10 main scientific discoveries about happiness

For 2 years, the pandemic has been shaking our nerves, making us feel uncertain: will schools close again, what will happen to work, vaccination schedules, etc. Very stressful time. But scientists have also found a positive effect in this.

It turns out that the feeling of uncertainty about tomorrow pushes us to enjoy the little things in the present. More than 6,000 people took part in the experiment, where during the day people were asked how much they felt the unpredictability of the situation and enjoyed the moment. And the more they felt that the world was messy, the more likely they were to savor the present a couple of hours later.

Researchers believe that this is a protective reaction of our mind. Enjoyment takes us from fear through the murky future into a clear, pleasant feeling right now.

Previous studies have told us that cloud greetings make us unhappy, sick, and even less caring.

But this year's research showed that daydreaming can still be useful.

Such free cheering in the clouds increases alpha waves in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with non-standard, creative thinking.

In one study, high school students were asked to answer a classic 36 questions.

For 30 minutes during the month, a pair of children asked and answered each other questions, such as "what is the most difficult for you at school?", "what are you proud of?".

At the end of the experiment, they felt closer and called each other friends, even though they had spent only 90 minutes together in the last 3 months. And these indicators were even in couples with children of different races.

The practice of empathy has a positive effect on relationships and has been extensively studied in laboratory studies. A new study published in the journal Psychological Science examines empathy in everyday life.

His results showed that people have about 9 opportunities per day to show empathy and about 6 to receive it. And in 88% of cases, they used these opportunities. They felt more empathy towards close people than strangers. And it is surprising, in my opinion, that they empathized more with positive emotions than with negative ones.

More importantly, people who found more opportunities for and expressed empathy were happier and had greater well-being.

University of Coimbra psychologist Marcela Matos and her team asked more than 4,000 people from 21 countries to describe their beliefs about compassion, as well as their psychological state.

Many have avoided compassion during the pandemic because they feared it would be too emotionally difficult. The researchers found that participants who were afraid to show compassion to themselves or others were likely to feel more depressed, anxious and nervous during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, many people started working via zoom. Researchers soon began documenting the mental health implications of this necessary change. According to one of these studies, women suffer from "magnification fatigue" more than men.

Scientists are still figuring out why zoom has such an effect, but there are some assumptions.

Colleagues often feed each other's anxiety, a feeling of physical entrapment, the scrutiny of many people at the same time, it is difficult to interpret non-verbal signals through the screen, many parallel distractions: messages, letters. But the main problem seems to be the camera. What we can see.

"In the real world, if someone was watching you all the time with a mirror - while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback - you saw yourself in the mirror, that would be just crazy," says the professor Stanford University Communications Jeremy Bailenson.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has caused morbidity and mortality rates to be much higher than they should be as people refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated. Who tends to believe fake news?

Age and education play a role. But there is another factor that attracts the attention of researchers: intellectual humility. It's simply the realization that you can be wrong because of biases created by your emotions, experiences, or education.

The researchers found that those with higher intellectual humility were more likely to try to find out if the headline was true, such as by fact-checking, learning more about the source, and even simply reading the entire article.

In an article published in Steve Rattier and his colleagues, nearly 2,000 audience members were randomly assigned to take surveys before and after seeing one of three theater productions dealing with issues of economic and social inequality.

Results: After seeing the productions, audiences reported feeling more empathy for the groups of people depicted in the plays and even changed their attitudes about the political issues raised by the productions.

What's more, the productions actually changed behavior: people were more likely to donate money to charity.

For five years, students in the San Francisco Unified School District with an eighth-grade GPA below 2.0 were assigned ethnic studies classes in their first year of high school.

The course covered topics such as "the genocide of Native Americans in California, community resistance in California's Chinese and Latino communities, and trade unionism during the Great Depression and World War II among African Americans and Filipino Americans."

The result: Students who took ethnic studies classes made significant and sustained gains—they were more likely to attend school, take more classes, graduate from high school, and go on to college.

Yomna Samir of Abu Dhabi University and her colleagues looked at happiness scores for 152 countries, as well as how much those countries consumed, how much they met their sustainability goals, and what they disposed of.

After controlling for confounders such as country welfare, government corruption, and general social trust, they found that happier countries meet sustainability goals and recycle more than unhappier countries.

On the other hand, according to another study published in Emotion, gratitude may be an even more effective means of ensuring resilience.