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One of the claims that is somewhat easy to validate empirically is that "432 Hz sounds better than 440 Hz." This informal experiment tests this in a straightforward way. People listen to pitch-shifted versions of songs at a variety of different frequencies and rate their preference for the song. Importantly, they don't know which frequency the song has been ...
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[Edit]: Parts of this answer respond to removed content in older versions of the OP, and to comments. The current version of the OP deserves some elaboration of this answer. (And, IMHO, other answers too!)
There are other spiritual "worlds" than those that are dualistic. By common psychological definitions of spirituality, the existence of an "...
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It's mostly a fairly vapid truism (see the rhetorical sense). Here's a diagram from a popular theory from a positive psychologist at my doctoral alma mater of [what really makes people happy (or not):
(source: edbatista.com) (Lyubomirsky, 2008)
Thus the truer truism would be, "You can make yourself happier, to some extent..." but it's tricky enough to ...
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I'm not sure about the trained part, but there have been cases where people have spontaneously shifted into a very enjoyable state of mind for a very long time, for example: Eckhart Tolle, who supposedly spent 2 years in utter bliss.
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This is a big question, but here are a few thoughts.
While we could argue about the details, concepts around set points and the hedonic treadmill have reasonable empirical support. The general finding is that life satisfaction ratings are fairly stable from year to year (Lucas & Donnellan, 2007) which suggests that there are relatively stable individual ...
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Since you asked a vague question, I will provide a relatively vague answer.
A standard way to test fairness experimentally, is by having people play the ultimatum game. This is an interaction between two participants, one is randomly assigned to be Alice and the other is Bob. Alice is given a couple of days wage in money (either the local currency or other ...
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Why do we anchor our happiness to short term situational comparisons rather than large scale events?
Research on well-being has explored happiness from different temporal perspectives.
Much of the literature looks at how people respond to measures of life satisfaction, quality of life, and measures of tendencies to experience positive and negative emotion. These tend to reflect longer term evaluations and emotional experiences. This shows up in for ...
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So I had a quick look into your question (not my area). It turns out there is long established journal called "Death Studies" that focuses specifically on "bereavement and loss, grief therapy, death attitudes, suicide, and death education".
From a quick search on Google Scholar for "funerals grieving", I found an article by Romanoff (1998) that looked ...
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Going off the findings in this paper, it seems that one's baseline level of happiness can be increased and maintained at a (weakly) significant level by "continual effort and engagement in some intentional process" (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006, pg. 59), which the authors refer to as "activity-based changes". Examples given include, ...
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In a "traditional" marriage relationship, the man's job is to be a breadwinner and the woman's job is bearing and raising children. Intelligence helps a man do his job as a breadwinner, but is not as critical to a woman in a childbearing role. Beauty is a "signal" of a woman's childbearing abilities (including sexual attractiveness), which is why an ...
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In alignment with the question author's commentary refinement, "It would already be a nice and useful answer if there was -any- clue on -any- type of happiness.":I submit:
Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. "Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?" American Economic Review 103.3 (2013): 598-604. Web.
Abstract
Many ...
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I never knew the name for this before and used to just call it "awareness bias"; however, upon reading your question, I did a little bit of digging on Wikipedia and found out about the mere exposure effect, also known as the "familiarity principle" in social psychology.
My other source was this page.
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The Canadian Mental Health Association of Ontario is pretty unambiguous about the bidirectionally causal relationships between physical and mental well-being:
Mental and physical health is fundamentally linked. There are multiple associations between mental health and chronic physical conditions that significantly impact people’s quality of life, demands ...
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You could try meditation. Meditation practices have been shown to have an effect size similar or higher to antidepressants.
"During the course of 2to 6 months, the mindfulness meditation program ES estimates ranged from 0.22 to 0.38 for anxiety symptoms and
0.23 to 0.30 for depressive symptoms. These small effects
are comparable with what would be expected ...
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I would say it is impossible.
Being unhappy is a necessary experience to make the feeling of happiness arise. Maybe there is some joyful state that can persist over time without unhappiness but I doubt it.
As I see it, unhappiness at times comes with the deal of living.
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Oddly enough, the place where you find the most information about this topic is where there's a lot of money to be made from it. Facebook games or games in general. If you focus on "why do people like to play some games and not others", then you're asking more of an economical question, and there will be a lot more information on the topic.
Example:
...
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The term eustress was coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye, consisting of the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and stress, literally meaning "good stress".
There is also the Yerkes–Dodson law which is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance dictating that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point.
...
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That's simple. Many celebrities commit suicide, or are drug addicts. Why? They have the money, they have the lover, they have the fans, they have the fame, the power. They have it all. Do they? No, that's not the case.
Lets define happiness; we don't know what happiness is, but we do know:
It's not about the money
It's not about the fame, the power
It's ...
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As the CDC page you linked states,
Well-being integrates mental health (mind) and physical health (body) resulting in more holistic approaches to disease prevention and health promotion.
Mental health and physical health are the 2 main components to well-being, and both these components have components within them.
Mental health will have positive ...
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There are many consumer satisfaction tests available, see for a somewhat dated but informative review Westbrook & Oliver (1981). Most often, simple, single-item rating scales are employed. Reportedly, there is little uniformity in the number of scale steps used and in the anchoring. They often range from 3-point labeled rating scales (e.g.., good - ...
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I do believe these concepts should not be applied as in boolean logic, with either ALL PESSIMISTIC or ALL OPTIMISTIC, but in a rather spectral fashion.
Happiness is closely linked to having lower expectations:
(...) Robb Rutledge says, “Happiness depends not on how well things are going but whether things are going better or worse than expected.”
Pessimism ...
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Step one would be to define what you mean by "soul".
The common Judeo/Christian/Muslim theory is that there is something that (a) is the essential core of a person's personality that is related to the brain but is not synonymous with the electrochemical processes of the brain; and (b) that continues to exist when the body is dead.
If you could prove that ...
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