Panda knows all about these.  :)

I do! Happy people tend to give happiness to others.

Eric, your latest article is a grand slam!

Love is the common theme:

What happens when you look at the happiest people and scientifically analyze what they have in common? Researchers did just that.

There was a clear answer to what differentiated these people from everyone else — and it wasn’t money, smarts, age, gender or race.

It was strong social relationships.

Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:

Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result—social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge—most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are.

The Grant Study (which followed a group of men for their entire life) found that “the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.”

That and being alive at age 80...