It's funny what you can "prove" in the "soft" sciences, like psychology:

What the authors found was that Berkeley children who were rated as unhappy in their kindergarten years turned out as adults to be conservatives. [1]

Most the people I know who were "popular" in school aren't very happy now. Conversely, it seems to me most the people who felt like they didn't fit in back then are now fairly successful people.

Yet the Berkeley "researcher's" assumptions seem to be that if you were unhappy in a public school kindergarten, you will make an unhappy adult. Seems like a stupid assumption, but I guess nothing's too farfetched for an academic with a political axe to grind.

Study after study has demonstrated that "religious" people -- as measured by church attendence -- are generally much happier and healthier than those who aren't. Since the vast majority of those with religious faith are, in fact, political "conservatives" it's quite a feat to "prove" the exact opposite.

But hey, as long as you don't mind making a few bone-headed assumptions, anything is possible in Berkeley.

Sadly -- for them -- and to the contrary, this is a more typical result:

Some 45% of all Republicans report being very happy, compared with just 30% of Democrats and 29% of independents. This finding has also been around a long time; Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey began taking its measurements in 1972. Pew surveys since 1991 also show a partisan gap on happiness; the current 16 percentage point gap is among the largest in Pew surveys, rivaled only by a 17 point gap in February 2003.

Could it be that Republicans are so much happier now because their party controls all the levers of federal power? Not likely. Since 1972, the GOP happiness edge over Democrats has ebbed and flowed in a pattern that appears unrelated to which party is in political power. [2]

Since asking people if they are happy doesn't yield the "correct" result for a lefty researcher. So we'll desperately search for some other connection between conservatives and unhappiness.

John Ray (follow first link) also points out the authors are refusing to reveal how they classified people as "conservative" or not. Again, how typical. My suspicion is that the researches themselves are probably pretty miserable people.