The Bluebird Patch

Humans are, at heart, altruistic - or at least we are according to psychology Professor Dacher Keltner, of the University of California at Berkeley who has produced a cheering video to explain why.    "Most people think that Darwin had this idea of survival of the fittest and that it’s really the most ruthless and bloodthirsty who really thrive and survive. That is not Darwin’s view of human evolution at all. He really felt that sympathy is the strongest instinct that humans have".     Dacher Keltner Greed is good. War is inevitable. Whether in political theory or popular culture, human nature is often portrayed as selfish and power hungry. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner challenges this notion of human nature and seeks to better understand why we evolved pro-social emotions like empathy, compassion and gratitude. We've all heard the phrase 'survival of the fittest', born from the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Keltner adds nua...

  Happiness is Love at First Sip! New research shows that coffee may make drinkers more cheerful by stimulating their response to positive words.  Scientists believe it stimulates parts of the brain connected to positivity, therefore making us more happy by g iving us a better outlook on life.   Coffee also can ward off dementia and it’s also linked to a lower suicide rate, according to a large-scale study from the Harvard School of Public Health.     

Work schedule flexibility seems to be the number one contributor o f a women happiness in the workplace. Flexible hours can dramatically affect happiness and improve productivity. Below is an infographic from Accenture that illustrates the findings of Accenture’s Defining Success research conducted for International Women’s Day 2013. Further, research reveals that many professional working women, if given the option, would choose flextime, spending time with family, and helping others over making more money. Other studies show women want friendly and supportive work environments and are, therefore, working with organizational leaders to achieve them.   

An international team of scientists led by the University of California , Los Angeles has found that a hypothalamic neuropeptide hypocretin (also known as orexin )  greatly increases when humans are happy but decrease when they are sad .  The finding, published online in the journal Nature Communications , suggests that boosting hypocretin could elevate both mood and alertness in humans, thus laying the foundation for possible future treatments of psychiatric disorders like depression. " We show that hypocretin-1 levels are maximal during positive emotion, social interaction and anger, behaviours that induce cataplexy in human narcoleptics". Orexin , also called hypocretin , is a neurotransmitter that regulates arousal, wakefulness, and appetite. The most common form of narcolepsy, in which the sufferer briefly loses muscle tone (cataplexy), is caused by a lack of orexin in the brain due to destruction of the cells that produce it. Read more at: Nature.c...

  Did you know? Spring cleaning can improve your happiness and productivity. De-cluttering gives us an opportunity to start afresh, get organized,and let go of things that no longer serves you. Researchers at Princeton University Neuroscience Institute published the results from their report “ Interactions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex ” and concluded that physical clutter negatively affects your ability to focus and process information.   " The first and most fundamental prediction of biased competition theory is that objects compete for neural representation in visual cortex. A large body of evidence from both single-cell physiology and neuroimaging suggests that multiple stimuli present at the same time within a neuron’s receptive field (RF) are not processed independently, but interact with each other in a mutually suppressive way. In single-cell physiology studies (Britten & Heuer, 1999; Luck, Chelazzi, Hillyard, & Desimone, 19...

A new study conducted by scientists at the University of Vermont has used Twitter to establish that Hawaii is the happiest state in the union and Louisiana, Georgia, Missisipi and Maryland the saddest.   "Looking at 10 million tweets posted from 373 different sites across the country, the team ranked the saddest and happiest states and cities based on the frequency of happy and sad words posted onto the social networking site.   Dubbing the mathematical formula created to collate the information as a 'hedonometer', the scientists discovered that Napa, California was the happiest city, while Beaumont in Texas ranked as the most miserable".

For Chinese people, psychological and physical health, harmonious family and stable marriage (or be in love) are the top three factors to happiness. That's according to a survey conducted by the Women's Studies Center of Peking University, among 4,175 people via Internet or printed questionnaires. The results were released at the ongoing 3rd Asia Women's Forum, which opened in Hong Kong yesterday. The survey indicated that 26.7 percent of people listed good health as the most important factor to happiness, harmonious family 23 percent and stable marriage (be in love) 19.1 percent. According to the survey, people with higher education, higher incomes and stable marriage appeared to experience more happiness. 

Nothing is Good or Bad Jonathan Haidt speaks about happiness and how nothing is good or bad. Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia . His research focuses on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures and political ideology . Haidt created a "Happiness Theory" that can be read (and downloaded) by going to this link http://www.positiveworkplacealliance.com/files/Abstract%20Happiness%20Hypothesis%20Haidt%202006.pdf My favorite idea about Haid is about the "divided self" or divided mind and how he uses the analogy of the rider and the elephant. Basically, he states the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. People are driven by strange forces.They are able to see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong. People are not really in charge of their behavior. They know and see the right way but they just can...

The good life begins at fifty claims a new report which found that this was the start of the happiest time of our lives. For many, the age of 50 may be the beginning of the end, but a group of scientists claim the good life begins only when people reach their fifties. Despite increased risk of death and disease, it seemed that people in their fifties worry less, ignore the negatives and accentuate the positives, according to scientists at Stony Brook University, New York.  "As people age, they are less troubled by stress and anger," the researchers noted in their study, which was led by Arthur Stone, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University and published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . "And although worry persists, without increasing, until middle age, " they continued, "it too fades after the age of 50." Read the full post here .