Introduction. How to measure and study happiness. Joy and other positive emotions. Satisfaction. Humour and laughter. Social relationships. Work and employment. Leisure. Money, class and education. Personality, age and gender. Religion. National differences in happiness. Happiness enhancement. The effects of positive moods and happiness. Conclusions.

Sixty-five subjects reported amount of social support given and received, and satisfaction with relationships where support exchanges took place. Negative affect from relationships, psychological symptoms, and happiness were also measured. Multiple regression analyses showed that receiving and giving support was related to some negative feelings toward the relationships concerned. Receiving support was also related to inflated anxiety symptoms. Effects of receiving support on guilt and dependent feelings were moderated by relationship satisfaction. Effects of giving support on anxiety were also moderated by relationship satisfaction. Extraversion and satisfaction with relationships predicted happiness. There were some individual differences in support exchanges. Extraverts gave more support. Women received more support whereas conscientious people received less.

Similar samples of English, Italian and Japanese subjects were asked to identify 8 emotional states and 4 interpersonal attitudes from video‐taped expressions of 2 performers from each of these cultures. AN sets of judgements were above chance, except Italians judging Japanese. The Japanese subjects were no different from English and Italian subjects in recognition ability but the Japanese performances were harder to recognize supporting Ekman's theory of display rules; in fact all Japanese expressions were difficult to recognize, with the exception of happy‐friendly. The Japanese (performers) make a clearer distinction between sad and depressed than other cultural groups, but did not distinguish between happy and friendly, or between angry and hostile.

The aim of the study was to examine the relationships between Eysenck's primary personality factors and various aspects of religious orientation and practice. Some 400 UK undergraduates completed questionnaires constructed from the Batson and Schoenrade Religious Life Inventory (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991) and the Eysenck Personality Profiler (Eysenck, Barrett, Wilson, & Jackson, 1992). As is generally found, all the religious variables correlated negatively with the higher order personality factor of psychoticism. In contrast, among the primary factors, those associated with neuroticism appeared to be the strongest indicators of religiosity. In particular, all the primary traits classically linked to neuroticism correlate positively with the quest orientation. However, fewer primary traits predict religious behaviour in regression and of these, a sense of guilt is the greatest and a common predictor of extrinsic, intrinsic and quest religiosities. Upon factor analysis of the significant personality predictors together with the three religious orientations, the orientations formed a single discrete factor, which implies that extrinsic, intrinsic and quest religiosities have more in common with one another than with any of the personality traits included in the study. This suggests that religious awareness may itself be an important individual difference that is distinct from those generally associated with models of personality.

By "ritual" is usually meant repeated and voluntary bodily acts which are symbolic ; in the case of religious ritual they symbolise divine objects. Ritual includes the words which may accompany the bodily acts. Obsessional hand-washing is not a ritual in this sense, since it is not voluntary. Shaking hands on greeting is a ritual, but not a religious one. There are different kinds of ritual, and there are several ways of classifying them. Here are some of the main kinds: (1) Rites of passage, where there is some change of status or relationship, as in marriage, graduation, and becoming an adult in primitive society. (2) Healing rituals, intended to produce changes of bodily state. (3) Worship, intended to strengthen relations with God. It may include sacrifices and prayer. Rituals may have further benefits for those involved, such as happiness, mental health, religious experiences or enhanced faith. How can we study the effects of rituals? Orthodox social science requires carefully designed comparisons of numbers of individuals before and after ritual acts, or comparison of matched groups who have had different experiences. There are a number of research designs which do something like this. We shall report beforeand-after studies of healing services. There are experiments on the effects of stressful life events, where religious coping has been found to be beneficial. Surveys of the reported triggers of religious experiences have found an effect of rituals. There are investigations using causal modelling to see the effect of ritual in a causal chain. In surveys and correlational studies it may be possible to interpret the results causally. Anthropologists have written much about ritual but rarely carry out controlled studies. We shall report one on the conditions under which religious rituals are used.

Three hundred sixty-four adults, of whom 46% were church members, participated in a study of mystical-religious experiences. They also completed measures of happiness; measures of some trait, cognitive and other personality variables; and items intended to form an improved measure of religious affect. Church members reported twice as many experiences as nonmembers, and their experiences were predominantly mild. This lends support to Pratt's (1920) prediction that the religious experiences of ordinary churchgoers would be commonplace and mild rather that intense. However, the ratios of mild to intense experiences were similar for church members and nonmembers, and it was not possible to show that greater happiness was associated with the mild experiences of churchgoers, as Pratt also predicted. Analysis of the new measure showed that religious affect comprises Immanent, Social, and Transcendent Factors. The Immanent and Social Factors relate most closely to church membership, whereas the Transcendent factor is associated with mystical experiences. There were few associations between church membership or mystical experiences and the personality variables, and those that were significant were weak. The participants' neuroticism and psychoticism scores provided no support for James's (1902) suggestion that some form of psychological distress is associated with mystical experience.

Abstract Happiness and positive moods influence health, and vice versa. A number of social and personality factors influence health directly, for example by affecting health behaviour or the immune system. These factors also affect health indirectly by influencing happiness and moods. These factors include social relationships, exercise and other aspects of leisure, job status and other aspects of work, social class, and several aspects of personality. The evidence on direct and indirect influences of happiness on health is summarised here.

One of the first psychologists to investigate experimentally the role of gaze in human behaviour was Michael Argyle. In 1963 he set up a research group at Oxford with Ted Crossman and Adam Kendon, to study non-verbal communication in human social interaction, which included gaze as an important aspect of this behaviour. Shortly afterwards, Mark Cook joined this group which was funded until 1975, during which time considerable research on gaze had been carried out both at Oxford and elsewhere. This book summarises much of the work done in this field up until that time.