Comments on: Happiness is not universal

By: [Cerebrl]

[Cerebrl] — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:47:54 +0000

This brings up an interesting question. Is the West’s idea of happiness, individual success, antagonistic to the human’s evolutionary psychology? Humans are HIGHLY social, and, therefor, social success should be top priority for such a social animal, but when individual success is the measure for which we are happy, and for an individual to succeed they must take from another (limited resource model), does it create antagonistic feelings within the human psyche?
Could this be a possible explanation of the West’s, especially America, higher incidence of depression, anger and criminal behavior. If our, the West’s, collective psychology, cultural cognition (individualism) was more aligned with our evolutionary psychology (socialism), like the East’s, would we be more aligned and have less internal conflict with ourselves?
[Cerebrl]

By: wirx

wirx — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:28:03 +0000

Chinese is lack mindhelping medication.So,antidepressant medication mainly depand on pills.

By: Mark(p.s.)

Mark(p.s.) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:10:29 +0000

With the fact that happiness can be dependant on the social culture the question:
Does the cultural differences in defining Happiness affect the success rate-efficacy of antidepressant medication? (in different countries)

By: George

George — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:07:57 +0000

Great post, thank you. The authors have written about the theme before. Here ist a link to an free available pdf:
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43061/1/10902_2004_Article_5278785.pdf
Bye
George

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:23:02 +0000

As usual, the aftermath of your post was revealing and one of the outcomes was this – http://www.theschooloflife.com/About – which I would be surprised if you didn’t know about already, though the search on your blog did not bring it up specifically. Cheers.