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Showing papers on "Happiness published in 1975"



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that women, as a whole, exceed men in both the stress and the satisfaction they derive from marriage, and that marriage is more beneficial to husbands than to wives.
Abstract: reported here, is greater for females than for males. Data .from two of the surveys show similar levels of reported marital happiness for husbands and wives, and they show a stronger relationship of marital happiness to global happiness for the wives. On the basis of this evidence, Bernard's thesis that marriage is more beneficial to husbands than to wives is rejected. The data presented here can be reconciled with Bernard's data showing an unusual prevalence of symptoms of psychological stress among married women by the hypothesis that women, as a whole, exceed men in both the stress and the satisfaction they derive from marriage.

202 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: The history of the stress theory is sketched briefly and it is demonstrated how this information can help anyone, physician or layman, lead a more complete and satisfying life.
Abstract: I must ask the reader's indulgence for this article's concern with applications of the stress concept, which are distinct from, although related to clinical medicine. It has not been my object to deal with the way physicians have been aided by stress research in the practice of medicine--that information is already widely available. Rather, I have attempted to sketch briefly the history of the stress theory and to demonstrate how this information can help anyone, physician or layman, lead a more complete and satisfying life. The applications of the stress theory have been dealt with at length elsewhere. I believe that we can find within scientifically verified observations the basis of a code of behavior suited to our century. The great laws of nature that regulate the defenses of living beings against stress of any kind are essentially the same at all levels of life, from individual cells to entire complex human organisms and societies. It helps a great deal to understand the fundamental advantages and disadvantages of catatoxic and syntoxic attitudes by studying the biologic basis of self-preservation as reflected in syntoxic and catatoxic chemical mechanisms. When applied to everyday problems, this understanding should lead to choices most likely to provide us the pleasant eustress (from the Greek eu meaning good, as in euphoria) involved in achieving fulfillment and victory, thereby avoiding the self-destructive distress of frustration and failure. So the translation of the laws governing resistance of cells and organs to a code of behavior comes down to three basic precepts: 1. Find your own natural stress level. People differ with regard to the amount and kind of work they consider worth doing to meet the exigencies of daily life and to assure their future security and happiness. In this respect, all of us are influenced by hereditary predispositions and the expectations of our society. Only through planned self-analysis can we establish what we really want; too many people suffer all their lives because they are too conservative to risk a radical change by breaking with hiabits or traditions. 2. Altruistic egoism. The selfish (i.e., self-interested) hoarding of the goodwill, respect, esteem, support, and love of our neighbors is the most efficient way to give vent to our pent-up energy and to create a more enjoyable, beautiful, or useful environment.3. Earn thy neighbor's love. This motto--which is merely a rewording of the command to "love thy neighbor as thyself"--is compatible with man's natural structure, and although it is based on altruistic egoism, it could hardly be attacked as unethical. Who would blame the man who wants to assure his own homeostasis and happiness only by accumulating the treasure of other poeple's benevolence and love? Yet this makes him virtually unassailable, for nobody wants to attack and destroy those upon whom he depends.

187 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is found that changes in activities may be more important to happiness among the most elderly persons interviewed than others, and direct relationships between happiness and social activity among elderly people were found.
Abstract: This paper reports on a 4-year longitudinal study of 60 elderly women. Data about their happiness and social activities were collected using the Affect Balance Scale and nine measures of socially relevant activities, including three measures of media use, three of interpersonal interaction, and three of activities in voluntary associations. Direct relationships between happiness and social activity among elderly people were found in analysis of these data. This finding was not spurious according to longitudinal data: activity increments were associated with happiness and decrements with unhappiness. Although these findings describe the over-all picture, changes in activities may be more important to happiness among the most elderly persons interviewed than others.

173 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The hypotheses that physical attractiveness is positively correlated with happiness, psychological health, and self-esteem was tested with 211 men and women undergraduates and the superior outcomes obtained by the attractive women made them happy, psychologically healthy, and proud of themselves.
Abstract: The hypotheses that physical attractiveness is positively correlated with happiness, psychological health, and self-esteem was tested with 211 men and women undergraduates. Physical attractiveness was measured by judges' ratings, while happiness, psychological health (neuroticism), and self-esteem were measured by self-report inventories. Physical attractiveness was found to correlate positively with happiness (r equals .37), negatively with neuroticism (r equals minus.22), and positively with self-esteem (r equals .24) for women but not for men (corresponding rs equals .09, .03, and minus.04, respectively). These results were accounted for by the suggestion that physical attractiveness "buys" more for women than for men, and the most prominent outcomes obtained by physical attractiveness--friends and dates--are of greater value to women undergraduates than men. The superior outcomes obtained by the attractive women made them happy, psychologically healthy, and proud of themselves.

126 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: According to data from six U.S. national surveys, middle-aged women whose children have left home report, as a whole, somewhat greater happiness and enjoyment of life than women of similar age with a child (or children) living at home, and the former report substantially greater marital happiness than the latter as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: According to data from six U.S. national surveys, middle-aged women whose children have left home report, as a whole, somewhat greater happiness and enjoyment of life than women of similar age with a child (or children) living at home, and the former report substantially greater marital happiness than the latter. These findings, considered in conjunction with consistent findings from retrospective and longitudinal studies, are convincing evidence that the children's leaving home does not typically have an enduring negative effect on the mother's psychological well-being.

114 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Females more frequently reported moods of happiness or unhappiness than males, while mood did not vary as a function of age.
Abstract: Does mood vary as a function of age, sec, or situation? In four investigations, 6,452 persons aged 4 to 99 were interrupted at leisure, at home, at school, and at work and asked to assess their mood as being happy, neutral, or unhappy. Moods of happiness and neutrality were each reported about 45% and unhappiness about 10% of the time. Females more frequently reported moods of happiness or unhappiness than males, while mood did not vary as a function of age. Persons at leisure reported more affectively pleasant moods than those at work, at home, or at school. Persons of higher socioeconomic status reported more happy moods than those of lower status. In another study, a class of 255 students was administered various personality scales and then interrupted 21 times over the course of the quarter and their mood indexed. Tested religiosity negatively correlated with frequency of pleasant moods, the Barron Ego-Strength Scale was uncorrelated with frequency of kind of mood, and the Eysenck Neuroticism Scale correlated with frequency of unpleasant moods.

65 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the question of whether rational activity correctly identifies with maximizing activity, and in part to answer, this question is not an issue solely, or perhaps even primarily, about the presuppositions of economics.
Abstract: Economic man seeks to maximize utility. The rationality of economic man is assumed, and is identified with the aim of utility-maximization.1 But may rational activity correctly be identified with maximizing activity? The object of this essay is to explore, and in part to answer, this question. This is not an issue solely, or perhaps even primarily, about the presuppositions of economics. The two great modern schools of moral and political thought in the English-speaking world, the contractarian and the utilitarian, identify rationality with maximization, and bring morality into their equations as well. To the contractarian, rational man enters civil society to maximize his expectation of well-being, and morality is that system of principles of action which rational men collectively adopt to maximize their well-being.2 To the utilitarian, the rational and moral individual seeks the maximum happiness of mankind, with which he identifies his own maximum happiness.3

53 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used the concept of quality of affect to develop variables descriptive of how a person is feeling, such as the extent of marked positive affect, negative affect, and modal hedonic level or modal QoE.
Abstract: The concept of quality of affect is used to develop variables descriptive of how a person is feeling. The extent of marked positive affect, the extent of marked negative affect and the modal hedonic level or modal quality of affect are presented as three components of a quality of affect measure. Alternative two-component measures are also developed. Findings based on interviews with a sample of Washington County, Maryland adults are presented. Selfevaluated happiness was found to have a strong positive relationship with quality of affect. However, while the quality of affect measures are designed to give equal weight to positive affect and negative affect, self-evaluated happiness was found to be related more strongly to positive affect than to negative affect.

36 citations




01 Jan 1975

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The NFER Constructive Education Project (NFER) as mentioned in this paper found that teachers were seen as positively as other adults, but also as being somewhat lacking in the more human qualities such as warmth, kindness and happiness.
Abstract: Summary The research reported here was carried out as part of the NFER Constructive Education Project, financed jointly by the Home Office and the Department of Education and Science. Teachers of approximately 2,400 first‐ and fourth‐year secondary school pupils were asked to identify those among them whom they thought to be particularly well‐ or ill‐adjusted. The attitudes of these contrasted groups towards various aspects of school and home life were then assessed by the use of the ‘semantic differential’ technique. It was found that, overall, teachers were seen as positively as other adults, but also as being somewhat lacking in the more ‘human’ qualities such as warmth, kindness and happiness. The ‘ill‐adjusted’ pupils had less favourable opinions of school and teachers. In presenting these results it is acknowledged that the manner in which the contrasting groups were identified severely limits the significance that can be attached to the findings. The teachers’ own attitudes towards the individual p...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Investigation of whether a posthypnotically released emotion (i.e., a sense of happiness) could modify the frequency of a behavior performed by S found it to be possible to alter the response of highly susceptible Ss.
Abstract: The main purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether a posthypnotically released emotion (i.e., a sense of happiness) could modify the frequency of a behavior performed by S. 7 highly susceptible Ss participated in the experiment. They received a posthypnotic suggestion with the implication that each time they made a certain response a sense of happiness would be released. They also received a suggestion of amnesia for the posthypnotic suggestion. In all 7 Ss the response evoked a sense of happiness. The frequency of the response increased significantly in all SS (p-01)

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 1975
TL;DR: Work has a significant effect on a person's life, his psychological state or his illness, and it is not easily incorporated into the treatment and management of the psychiatrically ill as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: While work has a significant effect on a person’s life, his psychological state or his illness, it is not easily incorporated into the treatment and management of the psychiatrically ill. Doctors and nurses tend to believe that the sick need rest, not labour. They and the public often equate work with industrialisation and confuse it with a dehumanised assembly line and piecework model of human relations. This view is oversimple, for it neglects the equally dehumanising effects of idleness and unemployment. By using work to help people to adapt in society, one does not endorse society’s norms nor expect people to conform to them. To adapt socially is to be able to deal with the complexities of everyday living. Such adaptation may lead to wealth or poverty, happiness or unhappiness or may involve attacking, neglecting or upholding the established social order. It may be more important to adjust to family life than to work pr leisure, although for economic and social reasons both are very intimately related to family adjustment. Everyone has views on work. It is not only protestants who subscribe to what is known as “the protestantwork ethic”, or non-protestants who have visions of work in dark, satanic mills.

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 1975
TL;DR: Aggression and violence have both fascinated and repelled mankind since earliest recorded history as discussed by the authors, and those who have dared to speak out against aggression and to advocate that man use persuasion, reason, logic, and ethics to settle our human differences have, more often than not, been themselves imprisoned and tortured, burned at the stake, crucified, or certified to be insane for their heretical contention that aggression is not the only way to achieve happiness for the greatest number of people.
Abstract: Aggression and violence have both fascinated and repelled mankind since earliest recorded history. All of our histories, and our great legacy of drama and literature, are chronicles of war, civil strife, criminal acts of murder and rape, and accounts of man’s inhumanity to man. The figures of history are, for the most part, men of violence—Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Caesars, Napoleon, Wellington, and Hitler, to mention only a few. Those who have dared to speak out against aggression and to advocate that man use persuasion, reason, logic, and ethics to settle our human differences have, more often than not, been themselves imprisoned and tortured, burned at the stake, crucified, or certified to be insane for their heretical contention that aggression is not the only way to achieve happiness for the greatest number of people.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A husband's membership in A.A. was related to greater marital happiness, superior ability as a father and less severe drinking problems.
Abstract: A husband's membership in A.A. was related to greater marital happiness, superior ability as a father and less severe drinking problems.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The elimination of undesirable habits may resolve much marital misery but it does not necessarily follow that as unhappiness decreases happiness will increase.
Abstract: Alcoholic husbands and their wives generally agreed that the major aspects of marital happiness dealt with the quality of interpersonal relations "Undesirable vices (excessive gambling, drinking, etc)" ranked first as contributing to marital unhappiness while their absence was ranked 275 by the husbands and 95 by the wives as contributing to marital happiness The elimination of undesirable habits may resolve much marital misery but it does not necessarily follow that as unhappiness decreases happiness will increase

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: All the social services, health provision and care induded, involve considerable problems in terms of the allocation of resources, and one central candidate for this role is the principle of utility, or 'the greatest happiness' principle.
Abstract: All the social services, health provision and care induded, involve considerable problems in terms of the allocation of resources. These problems may apply at both a very general and a highly specific level. At the general level major allocative problems arise over the provision of financial resources between the various social services: for example, between medicine and education. Within medicine these allocative problems will occur in the context of the distribution of money between the different and competing forms of health provision: for example, between geriatric care and more sophisticated facilities for treating cardiac cases. At the most specific level problems may arise over the allocation of a scarce and possibly life-saving resource between two or more individuals when that resource can be utilized by only one person: for example, a donated organ. In a situation of scarcity, and such a situation is endemic, men are forced to allocate, reckon and distribute but how? Is there a justifiable moral principle which could guide those making decisions in such contexts and free the decision from arbitrary choice, chance or prejudice? One central candidate for this role is the principle of utility, or 'the greatest happiness' principle. The principle of utility is held by some to provide a determinate, scientific and calculable answer to all allocative problems. In a situation of choice between alternatives it enjoins acceptance of the course of action which will maimize the net balance of happiness or satisfaction.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The cliches: ‘Schooldays are the happiest days of your life' as discussed by the authors have been used to encourage young people to be optimistic and forward-looking.
Abstract: Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor … it is very easy to think of the cliches: ‘Are you happy in your work?’ ‘Schooldays are the happiest days of your life’. I used to think that this was one of the silliest things ever said by distinguished people on speech‐day platforms; because if a boy or girl is miserable at school (and many are) then it's a pretty grim outlook that he faces; and if in fact he is perfectly happy at school, it is still very discouraging for him to suppose that in the eyes of successful middle‐aged adults he will never be so happy again. If young people are to have life satisfaction, then surely they should be encouraged to be optimistic and forward‐looking.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Two samples of college students, one obtained in 1971 and one in 1973, were asked to draw a picture of a happily married couple, indicating that fewer college students now accept the notion that children are necessary for marital happiness.
Abstract: Summary: Two samples of college students, one obtained in 1971 and one in 1973, were asked to draw a picture of a happily married couple. Some subjects were asked to draw the couple after two years of marriage and some after five years of marriage. The pictures were scored for the presence or absence of children as an estimate of the attitude that children are necessary for a happy marriage. A large decrease in the "presence of children" from the 1971 to 1973 sample was interpreted as indicating that fewer college students now accept the notion that children are necessary for marital happiness.


01 Jan 1975
TL;DR: The present extension of drug consumption with a view to solving personal conflicts and transitory experience of happiness, as well as the unsuccessful 'quest for God' of many young drug consumers should be understood in the context of the specific drug effects.
Abstract: In the whole history of mankind, hallucinogenic drugs have played a big part in religious and cult practices and have transmitted special religious experiences during a drug-induced ecstasy. The present extension of drug consumption with a view to solving personal conflicts and transitory experience of happiness, as well as the unsuccessful 'quest for God' of many young drug consumers should be understood in the context of the specific drug effects, of the technological developments of our times, as well as of the change and breakdown of religious and cult traditions. This desperate quest for happiness and religious experience calls for a critical reflection about the present sociocultural developments and raises the question of the necessity of an authentic religious life.


Journal ArticleDOI
28 Apr 1975-JAMA
TL;DR: Ten years of listening to young women at a large Eastern university have made me aware of the sexual confusion of the children of a generation that either misunderstood or ignored sexuality and had little wisdom to pass on to its self-liberating children.
Abstract: SHE LOOKED like every other co-ed— long, straight hair, a sweatshirt too big, and dungarees too small. And her story was a familiar one. Her friends teased her about being a virgin so she had tried "it." Now, tearful and fearful, she described her symptoms. Examination showed only body lice— easily curable. Her reaction spoke volumes: "It sure wasn't worth it—it was no fun at the time, I've been worried ever since—and all it did was give me a dose of crabs." Ten years of listening to young women at a large Eastern university have made me aware of the sexual confusion of the children of a generation that either misunderstood or ignored sexuality and had little wisdom to pass on to its self-liberating children. Urged on by a loud minority, many young people have accepted a pattern of sexual activity that has no valid support. Anticipating love and happiness,

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that obedience to one's conscience (which he calls "virtue") does not pay from the point of view of self-interest, and it is at least logically possible for the paths of virtue and advantage to diverge.
Abstract: He concedes, however, that it is at least logically possible that obedience to one's conscience (which he calls "virtue") does not pay from the point of view of self-interest. What is in our interest, according to Butler, is nothing but our happiness, and happiness consists of the pleasure we feel in getting what we desire. It is at least possible that going against our conscience (which Butler calls "vice") will bring us more pleasure (all in all) than a virtuous act. It is true that most persons' self-esteem depends to some degree upon doing what is thought to be morally right, so virtue can play an important part in bringing happiness. But virtue is not the only source of happiness, and we can care so much about things like acclaim, wealth, and power as to make it seem worthwhile to forgo the self-esteem that comes from being morally good in order to get them. Butler even concedes that there are persons so perverted as not to be bothered at all, or bothered very little, by knowingly going against their own consciences.3 Such men might reasonably think that they have much happiness to gain from carefully chosen acts of wrong-doing. So it seems that, for Butler, it is at least logically possible for the paths of virtue and advantage to diverge.