Special Issue- Positive Psychology & Health

From last year: Annals of Behavioral Medicine Evaluating the Health Implications of Positive Psychology

This one's worth a look: The Value of Positive Psychology for Health Psychology: Progress and Pitfalls in Examining the Relation of Positive Phenomena to Health

The effect of terrorism (the 9/11 attacks) on well being in the UK.

The 9/11 attacks in the US are memorable for all the wrong reasons. Just as an older generation remember where they were when JFK was assassinated, most of us will remember the events in the US as it unfolded. This paper quantifies the effects on well-being in the UK.
Destruction and distress: using a quasi-experiment to show the effects of the September 11 attacks on subjective well-being in the UK
Robert Metcalfe,Nattavudh Powdthavee,Paul Dolan
Using a longitudinal household panel dataset in the United Kingdom, where most interviews are conducted in September each year, we are able to show that the attacks of September 11 resulted in lower levels of subjective well-being for those interviewed after that date in 2001 compared to those interviewed before it. This quasi-experiment provides one of the first examples of the impact of a terrorist attack in one country on well-being in another country. We value this effect through a cost of illness approach, which is estimated to be between £170 and £380 million.

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being

This new book by Daniel M. Haybron (Oxford University Press, 2008) is reviewed here on MetaPsychology by Daniel O'Brien.

Irish Day Reconstruction Project

A new website will be up soon detailing the ongoing well-being work being conducted here. below is the initial version. It contains reading lists, details of the studies being undertaken, links, people involved and so on.

http://geary.ucd.ie/wellbeing/home

We recently won an IRCHSS grant to carry out this work on a representative population sample examining town-level factors affecting well-being, measurement of well-being, integration of biological markers and so on. This builds on work we have already conducted on a student sample and on a sample of commuters in Dublin. From this work, we integrated biological markers to study financial discounting and we are about to release a set of papers examining diurnal biological patterns and their relation to affect.

This is strongly related to another project we have been developing examining health history in Ireland in the 20th century including the health and well-being of migrants to the UK, US and other destinations. We are currently working on a set of papers examining the determinants of infant mortality in Ireland and how early conditions affected the later health and well-being of the Irish population.

http://geary.ucd.ie/secondarydata/

Happy to talk to anyone who is interested in either of these projects.

IZA Working Paper on "Happiness Inequality"

Barry Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Abstract


This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness across groups: Two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has been eroded, and the gender happiness gap has disappeared entirely. Paralleling changes in the income distribution, differences in happiness by education have widened substantially. We develop an integrated approach to measuring inequality and decomposing changes in the distribution of happiness, finding a pervasive decline in within-group inequality during the 1970s and 1980s that was experienced by even narrowly-defined demographic groups. Around one-third of this decline has subsequently been unwound. Juxtaposing these changes with large rises in income inequality suggests an important role for non-pecuniary actors in shaping the well-being distribution.



http://ftp.iza.org/dp3624.pdf

Review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being

"There is increasing interest in the “economics of happiness”, reflected by the number of articles that are appearing in mainstream economics journals that consider subjective well-being (SWB) and its determinants. This paper provides a detailed review of this literature. It focuses on papers that have been published in economics journals since 1990, as well as some key reviews in psychology and important unpublished working papers. The evidence suggests that poor health, separation, unemployment and lack of social contact are all strongly negatively associated with SWB. However, the review highlights a range of problems in drawing firm conclusions about the causes of SWB; these include some contradictory evidence, concerns over the impact on the findings of potentially unobserved variables and the lack of certainty on the direction of causality. We should be able to address some of these problems as more panel data become available."

Dolan et al. (2008)

hedonic adaption

Theres a very interesting paper in the latest J Public Economics by Oswald and Powdthaveeb

Does happiness adapt? A longitudinal study of disability with implications for economists and judges

This paper is an empirical study of partial hedonic adaptation. It provides longitudinal evidence that people who become disabled go on to exhibit considerable recovery in mental well-being. In fixed-effects equations we estimate the degree of hedonic adaptation at — depending on the severity of the disability — approximately 30% to 50%. Our calculations should be viewed as illustrative; more research, on other data sets, is needed. Nevertheless, we discuss potential implications of our results for economists and the courts.