Shankar Vedantam - "Is Great Happiness Too Much of a Good Thing?"

"Americans report being generally happier than people from, say, Japan or Korea, but it turns out that, partly as a result, they are less likely to feel good when positive things happen and more likely to feel bad when negative things befall them. Put another way, a hidden price of being happier on average is that you put your short-term contentment at risk, because being happy raises your expectations about being happy. When good things happen, they don't count for much because they are what you expect. When bad things happen, you temporarily feel terrible, because you've gotten used to being happy."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093000632.html

One might very well wonder if a case is being made here for an empirical theory of happiness analogous to Lawrence Kohlberg's "levels of moral development". Of course, one must then address - hopefully in a non-pre-posterist way - issues of gender [nature] & culture [nurture]. This article is, accordingly, a useful entry into a much-needed discussion of the "place" & "places" of differing conceptions of happiness in our putatively flattening world.