Does the country people live in affect the probability of them experiencing happiness? Can a country variable in an ordinal regression model be affected when microeconomic and macroeconomic factors are added to the model? The possible outcomes are either that the country variable affects less when the additional predictors are added to the model, or that they stay the same. The micro data is collected from the European Social Survey database, the macro data is collected from the World Bank. The country variable becomes less substantial when additional variables are added to the model. The variable with the most influence over expected happiness apart from the country variable is whether the individual often socializes with friends or not. It’s statistically significant that the supervened variables make the country variable less volatile in some cases.

This thesis aims to examine Johnson¡¦s writings and argue his happiness is a state of eternity in the afterlife which results mainly from God¡¦s mercy and human beings¡¦ obedience, repentance and virtue (or good works). To prove my thesis, I need to study the foundation and essence of Johnson¡¦s salvation alongside his moral and religious thoughts. I thus argue, in Chapter One, that Johnson¡¦s early life has great influence upon him and his well-known spiritual anxiety serves as the main cause of his fear of death and as an important index in the study of Johnson¡¦s conditional salvation. Before probing into Johnson¡¦s salvation, I attempt in Chapter Two to expound religion in eighteenth-century England, especially Johnson¡¦s role as a religious man and a moralist. Both identities play crucial roles in analyzing Johnson¡¦s happiness. Johnson¡¦s morality is surely profoundly conditioned by the climate of social, religious and moral experience shared by his contemporaries in eighteenth-century England and can hardly be dissolved despite great care. His religious and moral thoughts are so large questions to approach, not to mention to answer them. Therefore, the treatment is necessarily selective. I will focus on the connection between Johnson¡¦s morality and his own Christian belief shown in his sermons and other genres of writings. Though Johnson is noticeably ambivalent towards his moral instruction at times, he never jumps the track of the core of his moral thinking: his happiness is of after-life. In Chapter Three and Chapter Four, I will do a close reading on Johnson¡¦s frequent discussion of happiness in his periodical essays and Oriental tale Rasselas and on that of salvation, virtue and eternity respectively with intent to argue that Johnson¡¦s happiness is largely supported by his belief in Christian¡¦s ideas of salvation and eternity. Samuel Johnson in Rasselas voices the essence of happiness through Nekayah after a series of adventures and pursuit of happiness: ¡§To me, the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity¡¨ (Rasselas 418). This passage clearly marks that happiness of this life is unreliable and the quest will be not only aimless but endless. To assure everlasting happiness, one ought to aspire to the afterlife by strenuous efforts in this life for eternity. Furthermore, I will show evidence from Johnson¡¦s life and words to strengthen my presumption that eternity forwards the realization of happiness. The eternal state of afterlife pacifies Johnson¡¦s spiritual anxiety in this life and enhances the charm of the world coming after. This is quite at odds with Johnson¡¦s fear of death; however, it pinpoints how a devout Christian struggles for not merely salvation but rewards from God after death. As such, I conclude my thesis in Chapter Five by showing how the intertexture of Johnson¡¦s life, religion, morality and literature helps him accept his imperfection, physically wretched and mentally disturbed, and then strive for perfection, that is, an elevated state of life in another world.

Emma Nordin: Emilie Du Châtelets analys av lycka: Upplösning av polemiken mellan illusion och förnuft. Uppsala universitet: inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria, C-uppsats, höstterminen, 2012.   The 18th century is a time period known for its battle with superstition, illusion and falseness. With the Torch of Reason the philosophers of the time were set on vanquishing everything untrue and lead mankind into what they themselves called the Enlightenment. Happiness had moved from Heaven to Earth in science, truth and pleasure. But is it that simple? This essay will analyze and discuss the French philosopher Emilie Du Châtelet’s concept “illusion”, something she did not encourage people to vanquish, but to nourish and cherish. Her ideas of illusion did not only contradict the ideas of many of her contemporaries and predecessors, but the associations the word has today as well. Unlike many others she did not consider illusion as falseness that eliminated reason, on the contrary, only with the two combined could one be truly happy. Du Châtelet argued for the apparent oxymoron: conscious illusion. She showed how this worked in happy occasions such as love, hopes of glory and something as simple as a visit to the theatre. She did not construct these definitions and reasoning in a vacuum, but in constant debate with predecessors such as Spinoza and Hobbes and her contemporaries such as La Mettrie and Rousseau. This essay will show that the relationship between reason and illusion during the Enlightenment was more complicated than one might think and that Du Châtelet argues for a fully functioning and necessary combination of illusion, happiness and reason. Illusion was not necessarily something the philosophers of the Enlightenment saw as something oppose to, or even threatening to, their flickering Torch.

This study aims to investigate the important indicators that contribute to happiness among Beijing residence. The residents of Beijing were taken as the target population for the survey. A questionnaire was used as the main statistical instrument to collect the data from the residents in Beijing. In so doing the investigation employs Factor analyses and chi-square analyses as the main statistical tools used for the analyses in this research. The study found that Beijing residents gained greater happiness in the family, interpersonal relationships, and health status. The analysis also shows that generally, the residence of Beijing feels happier and also in terms of gender basis, females in Beijing feel happier as compare to their male counterpart. It will find that gender, age and education are statistically significant when dealing with happiness.

The main purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between demographic variables (gender, experience of teaching, and educational background), playfulness, motivation of teaching, happiness and creative teaching among junior high school teachers. The participants in this study included 320 junior high school teachers in Kaohsiung City. The employed instruments included the Inventory of Creative Teaching Behaviors, the Inventory of Teacher Playfulness, the Inventory of Teaching Motivation, and the Inventory of Happiness. The applied analysis methods were Descriptive Statistics, One-way Multivariate Analysis of Variance, Canonical Correlation, and Discriminant Analysis. The main findings of this study were as follows: 1. The male teachers in junior high schools outperformed the female teachers in creative teaching, and the major differences were found on the dimensions of ¡§Interactive discussion and upgrading of thinking¡¨ and ¡§independent learning and challenge providing¡¨. 2. The teachers¡¦ experience of teaching and educational background did not have effects on their creative teaching. 3. The teachers¡¦ playfulness had positive effects on their creative teaching; more specifically, their playfulness in ¡§active sharing and atmosphere construction¡¨, ¡§enjoyment of trying and satisfaction obtaining¡¨, and ¡§easiness and self-recognition¡¨ had strong correlations with their creative teaching in ¡§varied teaching and motivation stimulation¡¨. 4. The teachers¡¦ motivation of teaching had positive effects on their creative teaching; more specifically, their teaching motivation of ¡§enjoying creation and problem solving¡¨ had the highest correlation with their creative teaching in ¡§independent learning and challenge providing¡¨. 5. The teachers¡¦ happiness had positive effects on their creative teaching; more specifically, their happiness in ¡§work enthusiasm and self-transcendence¡¨, ¡§Caring and optimism¡¨, and ¡§recognition and hope toward the value of life¡¨ had strong correlations with their creative teaching in ¡§varied teaching and motivation stimulation¡¨ and ¡§independent learning and challenge providing¡¨. 6. The playfulness, motivation of teaching, and happiness could jointly predict the teachers¡¦ performance in creative teaching, and the motivation of teaching and playfulness were the most powerful predictors. Finally, some suggestions were proposed for educational institutions, teachers, and further studies.

Habilitationsschrift--Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [417]-427) and index.

Wellbeing may be the most important feeling able to experience by a person. The research concerning wellbeing has traditionally been focused on psychological wellbeing, yet how wellbeing of populations can be estimated and compared remains unclear. This study proposes a method of measuring wellbeing by keeping to the essence of it as being a subjective feeling. It adopts the rather common term of subjective wellbeing (SWB) and identifies two important aspects of SWB; happiness and life satisfaction. These aspects of life are part of the questionnaires used in many multinational survey studies, including the World Value Survey (WVS). With data from these surveys, SWB can be compared between populations based on subjective survey answers from individuals. The paper tests this approach by using results of the WVS and performing a statistical analysis comparing SWB between cultures. Evaluation of the results leads to the conclusion that, by means of happiness and life satisfaction, a not complete, but at least reasonable operational measurement of SWB is obtained.

Planners often invoke wellbeing, sustainability, and related concepts when discussing planning initiatives, all of which are contested within their own separate literatures. Some of these planners, however, have begun drawing connections between the disciplines, a connection that very few in the planning academic literature are recognizing and studying. Using the Greater Victoria Happiness Index Partnership (HIP) in British Columbia as its primary case study, this thesis draws upon HIP’s experience in creating regional wellbeing indicators to better understand this relationship. It will investigate the efficacy of their efforts in affecting regional policy, explore their as well as the academic understandings of the wellbeing/sustainable development relationship, and draw recommendations that ultimately suggest a new means of applying this relationship in planning and other realms of public policy. / text

The field of psychology has traditionally focused on the deleterious effects of adversity to the exclusion of positive effects. However, a literature on positive sequelae of traumatic events has burgeoned over the past decade. The issue of whether individual's reports of positive changes are merely illusory self-enhancing biases or are reflective of objective, quantifiable change is perhaps the most contentious in the posttraumatic growth research at this time. This dissertation begins with a broad overview of the extant research on posttraumatic growth, then presents the evidence supporting each side of the validity debate. As the population studied in this dissertation is adults with traumatic-onset spinal cord injuries, a presentation of research that ties disability to the posttraumatic growth literature follows. Finally, the introductory chapter concludes with an argument for the importance of including a disability perspective in psychological science. Three papers follow, each taking up aspects of this relatively new focus on positive aspects of disability. / Psychology

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