Category: Happiness

2 Personality Traits That Predict Happiness

Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.

Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.

Young adults who are more outgoing go on to lead happier lives.

Being more emotional stable also predicts happiness in later life, psychologists discovered.

The study looked at data from 2,529 people born in 1946.

They first answered a series of questions about their personalities at 16 and 26-years-of age.

Forty years later, in their early sixties, they were asked about their well-being and satisfaction with life.

Dr Catharine Gale, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“We found that extroversion in youth had direct, positive effects on wellbeing and life satisfaction in later life.

Neuroticism, in contrast, had a negative impact, largely because it tends to make people more susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression and to physical health problems.”

High extroversion is linked to being more sociable, having more energy and preferring to stay active.

High neuroticism is linked to being distractible, moody and having low emotional stability.

Increased extroversion was directly linked to more happiness.

Greater neuroticism, meanwhile, was linked to less happiness via a susceptibility to psychological distress.

Dr Gale said:

“Understanding what determines how happy people feel in later life is of particular interest because there is good evidence that happier people tend to live longer.

In this study we found that levels of neuroticism and extroversion measured over 40 years earlier were strongly predictive of well-being and life satisfaction in older men and women.

Personality in youth appears to have an enduring influence on happiness decades later.”

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Gale et al., 2013).

This Is The Most Underrated Key To The Good Life — Beyond Happiness & Meaning (M)

The ‘good life’ is more than only a meaningful and happy life, there is a third path to fulfilment.

The 'good life' is more than only a meaningful and happy life, there is a third path to fulfilment.

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Why Some Songs Make You Cry While Others Give You Goosebumps

The real reason some people enjoy listening to sad music.

The real reason some people enjoy listening to sad music.

Music that makes you cry gives pleasure.

This might help to explain the enduring popularity of sad music.

The results come from a study that tested the cathartic effect of sad music.

Participants in the study were divided into two groups based on their responses to four questions:

“While listening to music, how frequently do you (1) get goose bumps, (2) feel shivers down your spine, (3) feel like weeping, and (4) get a lump in your throat?”

The researchers dubbed these the chills group (first two questions) and the tears groups (second two questions).

Then both groups listened to music that invoked their favourite feeling: either the chills or the tears.

The study’s authors explained the results:

“A song that induced chills was perceived as being both happy and sad whereas a song that induced tears was perceived as sad.

A tear-eliciting song was perceived as calmer than a chill-eliciting song.

These results show that tears involve pleasure from sadness and that they are psychophysiologically calming…”

It’s pretty easy to see why music that invokes chills would be pleasurable.

However, the study’s authors were slightly at a loss to explain what is so special about sad music:

“…sad songs induced strong pleasure.

It is difficult to account for why people feel sad music as pleasurable; however, the current results suggested that the benefit of cathartic tears might have a key role in the pleasure generated by sad music.”

One answer could be that music is such an ambiguous form, that it is easy to see your own life reflected in it.

The authors write:

“…listeners could identify with the sad character of the sad song and felt as if the singer knew their own sad experiences, making them feel understood and bringing pleasure…”

Related

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Mori & Iwanaga, 2017).

11 Tiny Habits That Skyrocket Happiness — Without Reinventing Yourself (P)

Happiness isn’t about big life changes: it’s there in tiny tweaks you can start today.

The key to lasting happiness is not always in major life changes, often it is in a few small shifts in your daily routine.

The most effective happiness boosters can be the most accessible: ones that take just minutes a day and cost absolutely nothing.

From how you spend your mornings to sleep habits, social connections and who you share meals with, these evidence-based insights challenge common assumptions about what really makes us feel good.

Here are 11 of the most compelling, science-backed strategies for feeling happier, starting right now.

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The Positive Emotional Key To A Successful Career

It is linked to trying harder at difficult tasks, earning more money and being more satisfied at work.

It is linked to trying harder at difficult tasks, earning more money and being more satisfied at work.

Feeling happy leads to success.People who are happy try harder at difficult tasks, earn more money and are more satisfied with their jobs, psychologists have found in multiple studies.While we are often told that working hard will make us happy, the reverse may also be true, perhaps even more so.Happiness is neither a requirement for success nor the only way of achieving it — legendary leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill suffered from depression.However, happiness is linked to higher creativity, curiosity and greater striving for higher goals.The conclusions come from a review of many different studies on the connection between happiness and career success.The study’s authors explain their conclusions:
“Happiness is positively associated with job autonomy, job satisfaction, job performance, prosocial behavior, social support, popularity, and income.Happy people also receive more positive peer and supervisor evaluations and are less likely to withdraw from work by becoming habitually absent or burning out.”
When people are followed over time, their happiness seems to predict their later success, the authors write:
“…people who are happy at an initial time point are more likely to find employment, be satisfied with their jobs, acquire higher status, perform well, be productive, receive social support, be evaluated positively, engage in fewer withdrawal behaviors, and obtain higher income at a subsequent time point.”
Experiments conducted in the lab also point to happiness causing success:
“The experimental research demonstrates that when people are randomly assigned to experience positive emotions, they negotiate more collaboratively, set higher goals for themselves, persist at difficult tasks longer, evaluate themselves and others more favorably, help others more, and demonstrate greater creativity and curiosity than people assigned to experience neutral or negative emotions.”
The study was published in the Journal of Career Assessment (Walsh et al., 2018).
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