD graduate in psychology from Case Western Reserve, “At extreme levels, entitlement is a toxic narcissistic trait, repeatedly exposing people to the risk of feeling frustrated, unhappy and disappointed with life." Entitlement—a personality trait driven by exaggerated feelings of deservingness and superiority—may lead to chronic disappointment, unmet expectations and a habitual, self-reinforcing cycle of behavior with dire psycho...

Well, big duh. Relationship satisfaction depends on the mating pool, according to a new study, as reported by newswise.com. Relationship satisfaction and the energy devoted to keeping a partner are dependent on how the partner compares with other potential mates, a finding that relates to evolution’s stronghold on modern relationship psychology, according to a study at The University of Texas at Austin.  UT Austin psychology researcher Daniel Conroy-Beam and his collaborators developed a method to test how mate preferences influence behavior and emotions in relationships in the study “What predicts romantic relationship satisfaction and mate retention intensity: mate preference fulfillment or mate value discrepancies?” he writes in Evolution & Human Behavior. Who hasn't been there?  You want to go to the prom but the only guy you think will ask you is kind of a big jerk.  But you'll go with him, anyway.  And then he doesn't ask you!  This ha...

Quick.  Which affects you more, a woman saying, "Help?"  Or a scream. Clearly we react more immediately to sounds, and that's just what a new study has found.  Human sounds convey emotions clearer and faster than words. It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions conveyed by vocalizations, according to researchers from McGill, newswise.com reports. It doesn’t matter whether the non-verbal sounds are growls of anger, the laughter of happiness or cries of sadness. More importantly, the researchers have also discovered that we pay more attention when an emotion (such as happiness, sadness or anger) is expressed through vocalizations than we do when the same emotion is expressed in speech. The researchers believe that the speed with which the brain ‘tags’ these vocalizations and the preference given to them compared to language, is due to the potentially crucial role that decoding vocal sounds has played in human survival....

Here's an interesting thought.  Happiness spreads, but depression doesn't. According to a new study, having friends who suffer from depression doesn’t affect the mental health of others. Research led by the University of Warwick found that just the fact of having friends can help teenagers recover from depression or even avoid becoming depressed in the first instance, newswise.com reports. The findings are the result of a study of the way teenagers in a group of US high schools influenced each others’ moods. The academics used a mathematical model to establish if depression spreads from friend to friend. “Depression is a major public health concern worldwide," says professor Frances Griffiths, head of social science and systems in health at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick. "But the good news is we’ve found that a healthy mood among friends is linked with a significantly reduced risk of developing and increased chance of recovering from ...

You win some, you lose some.  But did you know that Dannel Malloy may not feel that elated that he was re-elected as governor of Connecticut? That's because a new study has found that winning elections barely improves the happiness of those from the winning political party, and that losing, not surprisingly, reduces self-reported happiness and increases sadness substantially, according to newswise.com. I'm sure that's how Tom Foley feels this morning, after conceding defeat to his hated rival. The researchers used thousands of daily online survey responses from CivicScience, a market research and data intelligence company, to compare the happiness and sadness reported by those who identify with political parties in the days surrounding the 2012 presidential election. The sadness effect lasted for about a week, but eventually partisan losers recovered. “One of our main findings is that the pain of losing the 2012 presidential election dominated the joy of w...

We go out for dinner on Sunday nights. I usually have a salad and my husband, a burger. We always go to the same restaurant. The servers know us there and have my iced tea and his water, waiting, on our favorite table. We sit and talk – about our son, our wobbly finances, our crazy families. Pretty ordinary night. But it makes me happy. I lopk forward to it all week. Now a new study is finding that for some people, happiness can be that simple. According to a recent story in The New York Times, “ What we do, it seems, has more potential for lasting satisfaction and memory-making than what we have.” Ron Lieber writes that, i f you can cover basic expenses, pursuing inexpensive, everyday things that bring comfort and satisfaction can lead to happiness equal to jetting about on international trips in your 70s and 80s. Well, we're not that old but it seems to be holding true for us. I'm going back to work next week but I haven't held a job – ...

Did you know being happier could lead to a healthier environment? Well, it's not quite that simple.  But a new study has found that the pursuit of true happiness can lead people to lifestyles that will not only be satisfying but will be better for the environment,according to newswise.com. "For decades, consumerism has been on a collision course with the environment, with consumer appetites draining the planet of natural resources and accelerating global warming. One view is that we need to change consumption in order to save the planet,”Miriam Tatzel, PhD, of Empire State College, tells newswise.com. “But what if we approached it from the other way around? What if what’s good for the consumer meets what’s good for the environment?”  Positive psychology, or the study of happiness, well-being and quality of life, provides the answers to what really brings happiness to consumers, Tatzel said. Several studies have determined that people’s basic psychological need...

If you're like me, you pretty much check Twitter to see what your friends are up to, and what's going on in the world (that's how I knew exactly what was going on minute-by-minute during the Boston Marathon massacre).  But what would you think if it could tell you how happy your city was? That's the new plan developed by  the University of California, San Diego and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).  They're collecting and analyzing tweeted images of cities to measure just how happy people are in cities. According to newswise.com, the project will tackle a simple question: Is it possible to measure the overall happiness of metropolitan areas based on the study of images shared on Twitter? "Can visual characteristics of images shared on social media tell us something about the ‘moods’ of cities?” the Web site quotes principal investigator Mehrdad Yazdani, a data scientist with the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at the Qualcomm Ins...

Remember the old quote, "All happy families are alike?"  Well now, we're finding out that, just as there are many kinds of unhappiness (and families), there are also many colors of  happiness . According to medicaldaily.com, "While previous studies have mapped the effects of stress and other negative emotions on such a level, little time has been spent on positive emotions like happiness, hope and pleasure." "I've known anecdotally that positive emotions impact us on a cellular level, but seeing these results have given us proof that there is a real difference in the kinds of happiness we feel and its potential long-term consequences," John Ericson quotes  Barbara Fredrickson , a professor of psychology and principal investigator of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina, and the lead author of a  new study  published in the journal  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ." Appar...

Can you believe researchers actually study this?  But they do.  And it's a fast-growing, lucrative area of science. Molly Petrilla at smartplanet.com recently interviewed a psychologist,  Sonja Lyubomirsky , who has written several books about this, and how she herself tries to keep, well, happy. One of the first topics Lyubomirsky talks about (can she really be happy with that name?) is the fact that there's no such thing as a dream job. Sorry to disappoint you all out there but what makes people happy in their jobs is excitement and passion, and that only lasts so long. "We’re not hard-wired to be passionate and excited all the time. In fact, we probably wouldn’t want to be because it would be hard to get things done. But our expectations are way too high. I talk in the (new) book (The Myths of Happiness) about a lot of people who are constantly in search of the ‘dream job.’ And there is no dream job," Lyubomirsky tells Petrilla in their interview. The psych...

A recent study done in the UK has found that eating fruit and vegetables can make us euphoric.  Seven portions a day, that is. http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/October2FruitAndVeg2012BlanchOswaldStewartBrown.pdf