Los Angeles, CA, USA. A new collaborative paper by economist Richard Easterlin — namesake of the Easterlin Paradox and founder of the emergent field of happiness studies — offers the broadest range of evidence to date demonstrating that a higher rate of economic growth does not result in a greater increase of happiness.

Across a worldwide sample of 37 countries (encompassing rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist), Easterlin and his co-authors document strikingly consistent results: over the long term, a sense of well-being within a country does not go up with income.

In contrast to shorter-term studies that have shown a correlation between income growth and happiness, this paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), examined the happiness and income relationship in each country for an average of 22 years and at least ten years.

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Seeing bad things happen to other people is scary. One way to respond to this is to blame the victim — to look for some reason why it happened to them. But there’s another common response, according to a new study published in Psychological Science. The researchers found that people who believe in justice in the world also believe that a tragedy gives the victim’s life more meaning.

“A lot of the time when people see someone else suffering, and helping them isn’t an option, people will instead justify the fact that something is negative is happening to them.

Because it’s scary for something negative to happen to a good person — that means it could happen to you,” says Joanna E. Anderson of the University of Waterloo, who cowrote the study with her colleagues Aaron C. Kay and Gráinne M. Fitzsimons. Anderson suspected that there was another way to feel better about someone else’s tragic experience: to believe that the negative experience is balanced by positive outcomes.