As many an active philanthropist, and their recipients, will tell you, giving truly is the path to lasting happiness.

Supporting many a traditional value of looking after thy neighbour, new research from North America shows that it's not how much you have that matters, it's how you spend it. It has proven that those people who donate their pounds and pence to charities or shower gifts on others are more content than those who spend all their money on themselves.

Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada may have found the answer to why post-industrialised societies have not become happier with affluence.

To find out what kind of spending really does make people happy, Dunn, along with colleagues, surveyed 109 UBC students. Unsurprisingly, most said they would be happier with $20 in their pocket than they would with $5, and that they would prefer to spend the money on themselves than on someone else.

However, when Dunn's team gave 46 other students envelopes containing either $5 or $20 and told them to spend it, those who gave it to others (donating to charity or giving a gift) were happier than those who used it for themselves (to pay a bill or indulge in a treat).

Two further surveys revealed similar results.

Sixteen employees of a Boston company were polled by Dunn’s team, before and after they received bonuses of various sizes; they also gathered data on income, spending, and happiness from 632 people across the United States.

In both groups, happiness correlated with the amount of money people spent on others rather than the absolute amount of the bonus or income.

Giving once might make a person happy for a day, but "if it becomes a way of living, then it could make a lasting difference," Dunn told AAAS magazine, a U.S. based science publication.

She hopes the finding might someday spur North American policy-makers to promote widespread philanthropy that could make for a more altruistic, and happier, population.