A team of psychologists looked at the warm, positive feelings we get when we see someone help another person or perform a good deed—what they call “elevation”—and how these feelings then affect our own behavior. It turns out that volunteers who watched uplifting clips of The Oprah Winfrey Show (in which musicians thanked their mentors) later spent almost twice as much time helping a researcher with a boring, tedious task than did volunteers who watched less uplifting TV clips or snippets of a British comedy show. This suggests, of course, that we do pay it forward—and that we may be able to make people more altruistic by having them watch another person do something good.

Psychological therapy could make you happier than winning the lottery or getting a big pay raise, according to new research from psychologists Chris Boyce of the University of Warwick and Alex Wood of the University of Manchester.
They found that it would take a pay raise of about 40,000 dollars to reach the same increase in well-being that’s achieved through a course of therapy costing around 1,300 dollars. In other words, money is an inefficient way of boosting happiness.
It’s an important finding, as Boyce explains:

We have shown that psychological therapy could be much more cost effective than financial compensation at alleviating psychological distress. This is not only important in courts of law, where huge financial awards are the default way in which pain and suffering are compensated, but has wider implications for public health and well-being.
Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies. The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the hormone oxytocin, often called the “love hormone.” Levels surge during sex and childbirth, and it has long been shown to reduce anxiety and play a key role in our sense of trust and desire to connect with others. But according to researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa, oxytocin also appears to have some undesirable effects on our behavior.
Shamay-Tsoory found that people who inhaled a synthetic form of oxytocin while playing a money game showed higher levels of envy when they won less than their opponent and gloated more when they did better—though these negative behaviors ended once the game was over.
As she explains:

Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: When the person’s association is positive, oxytocin bolsters pro-social behaviors; when the association is negative, the hormone increases negative sentiments.

Does telling our sins to a stranger make us feel better? Apparently so, according to British psychologist Richard Wiseman, who decided to test the idea in another of his online experiments.
Wiseman asked people to publicly post their confessions on his blog and then tell him how they felt (better, worse, or no different). “The stats,” he says, “do indeed suggest that confessing makes many people feel better.”