21 Nov Money might not make you happy but happiness can make you money!
by Amina Kahn – Sydney Morning Herald
Regardless of whether money can buy happiness, being happy may actually make you more money down the road, new research finds.
People who express more positive emotions as teenagers and greater life satisfaction as young adults tend to have higher incomes by the time they're 29, according to a study published Monday by the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The difference was so great that when measuring life satisfaction on a 5-point scale, a 1-point jump at age 22 made a $2000 difference in income down the line. Between the gloomiest and the happiest brackets, that amounts to an $8000 earnings swing.
Drawing on data from the federally funded Add Health survey of teenagers, the researchers examined the profiles of more than 10,000 Americans at ages 16, 18 and 22 as well as their annual incomes at 29. They controlled for a number of factors known to contribute to financial success, including education level, IQ, height and self-esteem.
Whether smart or simple-minded, tall or short, self-confident or insecure, happier people earned bigger pay cheques than more doleful peers: Deeply unhappy teens' future incomes were 30 percent lower than the average, while very happy teens earned 10 percent above average.
The research team took the analysis even further, comparing roughly 3000 people in sibling pairs who shared the same parents and, presumably, the same socioeconomic status. The happier siblings, they found, still did better than their less-happy counterparts.
The findings suggest that interventions to encourage more positive thinking in kids and teens could greatly improve their future success, said Michael Norton, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School who was not involved in the study….
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