Men Who Like Culture Are Happier

The Louvre. From Brock's Renaissance Art.

Hey gang. Today's story is again brought to you by Julia of The Thank You Project. It seems whenever I have trouble finding new stories, there she is with a good one. Any help is always welcome!

As for the story itself, LiveScience reports that men who enjoy cultural outings, like visits to art museums or the ballet, tend to be happier with their lives than those who don't. The researchers call this "receptive culture," which is separate from "creative culture," wherein a person actually takes a hands-on approach by painting, singing, or writing.

Study author Koenraad Cuypers and his colleagues looked at data on the activities, life satisfaction, perceived health, anxiety, and depression of 50,797 adult residents of Nord-Trondelag County in central Norway. Even after controlling for income and education, participating in receptive culture has a positive effect on the wellbeing of both genders, but the effect is not equal. Cuypers says, "Men seemed to get more of a percieved health benefit from being involved in different receptive cultural activities than women did."

Since this study did not examine people's happiness over time, it can make no assertions on whether receptive culture causes happiness or if the two just happen to go together. Cuypers wants to expand the research to answer that question, and also to find out if the correlation is true in European countries other than Norway.

You can read the actual study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Looking Back on Positive Memories Keeps You Feeling Happy

"The Persistence of Memory" (1931) by Salvador Dali.
From VirtualDali.

As more peaceful news starts to break through again, The Times of India reports that people who remember positive experiences are happier than those who focus on negative experiences. This information is based on a study that looked at correlations between "Big Five" personality traits and happiness.

As Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University explains, "We found that highly extraverted people are happier with their lives because they tend to hold a positive, nostalgic view of the past and are less likely to have negative thoughts and regrets. This is good news because although it may be difficult to change your personality, you may be able to alter your view of time and boost your happiness."

If you've got $31.50 burning a hole in your pocket, you can pay to read the actual study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, which is good because the news article is very light on details. How was this study conducted? How many participants were there? How were cultural differences in memory controlled for?

Who knows, but at least it's kind of normal news again, right!?

The Happiest Places Also Have The Highest Suicide Rates

By Vincent Van Gogh. From 0rchid Thief.

Some troubling news today, as Eurasia Review reports on new research that compares the happiness, both of cities and of countries, to suicide rates. It's all part of a research paper entitled "Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places" from University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Researchers have previously suspected a link between national happiness data and suicide rates when it comes to Denmark, but this new study shows a similar link in Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland, and Switzerland. Since different cultures have different standards on reporting suicide rates, so the paper also goes into detail on happiness and suicide rates within a single geographic region--namely the United States.

Using a happiness sample of 1.3 million Americans and data on 1 million "suicide decisions," the researchers found happy states are also high in number of suicides. For instance, Utah was ranked first in life satisfaction, but showed the 9th highest suicide rate, while New York was ranked 45th in life satisfaction, yet had the lowest suicide rate in the country. Hawaii, sometimes considered the happiest state, was second on their life satisfaction list, yet had the fifth highest suicide rate.

The researchers theorize that this link happens because humans always compare themselves to those around them. In other words, living in a happy place could make unhappy people even MORE unhappy because they feel disconnected from the happy people around them. As Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick says, “Those dark contrasts may in turn increase the risk of suicide. If humans are subject to mood swings, the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy.”

Casual Friday: A Trip to the Art Museum

As Aristotle was fond of saying, "There comes a time in one's life when one has no idea what to post on one's blog." For me, that time is now, so I'm just going to post a bunch of paintings that I like, because art is a great method of transmitting meaning and joy. I don't know if anyone else will like them and I don't know if most of these would even be classified as "happy" art, but they do all have a positive feeling to them. (You can click each one for the full-sized version.)

"First Steps (after Millet)" by Vincent Van Gogh. He painted this in 1890 while he was a voluntary insane asylum patient at Saint-Remy, where he also did some his most famous work (like "Starry Night").

"The Botanist" by Louis Wain. Louis Wain is one of my favorite painters, even though he's not really considered serious or deep by the art world (because he mostly painted cats with funny anthropomorphic features). He is also famous for becoming schizophrenic, with his cat paintings often looking completely abstract and psychedelic before psychedelic was even a word. You can check out other Wain paintings at Catland.

"Every Girl Should Have a Unicorn" by Dr. Seuss. Many people don't know this, but the famous children's author and artist Dr. Seuss also made paintings for adults--he just didn't release them usually. Well, his "adult" paintings are just as colorful and imaginative as the ones in his children's books, if not more so. You can see them in the excellent book The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss.

Hopefully these are some paintings you haven't seen before. I'm keeping it short so YOU feel free to post any paintings you like in the comments!

Yale Photography Exhibition Showcases Happiness

From Yale Daily News.

Today Yale Daily News reports on a new photo exhibition that aims to show the contagious nature of happiness. The exhibition, entitled "Happiness Around the World," is sponsored by the International Student Organization and "HappyHap @ Yale," a student group focused on happiness.

Sunnie Tölle, co-founder of HappyHap, says, "One of the exhibition’s goals is to showcase in an artistic way that happiness is contagious and can inspire, empower and unite people across countries and cultures. Happiness can be expressed in infinitely many ways."

The photographs also entered a competition. Wanwan Lu, the first-place winner with a photo of a Cambodian child in a rice field, says, "I was travelling in Cambodia and saw this little girl playing around in the mud and she looked happy. We all need some positive energy in life."

You can see "Happiness Around the World" in the Davenport Art Gallery until February 19. Donations to the exhibition go to support SmileTrain, a charity that helps children with cleft lips.

Puppet Show Teaches Pakistani Children about Peace and Happiness

From TheSpec.

Today TheSpec reports on a new puppet/storytelling/art show that aims to teach the children of Pakistan about peace and happiness, states of mind that children in especially war-torn regions may have never experienced.

As Jahan Zeb, the project leader, says, "When we were growing up, there was peace. There was happiness in those villages … towns and cities. Now our children, our (second and third) generations, they don’t know. Was there happiness? Was there some hope? They don’t believe. They don’t know what is hope."

Zeb became motivated to start a peace project when the Taliban took over the Swat region of Pakistan, where his wife's family lived. He created the Art and Peace Education Exchange (or APEX) with Journey of Peace.

The project itself is a 16-part series of stories told through puppets. The stories deal with a displaced Afghan family and have been included in the school curricula of Afghanistan provinces Kandahar, Kabul, and Samangan since 2007. In Pakistan, the stories will be translated and adapted from dealing with landmines, which are prevalent in Afghanistan, to dealing with terrorism and suicide bombing.

The project just had their first show in Canada at The Pearl Company.

Artists Create a 3D Happiness Map of Leeds, England

From the BBC.

The BBC reports that Invisible Flock, a group of interactive artists, is embarking on the two-month "Bring the Happy" project to collect happiness data and turn it into a 3D happiness map. Invisible Flock--composed of Ben Eaton, Victoria Pratt, and Richard Warburton--are holding their giant map installation in an empty Leeds shopping unit. Visitors to the installation can remember happy memories, rate those memories on a scale of one to ten, and point out where those memories occurred. The 3D effect comes from the use of glass rods, with "ten" memories using the longest rods and "one" memories using the shortest.

Invisible Flock member Richard Warburton says, "There have been about 100 memories added to the map so far and we've already got some hot spots. Elland Road and St Jimmy's are already populated with happy memories." The group plans to stage "happiness intervention" in areas that seem to be lacking in happiness, so you may want to avoid those areas if you're not into that sort of thing. A graphical version of the map will come online once the project is complete.

This is an interesting idea that could produce a beautiful work of art. However, some happiness researchers, like Daniel Gilbert of Stumbling on Happiness fame, think memories of past happiness are inaccurate. Even so, I can't wait to see the finished map!