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Being: Your Happiness, Pleasure, and Contentment

Don Lucas, Ph.D.

ISBN: 978-0-7380-4528-3
Net Price: $23.75

Being: Your Happiness, Pleasure, and Contentment introduces you to the science of happiness. It takes you on a journey of discovery through the science of psychology and its newest branch, positive psychology. This journey has several expected stops along the way—including stops at love, leisure, humor, money, health, playing, and friendship. However, Being also addresses the unpleasant bumps along the road such as addiction, obesity, alcoholism, prejudice, depression, hatred, divorce, and suicide that other books tend to avoid. Through its unique, entertaining, honest, and smart presentation, Being provides you with the tools to measure, cultivate, and maintain your own true happiness—with a laugh along the way.

Features

• A review of scientific research on happiness
• A recipe for your own happiness-with recipe card to boot!
• A personal method to distinguish among happiness, pleasure, and contentment to help you focus on what matters most.
• Measures of your happiness, pleasure, and contentment within eleven parts of your life:
  • With your Partner/Spouse
  • Within your Family
  • When you are Alone
  • When your are at Work
  • Relative to your personal Health
  • When you are Learning
  • Relative to your Finances
  • Within your Friendships
  • Relative to your Possessions
  • Relative to your Leisure time
  • When you are at Home
• Tools to help you gain true happiness, better health, and increased longevity.
• Personal activities that can make you happy in a moment's notice.
• Methods to transform your emotions from negative to positive

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What are you going to get out of reading this book?
Chapter 2. The Science of Happiness
Chapter 3. Your Happiness: A Ten-Ingredient Recipe for Happiness
Chapter 4. A New Look at an Old Phenomenon: Being Theory and Happiness
Chapter 5. Definitions of Happiness, Pleasure, and Contentment
Chapter 6. You Probably Don't Need to Change Your Whole Life: You Just Have a Few Things You Want to Work On
Chapter 7. Being Content and Living Longer
Appendices
Index

About the Author:
Dr. Lucas is the chair of the psychology department at Northwest Vista College. Before joining the department in 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Smith-Kettlewell Research Institute in San Francisco, and took his Ph.D. in Psychology with a specialty in Neuroscience and Behavior from Northern Illinois University. He publishes and presents on a variety of topics about human behavior, including psychophysics, family and domestic violence, teaching and learning, happiness, contentment, and life satisfaction. Dr. Lucas, who has been teaching for 19 years, has received numerous awards including the Minnie Stevens Piper award-the oldest and most prestigious award for higher education in Texas.

Suggested for:
Psychology
Personal Development

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