Posts Tagged ‘Happiness’
Helping Others Is a Link Between Self-Control and Life Satisfaction
Last week, I wrote about the health and mental health benefits of volunteering. Today brings us another study on the theme of helping others being a good way to help yourself. If all this talk about the benefits of helping others is starting to sound a little preachy, don’t blame the messenger! It just happens…
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Valuing Time Rather Than Money May Lead to Happiness
Time is money, right? But in a literal sense, that’s not true. Time is time, and money is money. In fact, time might be more important than money, at least as far as happiness goes. A new study suggests that when it comes to creating a life that makes you happy, prioritizing time over money…
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Social Media Might Kind of Affect Life Satisfaction in Teens
Maybe you’ve heard that social media usage is linked to lower life satisfaction. But what does that mean? There are multiple ways social media and life satisfaction could be “linked”: People with higher life satisfaction use social media less than people with lower life satisfaction People tend to use social media more when they become…
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What’s Behind the Mona Lisa’s Crooked Smile?
For centuries, people have puzzled over the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic expression. In recent years, psychology researchers have joined in with their own theories, even debating fundamental questions such as whether Mona Lisa’s facial expression indicates happiness or sadness. The latest contribution to the “Mona Lisa studies” branch of psychology comes from a paper titled Unraveling…
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Looking at the Big Picture Increases Happiness
Sometimes in life, being happy means looking at the big picture and not getting stuck on the details. Recently, a team of researchers tested that idea in a very literal way. Psychologists talk about global processing and local processing in perception. When you see an object, for example, do you consider the object as a…
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News Flash: The News Is Making You Less Happy
Breaking news, this just in! According to reports we’re getting, uh, it seems that the news might be messing with your mental health. And by reports, I mean a study just published in the British Journal of Psychology. The study, titled Is the News Making Us Unhappy? The Influence on Daily News Exposure on Emotional…
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3 Quick Positive Thinking Exercises
It’s easy enough to say that the key to happiness is being able to focus on the good things in life. But how to actually do that? There may not be a simple answer, but researchers from Harvard Medical School have identified three quick exercises that will help. In different ways, these exercises seem to…
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More Evidence That Happier People Live Longer
A new study adds weight to the idea that happiness and physical health go hand-in-hand. The study, by researchers in Singapore, looks at two groups of people who have been previously underrepresented in research on the health effects of happiness: people over the age of 60 and people in non-Western countries. In the study, 4,478…
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Brain Connectivity Is Different in People Who Are Happy With Their Lives
Does the brain of someone who’s satisfied with the way their life is going look obviously different than the brain of someone who’s not? Possibly so. A new study by researchers in China has found different patterns of brain connectivity that relate to people’s subjective well-being, which measures the way they feel about their lives.…
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Why Caring Too Much About Power Leads to Unhappiness
Some things in life, like building genuine connections with other people or having a job you love, can lead to an ongoing sense of happiness. Other things, like chasing power and money, can make you feel good in the short-term but have more complicated long-term psychological consequences. This idea is common in the folk wisdom…
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