Happiness

There is little consistency in the literature concerning factors that influence motor coordination in children. A hypothesis-free "exposome" approach was used with 7359 children using longitudinal information covering 3 generations in regard to throwing a ball accurately at age 7 years. The analyses showed an independent robust negative association with mother's unhappiness in her midchildhood (6-11 years). No such association was present for study fathers. The offspring of parents who described themselves as having poor eyesight had poorer ability.

This study tested the mediating roles of cognitive reappraisal and attentional preferences in the relationship between hope and psychosocial well-being among 712 adolescents. Results of the structural equation modeling revealed that the beneficial relation of hope to subjective happiness, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and interpersonal difficulties was partially mediated by attention to positive information but not cognitive reappraisal.

Despite many studies on the age-related positivity effect and its role in visual attention, discrepancies remain regarding whether full attention is required for age-related differences to emerge. The present study took a new approach to this question by varying the contextual demands of emotion processing. This was done by adding perceptual distractions, such as visual and auditory noise, that could disrupt attentional control. Younger and older participants viewed pairs of happy-neutral and fearful-neutral faces while their eye movements were recorded.

Two tapes of six emotions (anger, fear, sadness, contentment, happiness, love) recorded by child and adult speakers were played to child and adult listeners to determine whether (a) each group of listeners responds more accurately to positive or negative emotions; (b) each group of speakers communicates positive or negative emotions more accurately; (c-g) there were specific ways in which children adn adults differ in accuracy of perceiving and communicating the six emotions studied. Two hundred and ten white, male, middle-class Ss were used.

A descriptive study of factors in the lifestyle of fifty couples married an average of 55.5 years and an average age of seventy-nine years provided data for this report. The non-random sample was heterogeneous using traditional socio-economic indicators. Life-Satisfaction (LSI-Z), Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment scores, and perception of health were all high. More than half the sample were now or had been sexually active within the past five years. Independence, commitment, companionship and qualities of caring were significant elements in these long-lasting marriages.

The author points to the universal character of this complex psychic reality, i.e. happiness, and intends to define and describe its characteristics. Etymologically speaking, it means joy that is experienced through the object reached or the objective achieved, achievements which presuppose activity and effort. This psychological state is a pleasant, relative and dynamic one and shows itself up through the impulses that lead to spontaneous actions which are in harmony with the fundamental tendencies of the subject. They are not alien to running risks and to the will of victory.

This study investigated the concept of happiness using multidimensional scaling analyses. Two samples were studied. The first contained 100 adult males and females, aged nineteen to ninety (M = 39.5). The second contained 126 female adults, aged twenty-six to eighty-nine (M = 61.3), all Catholic nuns. Respondents provided word associates to the words happiness and unhappiness during separate one-minute intervals. Subsequently, the twelve most frequent associates and the word happiness were used in a written paired comparison task of dissimilarities between all possible pairs.

Broad categories have been suggested for the events which contribute to happiness. In 1943 Maslow might have argued that people are happy when they meet or continue to meet their basic needs in his hierarchy of needs. A survey was given to 150 college students to assess which of Maslow's levels of need is perceived to be most important to happiness. Falling or staying in love was chosen significantly more often than the other choices by undergraduates of both genders.

In this study, 605 subjects were asked about romantic love and marriage. Married people differentiated themselves from single people with stable partners and divorced people with new partners by more frequently living together with their great love, more reciprocity in that love, and less disappointments in love relationships prior to the current relationship; but they also described themselves as less happy and satisfied than the single and divorced respondents, particularly with regard to tenderness, sex, and conversation with their partners.