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now peaking at a Barnes & Noble near you: Last year 4,000 books were published on happiness, while a mere 50 books wow power leveling on the topic were released in 2000. The most popular class at Harvard University is about positive psychology, and at least 100 other universities offer similar courses. Happiness workshops for the post-collegiate set abound, and each day "life coaches" promising bliss to potential clients hang out their shingles.In the late 1990s, psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania exhortecolleagues to scrutinize optimal moods with the same intensity with which they had for so long studied pathologies: wow gold We'd never learn about full human functioning unless we knew as much about mental wellness as we do about mental illness. A new generation of psychologists built up a respectable body of research on positive character traits and Happiness-boosting practices. wow gold wow gold[/url] 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 ncrease their well-being.wow gold 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 shallow 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! All it takes wow gold is a little gratitude. Or maybe a lot.
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 has flourished; perhaps that's why we've eagerly bought up its offerings. It may be that college students sign up for positive psychology lessons WOW power leveling in droves because a full wow gold wow gold[/url] 15 percent of them report being clinically depressed.So it's not surprising that the happiness wotlk gold movement has unleashed a counterforce, led by a troika of academics. Jerome Wakefield of New York University and Allan Horwitz of Rutgers have penned The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow 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 wow gold come at the cost of sadness, an important feeling that we've tried to banish from our emotional repertoire.