You've probably seen many claims about how a book can improve your life. Thousands of people have provided supportive evidence for this book. It gives both clear how to information and evidence for its ideas. Even if you have a history of unhappiness or depression or are facing difficult circumstances, you can learn to be happier. For those who doubt they can affect their emotions, the book provides strong contrary evidence. The factors Dr. Stevens' research identified are specific learnable beliefs and skills--not general, heritable traits. Each chapter teaches some of these factors about how to be happy and successful. The book is for people who value growth and self-development to become happier and healthier. Perhaps you want to improve self-esteem, positive thinking, assertiveness, autonomy, motivation, emotional control, relationships, self-control, or achievement. Chapters deal with these issues, but also deal with core issues underlying these problems. This book is for people who are serious about being happy. No matter how difficult your past history or current circumstances, striking insights into the causes of emotions can empower you to rise above negative emotions, and you can choose to be happy. Dr. Stevens combines expertise of 31 years as a psychologist with a philosophical-spiritual approach and his personal experience to make this an important book about achieving happiness. His research provides crucial, detailed support for these ideas not found in most self-help books. Yet, his clinical and personal experience helps him provide practical, detailed self-help advice. For more help, take his extensive, free online, Success and Happiness Attributes Questionnaire (SHAQ), based upon the book.The well-known author and PBS speaker, Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote that this book is, "A thorough presentation, rich in detail, yet very reader friendly. I enthusiastically endorse Tom Stevens' book and recommend it as a powerful tool for human development." He developed questionnaires on life skills and intimate relationships that tested many ideas later presented in this book. What he learned about happiness was the basis for his own happy marriage and life. It gave him new approaches to therapy that greatly enhanced his ability to help others. The first edition of this book was a result of his 40-year experiment. That's why readers say things like, ¿ "It's packed with insightful knowledge and expertise." ¿"All the personal experiences and skills I learned will stay with me forever." ¿ "I'm a self-help book 'junkie'-I've read them all; and this is the best self-help book I've ever read." ¿"The book is a terrific combination of scholarship, superb information, and spirituality." ¿100% of a reader test group said they would recommend the book to a friend--40% already had. They rated the book an average of 8.23 out of a possible 9.0 on a scale of "overall usefulness of the book." After writing the first edition, Dr. Stevens wanted even more proof that the content of this book was valid, so he developed the free, online questionnaire, SHAQ (The Success and Happiness Attributes Questionnaire), by going through each chapter, taking each main idea, and turning it into questions. He correlated these questions (and related scales) with over 3400 SHAQ users' emotional and life success measures. SHAQ scales correlated with Happiness, .87; with Low Depression, .73; with Low Anxiety, .68; with Low Anger-Aggression, .70; with Relationship Success, .70; and with good results for career success measures as well. Correlations this high are rarely found in this type of research. These dramatic results impelled Dr. Stevens to revise this book and include the results of his study and some other new sections.