01 Jun Happiness…comes with age!
Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can_ã_t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.
It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
_ã–It could be that there are environmental changes,_ã said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, _ã–or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological _ã” for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes._ã
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about _ã–global well-being_ã by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal _ã–hedonic well-being,_ã a person_ã_s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
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