Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle?
David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald

Research shows that, broadly, individuals are least happy in middle age read the article here. The authors suggest this could be because in middle age individuals temper aspirations, that individuals become thankful for their lives in later years and that cheerful individuals tend to live longer thereby creating a U-shaped happiness curve.

Click here to read coverage of this issue in Time.

2007 Diana Forsythe Award

The Editors are delighted to announce that Davide Nicolini's paper The work to make telemedicine work: A social and articulative view published in Social Science and Medicine, Volume 62, Issue 11, 2006 has been awarded the 2007 Diana Forsythe Award sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) People and Organizational Issues Working Group.

The Diana Forsythe Award honours either the peer-reviewed AMIA conference paper, or the peer-reviewed article published during the previous year, that best exemplifies the spirit and scholarship of Diana Forsythe's work at the intersection of medical informatics and the social sciences. 200 papers were reviewed for the 2007 award.

Social Science & Medicine is the top rated journal 

Social Science & Medicine (SS&M) has recently been rated by Thomson ISI as the world’s most cited social science journal over a decade. Published since 1967, SS&M came top of the top 20 out of 629 journals, with 3,761 papers cited a total of 42,554 times to date, between 1997-2007.

Read the full press release and visit the   Thompson website for more information.

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Social Science & Medicine is keen to stimulate expert debate and commentaries in response to its published articles. Contributors are invited to submit timely commentaries on recently published, in press and accepted papers that will be of interest to the wide readership of the Journal and which substantially contribute to debate. Where possible commentaries will be published alongside and accompanied by a response from the author of the original article. Commentaries should be submitted via our online submission system (EES) under Article Type "Commentary"; further information is available in the Guide for Authors and from the Managing Editor.

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• Gender and Health
• Child Health

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