Dow Jones Sinks

In this month’s posting for Positive Psychology News Daily, I reviewed some brand new research from Professor Carol Graham, Soumya Chattopadhyay, and Mario Picon (all from the University of Maryland). Their objective was to better understand the effects of the US economic crisis on well-being and to determine if individuals adapt both to the bad news of the crisis and then to the good news of potential recovery.

Looking across time during the crisis, not surprisingly happiness levels decreased markedly at the start of the crisis, reaching their lowest levels early in 2009. They then followed an equally marked upward trend after April 2009. During the downward trend, happiness levels lag the stock market spikes, which makes intuitive sense.

But the most striking result is that happiness levels lead the stock market on the upward trend. What’s more, by July 2009 happiness levels were above those at the start of the crisis, even though the Dow Jones was only just starting to recover, having hit rock bottom.

For the full posting and to read all the comments, see Positive Psychology News Daily.

Image  courtesy of Scorpions and Centaurs

Here’s a great article on the value of Positive Psychology to business, covering all the basics from the benefits of positive emotions (e.g enhancing creativity and problem-solving) to hiring people on their strengths not their CVs.

Plus it mentions the work of two of my Positive Psychology News Daily colleagues, David J Pollay and Senia Maymin (founder), who also happen to be graduates of the Penn MAPP programme.

Image: Kevinzhengli

Thanks to Greg Quinting for the link

Well, here’s a turn up for the books as they say – the good old Financial Times talking about happiness, whatever next. I suppose we shouldn’t complain that Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness measure is actually very old news, and we should be thankful that the whole concept of social well-being is being discussed by such serious and influential bodies as the FT. And it makes a change doesn’t it from the constant doom and gloom emanating from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

I do get slightly twitchy about the mention of  statistics though. Which management guru was it who said you can’t manage what you can’t measure? The problem is that people tend to become obsessed with the target and forget why it was introduced in the first place. Hence the bizarre situation in GPs surgeries up and down the land where you’re prevented from booking appointments more than 24 hours ahead/told to ring back tomorrow so that Surgery Managers can meet the target for waiting lists.  Or in schools where children unlikely to pass a GCSE are ‘advised’ not to sit it so that the school’s pass rate is maintained. If we start measuring well-being in this way in the UK, and especially if we link it to performance-related pay, guess what will happen?

Image: TFDuesing on flickr.com, reused under Creative Commons License.

Here’s my latest article on Positive Psychology News Daily on that age-old subject of wealth and happiness. It seems to have caused a bit of a stir with some readers, judging from the number of comments (32 as of today), although maybe not for the right reasons!

Never mind, I’m sure you’ll find the recent research interesting. Feel free to write your comments on the Positive Psychology News Daily site itself.

Image: thisduck

In this article last year I mentioned that the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan pioneered the measurement of well-being with its Gross National Happiness index.

Now Bhutan is in the news again because tomorrow it will hold its first-ever democratic elections. This could be seen as a test of how serious the two main political parties and their supporters are about happiness, or whether, when they have the opportunity, they put economic growth first.

The head of Bhutan’s planning commission suggests that happiness and economic growth are not incompatible, but nevertheless, observers are right to acknowledge that economic growth will have consequences, not all of them positive. But perhaps the Bhutanese know enough about well-being to be wise to the negative effects of materialism.

Whatever the result of the elections, it will be interesting to watch how democracy unfolds in Bhutan in the next few weeks and months.

Image: Babasteve