I have been thinking a great deal about happiness and how we can best study the happiness of our species. That is why a recent study on great ape mood caught my eye. I found it quite insightful. The study was led by psychologist Alexander Weiss, who investigated patterns of well-being in two great ape species: chimpanzees and orangutans (Coles, 2012). In this study, Weiss and his colleagues wanted to understand if our closest relatives share the same general life pattern of well-being that humans seem to possess. Social scientists have established that humans experience a U-shaped pattern of well-being. This means that as a species we tend to experience greatest mental health in youth, become far less happy throughout midlife, and then become happier again in old age (Weiss et al., 2012). This seems to be a general pattern regardless of various socio-cultural and economic factors. The study by…
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