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Welcome to the happiness frenzy, now peaking at a Barnes & Noble near you: Last year 4,000 books were published happiness, while a mere 50 books on the topic were releasedin2000. The mostpopular class wow gold, at Harvard University isaboutpsychology,least100other universities offer similar courses. Happiness workshops for the
post-collegiate setabound, and each day "life coaches" promising bliss to potential clients hang
out theirshingles.In the late 1990s, wow gold
psychologist Martin Seligman of the University ofPennsylvania exhorted colleagues to scrutinize
optimal moods with the same intensity with which they had for so long studied pathologies: We'd
never learn about full humanfunctioning unless we knew as much about ellness as we do about
mental illness. new generation of psychologists built up a respectable body of research on
positive character wow power leveling traits and Happiness-boosting
practices. At the same time, developments in neuroscience provided new clues to what makes us
happy and what that looks like in the brain. Not to be outdone, behavioral economists piled on
research subverting the classical premise that people always make rational choices that increase
their well-being. We're lousy at predicting what makes us happy, they found.It wasn't enough that
an array of academic strands came together, sparking a slew of insights into the sunny side of life. wow gold Self-appointed experts jumped on the
Happiness bandwagon. A s w sea of yellow smiley faces, self-help gurus, and purveyors of
kitchen-table wisdom have strip-mined the science, extracted a lot of fool's gold, and stormed
the marketplace with guarantees to annihilate your worry, stress, anguish, dejection, and even
ennui. Once and for all! Allit takes is a little gratitude. Or maybe a lot.
archlord gold But all is not necessarily well. According
to some measures, as a nation we've grown sadder and more anxious during the same years that the Happiness movement hasflourished; perhaps that's why we've eagerly bought up its offerings. It
may be that college students sign up for positive psychology lessons in droves because a full 15
percent of them report being clinically depressed.There are those who see in
wotlk gold the happiness brigade a glib and even dispiriting
Pollyanna gloss. So it's surprising that the happinessmovement has unleashed a counterforce, led
by a troika of academics. Jerome Wakefield of New University and Allan Horwitz of Rutgers have penned The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow wow gold into Depressive Disorder, and Wake Forest
University's Eric Wilson has written a defense of melancholy in Against Happiness. They observe that our preoccupation with Happiness has come at the cos |
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