NOTES

1 Research on the fixed aspects of personality is discussed in Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), chapter one.

2 See Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007).

3 David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman, ‘Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction’, Psychological Science 9 (1998): 340–346.

4 The research on self-deception and denial is voluminous. One recent example is Nina Mazar et al, ‘The dishonesty of honest people: a theory of self-concept maintenance’, Journal of Marketing Research 45 (2008): 633–644.

5 Jennifer Gregg et al,‘Improving diabetes self-management through acceptance, mindfulness, and values: a randomized controlled trial’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75 (2007): 336–343.

6 Lawrence Tabak, ‘If your goal is success, don’t consult these gurus’, Fast Company (December 1996).

7 Kim Baskerville et al, ‘Reactions to random acts of kindness’, Social Science Journal 37 (2000): 293–298.

8 Much of the research on the benefits of novel experience is collected in Todd Kashdan, Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (New York: William Morrow, 2009).

9 Mark Easton, ‘Britain’s happiness in decline’, BBC News website, May 2, 2006, accessible at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4771908.stm.

10 For a summary of Michael McCullough and Robert Emmons’s gratitude research, with references to individual journal articles, see psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons/or Robert Emmons, Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). See also note 1.

11 Martin Seligman et al, ‘Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions’, American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410–421.

12 See, for example, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, ‘Counting blessings versus burdens: an experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2003): 377–389.

13 Andrea diMartini et al, ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder caused by hallucinations and delusions experienced in delirium’, Psychosomatics 48 (2007): 436–439.

14 Jorge Moll et al, ‘Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 15623–15628.

15 Footage of Dawkins taking questions from creationist students, including a discussion of altruism, is at video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8033327978006186584#.

16 Sandy Wolfson and Pamela Briggs, ‘Locked into gambling: anticipatory regret as a motivator for playing the National Lottery’, Journal of Gambling Studies 18 (2002): 1–17.

17 Roese’s research is discussed in Neal Roese, If Only (New York: Broadway, 2005). For further evidence that inaction is regretted more than action, see Marcel Zeelenberg et al, ‘The inaction effect in the psychology of regret’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 (2002): 314–327. Several earlier studies reached an opposite conclusion, but Zeelenberg et al suggest this may be because they studied isolated, one-off decisions in artificial experimental settings.

18 Neal Roese and Amy Summerville, ‘What we regret most … and why’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 1273–1285.

19 Robert Provine’s research on laugh-trigger phrases, the link between laughter and humour, and the role of laughter in personal advertisements is detailed in his book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000).

20 James Pennebaker and Sandra Beall, ‘Confronting a traumatic event: towards an understanding of inhibition and disease’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95 (1986): 274–281.

21 John Weinman et al, ‘Enhanced wound healing after an emotional disclosure intervention’, British Journal of Health Psychology 13 (2008): 95–102.

22 If you’re part of a married couple, anyway. The paper in question is Jean Twenge et al, ‘Parenthood and marital satisfaction: a meta-analytic review’, Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (2003): 574–583.

23 Nattavudh Powdthavee, ‘Think having children will make you happy?’, The Psychologist 22 (2009): 308–310.

24 Philip Brickman et al, ‘Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1978): 917–927.

25 Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, ‘Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5 (1998): 644–649.

26 Scott Taylor, ‘An exploration of wilderness effects: a phenomeno-logical inquiry’, online at www.c-zone.net/taylors.

27 These findings are from Robert Wuthnow, ‘Peak experiences: some empirical tests’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 18 (1978): 59–75 and Andrew Greeley, Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (New York: Prentice Hall, 1974): 141.

28 See Martin Seligman, Helplessness (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).

29 For example, Brad Bushman, ‘Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 724–731.

30 R.H. Hornberger, ‘The differential reduction of aggressive responses as a function of interpolated activities’, American Psychologist, 14 (1959): 354.

31 Lisa Starr and Joanne Davila, ‘Clarifying co-rumination: associations with internalizing symptoms and romantic involvement among adolescent girls’, Journal of Adolescence 32 (2009): 19–37.

32 Richard Wiseman summarised his findings, based on surveys conducted at a science festival, in ‘The truth about lying and laughing’, The Guardian, 21 April 2007, at www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/21/weekendmagazine.

33 F. Strack et al, ‘Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 768–777.

34 The story of Hans Selye, stress and strain is summarised at the website of the American Institute of Stress, www.stress.org/hans.htm.

35 Bert Brown, ‘Face-saving following experimentally induced embarrassment’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 6 (1970): 255–271.

36 Christine Harris, ‘Embarrassment: a form of social pain’, American Scientist 94 (2006) 524–533.

37 Ibid.

38 Much of the research on embarrassment involved Rowland Miller, and is discussed in his book Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).

39 Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada, ‘Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing’, American Psychologist, 60 (2005): 678–686; and Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (New York: Crown, 2009).

40 J.P. Forgas and S. Moylan, ‘After the movies: the effects of transient mood states on social judgments’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13 (1987): 478–489.

41 These findings are discussed throughout John Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).

42 C.-B. Zhong and G.L. Leonardelli,‘Cold and lonely: does social exclusion literally feel cold?’, Psychological Science 19 (2008): 838–842.

43 Cacioppo, op. cit. (See note 41).

44 E.E. Jones and V.A. Harris, ‘The attribution of attitudes’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967): 1–24.

45 J.G. Miller, ‘Culture and the development of everyday social explanation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984): 961–978.

46 Philip Zimbardo, ‘A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators’, in Arthur Miller, ed, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil: Understanding Our Capacity for Kindness and Cruelty (New York: Guilford, 2005).

47 Scott Feld, ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do’, American Journal of Sociology 96 (1991): 1464–77.

48 Satoshi Kanazawa, ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do’, Psychology Today, November 1, 2009, online at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen talist/200911/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-you-do.

49 Andrea Donderi’s posting, under the username ‘tangerine’, is online at ask.metafilter.com/55153/whats-the-middle-ground-between-fu-and-welcome#830421.

50 See, for example, research by Stephen Emlen and Peter Buston, summarised in Catherine Zandonella, ‘Opposites do not attract in mating game’, New Scientist 30 (June 2003), at www.newscientist.com/article/dn3887-opposites-do-not-attract-in-mating-game.html.

51 Robert Epstein, ‘How science can help you fall in love’, Scientific American Mind Jan–Feb 2010: 26–33.

52 Ibid.

53 One real-life example is Thomas Walker and Eleanor Main, ‘Choice shifts in political decisionmaking: federal judges and civil liberties cases’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 3 (2006): 39–48.

54 For example, Miron Zuckerman et al, ‘The egocentric bias: seeing oneself as cause and target of others’ behaviour’, Journal of Personality 51 (2006): 621–630.

55 Thomas Gilovich et al, ‘The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 211–222.

56 Jon Jecker and David Landy, ‘Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour’, Human Relations 22 (1969): 371–378.

57 One such recent study is S. Goel et al, ‘Real and perceived attitude homophily in social networks’, a report for Yahoo! Research (2010), available online at www.cam.cornell.edu/~sharad/papers/friendsense.pdf.

58 William Swann and Michael Gill, ‘Confidence and accuracy in person perception: do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 747–757.

59 Solomon Asch, ‘Opinions and social pressure’, Scientific American 193 (1955): 31–35.

60 See for example Mark Granovetter, ‘The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited’, Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–233.

61 Robert Nelson and Peter Economy, Better Business Meetings (Burr Ridge, Illinois: Irwin Professional Publishing): 5.

62 Zoltán Dornyeï, The Psychology of the Language Learner (Mahwah, New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2005): 158.

63 Steven Rogelberg et al, ‘“Not another meeting!”: are meeting time demands related to employee wellbeing?’ Journal of Applied Psychology 1 (2006): 86–96.

64 Discussed in Mary Czerwinski et al, ‘A diary study of task switching and interruptions’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004): 175– 182.

65 Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff, ‘Why do dominant personalities attain influence in face-to-face groups? The competence-signaling effects of trait dominance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 491–503.

66 K. Weaver et al, ‘Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: a repetitive voice can sound like a chorus’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007): 821–833.

67 This research is collected in Dalton Conley, Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety (New York: Pantheon, 2009).

68 Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2009): 109, referring to research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

69 Justin Kruger and David Dunning, ‘Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties of recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999): 1121–1134.

70 In Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

71 J. Harriott and J.R. Ferrari, ‘Prevalence of procrastination among samples of adults’, Psychological Reports 78 (1996): 611– 616.

72 The definitive resource on the Hawthorne experiments is on Harvard Business School’s website at www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hawthorne/.

73 For example, see ‘Survey finds workers average only three productive days per week,’ Microsoft news release, 15 March 2005, at www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-15threeproductivedayspr.mspx.

74 R. Buehler et al, ‘Exploring the ‘planning fallacy’: why people underestimate their task completion times’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 366–381.

75 Most terrifyingly, see www.flickr.com/photos/hawk express/sets/72157594200490122/.

76 Mary Czerwinski, op cit. (See note 64.)

77 Warren St John and Alex Williams, ‘The crow of the early bird’, New York Times, 27 March 2005.

78 K. Dijkstra et al, ‘Body posture facilitates retrieval of autobiographical memories’, Cognition 102 (2007): 139–149.

79 For example, Christopher Boyce et al, ‘Money and happiness: rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction’, Psychological Science 21 (2010): 471–475.

80 Daniel Kahneman et al, ‘The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias’, Journal of Economic Perspectives (1991): 193– 206.

81 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, ‘The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice’, Science 211 (1981): 453–458.

82 Robert Lemlich’s work on the experience of time passing is discussed in Jay Ingram, The Velocity of Honey (New York: Basic Books, 2006):191–193.

83 Petter Johansson et al, ‘Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task’, Science 310 (2005): 116–119.

84 Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, ‘Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes’, Psychological Review 84 (1977): 231–259.

85 Ap Dijksterhuis, ‘On making the right choice: the deliberation-without-attention effect’, Science 311(2006): 1005–1007.

86 Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz, ‘If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation’, Psychological Science 19 (2008): 986–988.

87 Mark Rubin et al, ‘A processing fluency explanation of bias against migrants’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010): 21–28.

88 Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, ‘Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 9369–9372.

89 Daniel Wegner, ‘How to think, say or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion’, Science 325 (2009): 48–50.

90 J. L. Freedman and S. C. Fraser, ‘Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4 (1966): 196–202.

91 Robert Knox and James Inkster, ‘Postdecision dissonance at post time’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8 (1968): 319–323.

92 Dan Ariely and Michael Norton, ‘Conceptual consumption’, Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 475–499.

93 B.F.Skinner, ‘“Superstition” in the pigeon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–172.

94 Matthew Gailliot et al, ‘Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: willpower is more than a metaphor’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007): 325–336.

95 Ibid.

96 Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan, ‘Repenting hyperopia: an analysis of self-control regrets’, Journal of Consumer Research 33 (2006): 273–282.

97 Ran Kivetz and Itamar Simonson, ‘Self-control for the righteous: towards a theory of precommitment to indulgence’, Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 119–217.

98 Brooks Gump and Karen Matthews, ‘Do background stressors influence reactivity to and recovery from acute stressors?’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29 (2006): 469–494.

99 Andrew Baum, Jerome Singer and Carlene Baum, ‘Stress and the environment’, in Gary W. Evans, ed, Environmental Stress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

100 ‘The case for smarter commuting’, Citrix Online, November 2009, available online at www.workshifting.com/Commute SmartWhitepaper.pdf.

101 For example, Alois Stutzer, ‘Commuting and happiness’, presentation to the AGS Annual Meeting 2009, available online at www.cces.ethz.ch/agsam2009/panels/AGSAM2009_ panel_mobility_Stutzer.pdf.

102 Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey, ‘Stress that doesn’t pay: the commuting paradox’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 110 (2008): 339–366.

103 Alpaslan Akay and Peter Martinsson, ‘Sundays are blue: aren’t they? The day-of-the-week effect on subjective well-being and socio-economic Status’, IZA Discussion Paper 4563 (2009).

104 Phillippa Lally et al, ‘How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world’, European Journal of Social Psychology, published online July 2009. See www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122513384/abstract.

105 Ellen Furlong and John Opfner, ‘Cognitive constraints on how economic rewards affect cooperation’, Psychological Science 20 (2009): 11–16.

106 Stanley Milgram et al, ‘Response to intrusion into waiting lines’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 683–689.

107 David Maister, ‘The psychology of waiting lines’, in J.A. Czepiel et al, eds, The Service Encounter: Managing Employee–Customer Interaction in Service Businesses (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1985).

108 Francesco Cappuccio et al, ‘Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies’, Sleep 33 (2010): 585–592.

109 P.M. Todd, ‘Searching for the next best mate’, in R. Conte et al, eds, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1997): 419–436.

110 Arline Bronzaft, ‘Beware: noise is hazardous to our children’s development’, Hearing Rehabilitation Quarterly 22 (1997) and M.M. Haines et al, ‘Multilevel modelling of aircraft noise on performance tests in schools around Heathrow airport, London’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 56 (2002): 139– 144.

111 Staffan Hygge et al, ‘The Munich airport noise study: cognitive effects on children from before to after the changeover of airports’, in Noise Control – The Next 25 Years (Inter Noise 96 Conference), F.A. Hill and R. Lawrence eds, 5 (1996): 2189–2192, and Gary Evans et al, ‘Chronic noise exposure and physiological response: a prospective study of children living under environmental stress’, Psychological Science 9 (1998): 75–77.

112 Stefan Willich et al, ‘Noise burden and the risk of myocardial infarction’, European Heart Journal 27 (2006): 276–282.

113 Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor, ‘Defensive pessimism: “harnessing” anxiety as motivation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1986): 1208–1217.

114 Discussed in Daniel Gilbert’s TED talk, available online at http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_ happy.html

115 See note 24.

116 Sonja Lyubomirsky, op. cit:20. (See note 1.)

117 J.J. Skowronski et al, ‘Spontaneous trait transference: communicators take on the qualities they describe in others’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 837–848.

118 George Miller, ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information’, Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.

119 Bruce Wampold, The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings (London: Routledge, 2001).

120 Rob Stein, ‘Revision to the bible of psychiatry, DSM, could introduce new mental disorders’, Washington Post, 10 February 2010.

121 David Bourland, ‘A linguistic note: writing in E-prime’, General Semantics Bulletin 32 & 33 (1965).

122 ‘Shania Twain more beautiful than Angelina Jolie?’, AFP report in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December 2009.