Norton said that in a study at the University of British Columbia, students that were given money and spent it on others became happier, while students that were given money and spent it on themselves were not any happier. Norton said that the same effect was found in Uganda.
Taking your peers out for a drink after work isn't wasted time, Norton said. In fact, work teams that spend money on happy hours perform better at work, according to research cited by Norton.
"Money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourself," Norton said, but "spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself."
And buying a small gift for your mom can make you just as happy as giving to an ambitious charity project.
"The specific way that you spend on other people isn't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy," Norton said. "You don't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy. You can do small trivial things and yet still get these benefits from doing this."
Norton's research is not the first to find that money leads to happiness, up to a certain point. People in households that earn more than $50,000 per year are more satisfied with their quality of life than people in households that earn less than $50,000 per year, according to a recent Marist poll.
A study by Princeton University also found that a larger paycheck leads to a happier life, up to an income of $75,000 per year. After earning that amount, money has no effect on happiness, according to the study.
Of course, the happiness threshold is higher in cities with a higher cost of living, according to The Wall Street Journal. That threshold was $163,000 per year in New York City in 2010, compared to $62,000 in Pueblo, Colo., according to the WSJ.
ace morgan on 14 Sep 12IF YOU can hear; you probably take sound for granted. Without thinking, we swing our attention in the direction of a loud or unexpected sound - the honk of a car horn, say. Because deaf people lack access to such potentially life-saving cues, a group of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon built a pair of glasses which allows the wearer to "see" when a loud sound is made, and gives an indication of where it came from. An array of seven microphones, mounted on the frame of the glasses, pinpoints the location of such sounds and relays that directional information to the wearer through a set of LEDs embedded inside the frame. The glasses will only flash alerts on sounds louder than a threshold level, which is defined by the wearer.
brad pitt on 27 Sep 12Every minute another person in New Zealand becomes a victim of cybercrime according to a new report which claims there are 556 million victims worldwide every year after the two NRI jailed for a major cyber fraud case revealed in this news blog. The report released by anti-virus company Norton researched 24 countries, including New Zealand, to find out how many people fell victim to crime on the internet as well as the price tag of consumer cybercrime for each country. see more: http://nortonscientificjournal.com/research/
