Not a miracle in years
You can’t buy happiness, but you can at least inherit it, said British and Australian researchers, after studying a thousand pairs of identical and non-identical twins. Their Eureka! on happiness is: Genes control half the personality traits that make people happy, while factors such as relationships, health and careers are responsible for the rest of our well-being.
The researchers identified common genes in identical twins that result in certain personality traits and predispose people to happiness. Sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious people tend to be happier, the researchers reported in Psychological Science.
{ The Hindu | Continue reading }
More than a century ago, an Irish economist named Francis Edgeworth imagined a futuristic device that he called a hedonimeter. It would be, Edgeworth speculated, “an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine.” His hedonimeter would measure happiness by “continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual.”
This may sound more like something out of science fiction than an idea from the annals of economic history. But Edgeworth’s fantasy grew out of his utilitarian approach to economics, with its assumption that the best way to make choices and allocate resources was to aim to maximize happiness in society. Today, the idea that happiness can indeed be measured and quantified remains at the heart of a new science of happiness.
Over the last few decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, behavioral economists and other social scientists have been busy using cold, hard data to try to fill in some of the blank spaces on the map of human happiness. It turns out that no hedonimeter is necessary. Much of the latest data on happiness is generated simply by asking people how they feel. (…)
As historian of happiness Darrin McMahon said in a paper he presented at a 2006 Notre Dame conference on the subject, people “have never been as preoccupied, never been as obsessed, I would argue, with happiness as they are right now.”
read more { Happiness: Cognition, Experience, Language | Collegium, Volume 3, 2008 }
