“John Helliwell, emeritus professor of economics at UBC and co-director of a CIFAR panel looking into Social Interactions, Identity and Wellbeing, was at Harvard yesterday summarizing his and others’ recent research on happiness research, with special attention to the social context of well-being.

He observed that the amount of data and experimentation regarding happiness research is in its infancy but suspects that the three major points about happiness that will ultimately emerge are:

1. The positive trumps the negative. So much of our society is built around the negative: treating the sick rather than preventing sickness, enacting laws to deal with failures, imprisoning transgressors,…  But Helliwell thinks we haven’t focused enough on “wellness” studies, observing what ensures that things actually work and make people happy.  How does the positive trump the negative? For example, autobiographies of nuns in their 20s were parsed for emotional content and positive emotional content was found to be predictive of longevity.  Similarly, mid-life members of the American Psychological Association, whose most important research finding represented something positive rather than negative, also lived longer, controlling for other likely factors.

2. Community trumps materialism. Partly because of advertising and economics, we chase materialism, thinking that a larger house or higher salary will bring us happiness, and in the process live somewhere necessitating a longer commute, less sleep, and less time spent in community.  In these Faustian bargains, we wind up less happy rather than more so. Helliwell and Huang have found that a 1% improvement in a worker’s relationship with the boss improves happiness as much as a 30% increase in salary.  Helliwell noted an experiment that showed that even the act of rowing together improved happiness.

John noted that he is working with Ed Diener, the CDC, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on an effort to get clinicians to ask community-connectedness and wellbeing questions as part of intake exams by physicians.

3. Generosity trumps selfishness. People who give away more of their wealth, regardless of income, feel happier than those who give away less.  Similarly, those who did favors for others in the last year felt happier than those who received favors in the last year.

The largest happiness effect is seen when people do things for someone together with other people.”

Read a lot more on this on the fantastic Social Capital Blog

Pic from Body and Soul Gardens – Festival International De Jardins 2010 at Domaine De Chaumont-sur-Louire

A very interesting article in The New York Times, by Ethan Watters, describe’s how the US’s view of mental health is homogenising mental health:

“For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.”

There is a very insightful article in the Guardian about how important Christmas is for nurturing our relationships with friends and family. Using some data from the new report by the Young Foundation Sinking and swimming: understanding Britain’s unmet needs, the article points to the increase in anxiety and depression and how important a renewed sense of connection is at Christmas “Between 1991 and 2007 prescriptions for antidepressants more than trebled. Anxiety and depression are set to double in a generation.”

Both Labour and the Conservatives have already begun to position themselves as the party of the family, but the debate so far has been dominated by ugly jousting over the importance of marriage. This is a dangerous impoverishment of a crucial debate. Contrary to the politicians’ rhetoric, the structure of the family is far less important than the quality of its relationships, as a recent Gingerbread report demonstrates. We also need to affirm the importance of all relationships, not just marriage. As society ages, the relationships between young and old will become all the more important. And the importance of relationships goes beyond the intimacies of home, into the public realm.

[Pic: Thank you ribbon from palomasnest]

This Emotional Life is a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.

Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, Professor Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face.

Premiering on PBS on January 4th 2010. Looks brilliant!

Their website also has some really interesting blogs.

Posted by Tessy

We’ve known for a long time that exercise reduces stress … but new research on rats
 described in The New York Times is showing that exercise actually builds calmer brains.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

Posted by Tessy

Many of us could do with the benefits that come with regularly practising meditation – as it can help develop qualities such as calm, focus and compassion. And perhaps nowhere are these qualities needed more than in the hustle and bustle of modern city life.

However as much as we may want to go and learn meditation at a class or course, many of us simply have no time. And even if we do have time, then there is the often problem that many such courses have too many spiritual and new age trappings that just don’t quite feel right.

But no more… the Hear&Now Project is here. This revolutionary and innovative approach has been designed to help people of all backgrounds develop the benefits of meditation in a way that fits convienentially into the realities of their lives without losing any of the authenticity of traditional approaches.

Posted by Tessy

Lots of people I know will love this new We Feel Fine book.

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

Posted by Tessy

Glenn and Jessie Close have launched a really interesting new mental health campaign called bringchange2mind.

“1 in 6 adults and almost 1 in 10 children suffer from a diagnosable mental illness. Yet, for many, the stigma associated with the illness, can be as great a challenge as the disease itself. This is where the misconceptions stop. This is where bias comes to an end. This is where we change lives. Because this is where we Bring Change 2 Mind.”

Posted by Tessy

The Mindapples blog has been a little quiet lately as Tessy and me have been super busy. We like to think our tweets are happy and interesting ( Thanks ArrivalEd for confirmation ) and we would like to invite you to follow us:

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Watch this space for mindapples tweets full of goodness…