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Spending money on one's self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one's sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people's predictions about their own and others' happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves or others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, wearing masks has become essential for social interaction, disturbing emotion recognition in daily life. In the present study, a total of 39 Korean participants (female = 20, mean age = 24.2 years) inferred seven emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise, and neutral) from uncovered, mask-covered, sunglasses-covered faces. The recognition rates were the lowest under mask conditions, followed by the sunglasses and uncovered conditions. In identifying emotions, different emotion types were associated with different areas of the face. Specifically, the mouth was the most critical area for happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, and anger recognition, but fear was most recognized from the eyes. By simultaneously comparing faces with different parts covered, we were able to more accurately examine the impact of different facial areas on emotion recognition. We discuss the potential cultural differences and the ways in which individuals can cope with communication in which facial expressions are paramount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]