AUSTRALIANS have coped with the economic slowdown by staying home, chilling out and saving money - and we’re all the happier for it. Click here to read the article.

Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, summed up happiness research in Forbes. Among his findings:Some of the happiest countries in the world are cold and dark… Democracies tend to fare better than dictatorships… Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Gratitude is not.He used theWorld Database of Happiness, which ranks the USA at No. 17, well below Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, Luxembourg; Ireland, Mexico and Norway.That’s a collection of some of the world’s least religious nations, according to Phil Zuckerman who added up the world’s least religious nations, calculated by the highest numbers of non-believers, atheists and agnostics for his book, Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. High on his list: Sweden (1), Denmark (3), Norway (4), Finland (7), France (8) and the USA (44).Click here the read the article. 

New research has found looking on the bright side of life can be a barrier to shedding unwanted kilos, while negative emotions can help weight loss because it means people care more about their condition and focus on the task at hand.

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K-State psychology researchers studied how positive work experiences extend into family life and facilitate family interactions. They found that employees who are engaged in their work, which includes higher levels of vigor, more dedication and absorption in daily activities, have better moods and more satisfaction at home.  Click here to read the article.

Research presented at the annual conference for Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain. Click here to read the article.

Psychological Science, September 2009

The current study examined the association between Openness to Experience and stress regulation (i.e., stress exposure, reactivity, recovery, and restoration). Seventy-three young adults underwent a laboratory stressor, and physiological and affective reactivity and recovery were examined. Openness was positively associated with reports of greater stress exposure during childhood, but was unrelated to the number of stressors in the past year. Higher Openness was associated with less blood pressure reactivity, increases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (HRV), and a modest increase in positive affect during the laboratory stressor. Life stress was associated with poor sleep quality for low-, but not high-, Open individuals. These findings suggest greater stress resilience among high-Open persons and greater vulnerability to adverse effects of stress among low-Open individuals.

Journal of reserach in  personality, August 2009

A 30-day diary study examined personality moderators (neuroticism and extraversion) of the interaction between positive and negative daily events predicting daily negative affect and night-time stress. Multilevel analyses revealed positive daily events buffered the effect of negative daily events on negative affect for individuals low in neuroticism and individuals high in extraversion, but not for individuals high in neuroticism or individuals low in extraversion. Positive daily events also buffered the effect of negative daily events on that night’s stress, but only for participants low in neuroticism.

Journal of Research in Personality  Volume 43, Issue 4, August 2009, Pages 547-555

The people who engage in media “multitasking” are those least able to do so well, according to researchers.

A survey defined two groups: those who routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones, and those who did not.

In a series of three classic psychology tests for attention and memory, the “low multitaskers” consistently outdid their highly multitasking counterparts.

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Can’t sleep at night? A new study published in the journal Sleep has found that people who suffer from insomnia have heightened nighttime blood pressure, which can lead to cardiac problems. Click here to read the article

A 2005 study, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.

Interestingly, a study published last April, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” found that “people actually worked faster in conditions where they were interrupted, but they produced less,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine and a co-author of both studies. And she also found that people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else.

“As observers, we’ll watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or e-mail,” she said. As I read that, I realized how often I was switching between writing this article and checking my e-mail.

Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people work in these patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have something to do with it.

Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure.

Click here to read the full New York Times article