Pursuit of Happiness
Heightened interpersonal security diminishes the monetary value of possessions
Margaret Clark, Aaron Greenberg, Emily Hill, Edward Lemay, Elizabeth Clark-Polner & David Roosth
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People may value their possessions, in part, because ownership of goods promotes feelings of security. If so, increasing their sense of security should reduce the value they place on possessions. In two studies we tested this prediction. In Study 1, participants who were assigned randomly to write about an instance of receiving social support placed less monetary value on a blanket they owned relative to participants who were assigned randomly to write about a pleasant restaurant experience. In Study 2, participants who were unobtrusively primed with security-related words placed less monetary value on a pen they just received relative to participants who were primed with positive or neutral words. Results suggest that enhancing interpersonal security reduces valuing possessions.
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Adaptation amidst Prosperity and Adversity: Insights from Happiness Studies from around the World
Carol Graham
World Bank Research Observer, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some individuals who are destitute report to be happy, while others who are very wealthy report to be miserable. There are many possible explanations for this paradox; the author focuses on the role of adaptation. Adaptation is the subject of much work in economics, but its definition is a psychological one. Adaptations are defense mechanisms; there are bad ones like paranoia, and healthy ones like humor, anticipation, and sublimation. Set point theory - which is the subject of much debate in psychology - posits that people can adapt to anything, such as bad health, divorce, and extreme poverty, and return to a natural level of cheerfulness. The author's research from around the world suggests that people are remarkably adaptable. Respondents in Afghanistan are as happy as Latin Americans and 20 percent more likely to smile in a day than Cubans. The findings suggest that while this may be a good thing from an individual psychological perspective, it may also shed insights into different development outcomes, including collective tolerance for bad equilibrium. The author provides examples from the economics, democracy, crime, corruption, and health arenas.
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Children and Life Satisfaction
Luis Angeles
Journal of Happiness Studies, August 2010, Pages 523-538
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between having children at home and life satisfaction. Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children. The effect, however, is contingent on the individual's characteristics. In particular, our findings are consistent with children making married people better off, while most unmarried individuals appear to be worse off with children. We also analyze the role of factors such as gender, age, income and education.
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The Politics of Happiness: On the Political Determinants of Quality of Life in the American States
Ángel Álvarez-Díaz, Lucas González & Benjamin Radcliff
Journal of Politics, July 2010, Pages 894-905
Abstract:
Recent decades have witnessed the development of an extensive social scientific research program on the determinants of life satisfaction. We examine the role of political factors in affecting quality of life in the context of the American states. In particular, we ask whether the choices made by voters, as manifested by the governments they elect, and the subsequent public policy regimes those governments establish, determine the degree to which individuals find their lives satisfying. We find that the different ideological and partisan orientations of state governments, as well as a state's pattern of public policies, have strong effects on satisfaction with life, net of economic, social, and cultural factors. The more a state attempts to insulate citizens against market forces, the greater is satisfaction. The implications for American politics and our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms that determine quality of life are discussed.
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Income, sense of community and subjective well-being: Combining economic and psychological variables
Bradley Jorgensen, Robert Jamieson & John Martin
Journal of Economic Psychology, August 2010, Pages 612-623
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to test the effects of income and reference group income on well-being while controlling for a range of social psychological variables. A random sample of 1033 residents in a regional Australian city were surveyed by mail on a number of variables including subjective well-being, sense of community, attitudes toward their political officials, civic participation, perceptions of city life, and socio-demographics. Three general findings are reported. First, income had a significant influence on well-being, but individuals' perceptions of their access to health services had a larger effect. Second, we found that the relationship between well-being and some of its determinants (e.g., health service perceptions) varied significantly between low and high levels of income at the household level and at the regional level. Finally, reference group income was not a significant predictor of well-being in any of the analyses we conducted. These results are discussed in light of the results from previous research in this area.
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Yana Avramova, Diederik Stapel & Davy Lerouge
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, August 2010, Pages 203-214
Abstract:
Five studies show that mood affects context-dependence, such that negative mood promotes attention to a salient target, whereas positive mood enhances attention to both target and context. Judgments of temperature (Study 1), weight (Study 2), and size (Studies 3 and 4) were more strongly affected by the context in a positive than in a negative mood. Moreover, these effects extend to the social domain: When perceiving a target person's emotions, happy people were more influenced by the context than were sad people (Study 5). Thus, positive mood enhanced, and negative mood reduced, the magnitude of perceptual context effects. The results suggest that this pattern is not easily explained in terms of effort or depth of processing differences.
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How much does money really matter? Estimating the causal effects of income on happiness
Nattavudh Powdthavee
Empirical Economics, August 2010, Pages 77-92
Abstract:
There is a long tradition of psychologists finding small income effects on life satisfaction (or happiness). Yet the issue of income endogeneity in life satisfaction equations has rarely been addressed. The present paper is an attempt to estimate the causal effect of income on happiness. Instrumenting for income and allowing for unobserved heterogeneity result in an estimated income effect that is almost twice as large as the estimate in the basic specification. The results call for a reexamination on previous findings that suggest money buys little happiness, and a reevaluation on how the calculation of compensatory packages to various shocks in the individual's life events should be designed.
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Greater sadness reactivity in late life
Benjamin Seider, Michelle Shiota, Patrick Whalen & Robert Levenson
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although previous research suggests that overall emotional reactivity does not change with normal aging, it is possible that different emotions follow different developmental courses. We examined emotional reactivity to films selected to elicit sadness, disgust, and a neutral state in young, middle-aged and older adults (total N = 222). Physiology and expressive behavior were measured continuously and reports of subjective emotional experience were obtained following each film. Results indicated that older adults reported greater sadness in response to all films and greater physiological responses to the sadness film than did the younger age groups. There were no age differences found in self-reported disgust or in behavioral expressions of sadness or disgust in response to any film. The age differences that were found were maintained even after controlling for pre-film self-reported sadness and for personal experiences of loss. These findings support the notion that sadness reactivity is heightened with age.
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Feelings don't come easy: Studies on the effortful nature of feelings
Assaf Kron, Yaacov Schul, Asher Cohen & Ran Hassin
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, August 2010, Pages 520-534
Abstract:
We propose that experience of emotion is a mental phenomenon, which requires resources. This hypothesis implies that a concurrent cognitive load diminishes the intensity of feeling since the 2 activities are competing for the same resources. Two sets of experiments tested this hypothesis. The first line of experiments (Experiments 1-4) examined the intensity of participants' feelings as they performed a secondary (backward counting) task. The results showed that the intensity of both negative and positive feelings diminished under a cognitive load and that this attenuation of feeling was not mediated by either distraction from external stimuli or demand characteristics. In the second set of experiments (Experiments 5-6), load was created by asking the participants to focus on the feelings. Even in these circumstances, the participants who were under load reported a lower intensity of feeling than those who were not under load. We explain these findings in terms of a resource-dependent model of emotional experience. Possible implications of our findings for a broader class of phenomenological experiences are succinctly discussed.
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The Heartbrake of Social Rejection: Heart Rate Deceleration in Response to Unexpected Peer Rejection
Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline Crone & Maurits van der Molen
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social relationships are vitally important in human life. Social rejection in particular has been conceptualized as a potent social cue resulting in feelings of hurt. Our study investigated the psychophysiological manifestation of hurt feelings by examining the beat-by-beat heart rate response associated with the processing of social rejection. Study participants were presented with a series of unfamiliar faces and were asked to predict whether they would be liked by the other person. Following each judgment, participants were provided with feedback indicating that the person they had viewed had either accepted or rejected them. Feedback was associated with transient heart rate slowing and a return to baseline that was considerably delayed in response to unexpected social rejection. Our results reveal that the processing of unexpected social rejection is associated with a sizable response of the parasympathetic nervous system. These findings are interpreted in terms of a cardiovagal manifestation of a neural mechanism implicated in the central control of autonomic function during cognitive processes and affective regulation.
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Understanding money's limits: People's beliefs about the income - happiness correlation
Jeremy Cone & Thomas Gilovich
Journal of Positive Psychology, July 2010, Pages 294-301
Abstract:
It is claimed that the correlation between income and happiness is considerably weaker than people expect and recent research supports that contention. However, an important lesson from judgment and decision-making research is that judgments are constructed in response to the prevailing context, leaving open the possibility that some elicitation procedures may reveal accurate intuitions about income and happiness. We examined whether this is so. Study 1 participants ranked a set of empirical relationships according to the strength of correlation and we examined whether they ranked the income-happiness link where it actually falls in the set. In Studies 2 and 3, participants estimated the probability that someone with a higher income than another is also the happier of the two. The estimates of the participants were then compared to the actual probability based on the documented income-happiness relationship. Results indicate that, using these elicitation procedures, people have an accurate understanding of the relationship between income and happiness.
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Family Matters: Happiness in Nuclear Families and Twins
Ragnhild Bang Nes, N. Czajkowski & K. Tambs
Behavior Genetics, September 2010, Pages 577-590
Abstract:
Biometric studies have shown that happiness is strongly affected by genes. The findings are mainly based on twin data, however, and the full validity of the results has been debated. To overcome some limitations in classical twin research, we examined aetiological sources of subjective well-being (SWB), using two independent population-based samples, one including nuclear families (N = 54,540) and one including twins (N = 6,620). Biometric modelling using R was conducted to test for a data structure implying either non-additive genetic effects or higher environmental co-twin correlation in MZ than DZ pairs (violation of the EEA). We also estimated non-random mating, cultural transmission and shared environments specific for regular siblings and twins. Two sets of nested models were fitted and compared. The best explanatory model shows that family matters for happiness predominantly due to quantitative sex-specific genetic effects, a moderate spousal correlation and a shared twin environment. Upper limits for broad-sense heritability were estimated to be 0.33 (females) and 0.36 (males). Our study constitutes the most elaborate biometric study of SWB to date and illustrates the utility of including responses from multiple types of relatives in quantitative genetic analyses.
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Adrian Chadi
Kyklos, August 2010, Pages 317-329
Abstract:
Studies investigating the determinants of happiness show that unemployment causes high distress for most affected persons. Researchers conclude that the amount of this disutility demonstrates the involuntariness of unemployment. This paper applies the happiness research approach to German panel data in order to revive the underlying economic question of whether unemployment is voluntary or involuntary. Accordingly, the decline in life satisfaction associated with unemployment is related to the willingness to work. The results of the econometric investigation indicate a very strong connection between unemployment-induced disutility and willingness to work, so that it is possible to divide unemployed individuals into certain categories, according to the potential voluntariness of unemployment. While there is a minority which can truly be regarded as voluntarily unemployed, most unemployed people actively search for work and suffer far more from unemployment than indicated by previous happiness research studies. A subsequent discussion includes a critical juxtaposition of the findings with policies such as the recent German labour market reforms.
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Ed Diener, Weiting Ng, James Harter & Raksha Arora
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2010, Pages 52-61
Abstract:
The Gallup World Poll, the first representative sample of planet Earth, was used to explore the reasons why happiness is associated with higher income, including the meeting of basic needs, fulfillment of psychological needs, increasing satisfaction with one's standard of living, and public goods. Across the globe, the association of log income with subjective well-being was linear but convex with raw income, indicating the declining marginal effects of income on subjective well-being. Income was a moderately strong predictor of life evaluation but a much weaker predictor of positive and negative feelings. Possessing luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living were also strong predictors of life evaluation. Although the meeting of basic and psychological needs mediated the effects of income on life evaluation to some degree, the strongest mediation was provided by standard of living and ownership of conveniences. In contrast, feelings were most associated with the fulfillment of psychological needs: learning, autonomy, using one's skills, respect, and the ability to count on others in an emergency. Thus, two separate types of prosperity - economic and social psychological - best predict different types of well-being.
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Social Capital and Happiness: Additional Cross-Country Evidence
Rati Ram
Journal of Happiness Studies, August 2010, Pages 409-418
Abstract:
Using several different samples, model specifications, and variable proxies, this study revisits the role of social capital in generating life satisfaction (happiness). The main outcome of the exercise is that the parameter for social capital (generalized trust) is extremely fragile, and most estimates show little significant role of social capital in generating happiness. Six additional points are noted. First, the role of income seems generally positive and significant. Second, there are marked parametric differences between high-income and low-income subgroups, but it is difficult to say whether social capital or income is more important in either group. Third, significance of income inequality and of inflation vary considerably across the models and the samples, but their association with happiness is generally weak. Fourth, two measures of happiness (life satisfaction) yield similar sets of estimates. Fifth, there is some indication that "transition" economies are marked by lower happiness while Latin American countries are generally happier. Last, a reasonable test indicates absence of any significant specification error and mitigates worries about possible endogeneities.
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Ragnhild Nes, Espen Røysamb, Jennifer Harris, Nikolai Czajkowski & Kristian Tambs
Twin Research and Human Genetics, August 2010, Pages 312-321
Abstract:
Specific environments and social relationships may alter the impact of genes. Previous studies have shown marriage to moderate heritability for depressive symptoms in females, suggesting that marriage provides protection or compensation against genetic risks. Similar mechanisms may be relevant for subjective wellbeing (SWB), which is considerably influenced by genes and almost universally associated with marital status. Questionnaire data on SWB from a population-based sample of 1250 monozygotic (MZ) and 981 dizygotic (DZ) male and female twin pairs (n = 4462) were analyzed using structural equation modeling by means of Mx to investigate genetic and environmental influences on SWB across marital status. Resemblance for SWB in MZ twins exceeded that of DZ twins, but the magnitude of this difference varied across marital status. Genetic factors explained 51% and 54% of the variance in SWB among unmarried males and females, and 41% and 39% in married or cohabitating respondents. Remaining variance was attributable to the nonshared environment. The genetic influences were partly different (rg = 0.64) across marital status in females, but overlapping in married and single males. Our findings show that marriage moderates the magnitude of genetic influences on SWB in both males and females, with a smaller estimate of genetic influences for those with a marital or equivalent partner. The genetic influences on SWB are thus clearly contingent on the environmental context.
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Acute effects of intranasal oxytocin on subjective and behavioral responses to social rejection
Gail Alvares, Ian Hickie & Adam Guastella
Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, August 2010, Pages 316-321
Abstract:
The hormone and neuropeptide oxytocin is believed to buffer against social stress and reduce social-threat perception. We employed a widely used ostracism paradigm, Cyberball, to investigate whether oxytocin ameliorated the acute behavioral and affective consequences of social rejection. In a double-blind, randomized, between-subjects design, 74 healthy male and female participants were administered intranasal oxytocin or placebo and subsequently ostracized or included during this virtual ball-tossing game. Ostracized participants reported negative affective and attachment-related reactions, as well as a significant motivational change in increased desire to be involved in the game; these effects were not influenced by oxytocin. Intranasal oxytocin did, however, increase included participants' desire to play again with the same participants, suggesting oxytocin enhanced desire for future social engagement following inclusion. These findings are argued to provide evidence that the effects of oxytocin in promoting social approach behavior may be context specific and sensitive to positive social cues. The results suggest that in an explicitly aversive context, oxytocin does not buffer against the immediate impact of blunt social rejection.