The “You and I” of Happiness: Investigating the Long-Term Impact of Self- and Other-Focused Happiness-Enhancing Activities
研究区分了自我导向和他人导向的幸福提升活动，通过六周实验发现，他人导向活动在提升幸福感方面持续优于自我导向活动。
It is commonly known in the positive psychology literature that people who want to increase their happiness ought to engage in so-called happiness-enhancing activities. Building on this stream of research, work that emphasizes the duality of happiness (affect vs. meaning) is introduced in order to propose a new conceptualization of happiness activities. The new conceptualization distinguishes between self- and other-focused happiness activities, and argues for the importance of other-focused activities over self-focused ones. Results from a six-week long study show that other-focused happiness activities consistently outperformed self-focused ones in terms of raising participants’ levels of happiness. Although self-focused happiness activities also increased happiness, by showing increases over time relative to participants’ baseline level, other-focused happiness activities consistently outperformed such increases.