HR Psychology - The Slippery Slope of Happiness

Steering the Law of Attraction in the positive direction of happiness, rather than in the negative direction of things, takes some attentive driving talent.

Americans report being generally happy but 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.

The study, in the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offers a new twist on an old idea.  Previously, psychologists said that people's day-to-day satisfaction was the sum of the positive and negative things that happened each day.  Researchers had found that people need a certain ratio of positive to negative events to be happy.  But according to the new study, led by University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, people who report a large ratio of positive to negative events also seem to derive diminishing returns from additional happy events--and ever larger adverse effects when they encounter negative events.

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.

So, keep thinking happy thoughts to remain very happy.  What you think, you get.

Thanks to John G. Agno / Source: "Is Great Happiness Too Much of a Good Thing?" www.WashingtonPost.com October 1, 2007   

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