One of the biggest reasons we enjoy the weekend is more time with family and friends. We can make our weekends (and weeks) even better by spending more time being social:
This paper exploits the richness and large sample size of the Gallup/Healthways US daily poll to illustrate significant differences in the dynamics of two key measures of subjective well-being: emotions and life evaluations. We find that there is no day-of-week effect for life evaluations, represented here by the Cantril Ladder, but significantly more happiness, enjoyment, and laughter, and significantly less worry, sadness, and anger on weekends (including public holidays) than on weekdays. We then find strong evidence of the importance of the social context, both at work and at home, in explaining the size and likely determinants of the weekend effects for emotions. Weekend effects are twice as large for full-time paid workers as for the rest of the population, and are much smaller for those whose work supervisor is considered a partner rather than a boss and who report trustable and open work environments. A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.
Source: "Weekends and Subjective Well-Being" from NBER Working Paper No. 17180
For more on happiness check out Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project or Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.
You should follow me on Facebook here or on Twitter. You'll find content there I don't post anywhere else. You can also subscribe via email or RSS. Check out the blog's most popular posts of all time.
Related posts:
Can ancient Chinese philosophical advice help us find happiness today?
At what annual salary does money stop making us happier?
At what ages are we happiest?
Does having more TV channels increase the happiness of heavy TV watchers?
How to make yourself happier in just a few seconds
What makes us happiest: work, love or leisure?
Can thinking quickly make you happy?
Do happy people love their jobs or do good jobs make people happy?
Permalink
| Leave a comment »
Read more posts on Barking Up The Wrong Tree »
reputation management consultant
Language Log » <b>News</b> Flash: BBC Admits Error
Update #2 — Google News Archive has nothing for AptiQuant, and LexisNexis yields 26 hits, all from 7/29/2011 or later. This is additional evidence that AptiQuant is a hoax, though it doesn't tell us what kind of hoax it ...
Language Log » <b>News</b> Flash: BBC Admits ErrorCBS <b>News</b> Executives Speak Out on License Fees, Dan Rather at TCA <b>...</b>
CBS News Executives Speak Out on License Fees, Dan Rather at TCA.
CBS <b>News</b> Executives Speak Out on License Fees, Dan Rather at TCA <b>...</b>08/03/2011: U.S. Department of Justice, EPA to Hold <b>News</b> <b>...</b>
3, 2011) - Representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will hold a news conference at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, Aug. 4, in St. Louis, Mo., to discuss a significant ...
08/03/2011: U.S. Department of Justice, EPA to Hold <b>News</b> <b>...</b>
No comments:
Post a Comment