For the past few months, actually ever since I wrote this, I paid attention to stuff written about happiness (articles, experiments, etc). What's super-interesting to me is human fascination with the idea of happiness and how to achieve it. Simply, I am mostly curious how people approach this question.
So ... here are some examples.
The really really long one is from Atlantic Monthly, published in June '09 - it's a longitudinal study of a selected group of people since almost the beginning of their life (72 years, to be exact) up to their old age. What would they change? Do they think they had a happy life? While I am slightly skeptical of people looking back at something and assessing it (because one of the cognitive + memory mistakes that we make is to judge a situation by its outcomes), I guess this study is great for associating actual people's reactions to the events in their life at the time when they are happening AND combining their insights with people's consequent assessments of that same situation (do things look consequently better or worse?). You can read the whole study here.
Track Your Happiness is a relatively new project, based on similar premises, but with ultra-compressed time. The experiment is described as "a new scientific research project that investigates what makes life worth living", and, instead of every 5 years or so, you are asked every hour how happy you are. Approach here is more "gather a lot of data from a lot of different people in a lot of different situations of their daily life" (you can read an overview of the experiment here). I started signing up but then decided that I don't really want to know what "makes life worth living". Would rather reflect on it in my old age.
Then, there is this awesome (informal) study done by NYT's TierneyLab, where Geoffrey Miller created an open invitation to readers to list "the ten most expensive things (products, services, or experiences) that they have ever paid for (inclusing houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements, taxes)", and then to also list "the ten items that they have ever bought that gave them the most happiness." The participants were also asked to count how many items appear on both lists.
The results are fun, to say the least. The items appearing much more on the "expensive" than on the "happy" lists were: 1. children (um...) and 2. marriage ceremonies (well ...). On the other hand, the thing that appeared much more on the "happy" vs. "expensive" list is "sharing meals with friends" - the fact that people like to eat together that hasn't changed for thousands of years, and apparently it's still the major source of accessible happiness.
At the same time, the prominent items on the "happiness" list were a) liposuction, b) a studio apartment in Paris, and c) a girlfriend. Some people are very specific. You can read here the rest of the findings as well as a few general trends.
And, there is whole other category of studying happiness, which is looking at if/how it spreads. To ask "Is happiness contagious?" is one way to approach the question - the reasoning goes, if we can't really figure out what makes individuals happy, then we can at least create conditions allowing them to be easy influenced with happiness (that is, with others who are, for their own reasons, happy - or at least seem so). Not a bad behavioral targeting idea. The latest study in this direction is the NYT article from last Saturday ... you can read it here. (Warning: it's really long. On the other hand, it offers insights into network dynamics + some real life examples).
As it could have been expected, all of this stuff just confirmed my impression that happiness is an individual thing. Whereas people can study for an exam, or train for a marathon, and certain training regimes will yield certain results, minus individual variation. But if certain procedure is followed, it is expected to make a difference in an expected direction. With happiness, there is no training regime or a routine. Individual variations are too high to form anything less than a really general trends ("social experiences make us happy"). So the quest continues ...