Thank you for joining us for episode 512 of Live Happy Now.

Every year on March 20th, we look forward to the release of the World Happiness Report,

and this year was no exception.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by Dr. Felix Chung,

assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and a faculty

fellow at the Schwartz-Riseman Institute for Technology and Society. He's also the Canada

Research Chair in Population Well-Being at the University of Toronto, and Felix is one of the

co-authors of this year's report. He's here to talk about what the report tells us about

social connections and where the U.S. stands on this year's report. He's here to talk about what the report tells us about social connections

and where the U.S. stands on this year's list of happiest countries. Let's have a listen.

Felix, welcome to Live Happy Now. Thank you so much for having me. This is a big moment because

you've been working on the World Happiness Report since last summer, you said. And so to finally see it coming to

fruition, seeing it out, this has to be a great week for you. Absolutely. Sometimes I feel like the

International Day of Happiness is the one day where we celebrate our discipline with the rest of the

world. So I really look forward to it. Yes, absolutely. So this year, as always,

the report has some interesting takeaways, and it really gives us an important window into the

state of our world. As you are working on it, what is the most significant thing that you

personally took away from the findings? So the theme of the 2025 World Happiness Report is on sharing caring. So on top of releasing our

national happiness ranking, we also reported on global trends and disparities in how helpful people

are. So I think one major takeaway from this year of World Happiness Report is first, people are generally

very helpful. You

we just look across the globe, 70% of people reported that they helped someone in the past

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