The first World Happiness Report (WHR) appeared in 2012. In 2013, the UN General Assembly declared March 20th the International Day of Happiness (Resolution 66/281). In 2013 and every subsequent year except 2014, the World Happiness Report, written by an expanding group of experts, was...
It has been a year since my neighborhood journey into “standing up” for trees began. It started as so many things do for me these days, on a dog walk. My rescue companion, Duke, and I were walking across the woods and farmland when we came...
WellBeing News has published articles on the challenges of measuring human well-being and reported on the growing number of organizations involved in such efforts. One recently established organization is the Happier Lives Institute, founded in 2019 and based in Oxford (UK), to explore the most...
For the ordinary citizen living outside Ukraine and safely divorced from the direct effects of the conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an event that defies logic and leaves most feeling helpless. A few have taken active steps and volunteered to fight in Ukraine....
The April 2022 Tales of WellBeing included a review of a book on human happiness written by social psychologist and professional ethicist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Haidt looked at happiness and how it might be achieved from the perspective of positive psychology. Professor Ng’s new (open...
As the world learns to live with the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, another zoonosis caused by a monkeypox virus (a cousin of smallpox) is appearing in America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Australia, having spread from its traditional "habitat" in Central and West Africa....
In the June 2020 Tales of WellBeing, Professor Alan Kazdin of Yale contributed an article promoting contact with nature to improve mental health. There is a growing academic literature on the importance of nature in promoting human subjective well-being. For example, in 2019, a paper...
WellBeing News has carried several stories about global happiness (e.g., World Happiness Report), subjective well-being, and happiness research centers. Happiness (and subjective well-being) research is booming, but these are not the only ways to measure global well-being. The Social Progress Imperative is a US-based non-profit...
Several well-being and happiness research centers and policy units have been established in the last decade at major universities. For example, Harvard’s School of Public Health established the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness in 2016, while Oxford University launched its Wellbeing Research...
The global growth of the number of internet users is remarkable. According to Internet World Stats, 63.2% of the world’s population used the internet as of October 2020. If children aged 0-4 are removed from the calculation, that percentage increases to 69.3%. If children aged...
