HAPPINESS STUDY REVEALS A CRITICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE

HAPPINESS STUDY REVEALS A CRITICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE

Personality is important.

Personality is also very often misunderstood.

Although there’s no doubt we all have certain “temperaments”, there’s also no doubt these are not necessarily as “fixed” as many think. That is, we might have certain patterns in our thoughts and behaviours that are consistent over time BUT we can also, at least to some extent, change these.

And all this is very relevant to our happiness …

via Inverse

HUMANS HAVE A complicated relationship with happiness. Consider this study on the subject: Scientists found that valuing happiness can lead to less happiness when you feel happy. It’s an emotional rollercoaster fueled by unhelpful expectations.

Yet the relationship gets more complex still. According to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science our current state of well-being can interfere with our perception of the past. Overall, researchers observed an asymmetrical pattern: Happy people tend to overreport an improvement in their well-being, while unhappy people tend to exaggerate a worsening sense of well-being.

First author Alberto Prati is an economist and research fellow at the University of Oxford. Life satisfaction, he explains, is increasingly used as a non-monetary measure of progress. Take, for example, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a United Nations initiative that publishes the World Happiness Report. This report ranks countries by how their populations feel, and these metrics, in turn, are used to guide public policy and measure its effectiveness.

Critically, the question “how satisfied are you with your life?” encompasses a person’s past, present, and expected state of well-being, Prati explains. “So, if we want to understand life satisfaction, we need to understand how people reconstruct past happiness,” he says.

MEASURING HAPPINESS

Family on vacation
Happy people tend to overreport an improvement in their well-being.Constance Bannister Corp/Getty Images)

An evaluation of four multi-year surveys revealed several insights. These surveys included more than 60,000 adults living in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

One common theme was the tendency to underreport past happiness. This suggested to the researchers that present feelings of happiness come with the implication that the individual feels happier now than they were yesterday. People tend to overstate their improvement in well-being over time.

Most people were also “pretty satisfied” with their life, Prati says. On average, study participants reported a seven on a zero-to-ten happiness scale.

“Most people believe themselves to be happier than they were before,” he says…

… keep reading the full & original article HERE