A fascinating article that compares how well students perform in high school advanced placement classes and how they perform in college exposes the terrible disconnect created by high schools in teaching students how to think and hold critical discussion that occurs at the college level.

Are you suffering from an existential dilemma, trying to find the meaning of life? Well, you're not alone. Look for politically argumentative people. You may find their extreme views are the result of being bored.

Yes, Americans and Europeans share a commitment to democratic principles, but differences between Americans and Europeans are notable when it comes to personal liberty and the individual’s role in achieving one’s own success. And while historically, American sensibilities about the role of government, individualism, and freedom can be drawn from some of the great European thinkers of the past […]

If tuition and fees — net of aid — had risen only as fast as skyrocketing health care costs had from 1987 through 2010, they would have increased to $8,700 from $6,600. Instead, they hit $10,300, according to the new working paper “Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition” by Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund. […]

According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness,” tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of […]

Wen He and Maggie (Rong) Hu, senior lecturers at the University of New South Wales Business School in Australia, examine whether religion affects the terms of bank loans. In the paper’s abstract, they write, “We hypothesize that lenders value the traits of religious adherents, such as risk aversion, ethical behavior and honesty, and thus offer favorable […]

Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security. Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, […]

Background Poor health can cause unhappiness and poor health increases mortality. Previous reports of reduced mortality associated with happiness could be due to the increased mortality of people who are unhappy because of their poor health. Also, unhappiness might be associated with lifestyle factors that can affect mortality. We aimed to establish whether, after allowing […]

The family is the core institution for child-rearing worldwide, and decades of research have shown that strong families promote positive child outcomes. For this reason theWorld Family Map Project monitors family well-being and investigates how family characteristics affect children’s healthy development around the globe. Families do not operate in a vacuum: their ability to provide for […]

Among the many documented benefits of a college education is a higher level of self-reported happiness. The present work considers instead the level of demonstrated happiness and unhappiness within groups, the latter proxied by the conditional probability of suicide within groups having a college education and those without.

The lackluster economic recovery, which is now more than 50 months old, has not brought relief to American individuals, families and communities. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10.2 million Americans are unemployed. 3.6 million have been jobless for more than 27 weeks.7.3 million are involuntarily working part-time.

People who believe they control their own destiny actually live longer than people who lack that sense. The effect was muted among the highly educated — but for people with less schooling, an ethic of personal responsibility literally proved to be a life-saver.  

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the “perfectly happy.”

This study examines how parent income, inequality, school quality, social capital, and family stability affect intergenerational upward mobility.

The affective profiles model categorizes individuals as self-fulfilling (high positive affect, low negative affect), high affective (high positive affect, high negative affect), low affective (low positive affect, low negative affect), and self-destructive (low positive affect, high negative affect). The aim of the present study was to investigate differences between profiles regarding happiness, depression, and satisfaction.

Considerable research has been devoted to examining the relations between self-esteem and social support. However, the exact nature and direction of these relations are not well understood. … Self-esteem reliably predicted increasing levels of social support quality and network size across time. In contrast, the consequence model was not supported.

Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself.

Economists are trained to infer preferences from observed choices; that is, economists typically watch what people do, rather than listening to what people say. Happiness research departs from this tradition. Instead, happiness researchers have been particularly interested in self-reports of well-being.

Emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a person’s chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices.

Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization.

An improved instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), has been derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, (OHI). The OHI comprises 29 items, each involving the selection of one of four options that are different for each item. The OHQ includes similar items to those of the OHI.

Material aspirations are initially fairly similar among income groups; consequently more income brings greater happiness. Over the life cycle, however, aspirations grow along with income, and undercut the favorable effect of income growth on happiness, although the cross-sectional happiness-income difference persists. People think they were less happy in the past and will be happier in the future.

Reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness as well as how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are.

Institutional factors in the form of direct democracy (via initiatives and referenda) and federal structure (local autonomy) systematically and sizeably raise self-reported individual well-being in a cross-regional econometric analysis. This positive effect can be attributed to political outcomes closer to voters’ preferences, as well as to the procedural utility of political participation possibilities.