The crowd began assembling at a Washington bookstore an hour before Eric Weiner's lecture on happiness. When the author of the New York Times best-seller The Geography of Bliss took to the podium, more than 200 people sat before him, with another 50 or so peering from behind walls and bookshelves.

For the self-described grump - "my name sounds like 'someone who whines'," he says - the turnout goes to show that everyone wants to learn more about happiness. Namely: What makes us happy? When and where are we most likely to be happy? Which groups are happier than others?

Those questions are central to Weiner's book and to a growing field of behavioral study: happiness research. After years of being regarded as scientific trivia, happiness research is being driven by scores of authors, economic analysts, government officials and college professors committed to gauging our feelings and moods.

Nowadays, such cheery initiatives seem to be sprouting everywhere. There are Happiness Institutes in Sydney, Australia, and Wilmington, N.C.; the World Database of Happiness in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; the Happiness Project in Surrey, United Kingdom. At Harvard University, one of the most popular courses two years ago was Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology, which probed such topics as happiness, self-esteem and friendship.

Some nations have even linked happiness research with public policy, most notably Bhutan, which since the 1980s has embraced a method of tracking the country's emotional well-being, called Gross National Happiness. Last year, Thailand hosted the third annual International Conference on Gross National Happiness.

"It's definitely a growing field. A lot of economists have taken to using [happiness] survey research," said Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Cato Institute. He has a regular blog, Happiness and Public Policy, and has written online essays on happiness.

Weiner, a Washington-based foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, traveled extensively in search of the happiest people on earth. He began his quest at the World Database of Happiness, which for decades has studied merriment among nations.

In his travels, Weiner discovered that some groups of people are happier than others - or at least they're more likely to respond favorably when queried about the topic.

"Republicans are happier than Democrats," Weiner told his audience at the Politics and Prose bookstore last month, prompting several sneers and laughs. "Married people are happier than singles, although people with children are no happier than childless couples. People with college degrees are happier than those without. People with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a B.A.

"People with an active sex life are happier than those without. Women and men are equally happy, though women have a wider emotional range. People are least happy when they're commuting to work. Busy people are happier than those with too little to do. Wealthier people are happier than poor people, but only slightly."

Quantifying those differences isn't easy, though.

"Traditionally economists have tried to measure what they call 'utility,' which is supposed to be a stand-in for happiness," Wilkinson said. "Usually economists learn to use money as a proxy for utility. ... A lot of people suspect that money isn't the most important thing in life. And if we could measure happiness more directly, we could find out what really does matter."

To that end, happiness researchers have compiled data by asking respondents some variation of the following question: How happy are you on a scale of, say 1-10 - with 1 being least happy and 10 being happiest?

"One of the biggest challenges that happiness researches have is how to measure happiness," said Weiner, "because happiness - or what scientists call subjective well-being - is subjective. If you don't know how happy you are, who am I to say, 'Well, he looks like he lives a good life, he should be happy'?"

Still, those who track happiness have a workable definition for it.

"I think of happiness as being the mirror image of depression," said Wilkinson. "It is a stable disposition to feel good in the same way that depression is a stable disposition to feel sad or melancholy."

Thanks in part to happiness research, it's known that most people have a general emotional level. Though stimulated by events of the day, they ultimately return to that level.

Two years ago, Forbes published findings from its own study regarding happiness and money. It featured a list of 12 things that make people happy. Among them: socializing, marriage, praying, good health and friends.

"Marriage and praying are interesting," said Michael Noer, Forbes executive director for special projects. "It's difficult to say whether marriage makes you happier or if happier people are attractive to the opposite sex. And you don't knowwhether praying makes people happy or if happy people pray."

University of Maryland psychology professor Paul Hanges has studied relationships between self-satisfaction and work. He noted that those who readily perform what are called "organizational citizenship behaviors" - such as making sure the office coffee pot is always replenished - tend to be happier than those who do not.

"These are tasks that aren't assigned to anyone, they have no requirement," said Hanges, "but without doing them, efficiency decreases."

Sociologist Ruut Veenhoven, director of the World Database of Happiness, wrote the study Average Happiness in 95 Nations 1995-2005. It ranked the world's five happiest nations - which, not surprisingly, were among the wealthiest - as Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Finland.

The bottom five nations were among the poorest: Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, Zimbabwe and, last, Tanzania. Among the others, the United States ranked 17th, France 39th and China 44th.

Those rankings raise the age-old question: Does money buy happiness?

"All the evidence points to the fact that people who have more money are more likely to say that they're happy on these surveys," said Wilkinson. "People who say that money doesn't matter are misleading you. Within just about any country, as you go up the income scale, the people higher up the income scale are happier."

joe.burris@baltsun.com