Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative...

Investigated the effects of a person's positive affective state on his or her subsequent helpfulness to others. "Feeling good" was induced (a) in 52 male undergraduates by having received cookies while studying in a library (Study I), and (b) in 24 female and 17 male adults by having found a dime in the coin return of a public telephone (Study II). In Study I, where...

The standard economic model of decision making assumes a decision maker makes her choices to maximize her utility or happiness. Her current emotional state is not explicitly considered. Yet there is a large psychological literature that shows that current emotional state, in particular positive affect, has a significant effect on decision making. This paper offers a way to incorporate this insight from psychology into economic...

Aspiring for financial success is an important aspect of capitalist cultures. Three studies examine the hypothesis that values and expectancies for wealth and money are negatively associated with adjustment and well-being when they are more central to an individual than other self-relevant values and expectancies. Studies 1 and 2 use 2 methods to show that the relative centrality of money-related values and expectancies is negatively...

Using a ''subjectivist'' approach to the assessment of happiness, a new 4-item measure of global subjective happiness was developed and validated in 14 studies with a total of 2 732 participants. Data was collected in the United States from students on two college campuses and one high school campus, from community adults in two California cities, and from older adults. Students and community adults in...

This paper is an empirical investigation into the validity of some theses posed in . There it is stated (1) that the individual is able to evaluate his income level on a zero-one scale in a cardinal way, and (2) that the resulting evaluation U(y) of a steady income stream at level y under specific assumptions is approximately equal to λ (y; μ, σ2), where...

The measurement of preferences is an ongoing challenge for economists. New insights can be won by relying on reported subjective well-being in addition to observed behaviour. Empirical estimates of well-being functions, based on a sample of 5500 Swiss residents, find that unemployed persons are much unhappier than employed ones. Differences in life satisfaction between income classes are quite small and improvements in financial situation hardly...

Neuroeconomics uses knowledge about brain mechanisms to inform economic analysis, and roots economics in biology. It opens up the "black box" of the brain, much as organizational economics adds detail to the theory of the firm. Neuroscientists use many tools— including brain imaging, behavior of patients with localized brain lesions, animal behavior, and recording single neuron activity. The key insight for economics is that the...

Neuroeconomics seeks to ground economic theory in detailed neural mechanisms which are expressed mathematically and make behavioural predictions. One finding is that simple kinds of economising for life‐and‐death decisions (food, sex and danger) do occur in the brain as rational theories assume. Another set of findings appears to support the neural basis of constructs posited in behavioural economics, such as a preference for immediacy and...

One important consequence of the increasing convergence between sociology and econ omics is that sociologists make increasingly more use of rational choice theories for the explanation of social action. This shift opens up the possibility that sociologists make use of what must be considered to be the most powerful regularity in the social sciences: the relative pnce effect, which states that behavior depends directly on...