It seems that emotionally charged memories are the most difficult to lose. (A fact that I don’t find particularly surprising.) Another recent study (whose link I seem to have lost) suggests that writing down negative memories helps to alleviate their burden - and writing down positive memories seems to remove the positive effects as well. Though writing down small notes on what you’re thankful for reinforced them. Perhaps we should all be keeping journals of our most negative memories, and keeping post-its of our happiest ones.
“Our findings add to accumulating evidence that emotion places limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind,” Payne said. “Our results suggest that even a relatively mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional forgetting. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that emotional memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies.”
Read: The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose
A recent study in the UK shows that people in skilled jobs said they were happier than people in other jobs.
Professionals including doctors, solicitors, nurses, teachers and police officers were most satisfied with their lives, scoring 7.6 out of 10 on average.
Read: Health, wealth and a skilled job is the way to happiness - Independent Online Edition > Health
UK residents as a whole scored 7.3
Matthieu Ricard may be the happiest man on earth. He was born in France & became a biochemist, but left his life & career behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Several years ago, he participated in a study in which his brain was scanned while he meditated on “peace.” They found that activity in his left prefrontal cortex was off the charts - 150% more than anyone they’d scanned before. And he could do it at will. Happiness, they found, is a skill.
Now Matthieu has written a book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, in which he teaches us how to develop the skill of happiness.
In direct contrast to the previous article, in what looks to be an entirely unscientific survey, women say that shopping makes them happy. I wonder what a study of women who spend “at least £2,000 on a single item of clothing or an accessory” vs. women who don’t wound find about overall levels of happiness in their lives - taking into account income & age bracket, of course.
One in 10 women have spent at least £2,000 on a single item of clothing or an accessory, according to a new survey.
Half the 3,792 women aged 20 to 40 quizzed about their shopping habits said they shopped to cheer themselves up.
Read: Sky News: Shopping Means Happiness
You have to love a country that has a Gross Domestic Happiness Index & actually measures it from time to time like any other metric for success.
What’s especially interesting is the last paragraph where they say that people who follow a sufficiency economy are happier than those that follow “luxurious living.”
Thailand’s Gross Domestic Happiness Index (GDHI) in February continued to drop to 5.66 from its peak of 6.30 in September 2007, according to a recent survey.
…
What made Thai people happy is culture and tradition, and specific characteristics of Thais such as loyalty, friendship, kindness with each other, appreciation towards royally-supported projects, and living under the sufficiency economy philosophy.
The survey also found that the number of people, who have changed lifestyle to His Majesty the King’s sufficiency economy principle, increased to 39 per cent from 32.1 per cent in January. It showed also that the number of people who are happy with their lives under the sufficiency economy principle has risen as high as 54.4 per cent, while those who are happy with luxurious living is only 14.9 per cent.
Read: Gross Domestic Happiness Index continues to drop in February
This is really cool. Similar to How Happiness is Reflected in Blogs, this website creates a map of human feelings from blogs. It can be sorted by age group, gender, geographic region & weather on that day. And the UI is cute too, though I wish it were more useful. Check out the Findings.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
Read: We Feel Fine
This isn’t going to make Martin Seligman happy. A prominent advocate of the “set level” theory of happiness, he believes that people do not get much happier than their usual level, but that they can be made a bit happier within a range. According to this research, overall levels of happiness can change over the long term.
“Even though happiness is heritable and relatively stable, it can change,” Lucas said. “Happiness levels do change, adaptation is not inevitable and life events do matter.”
The party line for most psychologists has been that happiness – or what psychologists call subjective well-being – is largely independent of life circumstances. The dominant model: People adapt to major life events, both positive and negative, and happiness pretty much stays constant through life, even if it is occasionally disrupted.
Read: ScienceDaily: Pursuit Of Happiness Is Not A Straight Path
This is a cool article about how LiveJournal bloggers, who can tag their posts with various moods, are happier at some times of day & on some days of the week than others. Happiest time? 9pm. Happiest day of the week? Saturday.
Read: Google Operating System: How Happiness Is Reflected in Blogs
More on happinss from Martin Seligman. Spend more time with people, care about things less.
Now a burgeoning “positive psychology” movement that emphasizes people’s strengths and talents instead of their weaknesses is rapidly closing the gap, says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, author of the new book, Authentic Happiness. The work of Seligman and other experts in the field is in the early stages, but they are already starting to see why some people are happy while others are not:
The happiest people spend the least time alone. They pursue personal growth and intimacy; they judge themselves by their own yardsticks, never against what others do or have.
Read: USATODAY.com - Psychologists now know what makes people happy
You guessed, it, another map of happiness in the world, this time focusing on economic status. What’s interesting is that people in poor countries as often as not rated themselves as happy.
Read: The New York Times > Science > Image > A Plateau of Happiness