The "Being Happy" chapter in The Practice of System and Network Administration talks a bit about Cognitive Therapy and a book called The Feeling Good Handbook. The London Times this Sunday had an article that shows that research in this area is alive and well.
The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul".So what do you have to do to find happiness?
...
Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
Good stuff. Thanks