Category: Happiness

Before you go hell-for-leather for your next raise, consider this…

Getting more money does not make most people happier, a new study concludes.

However, losing money does make people less happy.

Losses matter much more, though, for people with a certain personality type.

Dr Christopher Boyce, who led the research, explained:

“It is often assumed that as our income rises so does our life satisfaction, however, we have discovered this is not the case.

What really matters is when income is lost and this is only important for people who are highly conscientious.”

The research involved over 18,000 people who were followed over a 9-year period.

No matter what people’s personality, increases in income did not increase their satisfaction with life, the scientists found.

People did get less satisfied with life, however, when they lost money.

Dr Boyce said:

“Continually increasing our income is not an important factor for achieving greater happiness and well-being for most people living in economically developed countries.

Instead, we should aim for financial stability to achieve greater happiness, while protecting those individuals who experience negative income shocks.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Boyce et al., 2016).

Money mind image from Shutterstock

People listen to their own voices, at least in part, to learn how they feel, study finds.

Listening to our own voices helps us discover how we feel, new research finds.

We take cues from what we hear in our own voice and this feeds back into our emotional state.

So, trying to change how your voice sounds may help you feel happier.

The conclusions come from a study which fed back people’s own voice to them, while changing the tone of it slightly.

Sometimes researchers made people’s voice sound happier, sometimes sad, and sometimes no adjustment was made.

People in the study were not aware that their voices were being manipulated.

The results suggest that people listen to their own voices, at least in part, to learn how they feel.

Dr Petter Johansson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“The relationship between the expression and experience of emotions has been a long-standing topic of disagreement in the field of psychology.

This is the first evidence of direct feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Aucouturier et al., 2015).

Voice image from Shutterstock

Unhappiness has frequently been linked to a shorter life — but is it really true?

A large new study suggests being happier does not contribute to longevity.

In fact, it’s more likely that being unhealthy causes unhappiness.

That is why unhappiness has been frequently linked in the past to a shorter life.

Dr Bette Liu, who led the study, said:

“Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill.

We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a ten-year study of a million women.”

The conclusions come from the UK Million Women Study, which asked women about their health, happiness and lifestyles.

Five out of six women said they were generally happy, while the rest said they were generally unhappy.

People who were most unhappy tended be deprived, single, smokers who did little exercise.

After taking account of their lifestyles, though, happiness was not linked to whether they died over the next 10 years.

Professor Sir Richard Peto, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect.

Of course people who are ill tend to be unhappier than those who are well, but the UK Million Women Study shows that happiness and unhappiness do not themselves have any direct effect on death rates.”

The study was published in The Lancet (Liu et al., 2015).

The study compared the effects of material purchases, like portable speakers and coffee makers, with experiential purchases, like tickets to a hockey game or a weekend ski trip.

Material purchases can bring as much happiness as experiential ones — it’s just of a different type, a new study finds.

The finding is fascinating because until now studies have suggested that experiential purchases are superior.

Experiential purchases include things like holidays, concert tickets or visits to a spa.

Material purchases, though, can provide just as much pleasure in the long-run, the new research suggests.

For the study, people were asked to keep track of their levels of happiness five times a day over two weeks.

The study compared the effects of material purchases, like portable speakers and coffee makers, with experiential purchases, like tickets to a hockey game or a weekend ski trip.

The results showed that experiential purchases provided short intense bursts of pleasure which tended to fade away.

In contrast, material purchases brought repeated smaller doses of happiness over the weeks.

However, when people looked back at their purchases six weeks later, it was the experiences that gave them more satisfaction.

So, perhaps experiences still have the edge.

Mr Aaron Weidman, the study’s first author, said:

“The decision of whether to buy a material thing or a life experience may therefore boil down to what kind of happiness one desires.

Consider a holiday shopper deciding between tickets to a concert or a new couch in the living room.

The concert will provide an intense thrill for one spectacular night, but then it will end, and will no longer provide momentary happiness, aside from being a happy memory.

In contrast, the new couch will never provide a thrilling moment to match the concert, but will keep the owner snug and comfortable each day throughout the winter months.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Weidman & Dunn, 2015).

Present image from Shutterstock

Some Chinese children are left with relatives while their parents travel for work.

Children living without their parents for a period may suffer delayed brain development, a new study finds.

The Chinese research looked at children who were left behind with relatives while their parents travelled for work.

Some parents left home for months at a time, others for years.

The shift is particularly acute in China where so many workers migrate for better jobs.

Mr Yuan Xiao, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We wanted to study the brain structure in these left-behind children.

Previous studies support the hypothesis that parental care can directly affect brain development in offspring.

However, most prior work is with rather severe social deprivation, such as orphans.

We looked at children who were left behind with relatives when the parents left to seek employment far from home.”

Brains scans were given to 38 ‘left-behind’ children between 7- and 13-years-of-age.

These were compared with children who lived with their parents.

Left-behind children had more gray matter in areas of the brain related to memory and the emotions.

The researchers think this may be a result of insufficient pruning of synapses, the connections between neurons.

Synaptic pruning is thought to be a vital developmental stage in adolescence.

Children who had higher gray matter volume in these areas tended to have lower IQs, the researchers found.

Mr Xiao said:

“Our study provides the first empirical evidence showing that the lack of direct parental care alters the trajectory of brain development in left-behind children.

Public health efforts are needed to provide additional intellectual and emotional support to children left behind by parents.”

The study was presented at the Radiological Society of North America.

Child image from Shutterstock

Could changes in society by behind shifts in happiness seen in latest research?

Americans over 30 are less happy than they used to be, new research finds.

But teens and young adults in the US are happier than previous generations.

It used to be that older people had a happiness advantage, but that could be disappearing.

That’s the result of surveys of 1.3 million Americans aged 13 to 96 carried out between 1972 and 2014.

Professor Jean M. Twenge, the study’s first author, said:

“Our current culture of pervasive technology, attention-seeking, and fleeting relationships is exciting and stimulating for teens and young adults, but may not provide the stability and sense of community that mature adults require.”

The number of people over 30 who said they were “very happy” has declined from 38% in the 1970s down to 23% in the 2010s.

The equivalent percentage for those aged 18 to 29 has gone up from 28% to 30% over the same timespan.

Teens have also become happier, on average, over the same period.

Professor Twenge said:

“American culture has increasingly emphasized high expectations and following your dreams– things that feel good when you’re young.

However, the average mature adult has realized that their dreams might not be fulfilled, and less happiness is the inevitable result.

Mature adults in previous eras might not have expected so much, but expectations are now so high they can’t be met.”

This drop in happiness was already detected in 2008, but only for women.

Professor Twenge said:

“A previous study in 2008 got quite a bit of attention when it found that women’s happiness had declined relative to men’s.

We now find declines in both men’s and women’s happiness, especially after 2010.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological Personality Science (Twenge et al., 2015).

Happiness image from Shutterstock

It reduces depression, ADHD and fights cancer, obesity and more…

Being in nature relaxes the mind, which in turn enhances the immune system, new research finds.

This may explain why nature has a remarkably beneficial effect on a wide range of diseases including depression, ADHD, cancer, diabetes, obesity and many more.

Dr Ming Kuo, who carried out the research, explained how nature helps:

“When we feel completely safe, our body devotes resources to long-term investments that lead to good health outcomes — growing, reproducing, and building the immune system.

When we are in nature in that relaxed state, and our body knows that it’s safe, it invests resources toward the immune system.”

Being happy and relaxed are obviously good for your immune system in any case.

So relaxing indoor activities are also good for you, but probably not to the extent of being in nature, Dr Kuo said:

“If you are absorbed and relaxed, chances are your parasympathetic system is happy and your immune system is going to get a boost.

That said, these enjoyable indoor activities don’t provide the phytoncides, mycobacterium vaccae, negative air ions, vitamin D-producing sunlight, and other active ingredients found outdoors.

So we’d expect a smaller boost than you’d get from being in nature.”

To reach these conclusions, Dr Kuo reviewed a large range of studies on the connection between nature and good health.

She described nature as a sort of magical multivitamin:

“I pulled every bit of the research in this area together that I could find, and was surprised to realize I could trace as many as 21 possible pathways between nature and good health–and even more surprised to realize that all but two of the pathways shared a single common denominator.

The realization that there are so many pathways helps explain not only how nature promotes health, but also why nature has such huge, broad effects on health.

Nature doesn’t just have one or two active ingredients.

It’s more like a multivitamin that provides us with all sorts of the nutrients we need.

That’s how nature can protect us from all these different kinds of diseases–cardiovascular, respiratory, mental health, musculoskeletal, etc. — simultaneously.”

The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Kuo, 2015).

Mental plasters image from Shutterstock

Why exercise feels so rewarding.

The so-called ‘runner’s high’ is down to more than just endorphins, a new study finds.

A neurotransmitter called dopamine — which is involved in motivation — is also responsible for the feeling of well-being.

Professor Stephanie Fulton, the study’s lead author, said:

“We discovered that the rewarding effects of endurance activity are modulated by leptin, a key hormone in metabolism.

Leptin inhibits physical activity through dopamine neurons in the brain.”

It’s fascinating that leptin — known as the satiety hormone — is involved in both exercise and food.

The theory is that in the past humans had to run to increase their chance of getting food — hence the connection.

Indeed there is even a link between leptin and athletic ability, as Dr Maria Fernanda Fernandes, the study’s first author, explained:

“Previous studies have clearly shown a correlation between leptin and marathon run times.

The lower leptin levels are, the better the performance.

Our study on mice suggests that this molecule is also involved in the rewarding effects experienced when we do physical exercise.

We speculate that for humans, low leptin levels increase motivation to exercise and make it easier to get a runner’s high.”

In the research, some mice were genetically engineered to suppress the effects of leptin.

The results showed that these mice ran less, supporting the connection between leptin and exercise.

Effectively, the body’s hormones are telling the brain — if I’m hungry, it’s fun to run and get some more food.

The research was published in the journal Cell Metabolism (Fernandes et al., 2015).

Runner image from Shutterstock