Two recent studies show that acts of kindness such as doing a good deed or buying a gift as long as it’s for someone else will make you happier. Perhaps, that ‘s why Saint Nicholas AKA Santa Claus is so jolly.

The first study, which was published in the Journal of Social Psychology had participants perform acts of kindness for a mere ten days.  The Great Britain researchers formed three groups out of the 86 participants in the study.  The control group was given no instructions and at the conclusion of the ten days were not happier than before the study began.  However, the group that was instructed to perform an act of kindness each day reported a significant elevation in their happiness.

The second study, conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School and the Univeristy of British Columbia suggests that kindness has a long lasting effect on our happiness.  This study’s findings reflected that people felt happier simply by recalling a time they bought something for someone else rather than when recalling a time when they purchased something for themselves.

Another intersting fact about the second study, which was published online in the Journal of Happiness Studies, was that the price of the gift didn’t seem to have an effect on the level of happiness the person experienced.  It didn’t matter if the gift had cost $20 dollars or $100 dollars. Also, the happier the participant felt about past acts of kindness, the more likely they were to choose to continue doing for others in lieu of themselves.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is all according to the Greater Good website from the University of California, Berkeley.

With the holidays just around the corner, we all have the opportunity to test these findings.  The new mantra Give and Be Happy.

Below is a video about enjoying life

Facial expressions are are a major part of communication and can be critical in a conversation between two hearing impaired individuals.

Business Standard Technology reports that a new program RockeTalk, a mobile social networking platform, allows users to send video messages which make conversing for the hearing impaired easier by allowing them to see each others facial expressions.

Rajesh Ketkar, head of a Vadodara-based NGO, Mook Badhir Mandal (MBM) states, “With video messaging, talking to one another becomes easy. In addition, users can also send their video messages to an interpreter who in turn would talk to a normal person on their behalf over the phone.”

This new app allows users, in India, to place free calls to social platforms such as Mig33,a moblie social platform and  Nimbuzz, a cross-platform chat app, over WiFi without using any voice minutes.

What are your thoughts on this?  Should these social applications allow the hearing imparied access to video talk for free?

Many people have heard of the endearing term ‘baby face”.  New scientific findings reveal that facial expressions begin even earlier than with newborn babies.  Science suggests that complex combinations associated with recognizable facial expressions occur as a fetus develops in the womb.

This new study reported on by LiveScience shows that as a fetus develops their facial expressions become very complex and can be recognized as combinations associated with known facial expressions.

Does this reinforce the universality of the seven basic facial expressions of emotion?  Well, more research needs to be conducted to confirm that but it is interesting.

Lead researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, Nadja Reissland noted that these facial expression don’t necessarily mean that the fetuses were experiencing emotion, “We can see the expressions which we can recognize; we can’t say whether the fetus has emotion.  They have yet the cognition necessary to have the emotions.”

The study, which appeared in August in the journal PLoS ONE, used 4-D ultrasound images to track the facial motions, and it’s main focus was on expressions of crying and laughing.  However, Reissland is looking into future research on additional facial expression of emotion such as anger and sadness.

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Facial Expressions Develop in the Womb (livescience.com)