The Pursuit of Happiness
Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness
Jordi Quoidbach, Elizabeth Dunn, K.V. Petrides & Moïra Mikolajczak
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study provides the first evidence that money impairs people's ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals' ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as that produced by actual individual differences in wealth, a result supporting the theory that money has a causal effect on savoring. Moving beyond self-reports, we found that participants exposed to a reminder of wealth spent less time savoring a piece of chocolate and exhibited reduced enjoyment of it compared with participants not exposed to wealth. This article presents evidence supporting the widely held but previously untested belief that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people's ability to reap enjoyment from life's small pleasures.
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Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents
Peter Sheridan Dodds & Christopher Danforth
Journal of Happiness Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth's equator.
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Of Sad Men and Dark Comedies: Mood and Gender Effects on Entertainment Media Preferences
Dara Greenwood
Mass Communication and Society, July 2010, Pages 232-249
Abstract:
Although traditional mood management theory suggests we use media to deflect sad moods and maintain good moods, various research findings reflect a more complex picture. The present study took a mixed-method, nuanced approach to basic mood management questions and investigated both open and close-ended media preferences among college students (N = 157) immediately following a positive or negative mood induction. Results show that sad (vs. happy) participants showed a preference for viewing a dark comedy or a social drama, whereas happy (vs. sad) participants showed a preference for viewing a slapstick comedy or an action adventure. Women (vs. men) showed an increased preference for romantic genres regardless of mood, whereas men showed a preference for action, suspense, and dark comedy genres. An interaction between gender and mood also emerged; sad men in particular showed a preference for dark comedies. Results are discussed in light of the emotional gratifications that mood-reflecting media may afford men and women.
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Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States
Thomas DeLeire & Ariel Kalil
International Review of Economics, June 2010, Pages 163-176
Abstract:
We examine the association between various components of consumption expenditure and happiness in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of older Americans. We find that only one component of consumption is positively related to happiness - leisure consumption. In contrast, consumption of durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing are not significantly associated with happiness. Second, we find that leisure consumption is associated with higher levels of happiness partially through its effect on social connectedness, as indexed by measures of loneliness and embeddedness in social networks. On one hand, these results counter the conventional wisdom that "material goods can't buy happiness." One the other hand, they underscore the importance of social goods and social connectedness in the production of happiness.
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Pre-outcome regret: Widespread and overlooked
Geir Kirkebøen & Karl Halvor Teigen
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many real-life decisions (e.g. promises, plans and agreements) involve a time interval between when the decision is made and the main outcome is revealed. Nearly all regret studies focus on anticipated or experienced post-outcome regret. We argue that regret is also frequently experienced in the pre-outcome period, and that this pre-outcome regret has other sources than regret experienced after the outcome is known. Regret experienced in the pre-outcome period has an important function post-outcome regret (usually) cannot have, namely to motivate the decision maker to reconsider the ongoing decision process and reverse the initial decision. Pre-outcome regret should for these reasons be distinguished from post-outcome regret, and studied separately. In two scenario studies, participants were asked to imagine their regret after agreeing to perform an inconvenient task. In both, more regret was reported before than after the event, even when they had imagined a worst case outcome. In the third study, participants described a difficult choice from their own life. Again, regret was perceived as higher in the pre-outcome period than afterwards. In a fourth study, participants reported regret online during an economic game (a version of the ultimatum game). They regretted their decisions more before than after they knew the outcome. We conclude that experienced pre-outcome regret is often stronger than post-outcome regret, and typically increases during the pre-outcome period. We suspect that the absence of JDM studies of pre-outcome regret is a legacy of the dominant gambling metaphor within decision research.
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Heritability and Genome-Wide Linkage Scan of Subjective Happiness
Meike Bartels, Viatcheslav Saviouk, Marleen de Moor, Gonneke Willemsen, Toos van Beijsterveldt, Jouke-Jan Hottenga, Eco de Geus & Dorret Boomsma
Twin Research and Human Genetics, April 2010, Pages 135-142
Abstract:
Causes of individual differences in happiness, as assessed with the Subjective Happiness Scale, are investigated in a large of sample twins and siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register. Over 12,000 twins and siblings, average age 24.7 years (range 12 to 88), took part in the study. A genetic model with an age by sex design was fitted to the data with structural equation modeling in Mx. The heritability of happiness was estimated at 22% for males and 41% in females. No effect of age was observed. To identify the genomic regions contributing to this heritability, a genome-wide linkage study for happiness was conducted in sibling pairs. A subsample of 1157 offspring from 441 families was genotyped with an average of 371 micro-satellite markers per individual. Phenotype and genotype data were analyzed in MERLIN with multipoint variance component linkage analysis and age and sex as covariates. A linkage signal (logarithm of odds score 2.73, empirical p value 0.095) was obtained at the end of the long arm of chromosome 19 for marker D19S254 at 110 cM. A second suggestive linkage peak was found at the short arm of chromosome 1 (LOD of 2.37) at 153 cM, marker D1S534 (empirical p value of .209). These two regions of interest are not overlapping with the regions found for contrasting phenotypes (such as depression, which is negatively associated with happiness). Further linkage and future association studies are warranted.
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Fixing Our Focus: Training Attention to Regulate Emotion
Heather Wadlinger & Derek Isaacowitz
Personality and Social Psychology Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Empirical studies have frequently linked negative attentional biases with attentional dysfunction and negative moods; however, far less research has focused on how attentional deployment can be an adaptive strategy that regulates emotional experience. The authors argue that attention may be an invaluable tool for promoting emotion regulation. Accordingly, they present evidence that selective attention to positive information reflects emotion regulation and that regulating attention is a critical component of the emotion regulatory process. Furthermore, attentional regulation can be successfully trained through repeated practice. The authors ultimately propose a model of attention training methodologies integrating attention-dependent emotion regulation strategies with attention networks. Although additional interdisciplinary research is needed to bolster these nascent findings, meditative practices appear to be among the most effective training methodologies in enhancing emotional well-being. Further exploration of the positive and therapeutic qualities of attention warrants the empirical attention of social and personality psychologists.
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Feelings Not Forgone: Underestimating Affective Reactions to What Does Not Happen
Eduardo Andrade & Leaf Van Boven
Psychological Science, May 2010, Pages 706-711
Abstract:
In two experiments, we observed that when given the choice of gambling or not gambling, people who chose not to gamble underestimated the intensity of their affective reactions to the forgone gamble's outcome. Those who would have been winners felt more displeasure than anticipated, and those who would have been losers felt more pleasure than anticipated. We suggest that this underestimation stems partly from people's belief that affective experience is relatively uninfluenced by events they chose not to experience. Consistent with this suggestion, participants' affective forecasts were not influenced by whether the participants or a computer made the choice not to gamble - as though participants did not feel personally responsible for the forgone outcome, whether chosen by themselves or by a computer. In contrast to their affective forecasts, however, participants' affective reactions to forgone outcomes were less intense when the computer chose not to gamble than when the participants themselves made the choice not to gamble. Participants therefore proved to be more accurate in predicting their affective reactions to the results of the computer's decision not to gamble than in predicting their affective reactions to the results of their own decision not to gamble. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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When Choosing Makes a Good Thing Better: Temporal Variations in the Valuation of Hedonic Consumption
Elaine Chan & Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Journal of Marketing Research, June 2010, Pages 497-507
Abstract:
This research investigates how the valuation of delayed consumption of hedonic products, such as concerts and chocolate, varies with the passage of time between choice and consumption. The authors find that when consumers make their own choices, they exhibit increases in evaluations of delayed consumption, but only if the interval between choice and consumption is relatively short. The effect attenuates over longer periods, resulting in an inverted U-shaped relationship between evaluations and time. In contrast, when somebody else chooses the same option for the consumer, evaluations decrease with the passage of time. These effects depend on the extent of intrinsic motivation toward the object of consumption and occur only for consummatory consumption that is of inherent interest. Moreover, anticipatory increases in evaluations before consumption have ironic negative effects on postconsumption evaluations. The authors discuss implications and directions for further research.
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Acts of Kindness and Acts of Novelty Affect Life Satisfaction
Kathryn Buchanan & Anat Bardi
Journal of Social Psychology, May-June 2010, Pages 235-237
Abstract:
The present experiment was designed to establish the effects of acts of kindness and acts of novelty on life satisfaction. Participants aged 18-60 took part on a voluntary basis. They were randomly assigned to perform either acts of kindness, acts of novelty, or no acts on a daily basis for 10 days. Their life satisfaction was measured before and after the 10-day experiment. As expected, performing acts of kindness or acts of novelty resulted in an increase in life satisfaction.
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Processing of the Incentive for Social Approval in the Ventral Striatum during Charitable Donation
Keise Izuma, Daisuke Saito & Norihiro Sadato
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, April 2010, Pages 621-631
Abstract:
Human behaviors are motivated not only by materialistic rewards but also by abstract social rewards, such as the approval of others. When choosing an action in social situations, to evaluate each action, the brain must convert different types of reward (such as money or social approval) into a common scale. Here using fMRI, we investigated the neural correlates of such valuation computations while individuals freely decided whether to donate to real charities or to take the money for themselves in the presence or absence of observers. Behavioral evidence showed that the mere presence of observers increased donation rates, and neuroimaging results revealed that activation in the ventral striatum before the same choice ("donate" or "not donate") was significantly modulated by the presence of observers. Particularly high striatal activations were observed when a high social reward was expected (donation in public) and when there was the potential for monetary gain without social cost (no donation in the absence of observers). These findings highlight the importance of this area in representing both social and monetary rewards as a "decision utility" and add to the understanding of how the brain makes a choice using a "common neural currency" in social situations.
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‘Oops...I did it again': Repeated focusing effects in reports of happiness
Paul Dolan & Robert Metcalfe
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use an experiment (relating to a major European soccer match) to replicate previous studies that show forecasts of the impact of an event on happiness are often greatly exaggerated. In addition, by randomising respondents into one of two groups (assessing happiness before and after the event or only after), we are also able to show that previously focusing on an event can affect subsequent happiness responses. From a final sample of 309 soccer fans contacted via a social networking site, the happiness ratings of the fans of the losing team who answered before and after the soccer match is a whole point lower (on a 0-10 scale) than similar fans who rated their happiness only after the event. The potential spillover of a focusing effect from one survey to the next has important implications for how we interpret happiness responses from longitudinal surveys.
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For Whom Can Money Buy Subjective Well-Being? The Role of Face Consciousness
Xin-An Zhang & Qing Cao
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, March 2010, Pages 322-346
Abstract:
The purpose of the current study was to more fully investigate the association between money and Subjective Well-Being (SWB) by treating face consciousness as a moderator variable and financial satisfaction as a mediator variable. We examined a sample of college students and found the effect of money on SWB is contingent on subjects' face consciousness, and further this moderation is completely mediated by financial satisfaction. These results indicated that people high in face consciousness may derive a higher level of financial satisfaction and then SWB out of money than those low in face consciousness, although face consciousness itself hurts SWB. Our findings were consistent with the view that the effect of money on SWB depends on different types of people and supported the value-as-a-moderator theory in SWB. The implications of these findings are discussed.
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Elevation Leads to Altruistic Behavior
Simone Schnall, Jean Roper & Daniel Fessler
Psychological Science, March 2010, Pages 315-320
Abstract:
Feelings of elevation, elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed, have been hypothesized to motivate a desire to help others. However, despite growing interest in the determinants of prosocial behavior, there is only limited evidence that elevation leads to increases in altruistic behavior. In two experiments, we tested the relationship between elevation and helping behavior. Prior to measuring helping behavior, we measured elevation among participants in an elevation-inducing condition and control conditions in order to determine whether witnessing altruistic behavior elicited elevation. In Experiment 1, participants experiencing elevation were more likely to volunteer for a subsequent unpaid study than were participants in a neutral state. In Experiment 2, participants experiencing elevation spent approximately twice as long helping the experimenter with a tedious task as participants experiencing mirth or a neutral emotional state. Further, feelings of elevation, but not feelings of amusement or happiness, predicted the amount of helping. Together, these results provide evidence that witnessing another person's altruistic behavior elicits elevation, a discrete emotion that, in turn, leads to tangible increases in altruism.