Well it seems that happiness is just like smack, the more you have the more you need to feel good. Quick summary: the happier people report they are the more positive events it takes to cancel out the sadness from a negative event. I think this is clearly a case where the government needs to intervene and save its citizens from the addictive scourge of happiness. Maybe they could have squads walk around and kick people in the balls who are smiling too much. I would post the article test, but its formatted in a bitch of a way, so here are some excerpts and the link at the bottom for the whole article:
Lewenstein's story is especially instructive in light of a study published this week about a paradox involving happiness. Americans report being generally happier than people from, say, Japan or Korea, but it turns out that, partly as a result, they are less likely to feel good when positive things happen and more likely to feel bad when negative things befall them.
Put another way, a hidden price of being happier on average is that you put your short-term contentment at risk, because being happy raises your expectations about being happy. When good things happen, they don't count for much because they are what you expect. When bad things happen, you temporarily feel terrible, because you've gotten used to being happy.
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By contrast, Oishi found that even though Japanese people were less happy overall than Americans, they needed only one positive event to regain their equilibrium after experiencing a negative event. European Americans needed two positive events on average to regain their emotional footing.
Oishi's research also provides an intriguing window into why very few people are very happy most of the time. Getting to "very happy" is like climbing an ever steeper mountain. Additional effort -- positive events -- doesn't gain you much by way of altitude. Slipping backward, on the other hand, is very easy.
02-10-2007, 17:01
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