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rpautrey2 · Guest

Happiness 'immune to life events'
Momentous events in your life such as having children, or getting
married, may make you happier, but only temporarily, say researchers.

Our basic happiness level essentially stays the same throughout adult
life, the Economic Journal reports.

Economists from the UK, US and France based their conclusions on a 20-
year analysis of the life satisfaction of hundreds of people from
Germany.

Even after traumatic events, overall mood dipped but then recovered.

There is the concept of a 'thermostat' of happiness - when a big event
happens to you, whether it is positive or negative, the spring
stretches, but returns back to its former state quite quickly
Francois Moscovici
White Water Strategies

The study looked at a psychological process called "adaptation" - the
way in which humans adjust to new circumstances, good or bad.

The German volunteers, aged between 18 and 60 at the start of the
study, were then questioned again regularly over the following two
decades and asked to rate their own happiness.

They were also asked to report any major events so that the
researchers could plot the relationship between the event and overall
levels of satisfaction.

They found that only unemployment gave a long-lasting decline in
overall mood in the five years after the event.

In other traumatic events, such as widowhood or divorce, overall mood
dipped, but then recovered.

Negative events

For positive events, such as marriage or childbirth, the effect was
equally transient - the researchers calculated that the happiness
increase delivered by the birth of a child lasted for two years before
the volunteers ratings were back to normal.

Dr Yannis Georgellis, a senior lecturer at Brunel University, and co-
author of the report, said that it suggested that old adages such as
"time heals" were true in many cases.

He said: "It's consistent with other findings that people recover from
negative events very quickly - there was some literature on people who
became paraplegic, who, when interviewed a few years later, had
similar levels of happiness to those who had not been affected this
way.

"Likewise, there are studies of lottery winners who are no happier in
the long term."

Francois Moscovici, director of psychological consultancy firm White
Water Strategies, said that there was plenty of evidence that people
had a fixed, underlying "range" of happiness, which could be
temporarily affected by major events, but not usually for long
periods.

"There is the concept of a 'thermostat' of happiness - when a big
event happens to you, whether it is positive or negative, the spring
stretches, but returns back to its former state quite quickly."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7502443.stm

Published: 2008/07/13 23:26:12 GMT

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