New Research on Happiness Says Life Events Do Matter

Popular psychological wisdom that says rich or poor, lucky or unlucky, individual happiness is stuck around a set point that merely fluctuates with good and bad events only to return to that point is wrong, according to a new study on human happiness. Rather, as Richard E. Lucas of Michigan State University and the German Institute for Economic Research asserts, "Happiness levels do change, adaptation is not inevitable, and life events do matter."

Lucas studied data regarding levels of satisfaction both before and after life-altering events such as getting married or divorce, losing a spouse, losing a job and suffering from illness or disability. He found that adaptation to these events does come into play, but in varying levels:

On average, most people adapt quickly to marriage, for example--within just a couple of years, the peak in subjective well-being experienced around the time of getting married returns to its previous levels. People mostly adapt to the sorrows of losing a spouse too, but this takes longer--about 7 years. People who get divorced and people who become unemployed, however, do not, on average, return to the level of happiness they were at previously. The same can be said about physical debilitation. Numerous recent studies have demonstrated that major illnesses and injury result in significant, lasting decreases in subjective-well being.