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The human pursuit of happiness is one of the most common human searches, but it tends to be an elusive goal as well. Luckily for us, the experience of "happiness" can actually take many forms and result from a variety of behaviors and life circumstances. Research can now point us to concrete ways that we can find or develop these various forms of happiness in our lives.

The feeling of joy comes from losing yourself in the present moment and appreciating what you have. It's fleeting in that it can sneak up on you and sometimes can disappear if you try to analyze it too much. It can also be found in many things if you have the right attitude and perspective, so it's a relatively accessible form of happiness to seek.

The easiest way to find joy is to engage in activities you know usually bring you joy. This can be anything from yoga to amusement parks to your favorite music. It's also important to try some new things to find novel avenues of joy.

Excitement

Though it can last longer than joy, this emotion is still somewhat fleeting-it dissipates rather quickly and can turn into ennui. However, it can be a motivating factor. Excitement about a new job, for example, can motivate you to work harder, and excitement about a new relationship can motivate you to put more effort into working through difficulties.

Excitement can also help you to get through jitters. If you tell yourself you are excited rather than anxious or nervous, studies have found, you can channel that potentially uncomfortable energy into more constructive activity.

Excitement can also extend the positive feelings you get from an activity. If you focus on your excited feelings of anticipation, the fun of a vacation can extend into the days and weeks before you even leave. Excitement isn't too difficult to come by, either, so this is an easy one to pursue. Take on new challenges. Keep a bucket list. Let yourself revel in anticipation when you have something big coming up.

Gratitude can disappear if you don't actively focus on it, but it's also an important form of happiness. Those who feel gratitude on a regular basis tend to be happier and healthier than those who are less prone to these feelings, according to research.

Further, gratitude is very simple to cultivate. You can use a gratitude journal, loving-kindness meditation, or even simply tell people in your life that you appreciate them, and do it often. Cultivating these feelings of gratitude has been shown to ward off feelings of depression, among other things. It may be less obvious, but this type of happiness can be brought to mind again and again.

While smug or competitive pride can be a negative thing, feelings of pride in your accomplishments can be a form of gratitude turned inward and are a great form of happiness to indulge in. You can take pride in your work and your family, your home and your self, and in anything you put effort, care, and love into.

You can cultivate a healthy sense of pride by including personal accomplishments in your gratitude journal or keeping a list of "wins" at the end of each day. This isn't the same as bragging or being "full of yourself"-you're not saying that you're better than others because of your accomplishments, but that you're a better form of yourself, and you're appreciating this fact.

Studies also connect optimism with greater outcomes in life. Optimists tend to focus on possibilities and have a combination of gratitude and pride. They're grateful for all of the possibilities life presents, proud of their abilities to harness these resources, and have a strong belief in themselves and their ability to make their attempts at whatever goals they pursue a success.

Optimists, when faced with disappointment, tend to minimize it, pinpoint how they can do better next time, and see mitigating factors that led to their negative outcomes. When they succeed, they give themselves credit and take it as a sign of better things to come. Optimism tends to be an overall way of being, so it's less fleeting than other forms of happiness.

Contentment

Contentment means being happy with what you have. Those who are content are less disappointed by life's drawbacks and feel lucky to have what they have in their lives already.

People strive to feel this form of happiness, and it can come with a focus of gratitude on what you have as well as a feeling that you have climbed high and deserve to enjoy the rewards that come with the effort. Reveling in your accomplishments and in everything you have can bring contentment, so focusing on what you have is a great way to stay content.

Love and happiness are sometimes said to be interchangeable, that love is an infinite source of happiness, and happiness itself is a form of love. However you look at it, both are vital to have in your life.

True love is fabled to be extremely difficult to come by, but in actuality, love can be found all around you. Family, friends, romantic partners, and even pets can all be sources of love, and focusing on all of these relationships can greatly enrich your life. This is a form of happiness that can come in endless supply.

Even though stressful relationships can sap us of happiness, healthy and supportive relationships can bring great and lasting happiness. Focusing on relationship skills, spending time with loved ones, and in other ways cultivating these relationships can help you to keep this form of happiness in your life.

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Article Sources

Adler MG, Fagley NS. Appreciation: Individual Differences in Finding Value and Meaning as a Unique Predictor of Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Personality, February 2005. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2004.00305.x.

Solberg Nes, L. S., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2006). Dispositional optimism and coping: A meta-analytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 235-251. DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_3.

Ullrich, Philip M., M.A.; Lutgendorf, Susan K., Ph.D. Journaling About Stressful Events: Effects of Cognitive Processing and Emotional Expression. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2002. DOI: 10.1207/S15324796ABM2403_10.

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The Best Types of Happiness and How to Find Them

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The human pursuit of happiness is one of the most common human searches, but it tends to be an elusive goal as well. Luckily for us, the experience of "happiness" can actually take many forms and result from a variety of behaviors and life circumstances.

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This video goes into description about the meaning of happiness and the science behind happiness.

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Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness

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Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.

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It turns out that some foods are made of compounds that have been shown to have an effect on our mood. Even more interesting, going without certain foods can have an opposite effect, putting us at a higher risk for depression.

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You're driving home after a long day at work. You're in no mood to cook and you stop at a drive-through to pick up some dinner. You're so hungry you don't even make it home to eat; you just pull into a parking space and devour your cheeseburger or tacos or whatever right there in the driver's seat. Afterward, you feel a bit bloated and greasy. You might even feel guilty and disgusted with yourself.

Then, there are those other occasions when you take the time to actually make a good and healthy dinner that you enjoy and savor. After those meals, you feel full -- and pretty happy.

Doesn't it seem a bit odd that food should make us happy? After all, we eat food to sustain ourselves. From the food we eat, we derive macronutrients like proteins, fats and carbohydrates that our bodies use for fuel and other essential functions. We also get vitamins and other nutrients from food that our bodies can't process but still require. Certainly, we need food, but why would some foods make us happy when we eat them?

The science of happiness has figured out why certain foods make us happy. It turns out that some foods are made of compounds that have been shown to have an effect on our mood. Even more interesting, going without certain foods can have an opposite effect, putting us at a higher risk for depression.

Find out what science has turned up in its exploration of culinary happiness on the following pages. First up, happy foods.

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You're driving home after a long day at work. You're in no mood to cook and you stop at a drive-through to pick up some dinner. You're so hungry you don't even make it home to eat; you just pull into a parking space and devour your cheeseburger or tacos or whatever right there in the driver's seat.

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Pharrell Williams - Happy (Official Music Video)

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1.)smile more
2.)exercise for 7 minutes
3.)sleep more
4.)Spend more time with friends and family.
5.)Go outside more often.
6.)Help other people.
7.)Plan a trip (even if you don't ever take it).
8.)Meditate.
9.)Move closer to work.
10.)Practice gratitude.
11.)And the easiest tip of all: get older.

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Obviously, we all want to be happier. But there's another reason to wish to be more lighthearted and content: Happiness is definitely a result, but happiness is also a driver.

Happy people accomplish more.

Easier said than done though, right?

Smiling can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:

"A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts--such as a tropical vacation or a child's recital--improve their mood and withdraw less."

Of course, it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye sockets. (You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference between a fake smile and a genuine smile.)

According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:

"Smiling makes us feel good, which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees."

A smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:

"Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition)."
2. Exercise for seven minutes.
Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out this seven-minute workout from The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.

The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:

"The groups were tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent."

You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brainpower, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.

We've explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.

"Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 x 40 minutes exercising and 6 x 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before."

Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.

"Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

"In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 31 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket."

The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.

" Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions."

Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.

Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire workday.

"Researchers found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods."

And, most important to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees performed and how well they performed it.
4. Spend more time with friends and family.
If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.

Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference in how happy we feel.

"We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends."

George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.

"In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, 'What have you learned from the Grant Study men?' Vaillant's response: 'That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.'"

"Men's relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger."

"Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra 85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness."

I think that last line is especially fascinating: "Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness." So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as we would if we increased the strength of our social relationships.

"We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest.

"Surprise: Our prediction was wrong ... Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age."
5. Go outside more often.
"Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory ... "

This is good news for those of us who worry about fitting new habits into already busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.

"Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments."

The American Meteorological Society published research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees (13.9C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.
6. Help other people.
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.

If we go back to Shawn Achor's book again, he says this about helping others:

" ... when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities--such as concerts and group dinners out--brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called 'prosocial spending,' also boosts happiness."

"Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future."

So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our time on other people?

"Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g., sports clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction."

" ... we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested."
7. Plan a trip (even if you don't ever take it).
"In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people."

Shawn Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:

"One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent."

If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar--even if it's a month or a year down the road.

Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.

Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also useful for improving your happiness:

"In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank."

Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down. It's often been proved to be the single most effective way to live a happier life. According to Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term:

"Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness."

The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through meditation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however we feel and think today isn't permanent.
9. Move closer to work.
Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.

According to the Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:

" ... while many voluntary conditions don't affect our happiness in the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it's not."

Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, "Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day."

We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don't work:

"Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute."

This is a seemingly simple strategy, but one I've found to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, or going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.

In an experiment where participants took note of things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just from this simple practice:

"The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the three studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits."

"Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three letters of gratitude over a three-week period. Results indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants' happiness and life satisfaction while decreasing depressive symptoms."
11. And the easiest tip of all: get older.
As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally grow happier. There's still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have a few ideas:

"Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less."

Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods--for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and focus their goals on greater well-being.

So if you thought getting old will make you miserable, it's likely you'll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.

How cool is that?

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Want to Be Happier? Science Says Do These 11 Things Every Single Day

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Obviously, we all want to be happier. But there's another reason to wish to be more lighthearted and content: Happiness is definitely a result, but happiness is also a driver. Happy people accomplish more. Easier said than done though, right?

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It's not marriage that makes you happy, it's happy marriage that makes you happy, Gilbert said. Married people are happier than unmarried ones, perhaps because the single best predictor of human happiness is the quality of social relationships. “Marriage seems to buy you a decade or more of happiness,” Gilbert said.

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Cover Story

Opening session keynote speaker and Harvard researcher Daniel Gilbert kicked off APA's convention with his finding that the life goals we strive for don't always make us happy.

By Christopher Munsey

Monitor Staff

October 2010, Vol 41, No. 9

Print version: page 20

When he was growing up, best-selling author and Harvard psychology researcher Daniel Gilbert, PhD, said his mom urged him to aim for three things in life - finding someone nice and getting married; building a fulfilling, well-paid career; and above all, having children - a sentiment echoed by American culture.

In the past 20 years, research led by psychologists is shedding light on whether the trifecta of marriage, money and kids does bring happiness, said Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness" (Knopf, 2006). As it turns out, his mom and society were right about some points and wrong on others, including:

It's not marriage that makes you happy, it's happy marriage that makes you happy, Gilbert said. Married people are happier than unmarried ones, perhaps because the single best predictor of human happiness is the quality of social relationships. "Marriage seems to buy you a decade or more of happiness," Gilbert said.

And people in unhappy marriages experience a spike in happiness once the marriage is dissolved, he said. Using a sampling application that contacts people via their iPhone, one of Gilbert's graduate students has found that people are happiest when they're having sex and talking, or otherwise investing in social relationships. Resting and relaxing don't bring happiness because when you're not engaged in a task - even a generally unpleasant one - your mind wanders, and you may ruminate on unhappy experiences.

If you hear someone say "money can't buy happiness," say "give me yours," Gilbert joked. People with money enjoy better nutrition, can go places with loved ones, worry less about their children and have more freedom to set their own schedules, he said. But money's ability to buy happiness levels out for people in the United States, with huge increases in happiness for people who vault into a middle-class income of $40,000 to $70,000. Once that level is reached, increases in wealth generate smaller rises in happiness.

Happiness falls for both men and women after the first child is born. Some 20 years of research shows that people without children are happier than people with children and that people with young children living with them are the least happy of all, Gilbert says. For women, spending time with their children ranks about the same as vacuuming on happiness scales. While the data establish that children don't make their parents happy - a fact that Gilbert acknowledged as contrary to his own intuition - parents need to believe that they do because of all the time and effort it takes to raise them well.

"As a result of that sacrifice, we love them all the more," Gilbert said. "We don't value our children in spite of how difficult they are, we value our children because of how difficult they are."

Related APA Resources
More resources [+]

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Cover Story Opening session keynote speaker and Harvard researcher Daniel Gilbert kicked off APA's convention with his finding that the life goals we strive for don't always make us happy. By Christopher Munsey Monitor Staff October 2010, Vol 41, No.

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there are several things that make me happy and even some weird things that make me happy. Family and friends would be one if the main things that make me happy, only because they are the people who truly know who i am deep down inside. Happiness comes with laughter, forgetfulness, and joy. When you're happy, you forget what is going on in your life for just a moment, and just enjoy yourself and who or what makes you happy. Music also makes me happy simply because as soon as i turn on a good song ima bale to forget about everything and tune into that song, especially when i have my headphones in. Music makes me smile, dance, sing, and have fun all in one song. Its the perfect receipt to create happiness.

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: happiness. Happiness is that feeling that comes over you when you know life is good and you can't help but smile. ... Happiness is a sense of well-being, joy, or contentment. When people are successful, or safe, or lucky, they feel happiness.

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Now that April is here, baseball season has returned and spring begins to take hold. People are excited that better weather will help them shake the winter doldrums and "improve their mood."

But while many people express these sentiments, it raises the question of whether the data back up such assumptions. Do our moods and self-evaluations actually improve with the arrival of spring and summer?

This question is complex and eludes a simple yes-or-no answer. For example, it is clear that weather strongly influences people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD). They often experience a depressed affect in winter that abates with the arrival of spring, primarily because of increased daylight (Oren et al., 1994). So for people who suffer from SAD, yes, better weather is a blessing indeed.

Yet when it comes to other people, the scientific literature has found that the weather-mood link is small-and sometimes surprising (e.g., Keller et al., 2005). For example, Deniseen et al. (2008) studied more than 1,600 people, examining daily reports of their well-being along with local weather station conditions (e.g., temperature, sunlight, wind conditions). The findings were interesting in that none of the weather measurements significantly predicted positive affect (e.g., feeling enthusiastic, inspired, determined). There was, however, evidence that negative affect (e.g., feeling jittery, distressed, irritable) increased with warmer-and not colder-temperatures, and decreased with more sunlight and less wind. Overall, the effects were small, and the findings observed indicated that although weather was unrelated to people's positive affect, warmer temperatures actually increased people's negative feelings, even though more sunlight, as one might expect, had a more desirable effect-but again, the effects were modest in size.

However, it is likely that better weather provides us with other, indirect benefits. For example, nicer weather often allows people to get outside to exercise and commune more with nature. Having urban residents spend 90 minutes walking through a park resulted in people showing less ruminative thinking and exhibiting more healthy brain activity (Bratman et al., 2015). Similarly, research has shown that hikers show 50% boosts in creativity after just a few days of hiking while being disconnected from technology (Atchley et al., 2012). Thus, even if the weather itself does not produce significant direct benefits for individuals, getting outside because of nicer weather can improve our health and mental performance through greater connection with nature and more exercise.
What about summer love?
Does better weather lead to the initiation of new romantic relationships? There is a belief that spring and summer are the seasons for love, while fall is when depressing break-up songs earn their popularity. Interestingly, Facebook can provide some insight into this issue in that the website tracks changes in relationship status across the calendar (albeit an imperfect measure of romantic relationship initiation and dissolution). Some interesting trends emerged in a study of users in the United States by Facebook researchers in 2012: More relation dissolutions occurred during the summer-June was the worst month for Facebook users' relationships, regardless of user age-while the days with the most "new relationships" occurred in February, right after Valentine's Day. In short, if Facebook is a barometer of relationships, summer weather brings about the demise of relationships, not their flourishing. Maybe the dissolution of some relationships is a cause for joy, but only a true cynic would conclude that breakups, on average, bring people greater happiness.
Summer is prime time for crime
One final note about summertime: In addition to its being a potentially bad time to maintain a romantic relationship, it also tends to be a period when more antisocial behavior occurs. In a classic study by Anderson and Anderson (1984) examining crime data in Houston, the number of aggressive crimes (e.g., murder, rape) went up as the temperature rose. Similar data emerged from examining more than 5 million publicly available crime reports in Chicago since 2001 (van Zanten, 2016). These data show that for violent crimes like assault, robbery, sexual assault, and battery, there is a strong linear trend of more of these crimes occurring as the temperature increases from cold (20°F) to warm (90°F).

Clearly, such weather-crime findings have alternative explanations (e.g., warm weather may simply increase the amount of contact that people have with others that is necessary for person-on-person crime activity rather than warmer temperatures causing antisocial behavior directly). However, controlled laboratory research has repeatedly shown that hot temperatures increase hostile thoughts and feelings that trigger aggressive actions (Anderson et al., 1995).
Summary
Overall, it is interesting that although people instinctively believe that better weather results in better moods, the evidence for this assumption is weak. In general, the effects of "better weather" on people's feelings are modest, inconsistent, and at times counter to commonly-held expectations. Moreover, warm weather seems associated with breakups and more antisocial behavior. Yet there can be benefits, not only directly for people who suffer from SAD, but via indirect effects when people get out in nature and exercise more. As with many assumptions in life, presumed cause-effect relations can be wrong. Often, the key to experiencing benefits depends on what people do with their opportunities rather than whether they simply have them in the first place.
References
Anderson, C. A., & Anderson, D. C. (1984). Ambient temperature and violent crime: Tests of linear and curvilinear hypotheses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 91-97.

Anderson, C. A., Deuser, W. E., & DeNeve, K. M. (1995). Hot temperatures, hostile affect, hostile cognition, and arousal: Tests of a general model of affective aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 434-448.

Atchley, R. A., Strayer, D. L., & Atchley, P. (2012). Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings. PLoS ONE 7(12): e51474.

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 8567-8572.

Denissen, J. J. A., Butalid, L., Penke, L., & van Aken, M. A. G. (2008). The effects of weather on daily mood: A multilevel approach. Emotion, 8, 662-667.

Facebook (March 21, 2012). The right time for love: Tracking the seasonality of relationship formation. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-right-time-for-....

Keller, M. C., et al. (2005). A warm heart and a clear head: The contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition. Psychological Science, 16, 724-731.

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Does Warmer Weather Really Make You Happier?

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Now that April is here, baseball season has returned and spring begins to take hold. People are excited that better weather will help them shake the winter doldrums and "improve their mood." But while many people express these sentiments, it raises the question of whether the data back up such assumptions.

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I always knew that music  could make you feel all types of ways, but never the reason behind it. dopamine: a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction mj

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People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction.

Even just anticipating the sounds of a composition like Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" or Phish's "You Enjoy Myself" can get the feel-good chemical flowing, found the study, which was the first to make a concrete link between dopamine release and musical pleasure.

The findings offer a biological explanation for why music has been such a major part of major emotional events in cultures around the world since the beginning of human history. Through music, the study also offers new insights into how the human pleasure system works.

"You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine."

"This basically explains why music has been around for so long," she added. "The intense pleasure we get from it is actually biologically reinforcing in the brain, and now here's proof for it."

In a previous study, Salimpoor and colleagues linked music-induced pleasure with a surge in intense emotional arousal, including changes in heart rate, pulse, breathing rate and other measurements. Along with these physical changes, people often report feelings of shivers or chills. When that happens during a listening experience, Salimpoor's group and others have found evidence that blood flows to regions in the brain involved in dopamine release.

To solidify the dopamine link, the researchers recruited eight music-lovers, who brought to the lab samples of music that gave them chills of pleasure. Most picks were classical, with some jazz, rock and popular music mixed in, including Led Zeppelin and Dave Matthews Band. The most popular selection was Barbar's Adagio for Strings.

After 15 minutes of listening, scientists injected participants with a radioactive substance that binds to dopamine receptors. With a machine called a PET scanner, the scientists were then able to see if that substance simply circulated through listeners' blood, which would indicate that they had already released a lot of dopamine, and that the dopamine was tying up all available receptors.

If most of their dopamine receptors were free, on the other hand, the radioactive substance would bind to them.

The technique showed, definitively for the first time, that people's brains released large amounts of dopamine when they listened to music that gave them chills, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience. When the same people listened to less moving music the next day, their dopamine receptors remained wide open.

Once the researchers knew for sure that dopamine was behind the pleasure of music, they put participants in an fMRI machine and played the moving music for them again. In this part of the experiment, the scanners showed that the brain pumped out dopamine both during the phase of musical anticipation and at the moment when chills hit in full force. The two surges happened in different areas of the brain.

"It is amazing that we can release dopamine in anticipation of something abstract, complex and not concrete," Salimpoor said. "This is the first study to show that dopamine can be released in response to an aesthetic stimulus."

The findings suggest that, like sex and drugs, music may be mildly addictive, said David Huron, a music cognition researcher at Ohio State University, Columbus.

Dopamine is an adaptive reward-inducing molecule that makes animals want to look for food before they're hungry. It's what makes it impossible for some people to pass by the neighborhood bakery without going in to buy a tart. And it provides a rush for heroin addicts when they see blood enter the needle -- before the drug even gets into their veins.

In its groundbreaking combination of techniques, Huron said, the study also offers a new way to study the relationship between dopamine and feelings of motivation, reward and pleasure. Brain scanners are notoriously expensive for scientists and claustrophobic for participants, with no room for people to do things like eat in them.

Music, on the other hand, can be pumped right in to the machine, and scientists can then look at pleasure responses on a note-by-note basis.

"Music is going to be a useful tool in trying to explain all sorts of aspects of pleasure, addiction and maladaptive behaviors," Huron said. "It's a technical tour de force what they've done. I just think it's a really wonderful piece of work."

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People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction.