Residents in Powys explain why the county is the happiest place in the UK to live. "Powys has some of the lowest crimes rates in the UK and that gives us peace of mind." Mrs Dunsford, 62, said: "Everybody knows each other and it's such a friendly place. A five-minute trip to the shops can turn into 20 minutes when you stop and chat."

"Emotional intelligence is often mistakenly thought of as gut instinct. But emotional intelligence may actually be a skill you can learn.

 To see whether EI is intuitive or learnable, Daus asked 102 students to take Mayer and Salovey's EI survey and to take a computer test in which they had to define a word shown on screen. All students in the study, presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Association, were asked whether they had used intuition to determine their answers. The more subjects reported using their intuition, the worse they performed on the EI tests. "Emotional intelligence is inversely related with use of intuition," writes Daus."

"Watching tragedy on the news has a psychological impact undreamed of by media executives. The video image is processed directly by the right hemisphere of the brain, bypassing language, reason, and logic. Unable to cope with the barrage of elemental emotions that get aroused, we emotionally turn off, numbing ourselves to pain and death."

The author does a nice job reconciling seemingly diverse findings about happiness trends and identifying the underlying reasons for differing conclusions.

Over the past decade or so there have been many Positive Psychology articles exploring the relationship between money and happiness. Myers (2000), Diener and Oishi (2000), Blanchflower and Oswald (2004), and Layard (2005) amongst others have presented research which suggests that increasing wealth does not buy happiness (this graph illustrates this point for the USA).Happiness is on the up… The good news is that according to a new study by Inglehart, Foa, Peterson and Welzel (2008), happiness is actually increasing: in this longitudinal study between 1981 and 2007, happiness levels went up in 45 out of 52 countries. And contrary to what you might conclude from Myers’ graph (mentioned above) the US is one of those countries which shows an upward trend in happiness (p276). So how do we explain the apparent inconsistency between Myers and Inglehart et al?

Women who have a positive outlook may decrease their chances of developing breast cancer, say Israeli researchers.

A government study finds Scots are happier with their lives than researchers had previously thought.

 This article talks about expert opinions on how to live a more authentic/eudaimonic life.

Eudaimonia refers to a state of well-being and full functioning that derives from a sense of living in accordance with one's deeply held values—in other words, from a sense of authenticity.

Dick Meyer, NPR’s new editorial director of digital media, has authored a new book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium. In it he rails against how our consumer culture has overemphasized the role and importance of personal choice.

From Greater Good Magazine:

A new study suggests that as we get older, we increasingly think of the world as generally good, and those of us who do are happier.

The study, published earlier this year in the journal Psychology and Aging, examined roughly 2,000 people over a two-year period. Researchers Michael Poulin at the University of Michigan and Roxane Silver at UC Irvine gave participants several surveys that asked them about their well-being, how religious they were, and whether they thought the world and human nature were basically good.

Greater Good Magazine recently ran this article on children, TV, and play:

People are usually quick to blame TV, complaining that kids are playing less because they’re watching TV more. A new study suggests the truth may be even worse. The study, published in the July/August issue of Child Development, found that kids play significantly less if they’re simply in a room in which a TV is turned on, even if they’re not trying to watch it and even if it’s turned to adult programming. Under these conditions, the kids observed in the study, who were all three years old or younger, played for about five percent less time than when a TV wasn’t turned on. For more on contremporary threats to play–and suggestions for how to revive play–you can check out Greater Good's recent play issue.