Summing up happiness research

In a previous post of mine, I devoted a couple of paragraphs to summing up the current state of psychological research into happiness. It occurred to me that Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss has a much better précis than I did at the time:

Extroverts are happier than introverts; optimists are happier than pessimists; married people are happier than singles, though people with children are no happier than childless couples; Republicans are happier than Democrats; people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not; people with college degrees are happier than those without, though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA; people with an active sex life are happier than those without; women and men are equally happy, though women have a wider emotional range; having an affair will make you happy but will not compensate for the massive loss of happiness that you will incur when your spouse finds out and leaves you; people are least happy when they’re commuting to work; busy people are happier than those with too little to do; wealthy people are happier than poor ones, but only slightly.

(Via Eric Barker’s excellent Barking Up The Wrong Tree.)