Young people who ‘spoke’ to an AI ‘therapist’ experienced improved well-being over six weeks.
40,000 combined years of marriage experience boiled down to these five points.
40,000 combined years of marriage experience boiled down to these five points.
The largest ever survey of long-term marriages has revealed the five keys to a happy marriage.
Over 700 people who have been married for a combined total of 40,000 years (!) took part.
They were asked how to find a suitable partner, how to get through difficult times and any other advice on love and marriage they had.
Professor Karl Pillemer explained his aims:
“Rather than focus on a small number of stories, my goal was to take advantage of the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ collecting the love and relationship advice of a large and varied cross-section of long-married elders in a scientifically reliable and valid way.”
The top five lessons for a happy marriage were:
Professor Pillemer explained:
“For a good marriage, the elders overwhelmingly tell us to ‘talk, talk, talk.’
They believe most marital problems can be solved through open communication, and conversely many whose marriages dissolved blamed lack of communication.”
Professor Pillemer said:
“Many of the elders I surveyed married very young; despite that fact, they recommend the opposite.
They strongly advise younger people to wait to marry until they have gotten to know their partner well and have a number of shared experiences.
An important part of this advice is a lesson that was endorsed in very strong terms: Never get married expecting to be able to change your partner.”
Professor Pillemer said:
“Rather than seeing marriage as a voluntary partnership that lasts only as long as the passion does, the elders propose a mindset in which it is a profound commitment to be respected, even if things go sour over the short term.
Many struggled through dry and unhappy periods and found ways to resolve them — giving them the reward of a fulfilling, intact marriage in later life.”
Professor Pillemer said:
“The elders urge us to apply what we have learned from our lifelong experiences in teams — in sports, in work, in the military — to marriage.
Concretely, this viewpoint involves seeing problems as collective to the couple, rather than the domain of one partner.
Any difficulty, illness, or setback experienced by one member of the couple is the other partner’s responsibility.”
Professor Pillemer said:
“Marriage is difficult at times for everyone, the elders assert, but it’s much easier with someone who shares your interests, background and orientation.
The most critical need for similarity is in core values regarding potentially contentious issues like child-rearing, how money should be spent and religion.”
The research is published in Professor Pillemer’s book.
Feeling purposeful is critical because it stokes optimism and hope and has all sorts of other benefits for mental and physical health.
In an unhappy marriage often one partner fails to speak up about problems affecting them both, but why?
In an unhappy marriage often one partner fails to speak up about problems affecting them both, but why?
People with low self-esteem are more likely to stay in an unhappy marriage, a study finds.
They are also likely to keep quiet about any problems in the relationship.
This is probably due to concerns about being rejected.
Dr Megan McCarthy, the study’s author, said:
“There is a perception that people with low self-esteem tend to be more negative and complain a lot more.
While that may be the case in some social situations, our study suggests that in romantic relationships, the partner with low self-esteem resists addressing problems.”
The study tested the effects of low self-esteem on relationships.
The researchers found that not speaking up about problems led to more overall dissatisfaction with the relationship.
Dr McCarthy said:
“We’ve found that people with a more negative self-concept often have doubts and anxieties about the extent to which other people care about them.
This can drive low self-esteem people toward defensive, self-protective behaviour, such as avoiding confrontation.”
Dr McCarthy said:
“If your significant other is not engaging in open and honest conversation about the relationship it may not be that they don’t care, but rather that they feel insecure and are afraid of being hurt.”
The study also found that people with high self-esteem who are agreeable tend to disclose their emotions more readily.
The reason is that they are more trusting of their partner’s caring nature.
In contrast, those with with low self-esteem found it harder to admit difficult emotions like sadness or to share risky thoughts with their partner.
Dr McCarthy said:
“We may think that staying quiet, in a ‘forgive and forget’ kind of way, is constructive, and certainly it can be when we feel minor annoyances.
But when we have a serious issue in a relationship, failing to address those issues directly can actually be destructive.”
Dr McCarthy concluded:
“We all know that close relationships can sometimes be difficult.
The key issue, then, is how we choose to deal with it when we feel dissatisfied with a partner.”
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (McCarthy et al., 2017).
Surveys carried out over 30+ years reveal the age at which people are happiest.
Surveys carried out over 30+ years reveal the age at which people are happiest.
People get happier as they get older, research finds.
Surveys of Americans carried out between 1972 and 2004 show that older people are the nation’s happiest.
Across the different generations, around 50 percent of people over the age of 80 said they were ‘very happy’.
It may be because older, more mature people are likely to be more at ease with themselves and to have higher self-esteem.
Dr Yang Yang, the study’s author, said:
“Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life.
The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting people’s needs.”
For the series of surveys a representative cross-section of Americans was asked the following question:
“Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”
The responses also teased out some interesting wrinkles.
The so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, were less happy than other equivalent generations.
Dr Yang said:
“This is probably due to the fact that the generation as a group was so large, and their expectations were so great, that not everyone in the group could get what he or she wanted as they aged due to competition for opportunities.
This could lead to disappointment that could undermine happiness.”
The study also found that African Americans are, on average, less happy than whites.
Among 18-year-olds, just 15 percent of black men said they were very happy in comparison to 33 percent of white women.
In fact, women were more happy than men overall, across racial and class divides.
Over the years, needless to say, having a significant other and having your health make you much more happy.
One surprise, to some perhaps, is that having no children increases the chances of being happy over the lifetime.
The study was published in the journal American Sociological Review (Yang, 2008).
Feeling that life is meaningful is crucial for good psychological and physical health.
Feeling that life is meaningful is crucial for good psychological and physical health.
People who feel that life is more meaningful tend to have more purpose, stronger values, greater efficacy and self-worth.
Psychologists repeatedly find that feeling that life is meaningful is important:
Meaning in life is particularly important to people in their 20s and 60s, although most adults can feel when it is missing.
So, below are 7 psychology studies, some from the members-only section of PsyBlog, that reveal how to increase meaning in life.
(If you are not already, find out how to become a PsyBlog member here.)
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For those who find it wasteful, leisure time can be reframed to create more purpose.
For those who find it wasteful, leisure time can be reframed to create more purpose.
Believing that leisure is unproductive and wasteful is linked to higher levels of stress and depression and lower levels of happiness, a study finds.
Many people believe that being productive is the ultimate goal of life and if you’re not serving some greater purpose, then you’re wasting time.
However, people who hold this view are more likely to report poor mental health and enjoy their leisure time the least.
Dr Selin Malkoc, study co-author, said:
“There is plenty of research which suggests that leisure has mental health benefits and that it can make us more productive and less stressed.
But we find that if people start to believe that leisure is wasteful, they may end up being more depressed and more stressed.”
One way for the productive-minded to enjoy leisure more, though, is to see it as part of a greater goal, explained Dr Rebecca Reczek, study co-author:
“If leisure can be framed as having some kind of productive goal, that helps people who think leisure is wasteful get some of the same benefits.”
Dr Malkoc agrees:
“…think about the productive ways that individual leisure activities can serve their long-term goals.
Find ways to make fun activities part of a larger goal in your life.
Think about how it is productive, instrumental and useful.”
The conclusions come from a series of studies, one of which asked people how they celebrated Halloween.
Some activities, such as going to a party, were fun for their own sake while others, like taking children trick-or-treating, served a larger goal.
People subscribing to the popular belief that leisure is wasteful found the party less enjoyable.
However, this was not the case for the trick-or-treating, said Dr Gabriela Tonietto, the study’s first author, said:
“Those who participated in fun activities that fulfilled responsibilities, like trick or treating with your kids, didn’t see such a reduction in how much they enjoyed their Halloween.”
It is not just Americans who view leisure time as wasteful — the view is globalised, said Dr Reczek:
“We live in a global society and there are people everywhere that hear the same messages about how important it is to be busy and productive.
And once you believe that, and internalize the message that leisure is a waste, our results suggest you’re going to be more depressed and less happy, no matter where you live.”
Negative views about leisure can be surprisingly damaging, affecting people’s ability to enjoy themselves even in the simplest ways.
In one study, students were invited to do a boring task which had a break in the middle when they watched a funny cat video.
However, people who view leisure as a waste of time couldn’t enjoy the video at all.
Dr Malkoc explained:
“These are students who are coming into the lab to answer surveys, which can be boring.
In the middle of that we give them a funny video to watch, which you would expect would be a nice break – and even then, some participants didn’t enjoy it as much.
They had no way to use the time more productively.
We were giving them a break from other, more boring activities.
And still, those who believe leisure is wasteful didn’t think watching the videos was as fun as others did.”
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Tonietto et al., 2021).
Will therapy make you much happier. According to this study, it works 32 times better than money.
Will therapy make you much happier. According to this study, it works 32 times better than money.
Money.
You need enough to live, but loads of it doesn’t make you that much happier.
It’s something we’ve all heard — whether it’s from psych studies or rich people — but do we behave as though it’s true?
I sometimes wonder.
To help convince our inner Mr Burns, here’s a nice statistic from a study done by researchers at the Universities of Manchester and Warwick, who compared the happiness gains from money to that from psychological therapy (Boyce & Wood, 2009).
They found that therapy was 32 times as cost effective as money in making you happier.
They reached this figure by looking at thousands of people who’d started therapy and compared them with others who’d had large increases in their income.
It turned out that to get the same increase in happiness from $1,300 spent on therapy, a person would have to get a mammoth pay rise of $42,000.
Hardly likely, right?
The study’s lead author, Chris Boyce, said:
“Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies.
The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realise the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counselling, can have on improving our well-being.”
If this is true, why are many governments so obsessed with economic growth and apparently so little concerned with mental health?
Take the Chinese, for example, who are getting much richer, but no happier. That’s just one of many, many examples.
Although economic growth in many major economies is less dramatic than in China, the effects on happiness are about the same: zilch, or close enough.
Any idiot knows the answer to this one: it’s because money makes the world go round, world go round, world go round…
And yet it makes me think we’re all idiots for nodding our heads sagely that money can’t make you happy, then off we all go to put in another 12 hour day, or whatever it is.
Think how much happier the world would be if, instead of annual pay rises or bonuses, we were all sent off to talk to a sympathetic stranger for a few hours.
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Improve your well-being with just one meaningful conversation a day.
Job satisfaction is hard to find, but pay attention to these 10 factors and you’ll be well on your way to your dream job.
Job satisfaction is hard to find, but pay attention to these 10 factors and you’ll be well on your way to your dream job.
If some job satisfaction surveys are to be believed then as many as a third of us are considering a change of job in search of the dream that will provide satisfaction and happiness.
Clearly many are finding it hard to get that feeling of satisfaction from work that a dream job might provide.
Job satisfaction and happiness is important not just because it boosts work performance but also because it increases our quality of life.
Many people spend so much time at work that when it becomes dissatisfying, the rest of their life soon follows.
Everyone’s dream job is different but here are 10 factors that psychologists regularly find are important in how satisfied people are with their jobs.
If you ask doctors what is the worst part of their jobs, what do you think they say?
Carrying out difficult, painful procedures?
Telling people they’ve only got months to live?
No, it’s something that might seem much less stressful: administration.
When thinking about a dream job, we tend to downplay day-to-day irritations, thinking we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
But actually people’s job satisfaction in a potential dream job is surprisingly sensitive to daily hassles.
It might not seem like much but when it happens almost every day and it’s beyond our control, it hits job satisfaction and happiness hard.
This category is one of the easiest wins for boosting employee satisfaction.
Managers should find out about those little daily hassles and address them—your employees will love you for it.
Whatever your dream job, for you to be satisfied the pay should be fair.
The bigger the difference between what you think you should earn and what you do earn, the less satisfied you’ll be.
The important point here is it’s all about perception.
If you perceive that other people doing a similar job get paid about the same as you then you’re more likely to be satisfied with your job than if you think they’re getting more than you.
People feel more satisfied with their job if they’ve achieved something.
In some jobs achievements are obvious, but for others they’re not.
As smaller cogs in larger machines it may be difficult to tell what we’re contributing and hard to think of it as a dream job.
That’s why the next factor can be so important…
There’s nothing worse than not knowing whether or not you’re doing a good job.
When it comes to job satisfaction, no news is bad news.
Getting negative feedback can be painful but at least it tells you where improvements can be made.
On the other hand, positive feedback can make all the difference to how satisfied people feel.
It can turn a routine job into a dream job.
People generally find jobs more satisfying if they are more complex and offer more variety.
People seem to like complex (but not impossible) jobs, perhaps because it pushes them more.
Too easy and people get bored.
To be satisfied people need to be challenged a little and they need some variety in the tasks they carry out.
It sounds easy when put like that but many jobs offer neither complexity nor variety.
You may have certain tasks you have to do, but how you do them should be up to you.
The more control people perceive in how they carry out their job, the more satisfaction they experience and the more likely it fits the profile of their dream job.
If people aren’t given some control, they will attempt to retake it by cutting corners, stealing small amounts or finding other ways to undermine the system.
Psychologists have found that people who work in jobs where they have little latitude—at every level—find their work very stressful and consequently unsatisfying.
Workers want to know their organisation cares about them: that they are getting something back for what they are putting in.
This is primarily communicated through things like how bosses treat us, the kinds of fringe benefits we get and other subtle messages.
If people perceive more organisational support, they experience higher job satisfaction and are more likely to feel they are in their dream job.
Remember: it’s not just whether the organisation is actually being supportive, it’s whether it appears that way.
The point being that appearances are really important here.
If people don’t perceive it, then for them it might as well not exist.
That’s why great managers need a politician’s touch.
Low job satisfaction isn’t only the boss’ or organisation’s fault, sometimes it’s down to home-life.
Trouble at home breeds trouble at the office.
Some research, though, suggests that trouble at the office is more likely to spill over into the family domain compared with the other way around (Ford et al., 2007).
Either way finding ways of distancing yourself from work while at home are likely to boost job satisfaction (Sonnentag et al., 2010).
Job honeymoons and hangovers are often forgotten by psychologists, but well-known to employees.
People experience honeymoon periods after a month or two in a new job when their satisfaction shoots up.
But then it normally begins to tail off after six months or so.
The honeymoon period at the start of a new job tends to be stronger when people were particularly dissatisfied with their previous job (Boswell et al., 2009).
So, hangovers from the last job tend to produce more intense honeymoons in the next job.
Some of us are more easily satisfied (or dissatisfied) than others, no matter how good (or bad) the job is.
To misquote a famous cliché: You can’t satisfy all the people all the time.
Still, some jobs do seem better suited to certain types of people.
A lot of work has been done on person-environment fit but because jobs vary so much it’s difficult to summarise.
One generalisation we can make, though, is that people get more satisfied with their jobs as they get older.
Perhaps this is because the older people are, the more likely they are to have found their dream job.
There’s little evidence for this but I’d certainly like to think it was true.
On my darker days, though, I tend to think it’s because young people have sky-high expectations (which are soon dashed) and older people have learned to live with their lot, however uninspiring it is.
When you look at this list of what makes for a satisfying job, you might wonder why everyone can’t have one.
With a little thought, most of the predictors of satisfaction can be provided.
The answer is probably quite simple.
Organisations pay lip-service to keeping their employees satisfied, but many don’t really believe it makes a difference.
What this research shows is that it can make a huge difference.
If you’re a manager looking to improve satisfaction at your workplace then start with point number 1: find out about people’s little hassles and address them.
It might not look like much but people will really appreciate it.
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