Browsing by Subject "Happiness"
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Item Open Access A qualitative analysis of the Three Good Things intervention in healthcare workers.(BMJ open, 2017-06-13) Rippstein-Leuenberger, Karin; Mauthner, Oliver; Bryan Sexton, J; Schwendimann, ReneBACKGROUND:Intensive care unit (ICU) personnel have an elevated prevalence of job-related burn-out and post-traumatic stress disorder, which can ultimately impact patient care. To strengthen healthcare workers' skills to deal with stressful events, it is important to focus not only on minimising suffering but also on increasing happiness, as this entails many more benefits than simply feeling good. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the content of the 'good things' reported by healthcare workers participating in the 'Three Good Things' intervention. METHODS:In a tertiary care medical centre, a sample of 89 neonatal ICU (NICU) healthcare professionals registered for the online intervention. Of these, 32 individuals eventually participated fully in the 14-day online Three Good Things intervention survey. Daily emails reminded participants to reflect on and respond to the questions: "What are the three things that went well today?" and "What was your role in bringing them about?" To analyse their responses, we applied a thematic analysis, which was guided by our theoretical understanding of resilience. RESULTS:Involving more than 1300 statements, the Three Good Things responses of the 32 study participants, including registered nurses, physicians and neonatal nurse practitioners, led to the identification of three main themes: (1) having a good day at work; (2) having supportive relationships and (3) making meaningful use of self-determined time. CONCLUSIONS:The findings show the personal and professional relevance of supportive relationships strengthened by clear communication and common activities that foster positive emotions. The Three Good Things exercise acknowledges the importance of self-care in healthcare workers and appears to promote well-being, which might ultimately strengthen resilience.Item Open Access American Realities, Diasporic Dreams: Pursuing Happiness, Love, and Girlfriendship in Jamaica(2009) Robinson, Bianca C.At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question: How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender, and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International (GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness."
This dissertation examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness" and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically, the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore, I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness, one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings, and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American Dream."
Item Embargo Augustine and the Therapy of Self-Love(2023) de Vries, WilcoFor over a century, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers have debated the coherence and moral validity of Augustine’s account of self-love. What to make of statements like “Love the Lord, and in so doing learn how to love yourselves” (s. 90.6) and humanity’s ruin “was caused by love of self” (s. 96.2)? Does Augustine’s account of self-love contain an inner contradiction? And does loving oneself by loving God turn God into an instrument in the quest for self-love and happiness?
In this dissertation, I analyze Augustine’s account of self-love and its relevance for pastoral care and redefine the more than a century-old debate in three ways. First, employing Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, enriched by Augustine’s insights, I analyze the prejudgments scholars brought to this debate. I demonstrate that scholars who fault Augustine’s understanding of enjoyment (frui) with instrumentalization read Augustine with wrong assumptions. Aware of how modern utilitarianism’s emphasis on happiness could lead to the instrumentalization of people, critics like Hannah Arendt, Anders Nygren, and Oliver O’Donovan think Augustine’s usage of utilitas (“usefulness”) and uti (“use”) instrumentalizes God and neighbor. Through a detailed analysis of how uti and utilitas appear in ordinary Latin, ancient philosophy, Scripture, and Augustine’s writings, I show that Augustine uses forms of uti to describe the divine order. For Augustine, to use something is not to instrumentalize it but to love it as it should be loved: as an end in itself, situated within the higher end of loving God above all, from which every end receives its order, meaning, and purpose.
Second, situating Augustine’s account of self-love in its historical context—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the debate between Stoicism and the Old Academy about the good life, and Scripture—I refute that his interpretation of self-love is incoherent. Augustine’s understanding of self-love is grounded in the ancient ideal of therapy. In antiquity, therapy is about a new way of seeing and being in the world. Through his writings and preaching, Augustine seeks to move his readers from a competitive self-love that favors the self over others to a connective self-love that flourishes in loving relationships with God and neighbor.
Third, having established the nature and coherence of Augustine’s account of self-love, I go one step further by making explicit the implicit motivation for the entire debate: the relevance of Augustine’s interpretation of self-love for living a good life. I argue that Augustine’s nuanced understanding of self-love offers a good starting point for integrating self-care and self-denial for the common good. And in dialogue with feminist critiques of Augustine and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I also analyze where Augustine’s account of self-love needs to be corrected and expanded.
Item Open Access Emotionally charged autobiographical memories across the life span: the recall of happy, sad, traumatic, and involuntary memories.(Psychology and aging, 2002-12) Berntsen, Dorthe; Rubin, David CA sample of 1,241 respondents between 20 and 93 years old were asked their age in their happiest, saddest, most traumatic, most important memory, and most recent involuntary memory. For older respondents, there was a clear bump in the 20s for the most important and happiest memories. In contrast, saddest and most traumatic memories showed a monotonically decreasing retention function. Happy involuntary memories were over twice as common as unhappy ones, and only happy involuntary memories showed a bump in the 20s. Life scripts favoring positive events in young adulthood can account for the findings. Standard accounts of the bump need to be modified, for example, by repression or reduced rehearsal of negative events due to life change or social censure.Item Open Access Makarios Now: Plundering Athens and Hippo(2016) Thomas, Clayton AllanA Christian doctrine of happiness differs greatly from contemporary and pseudo-Christian conceptions of happiness, which are measured subjectively and by the accumulation of external goods. In order to develop a fresh account with objective standards, I critique, integrate and revise Aristotle and Augustine’s accounts of happiness. Additionally, I rely heavily on scriptures to present a telos of godlikeness that in turn informs a robust account of makarios. Throughout the thesis, the argument is made that happiness (eudaimonia) and blessedness (makarios) are equivalents. Despite the skepticism of liberal theologians, Christian happiness (makarios) is promised in the New Testament and achievable in this life. Fundamentally, makarios is relational, active, constant, and dependent.
Item Open Access Mapping Suffering: Pain, Illness, and Happiness in the Christian Tradition(2013) Sours, Sarah ConradRespect for autonomy is the foundation of modern bioethics, even (or especially) where bioethics is attentive to the problem of suffering caused by the practice of medicine itself. It provides guidance in the midst of therapeutic and moral uncertainty, justification for morally problematic enterprises, and the promise of protection against self-serving or predatory medical personnel. Yet bioethical arguments that appeal to the injustice or the horror of suffering depend on an instinctual and uncomplicated association of suffering, especially imposed suffering, with evil. This uncomplicated association, this flattening of the complexities of the moral landscape, must lead to a diminished capacity to navigate the very difficulties that define the field of bioethics. This dissertation explores the relationship, particularly, of autonomy, suffering, and happiness in modern bioethics, as represented by three key theorists (James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, and H. Tristram Engelhardt). It then contrasts these findings with resources from the Christian tradition: Luke-Acts, the letters of Paul, and the theologians Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Genoa, and Margaret Ebner. Their accounts of the meaning and experience of suffering within well-lived lives makes for a more robust account of the moral life, one in which suffering plays a formative part.
Item Open Access Physical and mental decline and yet rather happy? A study of Danes aged 45 and older.(Aging Ment Health, 2015) Vestergaard, Sonja; Thinggaard, Mikael; Jeune, Bernard; Vaupel, James W; McGue, Matt; Christensen, KaareOBJECTIVES: Little is known about whether the feeling of happiness follows the age-related decline in physical and mental functioning. The objective of this study was to analyze differences with age in physical and mental functions and in the feeling of happiness among Danes aged 45 years and older. METHOD: Three Danish population-based surveys including 11,307 participants aged 45+ years, of whom 2411 were in the age group of 90+, were conducted in the period 1995-2001. The participation rate in the three surveys was between 63% and 82% and the same design and the same instrument were used. Self-reported mobility, a cognitive composite score, and a depression symptomatology score including a question about happiness were assessed. T-score metric was used to compare across domains and age groups. RESULTS: Overall, successively older age groups performed worse than the youngest age group (45-49 years), and the estimated linear decline was greater after age 70 than before age 70. For example, when comparing the oldest age group (90+ years) with the youngest, the T-score differences were found to be the largest for the mobility score (men: 40.2, women: 41.4), followed by the cognitive function (men: 22.0, women: 24.9), and the total depression symptomatology score (men: 15.5, women: 17.4). Conversely, the T-score difference in happiness was small (men: 5.6, women: 6.0). CONCLUSION: Despite markedly poorer physical and mental functions with increasing age, in this Danish sample age did not seem to affect happiness to a similarly notable extent, although, in this study, cohort and age effects cannot be disentangled.Item Open Access The Bourbon Ideology: Civic Eudaemonism in Habsburg and Bourbon Spain, 1600-1800(2021) Costa, ElsaThe intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.
Item Open Access Well-being Across Changing Social Landscapes(2018) Bartlett, BryceLow subjective well-being arises from differences between experiences and expectations, often identified through social comparisons. Many studies have investigated how individual exposures to a recessive period associates with contemporaneous changes in subjective well-being, finding inconsistent results. The studies collected here expand prior research by (1) examining contemporaneous associations between subjective well-being and unemployment rates before, during, and after a recession and by (2) investigating whether recessions influence subjective well-being in a more persistent manner through Cohort Socialization. This mechanism predicts first that exposure to recessions in young adulthood changes individual outlooks. Second, it predicts that these differences in outlooks correlate with differences in subjective well-being.
I use the General Social Survey (GSS) repeated cross-sections (1994-2014) and three GSS three-wave panels (2006-2014) to investigate this conceptual model. I analyze these data with various logistic regression models, including hierarchical models for panel data. These studies find a negative association between subjective well-being and contemporaneous unemployment rates across the study period. In addition, these studies find a persistent effect (exceeding five years) of exposure to recessive periods during young adulthood. First, those who experienced a recession in young adulthood have different average levels of subjective well-being from those who did not. Second, exposure to a short recession (near 6 months) in young adulthood (ages 18-22) is associated with higher subjective well-being, while exposure to a long recession (over 16 months) is associated with lower subjective well-being. Third, differences in intergenerational comparative expectations—how people compare their own standard of living to that of their parents and children—is a difference in outlook that partially mediates the observed differences in subjective well-being.