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...
Research indicates that we are less caring today than we were thirty years ago, leading former President Obama to argue in 2006 that Americans are suffering from an "empathy deficit." An empathy expert, Dr. Jamil Zaki, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford and the...
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....
Above: William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (left), during a visit to downtown Chattanooga in 1984. Photo credit: Chattanooga Venture Records, Chattanooga Public LibraryWilliam H. Whyte (1917-1999) may be best remembered as the author of The Organization Man. This 1956 bestseller described a corporate America in which,...
The first World Happiness Report (WHR) was issued in 2012. Therefore, this year (2022) is the tenth anniversary of that event. The WHR founders’ statements in the opening chapter of WHR 2022 assert; 1. The true measure of progress is the happiness of people. 2....
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...
