By Jen Angel | Yes Magazine

In the last few years, psychologists and researchers have been digging up hard data on a question previously left to philosophers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stanford psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethicist Stephen Post have studied people all over the world to find out how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.

1. Savor Everyday Moments

Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, “showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.

2. Avoid Comparisons

While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction, according to Lyubomirsky.

3. Put Money Low on the List

People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, according to researchers Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. Their findings hold true across nations and cultures. “The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life — it’s very fleeting.” Money-seekers also score lower on tests of vitality and self-actualization.

4. Have Meaningful Goals

“People who strive for something significant, whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations,” say Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. “As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive.” Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, agrees, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable.”

5. Take Initiative at Work

How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.

6. Make Friends, Treasure Family

Happier people tend to have good families, friends, and supportive relationships, say Diener and Biswas-Diener. But it’s not enough to be the life of the party if you’re surrounded by shallow acquaintances. “We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones” that involve understanding and caring.

7. Smile Even When You Don’t Feel Like It

It sounds simple, but it works. “Happy people…see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say Diener and Biswas-Diener. Even if you weren’t born looking at the glass as half-full, with practice, a positive outlook can become a habit.

8. Say Thank You Like You Mean It

People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons. Research by Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, revealed that people who write “gratitude letters” to someone who made a difference in their lives score higher on happiness, and lower on depression — and the effect lasts for weeks.

9. Get Out and Exercise

A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.

10. Give It Away, Give It Away Now!

Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

11. Read Ethiopian Review every day.

Legendary signer Mahmoud Ahmed and Ethiopian pop music sensation Jossy will perform in Seattle on Saturday, Dec 27, 2008 at the Lake Union Naval Reserve, 860 Terry Ave. N, Seattle. More info: 206 419 2765

Interview with the Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front (EPPF) International Committee’s chairman Ato Leul Qeskis with Ethiopian Review publisher Elias Kifle and EPPF’s head of press office Demis Belete. Click below to listen[podcast]http://www.ethiopianreview.info/audio/leul_qeskis_11162008.mp3[/podcast]
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney is calling President-elect Barack Obama’s national security lineup “a pretty good team.”

In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News with 35 days left in the Bush administration, Cheney also again vehemently defended going to war in Iraq, said waterboarding of suspects in the war on terror was justified in some instances and opposed closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I must say, I think it’s a pretty good team,” Cheney said of Obama’s national security choices, in a segment of the interview broadcast Tuesday on “Good Morning America.”

“I’m not close to Barack Obama, obviously, nor do I identify with him politically. He’s a liberal. I’m a conservative,” he said.

But the vice president also said he thinks “the idea of keeping (Bob) Gates at defense is excellent. I think (retired Gen.) Jim Jones will be very, very effective as the national security adviser.”

And Cheney said that while “I would not have hired” Hillary Rodham Clinton to be secretary of state, “I think she’s tough. She’s smart, she works very hard and she may turn out to be just what President Obama needs.”

Cheney also urged the incoming administration to “carefully assess the tools put in place to fight terror” and to not cast aside strategies he said worked for the current administration.

Of waterboarding, Cheney said it was an appropriate means of getting information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.

He said he is against closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, saying it can only be shut down responsibly once the war on terrorism has ended.

Asked when that might be, he replied, “Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The same fate awaits most the ruling Woyanne officials of Ethiopia.

STRASBOURG, France (AFP) — A Tunisian ex-diplomat, accused of torturing the wife of an opposition member in the 1990s when he was a police chief in Tunisia, was sentenced to eight years in prison in France on Monday.

Khaled Ben Said, who served as Tunisian vice-consul in the French city of Strasbourg from 2000 to 2001, had faced up to 20 years in jail if found guilty of torture.

The prosecution had asked for him to be acquitted, arguing that his case was “absolutely void”.

Targeted by an international arrest warrant, 46-year-old Ben Said stood accused by Zoulaikha Gharbi of leading a group of officers who interrogated and tortured her in a police station in the Tunisian town of Jendouba in 1996.

Gharbi claims she was subjected to torture during 24 hours for information about her husband Mouldi Gharbi, an opponent of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who holds refugee status in France.

The 44-year-old woman alleged that her torturers partially undressed her, hung her from a metal bar, insulted, scratched and pinched her breasts.

Ben Said was tried under French laws on universal jurisdiction that allow courts to prosecute foreigners for crimes committed anywhere in the world.

Tunisian officials have rejected the charges against Ben Said as “totally unfounded”, and questioned the French court’s competence to try the case.

The Tunisian government issued a statement describing the case as “sheer fabrication and a propaganda ploy by fundamentalists” bent on discrediting Ben Ali’s government.

“Torture and other forms of inhumane and degrading treatment are strictly forbidden under Tunisian law,” said the statement issued in Tunis.

Gharbi, 44, who now also lives in France, lodged the suit in 2001.

A Tunisian journalist and a political expert took the stand in the eastern city of Strasbourg on behalf of the plaintiff and described torture as a regular occurrence in the north African country.

“Violence is one of the central tenets of the Tunisian regime,” said Vincent Geisser, a research fellow for the CNRS institute, who said it was a “state-sponsored practice”.

“Torture is institutionalised” in Tunisia, said journalist Sihem Bensedrine. Once confined to special interior ministry rooms, torture is nowadays “practiced everywhere, even in the smallest police station,” he said.

It is the second time a legal case was opened in France under the provisions of universal jurisdiction, following the trial for torture of a Mauritanian military officer in 2005.

Written into the UN convention against torture, the principle has been making inroads into international law ever since the detention of Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998.

The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues was a civil plaintiff in the case, in which the Tunisian president and ambassador to France have both been called to testify.