More ideas from The Happiness Hypothesis

• Damasio (Descartes' Error) found that people who had a neurological defect were unable to make decisions. We think of emotion as impeding rational decision-making, but people who don't feel emotion "find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart."
• The reason we can't stop thinking about something like a white elephant, or an inappropriate and embarrassing thought, is that once we have that thought, our automatic systems take over and constantly check whether we are having that thought we don't want to have.
• When "two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other."
• "... the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things. We can't just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks."
• Whether you're a happy person or not is largely heritable. "Twin studies generally show that from 50 to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences." Haidt says that those who are generally happy and easy-going "won the cortical lottery." But: you can change your "affective style"--and the three best ways to do so are meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. "All three are effective because they work on the elephant."
• One reason many of us are so resistant to the idea of SSRI's is that we feel that "character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one's moral potential." 
• Robin Dunbar thinks that our brains became large in order to manage larger and larger social groups, and that "human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people ..."
• "In a world with no gossip, people ... would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations ... Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance ... Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life ... "
• Gossip also bonds us:  "Tell an aquaintance a cynical story that ends with both of you smirking and shaking your heads and voila, you've got a bond."
• Wealth and happiness: "People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than whose who don't. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller." I think many families have striven for so long to get out of poverty, that now in the past few decades in the West, when they reach the middle class or above, they are still in the mindset of seeking wealth and material goods. We don't always recognize that finally we have enough and are comfortable. 
• I wonder how much our society has been influenced by the childrearing practices of the early 20th century. If Freudians and behaviorists were telling parents not to show their children too much affection, then those children probably weren't very good parents either because of the neglect they received in childhood.