A new survey corroborates another set of studies which show that happy people watch thirty percent less T.V. than unhappy people. The General Social Survey has shown that happy people report watching an average of 19 hours of television per week and unhappy people report watching six more hours of television on average (education, income, age and marital status were controlled for).
The researchers have established a correlation between watching television and being unhappy but they don't know whether unhappiness leads to more television-watching or more television watching leads to unhappiness. After all, T.V might be a way for unhappy people to avoid dealing with the things that make them unhappy. Again, if you follow this blog, you are probably aware that another explanation of this data has been proposed: people who watch television are engaged in passive downtime (such as 'pooping out' in front of the boob-tube) miss out on the gratification of engaging in active downtime (such as riding a bike) or social activities which have been shown to increase your subjective well-being.
These explanations aren't mutually exclusive, and I would argue that television is probably part of some sort of vicious cycle (or shame spiral).
Mr. Thinley will continue to implement the government policy of GNH. Happiness is not hedonistic, "it is not the kind of fleeting pleasures that we seek." It has to do with "being able to balance material needs of the body and the spiritual needs of the mind."
He says the conditions for the pursuit of happiness have four pillars: Equitable and sustainable socioeconomic growth; conservation of the fragile Himalayan economy and environment; cultural preservation and promotion -- and good governance.
Interesting read, but I wonder if the four pillars make people happy, or if Mr. Thinley has decided the four pillars are good and should make Bhutan happy. I suspect, for instance, that sustainable growth has a negligible effect on the current happiness of the Bhutanese because of the availability heuristic: almost nobody is drastically, directly or immediately effected by the consequences of unsustainable development. I also suspect that conservation has a negligible effect on the subjective well-being of the Bhutanese because of adaptation effects: people tend to adapt to bad conditions (such as smog) if they increase gradually, over a long period of time. I doubt the four pillars are the result of rigorous empirical testing, but I imagine you could link them all to subjective well-being in a roundabout way.
How can interrogators sleep at night? In general, we believe that the world is just, a priori, so we conclude that a detainee who has been tortured must have deserved it. People are amazing, aren't they?
I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.
1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers. The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotionduring social decision-making."
3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality."
You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.
4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.
6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry.
7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."
Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...
This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."
8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."
9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."
10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.
11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.
According to the World Values Survey, overall, the world is getting happier. More people are happier today than was the case 25 years ago; the survey found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analyzed. As usual, Denmark, Columbia and Puerto Rico top the charts. The United States maintains about the same relative position (19 out of 96) as it did in the 2000 survey. Countries whose respondents reported high levels of happiness were much likelier to be democracies than were countries that rank lower in terms of their citizens' happiness. Apparently, there is a strong correlation between happiness, economic development (this is distinct from wealth, y'all) and democracy!
The authors don't address the truly puzzling cases that troubled Easterlin: why, for example, are Venezuelans happier than Americans? Why, exactly, are extremely wealthy nations (such as Japan) as happy or slightly happier than poor nations (such as Jamaica)?
As far as I'm concerned, this chart reveals the gross hedonic inefficiency of wealthy nations (and, conversely, the hedonic ingenuity of less wealthy nations). Remember, money is extrinsically valuable, and this data provides us with reasons to reconsider the way we use it.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, based on interviews of more than 100,000 people so far, shows that 47 percent of Americans are struggling and 4 percent are suffering.
People were asked to imagine where they would put themselves on a ladder with 10 steps. Those who said they were on step seven or above are listed as "thriving", those who were at four or below are "suffering" and those between seven and four are the "struggling." Apparently, those who are "thriving" tend to have higher incomes, more education and less illness, whereas those who are "suffering" tend to have trouble meeting their basic needs (such as food, shelter and medical care).
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) released its annual "Social Trends" report, according to which Britons are wealthier, healthier and living longer, but seem no happier than before. Britain's output per capita had more than doubled in the last 30 years, while mortality rates for circulatory diseases, cancer and respiratory illness continue to decline. Yet satisfaction with the standard of living in Britain has remained steady since the 1970s: each year since 1973 an average of 86 percent of people said they were "very" or "fairly satisfied" with their standard of living. In 2006, the figure was 85 percent, compared to six percent who rated themselves as "fairly" or "very dissatisfied". These figures seem to support the Easterlin Paradox.
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