14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody pursues happiness.
But happiness is triggered not only by what we do, but also by what happens to us and by life circumstances (like marriage, divorce, or debilitating illness).
Richard Lucas, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University - after analyzing data gathered over the years monitoring people through their moments of joy and sorrow - concluded that major changes in life circumstances can inflict long-term effects on happiness levels.
This contradicts the popular belief that general happiness levels of an individual would be a constant trait, refractory to long-term change. "In fact, some downturns do stay down for some people," said Lucas, affiliated with the German Institute for Economic Research.
"Even though happiness is heritable and relatively stable, it can change. Happiness levels do change, adaptation is not inevitable and life events do matter", he said.
Psychologists thought that happiness (subjective well-being) is largely disconnected from life circumstances and people adjust to major life events, positive and negative; thus happiness is quite constant throughout our life, even if it is occasionally perturbed. This means that winning the lottery won't make you happier in the long run and after a divorce or a major illness, when your life is thrown into upheaval for a certain period of time, your well-being level will come back to the initial levels.
Lucas's team analyzed two large national prospective panel studies, one over some 24 years in Germany and another over 15 years in UK, recording levels of life satisfaction both prior to and after major life events like marriage, divorce, unemployment and illness or disability.
These factors affected individuals differently: while marriage required people just two years to adapt (and after that they returned to previous levels of happiness) a divorce took them about seven years to recover.
But those who get divorced, unemployed, injured, seriously ill or physically disabled, however, did not, on average, recover the initial level of happiness they previously were at.
The new research found an individual factor involved in how happy people feel.
There were people happier after two years of marriage and people even less happy after two years. "We see some hints in these studies, like perhaps that people who are positive emotionally tend to bounce back more, or that good social relationships play a role. We need to understand the variability in the way people react", said Lucas.