Beauty and busi­ness are not nec­es­sar­ily top­ics you’d think of as going together, but most of us have heard of stud­ies link­ing good looks and career advance­ment. It cer­tainly doesn’t seem fair, but is it true? In a strange choice of Christ­mas spe­cial, the Econ­o­mist recently took a look at the issue. Not known for its sen­sa­tion­al­ist report­ing, the mag­a­zine nonethe­less came up with some pretty star­tling (and dis­il­lu­sion­ing) con­clu­sions. Among their most galling find­ings: dumb blond jokes aside, beauty is actu­ally cor­re­lated with intelligence.

In the last few years, psy­chol­o­gists and researchers have been dig­ging up hard data on a ques­tion pre­vi­ously left to philoso­phers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethi­cist Stephen Post have stud­ied peo­ple all over the world to find out how things like money, atti­tude, cul­ture, mem­ory, health, altru­ism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerg­ing field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy is burst­ing with new find­ings that sug­gest your actions can have a sig­nif­i­cant effect on your hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion with life. Here are 10 sci­en­tif­i­cally proven strate­gies to be happy.

Self-talk col­ors our think­ing, and can affect our reac­tions to peo­ple, events and life in gen­eral. It can also affect how we see our­selves, how stressed we are and how we deal with problems.

Just a fun post. One of those quiz things. I have a new name for them: “pocket psy­chol­ogy”. You take the quiz for five min­utes, and voila, they give you back your psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file in a flash. Well, you’re sup­posed to take every­thing tongue-in-cheek.
But hav­ing said that, I still felt good after read­ing the pro­file this par­tic­u­lar quiz gave me.

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to those who are unbri­dled, untram­meled, and free.
In love, you feel the most alive when things are straight-forward, and you’re told that you’re loved.
You’d like your lover …