Word: joyful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chief pleasures of owning used books is inspecting their margins for the scribblings of the previous owner. Snide jokes, charming irrelevancies, cheers of approval and disapproval—all of these little things bring a kind of vicarious joy to the second-hand book connoisseur. But the best commentaries are the really, really stupid ones...
Another larger study, released in January ahead of its publication in Social Science & Medicine this month, shows that whatever people's individual happiness levels, we all tend to fall into a larger, cross-cultural and global pattern of joy. According to survey data representing 2 million people in more than 70 countries, happiness typically follows a U-shaped curve: among people in their mid-40s and younger, happiness trends downward with age, then climbs back up among older people. (That shift doesn't necessarily hold for the very old with severe health problems.) Across the world, people in their...
...pursuing happiness, new research is showing that that goal may be largely out of our control. Two new studies this month add to a growing body of evidence that factors like genes and age may impact our general well-being more than our best day-to-day attempts at joy...
Still, lack of control doesn't necessarily mean lack of joy. "The research also shows that most people consider themselves happy most of the time," says University of Edinburgh's Bates. "We're wired to be optimistic. Most people think they're happier than most [other] people." And even if you aren't part of that lucky majority, Bates says, there's always that other 50% of overall life satisfaction that, according to his research, is not genetically predetermined. To feel happier, he recommends mimicking the personality traits of those who are: Be social, even if it's only with...
...Similarly, the symbolic figurehead of the reformist movement, former President Mohammad Khatami, called on Iranians to "Participate, though submissively, but with joy!" The reformists' expressed rationale is that the only other options are either another revolution, or a foreign invasion - and, like most other Iranians inside Iran, they reject both out of hand. "You see we have no choice. We're choosing the best way forward from a number of bad options," says Tajzadeh...